pjoismyblood

[thevagabondexpress]

some closing thoughts on delusions (and terrible fictions) (my genderbent tlh rewrite)

Whoo. This has been a long ride. A very long ride indeed.

When I started writing this back in June of 2021 (a couple years ago now), I hadn't realized I was genderfluid yet, neither had I realized that the only consistency in my experience of gender would be a never-ending byronic crisis about it. I brood about my gender like James Herondale broods about being damned and I am proud enough of this to make no apologies.

But I was very much aware that I was in the middle of an existential gender crisis and that meant I had gender thoughts very much in the forefront of my mind when I read Chain of Gold and Chain of Iron for the first time. So of course, it stuck out to me that the 'fake marriage' plot was really gender-specific and would not have worked (certainly not the same way as it was set up in canon) if Cordelia had been, say, Claude.

So, of course, I saw a challenge. I had to figure out how to make these books work if the characters' genders were swapped around. Then I stumbled across a) Cassandra Jean's genderbent Mortal Instruments art, and b) someone else writing fanfic about it, and that was the catalyst I needed. And because it's been my favorite series, I chose to start with TLH.

I gave up on Great Expectations. I knew the books are a pseudo-retelling of it and I didn't have the time and energy to read the story, besides which I knew it would come out very differently. So d&tf's inspirations are instead a hash of We Have Always Lived In The Castle, Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, and a Radiohead song, among others.

I chose not to wait for Chain of Thorns. I said, to heck with it, I've been watching these genderbent characters disperse in very different directions from their canon counterparts and while some of that (the existence of Fields, Felice's survival) was my deliberate fault, a lot of it was simply me listening to the story and taking it where it felt like it should naturally go. So, before we even had an official ChoT summary, I threw my hands up and decided to just write my own take on a final installment. Looking at what became of Chain of Thorns, thank goodness I did. There's so much about ChoT that would not have worked with the characters I had and the directions I was pushing them in.

This is not, by far, my best writing. It's messy, it's sloppy, there are things I could've done a lot better and different decisions I could've made and I could've done better worldbuilding and used the historical realism of a genderbent rewrite concept to push it even further away from the original TLH. I may go back and edit/rewrite someday, but not now. For now, let's just sit here and consider that I actually saw this through.

I may do more TSC Genderbent Editions if people want them. TID also has a very gender-specific plot that could be fun to wrangle, and while TMI doesn't in the same way, I've come to realize this series is also serving a fantasy for women who like shorter men so I may have to do it for that reason alone.

So I dunno, let me know if you want more of these rewrites (or additional/ongoing content for Judith + Claude, Michelle + Fields, Jackie + Lou, Alice + Tracey, Christa + the deep blue sea, etc.) because you bet I will listen.

[thevagabondexpress]

to be completely honest, a good chunk of the reason i started the genderbent tlh rewrite in the first place is because it gave us the potential for both a) a chubby male love interest (claude), and b) a male love interest who's shorter than his lady (lou) and that is the fictional character diversity that i desperately need.

[thevagabondexpress]

you do not realize the full extent of my love of rewrites-with-a-twist until you see the inside of my brain following @failempires 's ask. the number of possible takes to have on both tlh + ttf. matthew and judith interactions. james and genderbent-grace, how south would that meeting go and how fast? potentially matthew's response to alice? imagine if thomastair and tralice fully both got flipped around: alastair following claude and saeed around the cornwall gardens home with an armful of discarded coats, exasperatedly chanting "this is not a fraternity house, this is not a fraternity house, this is not a fraternity house" while barbara and eugenia have to deal with their brother's feminine counterpart and anna must face an even scarier scary-sapphic-person than herself. the possibilities.

[thevagabondexpress]

thinking about genderbent character things again. I did it with TLH and there's other TSC things I'd like to do it with (let's see how I feel about committing to a full rewrite of something again though, I don't know) and there's a few other series I'd like to mess with on that score but while a lot of the time the issue is that gender-swapping the characters doesn't change enough, occasionally I come across the opposite issue: it would change too much. there's a six of crows character I could see this happening to, and it's also the reason that I won't touch TDA with a ten-foot pole. characters where, no matter how close you try to stick to the story, just because of circumstances they would be rendered near unrecognizable.

which is kind of a shame when it comes to TDA actually because I could've had my chance to bring us characters like Frau Gauden and the Cailleach Bhéara and get us away from some of this Spenserian madness.

[thevagabondexpress]

i've already talked a lot about genderbent tlh and whether or not i should rewrite it and . . . once i've put the emotions i have surrounding the original aside i realize that really what i want is for a version with a genderbent grace to exist. i wrote a little bit of a thing exploring that once (and pseudo-explaining why i didn't use a dude version in delusions (and terrible fictions)) but i feel like there's a part of me that, three years after i started writing it, and after all of the analysis i did in the first draft, feels like i'd be up to the challenge of it now. i'm just not sure if anybody else would want to see that version much less where i'd put it since it'd feel weird to have it over on ao3 where the other version is.