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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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 07:47 am (UTC)From:2. All of the above, at various times.
3. In the one where the generswap was internal, the character was not particularly different, but that was also a v short fic so he wasn't given much time to react to being female.
In ones where the genderswap is external, there are more changes in the way characters react, both because the fic is longer and because genderswap AU laid over more than one generation of characters is going to change the sexual politics of the parentage involved.
4. There was more exploration of how switching genders would change relationships in the external fic as well. I kind of assumed that ambitious, pushy women are reacted to differently than ambitious, pushy men even in sci fi universes, so I re-wrote relationships accordingly.
here via <user name=finch>
Date: 2010-04-01 12:38 pm (UTC)From:2. One or two characters who have always been that gender in universe, rather than the "oh my god, when I woke up I was a different gender!" style.
3. Yes, they do; since they've grown up within a different social context, their personalities and attitudes reflect those changes. (Hi, I'm from the Judith Butler school of gender performativity!) So the surprises don't surprise me, though they often delight me.
4. Yes, of course--what would be the point of ignoring how the gender changes affect character interaction?
5. I love writing genderswap AUs, though I don't often find other genderswap AUs that I want to read--mostly because I write genderswap AUs to accomplish pretty specific things that I like. *shrugs* So you know. Difficult to find those kinks satisfied by other writers within my canons of choice.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 01:46 pm (UTC)From: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).
no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 02:47 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 02:56 pm (UTC)From:I saw a prompt that appealed to me. I hadn't really considered rwiting genderswap before that.
What kind of AU was it? (one character or many, external or internal change)
My first was one character internal. (I'm currently working on one character [a different character] external, but I've answered these questions about the first one.)
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?
She (I changed a male character to female) is a bit less bold than her male counterpart, but that's about it; she's still defiant, cranky, and loving like he is. I worried about seeming to make her a wimp just because she's female, but I also thought a 5'6" woman without combat training (due to plot reasons) would likely be less physically bold than a 6' man with such training.
Did you deliberately consider how being/becoming a different gender would affect their relationships with other characters?
Yes. I thought about it for all her relationships, for her relationship wtth the world.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-01 04:07 pm (UTC)From:Teddy Lupin
I decided to play with the idea of Teddy Lupin (Tonks and Remus' kid, a metamorphmagus) jokingly making himself look like a girl one day... and then liking it. I don't know why - possibly I'd read a fic, possibly I was just curious. And while I didn't write out a full fic, I had scribbles and ideas in my head - how he'd start learning how to change the insides with copious studies of biology books, how Teddy would perfect the externals of the girl!body with Victoire's (his girlfriend's) help, "just for fun" of course, and how she figured it out, how their relationship changed, how his relationship with his favourite cousin changed, how came out, so to speak, to his family and friends. Teddy didn't change significantly at ALL in becoming a girl, and the way he interacted with some people didn't change either. But then you This isn't TECHNICALLY genderswap so much as it is a very special transgendered transition story, but I thought I'd mention it.
Second!
Mark Cohen
I played an already-AU version of Mark Cohen from RENT in an AU pan-fandom RP who, having been with his amazing demi-god boyfriend for a while, decided he wanted a kid. Or, well, THEY decided they wanted to have a kid. And because they were in a magical place where magical people existed, they figured that if one of them could get turned into a girl for a year or so, they could have a BIOLOGICALLY THEIRS kid.
This was really important to them. So they tracked down some magical person who could do it, and Mark got turned into a girl.
He was not prepared for the hormones, and did get a lot more emotional. Considering it was a conscious decision and he would be going back once the pregnancy (which took quickly - I think it was the deity!sperm. That stuff seems to be potent) was over, most of his relationships didn't change much. There was a bit of a shift with his boyfriend, just because of the added intimacy there, but in the end, he was still Mark (if a little more prone to tears and chocolate and wanting to garrotte his biffle Roger with a guitar string), and his relationships and personality didn't change at all. Since it was an RP, I didn't have to think too much about how his relationships would change, because it pretty much would become apparent in the RPing of it.
And, finally, my favourite and most classic!Genderswappy...
