Musings that have been floating around in my brain for the past several months re: fic and changing bodies and identity and gender and how that plays out in different fandoms
( Read more... )
Are you in any way surprised that I hit comment limit again with such a topic?kegomMarch 27 2011, 20:48:31 UTC
I read Iambickilometer's post too, some time ago, and it really opened my eyes to some stuff that seems rather poorly thought out. (Of course I'm sure there're exceptions, but so far I haven't seen any.) I did use to wonder about stuff like sex-swapped people immediately deciding to try out their new body by having sex with it, but of course, since I'm asexual, that was something I was bound to notice. But I never really thought about the fact that any cis-gendered person would be bound to feel horribly uncomfortable in an opposite-sex body, even though the thought of waking up in a man's body without knowing when I might change back is pretty horrifying to me when I really think about it.
I think suspension of disbelief can be kept up quite well, if there's enough basis for the acceptance of the opposite-sex appearance and if the gender of the person that's changed isn't changed as well. If the characters are Arashi (or V6), for example (wasn't your fic the one where the whole of JE were changed and Arashi went home to have an orgy? Or do I confuse you with someone else?), I can easily believe that, since they're already subjected to so much sex/gender related madness (just how often have they cross-dressed yet?), their public personas would react quite calmly to the situation, as long as they knew that they'd probably turn back again pretty soon. If the characters were Western actors or, say, the characters from Hikaru no Go, for example, who're not subjected to the craziness of the Japanese entertainment industry, I'd have a far harder time believing that they'd just as easily accept the change.
The thing you mention at the beginning - the characters suddenly starting to behave like girls and thinking of themselves as such - is something that I can't suspend my disbelief of, though. Plus, it annoys me on the same level that feminized OOC characters annoy me: Whether we want it to be or not, gender is still a pretty big issue in pretty much all human societies (even children as young as four or five will be curious to know whether a small baby is a boy or a girl!) and it influences the way we think in a thousand little ways (it's such a difficult and huge topic that I once spent an entire night talking about that with my brother, who's a sociologist), so changing the gender of a character takes something away from his/her "true" characterisation. Plus, I can't help but suspect that the "all fanfic writers are girls" - and often younger girls as well - principle comes into play here: since the fanfic writers are girls, they turn the characters into the gender that they themselves know better, complete with female thought processes and pronouns. And personally, I think something like that is just laziness and sloppy writing. :(
To be completely fair to fanfiction writers, though, it's something "real" authors do as well. Most anime and manga hero/ines have little problems with their temporary sex-reassignment and while, for example, "The Day of Revolution" by Mikiyo Tsuda actually attempts to handle some of the problems with being of the opposite gender suddenly (after the intersexed hero/ine decides to live as a girl instead of a boy), I still couldn't quite believe just how quick the hero, who'd spent 15 years growing up as a boy and didn't give any signs of being transgendered before the discovery of his intersexed biology, adjusted to being a girl. :( (And let's not talk about Ozma of Oz...)
Edit: Sorry, I just noticed I missed typing some words!
I think suspension of disbelief can be kept up quite well, if there's enough basis for the acceptance of the opposite-sex appearance and if the gender of the person that's changed isn't changed as well. If the characters are Arashi (or V6), for example (wasn't your fic the one where the whole of JE were changed and Arashi went home to have an orgy? Or do I confuse you with someone else?), I can easily believe that, since they're already subjected to so much sex/gender related madness (just how often have they cross-dressed yet?), their public personas would react quite calmly to the situation, as long as they knew that they'd probably turn back again pretty soon.
If the characters were Western actors or, say, the characters from Hikaru no Go, for example, who're not subjected to the craziness of the Japanese entertainment industry, I'd have a far harder time believing that they'd just as easily accept the change.
The thing you mention at the beginning - the characters suddenly starting to behave like girls and thinking of themselves as such - is something that I can't suspend my disbelief of, though. Plus, it annoys me on the same level that feminized OOC characters annoy me: Whether we want it to be or not, gender is still a pretty big issue in pretty much all human societies (even children as young as four or five will be curious to know whether a small baby is a boy or a girl!) and it influences the way we think in a thousand little ways (it's such a difficult and huge topic that I once spent an entire night talking about that with my brother, who's a sociologist), so changing the gender of a character takes something away from his/her "true" characterisation. Plus, I can't help but suspect that the "all fanfic writers are girls" - and often younger girls as well - principle comes into play here: since the fanfic writers are girls, they turn the characters into the gender that they themselves know better, complete with female thought processes and pronouns. And personally, I think something like that is just laziness and sloppy writing. :(
To be completely fair to fanfiction writers, though, it's something "real" authors do as well. Most anime and manga hero/ines have little problems with their temporary sex-reassignment and while, for example, "The Day of Revolution" by Mikiyo Tsuda actually attempts to handle some of the problems with being of the opposite gender suddenly (after the intersexed hero/ine decides to live as a girl instead of a boy), I still couldn't quite believe just how quick the hero, who'd spent 15 years growing up as a boy and didn't give any signs of being transgendered before the discovery of his intersexed biology, adjusted to being a girl. :(
(And let's not talk about Ozma of Oz...)
Edit: Sorry, I just noticed I missed typing some words!
Reply
Leave a comment