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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.
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- it's super-detached from long fandom traditions of this, like zero acknowledgement of this as a pre-existing thing that has done important stuff in fandom's historical trajectory
- it's co-existing with EXTREME forms of feminisation, trans spectrum stories, ABO and wlw-swap
- as readers&writers, we're almost all bi, queer, on some trans journey: do we, in this non-economic space, really need to worry about cis swap Erasing canon gay? It'd be a different story if there were TONS of these, but it's a handful, not a Prevailing Norm.
- because of all the stuff that Is Okay, it ends up feeling quite focused on discomfort with Women in some strange way. Like look at ALL the ways ABO, with its social turns etc, its 'vestigial cocks' in some iterations, approaches this asymptote?
Like this is as close to a queer4queer audience as you're going to find, so everything is kind of contextualised differently than say, Network Television Made WWX a Girl in a Reboot for Broader Audiences/Cash. Also I'd like to trouble a notion that there's some WEALTH of great cis het stories wherein the women have a male character's range of dynamic action/agency and this level of troubled, focused-on, storied relationship with a male lead romantic partner. There are certainly some, but it's far from an abundant category, and imo since the decline of the Screwball Comedy we've gotten very few examples. Contemporary het screenwriting isn't any better for women, really, than 70s screenwriting, in most respects.
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It is a general cultural discomfort with women thing, and moreso with women's sexuality that people are bringing in to fandom, I think. I can also imagine that real life trauma related to compulsory heterosexuality might cause some queer people in fandom shy away from exploring certain tropes like cis het swap, or lash out at people that do explore it when they fail to protect themselves. This response probably isn't just limited to darker themes in fic since triggers are far more complex than fandom tends to acknowledge. (But that's a bit of a tangent, oops.)
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This point about complex triggers and responses reminds me of the anonymous person who responded to Started from the Bottom with a series of increasingly annoyed requests to tag it for feminisation or trans issues because the person marrying into a clan was sometimes called a wife and there was some like--femme medieval wedding robe action? But not much that signified any modern cross-dressing (everyone is in robes, everyone has long hair, everyone is wearing luxurious materials, it's xianxia). So the contention was sort of--if a guy ever wears a Fancy Robe, that is OUTSIDE gender appropriate behaviour for a guy and has to be distinctly recognised and labeled, right now! And it's just so against like, anything I think about queerness or gender, it made me think of a friend's asking 'do people dislike Gay Male Stereotypes, or do they hate gay men?' I just don't think the end-point of liberation is INTENSIFICATION of medicalised Victorian taxonomical discourses and policing gender expression. It was so counter to my experience growing up in the gay community (with a gay dad), I was kind of thinking--do you know any adult gay men? Nothing here is even like, Birdcage levels of femme.
Like, I'm willing to bet this commenter had some stuff they need to work through, but it's not really my fault for making you have a gender feeling in a fic which says every gendered thing that's happening right in the summary? That is your own Deal to work through? And if gendered sa jiao/any tension in that regard is *fraught* for you, idk what you're doing with WWX in the first place.
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The backlash against cis-het swap kind of feels like it stems from fandom's 'eww hets' attitude, which I've never really been comfortable with. Plus it implies stuff about queer relationships that I don't totally like? Queer relationships aren't interesting *because they're queer*, they're interesting because of the people involved in said relationships.
(For what it's worth, I *adore* that series, and if you ever did decide to continue it you would have at least one loyal reader!)
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That's interesting, re 'eugh, het', I didn't think about it like that.
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I've also seen people say that the trope is inherently transphobic, so I imagine if you agree with that argument there being genderswap that makes the pairing HET would be Going Too Far.
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I, personally, treat fandoms very differently when I main a female character than I do a male character. A dude's experience of his gender, no matter his particular presentation, is not going jive with my personal experience of my gender. We are parallel roads. A woman's experience can go same road/intersection/viaduct/oh shit highway why all in the same fic. I am frequently Not Up For That in fic.
So I'll a/b/o all day because scifi genders who cares but I don't do cishet swap or trans fic unless it's a blue moon.
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-reading that, "i normally don't like this but you did it great" can come off as very insulting makes sense but I'm pretty sure that I have definitely said it, meaning it as like, I don't normally love chocolate cake but your chocolate cake was so good it got over my inherent distaste of chocolate flavored things. But as you point it out i can definitely see how it can come off as passive aggressive.
-cis genderswap is a really interesting topic because I do think part of it is reflexive dislike at a perceived "un-queering?" of the text. Obviously fandom spaces are not the media at large but it is hard to separate the two (at least for me). I hadn't thought about it until I read your post but whenever I read an AU that changes something that I view as being fundamental to the character, like gender, I assume it is being done to focus on how other characters and the world at large would react to the character's trait being changed.
SO, and this is going to be a weird analogy. There is zero effort involved for me when reading about Thirteen having adventures and having a relationship with the Master as opposed to, idk, Three and his relationship with the Master. I don't feel like changing gender really changes anything about the Doctor or the relationship at issue and I actively seek out Thirteen/Dhawan!Master. However, when, for example, WWX's gender is changed and LWJ's is not, I assume the change will change WWX's character/WWX +LWJ's relationship in a way that, I am less interested in reading about *because* I have seen how these gender dynamics play out in other forms of media and I am not in fandom for that.
On that note, however, I also seldom click on a/b/o because I'm not interested in the super stereotypical gender dynamics that appear inherent to that genre. Which makes this whole analysis maybe moot because maybe I'm just not interested in stereotypical gender dynamics and that is the issue here? And maybe that is the case for a lot of people? We see a lot of male/female relationships and *know* how those dynamics play out in basically every space outside of fandom. Perhaps people are less willing to engage in a cis swap because of the glut elsewhere and because they are interested in fandom for different reasons. (this does not explain people's love of a/b/o and I can't even speak to that because I personally think the trope tends to be very stereotypical and reductive so... :shrug emoji: )
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Idk I'd kind of complicate--the notion that we see rich involved het dynamics where the female characters are very full and have Wangxian-level histories and interpersonal conflicts... much at all, in media of the past several decades. Mass media does comp het incessantly, but not particularly well, or even with much interest. The rom com isn't really being made anymore. I can't actually think of a great character driven m/f romance film released in the West in decades.