Quote: Acyl wrote:I don't understand what the problem is. The whole point of that particular genre of fic is "what if so and so was born a girl?"
It bears mentioning that some point after this, one of the canon rivalry/friendship relationships - between two guys, in the canon - started to be painted as
a romantic heterosexual one.
I couldn't decide whether that was the fic jumping the shark, or it simply living up to the expected conventions of this kind of AU fic...or the
author simply following plot threads and premise to a logical conclusion.
Unless the writer decides to either a) make the gender-swapped character homosexual, or b) never deal at all with romantic entanglements - both of which seem
to me to be dodging a lot of the interesting things to be done with the premise - then that sort of thing will happen, and there's nothing terribly
disconcerting about it to me. The gender-swapped character is not the original character, and is going to interact differently with the rest of the cast -
that's the whole point. In my mind, it's really no different than any other AU-type fic - if you do... I don't know, "what if Ranma really
was a big pervert?", then it's perfectly ordinary in the story for him to be a pervert, and do perverted
things. If you do "what if Ukyou really was a boy?", then it's perfectly ordinary for him to be a boy, and Ranma's rival for Akane rather
than Akane's rival for Ranma.
(Stories where the character has their gender altered during the course of the story - i.e., they were once a boy and a plot device turns them into a girl -
are a whole different barrel of worms when it comes to romance, and it is a lot more difficult to pull that particular plot line off well.)
Aaron Nowack