An academic question.

[ambersweet]

I have to ask this, so I can concentrate on the paper I'm supposed to be writing, rather than sitting here mulling over this or (worse) researching it.

O ye writers of fanfic:

Have you ever written a gender-swap AU? This includes fics where one, a few, or all characters are just naturally genderswapped (e.g., a universe in which Squall and Seifer are female and Quistis and Rinoa are male), or Something Happened to cause one or more of the characters to spontaneously swap genders (e.g., Hermione slipped polyjuice potion in Ron's pumpkin juice to make sure he NEVER laughed at her cramps again).



First, what made you decide to write an AU? ("the lulz" is a sufficient answer, but if you've got more, I'd love to hear it)

What kind of AU was it? (one character or many, external or internal change)

Did the characters respond differently in their new genders? (More or less emotional, communicative, friendly, talkative, considerate?) Were you surprised by the changes/lack of changes?

Did you deliberately consider how being/becoming a different gender would affect their relationships with other characters?

Any other comments?

Feel free (oh please please please) to pimp this out to your friends, relations, acquaintances, random people on the street, whoever.

Comments

[ilthit]

The thing about this is, the only fandom in which I've written genderswap was in Ranma 1/2 where genderswap is canon - though I had characters swap who never swapped in canon. Part of it was just to play off the existing idea of changing bodies, but mostly it was the idea of further confusing the sexual/romantic ties between the protagonists. Which, frankly, is what the original is all about - it's shameless. This question should rather be aimed at Rumiko Takahashi herself.

I wrote stories where there was temporary sex change willingly entered into for purposes of sex (female to male), accidental serial sex change (such as Ranma's, but applied to Ryoga) and stuck-in-new-sex-due-to-pregnancy fic. In all the stories the people concerned never changed their gender identity.

In the just-for-sex one, it was supposed to be just a one time thing for thrills between mostly hetero-identified characters but got them in trouble and turned into something else. Changing Ryoga's body had very little to do with anything except give Ranma another thing to tease him about and let me perve over boobs. I don't really have an excuse for that. I know I loved writing canon-genderswapped-Ranma/Ryoga (though I went for it in their cisbodies too).

The genderswapped individuals never changed their personalities as a direct result of the genderswap, but indirectly it had an effect - character growth, basically. It challenged their preconceptions of gender and sex and gave them a new outlook, eventually.

Their changing relationships with others were kind of the motivation for my writing these stories in the first place. Mind you, the characters in Ranmaverse were already pretty familiar with the idea of people's bodies changing.

I have also DRAWN genderswap of the always-been-the-other-gender-and-cissexed type, so I've considered the characterization in this case at least on a shallow level. Most recently I drew genderswapped Big Bang Theory cast. Motivation: I want TV shows about girl geeks. I pretty much kept their personalities as they were, though I was surprised to find out that Penny's changed the most. I think that's because she's so violently gendered - all things girly and pink, which kind of obfuscates everything else about her. She ended up turning into an aspiring musician instead of an actor, and became a lot less talkative. I dunno. I think I sort of just geared in on Penny's role as a "perfect girl" and turned it into "heart throb". I found the geeks' personalities more unsexed and transferable (yes I did, even Howard's).