Judas Iscariot
The "Jesus Christ Superstar" version, based on a) the portrayal of the character by Drew Sarich, and b) the staging/costuming/etc. of the Broadway revival that was recorded in 2000. I blame Aubrey for this one - I had recorded myself singing "Heaven on Their Minds", and after she listened to it, she said all she could think of was that it WAS Judas... just a girl. And that it had spawned a girl!Judas in her head. Which the idea of spawned a girl!Judas in MY head, on top of the boy!Judas I already had faintly.
Girl!Judas was always a girl, though given the very... special setting of JCS, that hasn't changed much about her. She's a little bit more prone to snapping at people (*coughSimonZealotescough*) and then apologising reluctantly. She's more likely to laugh (only by the tiniest bit), and she doesn't try to say that she loves Jesus like a brother or something. She doesn't admit she's IN love with him, but she doesn't feel like she has to rationalise her love like boy!Judas does.
She's somewhat more personally hostile towards Mary Magdalane, and she's strangely fond of Simon Zealotes, but other than that, as far as I can tell without having gotten a chance to play her off people, her relationships are mostly unchanged. There was a BIT of patronisation when she first started following Jesus, but he put a stop to that pretty quickly, and now she's "one of the twelve", so nobody who follows Jesus is likely to treat her badly for her gender.
...and there you have it.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 01:44 am (UTC)From:I got to thinking about what the sex would be like for a particular pairing and thought it would be quite delicious.
What kind of AU was it? (one character or many, external or internal change)
I pretty much reversed the sex of all of the characters.
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?
Because it was for a futuristic fandom that most writers like to hope would have a lot less stereotypes about gender, I actually felt I couldn't get away with changing too much about the way they behaved because they're supposed to be free from societal pressures like that, but also kind of got stuck there because many would argue there just simply are ways that women and men are different and I wasn't sure where the boundaries should lie on all of that. For some reason, though, when I changed a m/m pairing to a fm/fm pairing, the level of misunderstanding and failure to communicate between the two increased from how I usually see them, but this may have just been a factor of the specific story I was telling. It's still something I'm struggling with, because the characters lend themselves to being rather unsentimental, and I wouldn't want that to come across as actually making the women masculine.
Did you deliberately consider how being/becoming a different gender would affect their relationships with other characters?
I think the dynamics of friendships between males and between females are pretty different, so I had to sort of work out how the same levels of intimacy and comfort would translate into the AU characters without it seeming like I was actually altering the progression of the relationships.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 04:01 am (UTC)From:1. The lulz. XD But also because gender is especially fun to play "what if" with, just because of the way it makes you think about the canon and how (or even if) it would change.
2. Baldur's Gate is unusual as video games go because while most Western-style cRPGs give you the option to make a female character, until Bioware came along and made Romance subquests popular, the gender of the main character never really mattered. Baldur's Gate 2 has gender swap as part of the actual storyline, though it's played for gags, when the evil snarky mage in the party gets cursed by a magic scroll and changed into a woman. But I wanted to do it as a serious thing, so I made Sarevok, the Big Bad of the first game, naturally female. But just him. When I write fic for Bioware games I always use the character I rolled as the stand-in for the game's protagonist and 9 times out of 10 they're female, so I left the PC a woman.
3. Canon Sarevok is basically an ax crazy bruiser type. I mean he's not STUPID, he does pull off some pretty nasty planning and stuff, but he's not really one to sit around waxing eloquent on just WHY he deserves to become the new God of Murder instead of you (he's your half-brother, and your shared father was Bhaal, the deceased Lord of Murder in the Forgotten Realms setting). Lady!Sarevok, OTOH, came across much more calculated and colder for some reason. I found that her tactic of choice was the mindfuck rather than shock and awe. And she came across way scarier as a result.
4. Well, in BG2's expansion you actually get a chance to recruit Sarevok to your party, and through a long series of conversations and modeling good behavior, you can actually get him to flip his alignment from Chaotic Evil to Chaotic Good. Most of the intra-party conflict comes from a CE!Sarevok in a group with Good aligned characters, many of whom also fought against him in the first game. Alignment and history were much more of a factor than gender with Lady Sarevok, although one character DID act much differently toward her. Viconia, the Drow priestess of the party who is decidedly evil aligned (unless you romance the mean out of her), had much more respect for Lady Sarevok. Given her upbringing as a Drow (clawing her way through her sisters to fight for her station), she could sympathize with those motivations. They were downright shippy, even. o.O I figured she would relate to her (and it was one of the things that even drove the idea in the first place) but, uh, not quite to that degree.
