in the novel he even has to change avatars just to piss or take a bath because each avatar has it's own clothing or armor. That he can't take off.
So he was basically using a female one in the beginning probably because the smaller hitbox female toons used to have in most FPS games until devs finally fixed that crap. Some crappier FPS games still got that crap though.
But the novel doesn't say why he using a female one other than to say that each avatar has different looks/clothing/armor.
I was hoping the author would let him use one of the bulkier, muscularly and more armored ones and have his friends say, "How did you get so big?" Unfortunately that doesn't happen
@StolenGene It's probably due to the fact that backgrounds are likely computer-generated, then the characters drawn by hand/scanned and 'pasted' over the background. If you pay attention, you'll notice that there's narrow white outline around characters against the background.