
Like most other RPGs, Honkai: Star Rail immediately presents a dilemma for you. As soon as you start the game, you’re prompted to pick among two characters– a male and female Trailblazer (main character), a conundrum similar to Genshin Impact.
This begs the question, what exactly would you be missing out on if you picked one over the other, or what’s the difference between the two choices? Here’s a quick breakdown of what this choice affects — if anything.
Male or Female Trailblazer

One of the most anticipated mobile releases of 2023, Honkai: Star Rail, has surpassed most players’ expectations, but whether you chose Stelle or Caelus, you’re fundamentally getting the same character. Both of them have the same stats, use the same weapon, and belong to the same class.
Their styles are also mostly gender mirror images of one another. Both of them have gray hair and wear a trenchcoat though Stelle’s attire is a bit more revealing since she’s wearing a skirt instead of pants. The male Trailblazer also has shorter hair with a wider, more masculine body frame. The female Trailblazer has a feminine frame and long hair.
Both also offer the same storyline experience and the same gameplay or dialog choices. The devs made it that way so you wouldn’t feel like you missed out, and likely due to certain constraints since making the content unique for each character is rather time-consuming.
Still, once you’ve made your pick, you can’t change it anymore in-game. There’s no in-game item or paid premium token to help you change to the other character should you change your mind or regret your choice.
You’ll have to start a new account if you want to change your Trailblazer’s gender. So consider your choice carefully from the beginning, assuming the genders matter to you. For some people, gender does matter since both characters have different voice actors, which might be recognizable to fans of anime.
Male and Female Trailblazer Voice Actors

They only have a handful of lines in the game. For the majority of the story or dialog, the main characters are silent, but they still have their dedicated Japanese voice actor or actress, which is a bigger deal in Japan than it is in the West due to anime. These voice actors have also lent their voices to anime characters you’ve seen before or liked.
Stelle’s Japanese voice actress is none other than Yui Ishikawa. She’s most famed for lending a voice and personality to Mikasa Ackerman from Attack on Titan. Apart from that, she also voiced 2B from NieR: Automata, which is another wildly popular character with a cold demeanor. You can probably guess why she was picked for the role in Honkai: Star Rail.
Meanwhile, Caelus is voiced by Japanese voice actor Enoki Junya who also worked on Attack on Titan as the voice and personality for a young Reiner Braun. His other prominent character would be Yuuji Itadori from Jujutsu Kaisen, so he’s also no stranger to protagonist dialog (which is exceedingly sparse in Honkai: Star Rail, sadly).

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If you’re a fan of either voice actor, you might be more inclined to pick one over the other, especially since it’s a roleplaying game, and you might see yourself visualizing your main character as some of the anime characters mentioned above.
Differences From Genshin Impact

One of the reasons why you might be asking whether the genders of the Trailblazer in Honkai: Star Rail are important is due to how Genshin Impact handled its Traveler characters, named Aether for male and Lumine for female, both of which are siblings.
Because in Genshin Impact, the character you didn’t pick at the beginning will later appear in the game as an integral part of the story. In fact, in the current Genshin Impact storyline, the other unpicked playable character serves as one of the antagonists (with questionable motives).
It was a clever though somewhat predictable anime twist that made good use of the overarching story and main quest for the world of Genshin Impact. At the moment, it seems you might not see something like that on Honkai: Star Rail.
However, there’s still a chance the developers or writers for Honkai: Star Rail might pull a twist similar to Genshin Impact. After all, Honkai: Star Rail is also a live-service game, and more story-related content will roll out in the future, likely altering the canon and the lore.
Don’t count on it too much, though. For now, just enjoy your choice.
The Canon Choice

One of the first few games to introduce a voiced male or female main character where both of them are included in the story and are different people would be Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, where you get to choose between Alexios (male) and Kassandra (female).
Both are also siblings, allowing for the other character to appear in the story as a villain later on for some rather heated Greek tragedy between siblings.
The difference in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is that there’s actually an official canon choice which would be Kassandra since she was the character whom the writers picked in the game’s partner novel. So it’s understandable how some characters would debate something similar for Genshin Impact and, by extension, Honkai: Star Rail.
The debate is in vain, of course, because there’s no official announcement of who’s the canon sibling in Genshin Impact.
For Honkai: Star Rail, the main characters aren’t exactly twins or siblings, so it would be hard to shoehorn the other into the story later on as some kind of anime brother-vs-sister twist. We have to remember that these Trailblazers in Honkai: Star Rail might not even be human or organic and are just synthetic vessels for Stellaron.
So until HoYoVerse announces otherwise, there’s no canon main character in Honkai: Star Rail, just as there’s also no canon choice in Genshin Impact.
It’s ultimately up to you what to make of your choice in Honkai: Star Rail, as the purpose of these gray blank slate characters is to immerse the players and help them ease into a self-insert. Such is the beauty in roleplaying games, and Honkai: Star Rail is no exception.
Shame you don’t know, but Aether is confirmed as the protagonist in the Official Genshin Impact Manga, so he is canon not a female
MiHoYo (later HoYoVerse) also announced that there is no canon Traveler. And the manga predates their announcement. So we’ll stick with the latest MiHoYo announcement as our source since it’s more official.