...and now you're making me want to write Gender Swap Dragon Age fic. Damn you! XD
no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 08:38 am (UTC)From:and I'm just narcisisstic enough to want to ramble on about it. *nodnod*1 +2) I wrote an AU for Star Trek 2009 where James T. Kirk has always been a girl primarily because of the sheer amount of girl!Kirk AUs I'd found that I didn't agree with. That is, there were so many that had Kirk as Kirk-with-tits, or had her as being this complete mess, even more so than her male counterpart, who on the face of it would have been better off in rehab than Starfleet. And that felt both OOC and quietly, subconsciously (on the part of the writers, that is) gender essentialist/ misogynistic to me. I hasten to add it wasn't any one story in particular, but a culmination of several things that seemed to make up this fanon picture of girl!Kirk as a being the "messed up hot chick" who goes around offering people sex on tap or acting like a complete idiot or... aargh.
So I wrote one of my own.
3) Yes, and no. Yes, because I deliberately set out to give my version of girl!Kirk the kind of attributes and slightly different attitudes that I think she'd have if she had the same personality as Kirk, but was raised slightly differently, as happens with girls. She's more open with the close friends she has. She has more close friends than Kirk, specifically more female friends. Her relationship with her mother is a little more... vicious. (2009 Trek fanon states that Kirk and his Mom have issues. For various reasons, I think this is likely; I also think girl!Kirk would take it more personally than her male counterpart.) She's quicker to point out just how competent she is: double standards! If she wants to be taken seriously she needs to act like she knows what she's doing (which Pine's Kirk doesn't).
But no, there were a whole host of professional situations in which girl!Kirk acted just the way her male counterpart would/did in canon, because they're still the same person: they have the same education, the same basic personality traits, the same skills and innate talents. They can't back down from a challenge. They feel personally responsible for their whole crew... things like that.
4) No, I never considered it deliberately, but that was mostly because once I'd seen all the ways girl!Kirk was different from her male counterpart, the changes in her relationships with others just came naturally: slightly romantic undertone in her relationship with her male best friend (frankly, she reminds him of his ex), close platonic relationships with other female characters that her male counterpart (probably) never felt the need for. But then there were other relationships, with her mentor for example, that stayed exactly the same.
5) So basically, my girl!Kirk verse is both a "writer's favourite" fic, because it was just so much fun, and a manifesto, in a way: this is what I believe she'd be like, because "issues + girl-hormones" do not equal "more of a mess than her male counterpart".
Um, wow. I hadn't realised it got so long; but I hope it helps, and best of luck with your paper!
no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 01:08 pm (UTC)From:I prefer women to men. I think they're more interesting, they're hotter, I identify with them better (being female myself, this *should* be a given, but sadly it isn't), and they're rarer in cool roles, so they feel fresher and more original. But when I like a fandom enough to write fic about it, most of the time the women already *in* it don't interest me, and the characters I'm obsessed with are male... because the archetypes that really grab me are almost always written as male. So I will often change the sex of one or more of the male characters that I'm obsessed with to female because I like them better that way. I'd write gb all the time except I've learned that fans don't always respond well, and I like feedback as much as the next gal.
I've also written gb solely for the purpose of exploring how a woman would have dealt with a particular life situation, or solely for the purpose of exploring gender differences in general.
What kind of AU was it? (one character or many, external or internal change)
I've done them all. From "Every character in the fandom was born the opposite sex" to "The main male character had his body stolen by a woman and is now trapped in a female body" to "The main male character was actually genderless in the first place and could just as easily have taken female form".
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?
