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Some Thoughts on Cis Het Swap
Someone asked if I was going to continue my cis-het swap Wangxian series, and because I'd just seen someone else on Twitter complain about how I hadn't this week, I wrote a rather TL;DR answer, as I've been thinking about that. It's substantive enough that I thought maybe I ought to bring it back to meta cave:
Because I could write 3k for me, but fandom is largely communal and about readerships. The outlined next bit of this is a substantial 40kish plot fic. So, given my time and people's interest, are the necessary hours better spent on something other than a trope people dislike, for reasons they're further constructing as political? (A claim I think is being rather too easily made, but.) A lot of people flat-out won't read it (and you know, it's anyone's right to not like a trope), and a lot of people who do will rush in to tell me they disdain it, but I am okay, and frankly I don't need that.
It's not like I'm Here to Do Numbers, with my absolute disinterest in having fandom social media and monetisation, etc. etc. But also I can't say that I don't care that this is my least popular substantial project, because no one wants to spend time telling a joke that doesn't land.
I'd really like to, eventually! It's interesting because in slightly older fandoms (and still, in smaller fandoms), this form of gender swap fic has been very common for a long time. What you do with it ranges from, you know, sloppy to great. But a lot of younger tumblr-bred fandom isn't used to cis-het swap, so it can strike them as a really active, almost hostile gesture. There are a lot of comments even here re 'I hate this trope, but you did it okay'. People didn't mean to be rude, I know, but it is weird and kind of rude, given that: I wrote 20k of it, so I evidently have some time for it! [A/N: Further, who are you disclaiming to? What personal brand do you think you're protecting? I don't even know you, so?]
And to me, this particular reticence doesn't make a lot of sense considering how actively contemporary fandom engages in a lot of other gender play (ABO, forms of feminisation, etc). It can strike me as weird (frankly, as dubious) to, in that whole schema, draw the line at Actual Woman. I feel like wlw swap almost 'gets away with it' because people can't formulate an argument to address their still-extant discomfort. But given that (as I discovered after posting this) a lot of people are WILDLY ill-at-ease with cis-het swap as a concept at the moment, it does give me pause, even though I personally find this form of gender-exploration really interesting.
Because I could write 3k for me, but fandom is largely communal and about readerships. The outlined next bit of this is a substantial 40kish plot fic. So, given my time and people's interest, are the necessary hours better spent on something other than a trope people dislike, for reasons they're further constructing as political? (A claim I think is being rather too easily made, but.) A lot of people flat-out won't read it (and you know, it's anyone's right to not like a trope), and a lot of people who do will rush in to tell me they disdain it, but I am okay, and frankly I don't need that.
It's not like I'm Here to Do Numbers, with my absolute disinterest in having fandom social media and monetisation, etc. etc. But also I can't say that I don't care that this is my least popular substantial project, because no one wants to spend time telling a joke that doesn't land.
So I may come back to this: there's an outline and 3k written on the next part. But it'll really depend on how I feel about the fandom and other projects and negotiating All That.