It depends on the character. Charles Xavier barely changed -- she became a little more concerned with her physical appearance and bothered by her baldness, a little bit more sexually adventurous, than canon Charles, in the two always-a-woman AUs I've done. Magneto changed significantly because a lot of Magneto's behavior is based on a public persona constructed in part around the fact that he's a physically imposing man, and Magneto is more of a gender traditionalist anyway, so of my two always-a-woman Magnetos one is a radical feminist who's as concerned with gender politics as she is with mutant rights, and one took a more "traditionally" feminine route to power by marrying a mutant man and assisting him in his work, publicly downplaying her power and privately being a dominant force in the direction of mutantkind's future. Jane Kirk didn't end up much different but is *much* more aware of the hinky gender politics of TOS-era Starfleet than her male counterpart; female Spock wouldn't be different at all except that being in the role of the Vulcan woman in a marriage, rather than a man, means she *did* get married, and had a kid, and that has had a profound impact on her life. In the AU where Q took female form, Q isn't significantly different -- she plays female gender much the same way he played male gender, with frequent costume changes and sexual harassment of the opposite-sex starship captain -- but Picard's response to her is different (among other things he figures out that she wants him a *lot* faster than Picard would ever have figured it out from male Q.)
In the X-Men AU I did where *everyone* changed gender, some characters ended up radically different, while others barely changed at all.
Did you deliberately consider how being/becoming a different gender would affect their relationships with other characters?
Yes, absolutely, there wouldn't be a point to it otherwise.
Any other comments?
I see gb's as a fannish way of trying to restore women to narratives that strip them out. In the real world we are 51% of the population, but when we get to be 30% of an ensemble cast in science fiction, people start acting like the story is just for women and women dominate the narrative. GB's are an attempt (often) to put women back at 50% where we belong.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-02 09:14 pm (UTC)From:Dares and just wanting to confront my own gender biases, to be honest.
What kind of AU was it? (one character or many, external or internal change)
I genderswapped an entire main cast, with varying degrees of external/internal.
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?
The characters themselves were of about the same personality, but different characters reactions to each other had changed dramatically. Then again, a patriarchy had switched to a matriarchy, and implications for a lot of things changed.
Did you deliberately consider how being/becoming a different gender would affect their relationships with other characters?
Yes, actually, they really changed most of my hetero relations, with the gay ones had minor changes. One in particular that stood out was my tendency towards cranky professional guy/earthy hippie woman just wouldn't work the same genderswapped, to a large detriment. The slightly empowering aspect of being free-wheeling that the hippie had as a woman becomes something irresponsible and negative when they're a male, and the strains on the cranky professional one are much greater by turning them into a woman (almost exponentially).
It was that drastic change in dynamic that got me started on my current original fiction project, actually. Even if the main character's personality has sort of deviated quite a bit from the original genderswap.
Any other comments?
This discussion kind of reminds me of some fanart I've seen for KH where the only female Org XIII member gets genderswapped into a guy a lot, and suddenly she's a "so kawaii bishie!" and how much that annoyed me. XD
no subject
Date: 2010-04-03 07:55 pm (UTC)From:A lot of reasons are there for me to write an AU. For the lulz, because I wanted the plot of the original to go somewhere it didn't. I actually love to genderbend FF8 because I think that Rinoa should have been the knight. Not that the class of knight is male, but in that game it seemed to be, and further I think the argument against her father would have been better played, the mother issues with the loss of the mother figure early in life could have also been more developed from a male perspective. I keep poking at an AU of Final Fantasy 4 for the same reason. I want to make Rosa the knight. (of course I will probably NOT genderbend that one at all)
What kind of AU was it? (one character or many, external or internal change)
I've done all kinds. I tend to swap them all.
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?
Some of them shock me. Rosa (Ross) is very forward, but that's to be expected. Cecil (Cecila) is rather demure, however. Squall(Stormy) is kinda gothic on the outside, but she's a little ... less internalized than male version. And less of a prick. Vanessa (Vincent) is evil. Pure, Unadulterated EVIL. She's way too smart and was daddy's baby girl and is 6 feet tall and breathtakingly beautiful and she KNOWS IT.
The one who changed the least for me was Nevada(Reno). Mostly cause... yeah, Reno.
Did you deliberately consider how being/becoming a different gender would affect their relationships with other characters?
As someone who has studied feminist lit for most of my adult life? Oh hell yes. WHY I DID IT HALF THE TIME
Any other comments?
&hearts