Gender bender stories that don't exist

I am a big fan of gender bender media. I love storylines in which a man transforms into a woman or vice versa and tries to navigate their life in an unfamiliar body. However, you can only read and watch so many of them before you get completely bored. Gender bender media tends to be highly formulaic. How often have I seen the epitome of masculinity (or at least someone who wishes to be) get transformed into a cute girl and feel like their life is over? There are differences between a body swap and a simple sex change, and sometimes the character will find that everyone remembers them as their new sex, but there are really only so many variations of these tropes. Usually, the character hates the transformation and spend the rest of the story to find a solution. Sometimes a character grows to like their new body in the process, usually with the help of some romantic interest. It can be fun to see someone adjust to the change right away, though it's very often for sexual reasons rather than social ones...

You know, keeping the gender bender genre fresh is hard. I describe a lot of situations above, but there really aren't many stories that stray away from the tropes. I don't think that has to be the case, however. Here are four possible gender bender stories that would be unlike anything that has ever come before.

There are enough of these, alright?

The Great Undoing

Let's get the most tragic option out of the way first. I once read a short story about a woman who had just gotten breast implants. She was looking in the mirror, appreciating how her breasts had increased in a cup size or two, something she has wanted for years. Around this time, however, some completely unrelated character wished that everyone's breasts would become flat – don't ask me why. The woman, in great distress, watches the breasts she had paid thousands of dollars for just fade away into nothingness.

Let's bring this idea to a more impactful scale. Imagine a transgender character, let's call her Alice, who has been going through the various sexual reassignment surgeries and treatments to shape her body as she would prefer it. This is where the magical plot device hits her, however, and her body changes... into that of a boy. I suppose the reason I titled this hypothetical trope "The Great Undoing" is clear, as what I just described is the set-up of what would be a very saddening story.

Usually, gender bender stories have a high dose of fan service. I suppose I do not need to tell you that this concept is a harsh subversion of the genre in that sense, combining a magical sex change with the real world in what may be a horrifying manner. I think there are a lot of directions such a story could take, though honestly, I wouldn't want to run into one often. 

Non-Binary Swapping

To go into a much more cheerful direction, my next trope allows a person to freely change their sex on a regular basis. Imagine a non-binary person, be they agender, fluid, or some less well-defined gender. Let's call them Bill. Perhaps our protagonist is a 17-year old, having grown up as a boy all their life, but has never been comfortable in this role. Bill often feels more comfortable hanging out with the girls of their class than the other boys. Bill saw a definition of the word "agender" on the internet one year prior, and it has been tumbling in their head eversince (though they really don't care too much about labels anyway).

Now give Bill a magic ring that changes their sex whenever they put it on. What will they do with this power? Is it better being a boy or a girl? Does it vary? I believe fiction can explore a huge number of variables if it wanted to. What if a crossdresser got access to such a tool? I'd pay good money to see a storyline in which Haruhi Fujioka could physically turn into a guy. The only piece of media in which this happens that I can think of is El Goonish Shive, but with the number of variables that can be put in this equation, I would want to see more.

Solid-State Fluidity

Perhaps the opposite of "Non-Binary Swapping" is "Solid-State Fluidity" (I'm having a lot of fun making up these names, as you may have noticed). Imagine a genderfluid person, perhaps someone whose gender identity on any given day is basically determined by a coin toss. Let's call him Alex. Alex hasn't been very able to present himself as he likes to, as his environment doesn't really allow him this. As a result, he experiences frequent dysphoria, basically at the drop of a dime.

Then, one day, Alex gets cursed by some ancient Egyptian thingamajig, and not only does his body change to the opposite sex, but everyone in her life suddenly remembers her always being like that. At first, Alex is ecstatic to finally be a "real boy" and for everyone to treat him as one. But the next day, she suddenly feels less happy about her situation.

Getting a non-binary character stuck in a different body is at least as fascinating as allowing them to switch freely, if not even moreso. It would definitely put a refreshing twist on the classic gender swap story.

Real Gender Swap

You know, I've always been bother by terms like "gender bender" and "gender swap". It's a pet peeve, I suppose, but the misuse of "gender" is not making anyone better. What if we could do a real gender swap?

Here we have Jennifer, a cheerleader and, honestly, kinda a bully. One of her victims lays a curse on Jennifer: one that will let her experience a gender swap. However, the next morning, Jennifer doesn't look any different from usual. Did it not work? It did work, but simply not how you expected it, as the curse effectively turned Jennifer into a trans man. Jennifer suddenly feels uncomfortable looking in mirrors, starts to feel uncomfortable with her breasts, her whole presentation. This could get fairly dark as well, of course, as Jennifer may end up in somekind of negativity spiral. But maybe the classmates he once bullied will accept Jennifer for who he is?

And in the end... maybe Jennifer has been transgender all along?

I'm Broken for Not Liking Food

As someone who follows a few Tumblr microblogs, there is a specific sentence I’ve seen pop up multiple times. In the encouraging style users of the website usually bring the message, the sentence is “Asexual people aren’t broken.“ After all, this is an anguish many asexual people feel: if you grow up in a society that greatly values traditional relationships, certain inter-gender behaviors, and reproduction, you may feel like there’s something “wrong with you” if you don’t experience any of that. However, existing somewhere on the aro/ace spectrum myself, I’ve (luckily) never really felt this way. I feel myself being envious, wanting to be in a kind of relationship I’ll probably never end up in, but I’ve rarely felt like there was something wrong with me when it comes to my sexual identity.

When it comes to consuming media, I have a weird relationship with, ahem, relationships. Love Actually quickly became one of my personal favorite all-time films, as its various love stories can really bring tears to my eyes. I don’t know if I watch romantic stories in the same way as other people do, however. To me, a romance is not very different from a common fantasy trope. Romance is like magic: it’s fascinating and beautiful, something worth indulging in.

I am perhaps lucky in how much I can enjoy a good romance, as not everyone can, but I bring this all up because there is another theme I just can’t muster the same feeling towards. That theme is food. I don’t care about food as its own topic, and I have difficulty understanding or even imagining why so many people put so much value on food. In everyday life, this has created some weird social interactions with people who care strongly about what they eat every evening, but more interestingly to me is how it affects how I consume media.

When Digibro described why he found Log Horizon such an amazing anime, he talked for three minutes about how its use of food was “the most true-to-life thing [he] could image,” and here I realized something was going on. In the first episodes of Log Horizon, all the characters in story are transported into a world where all food tastes the same. This was presented in a very over-the-top manner inbetween the more serious scenes, as though it was a gag. Eventually, however, the cast came across a character who had discovered how to give food taste, which was followed by the characters truly ecstatic to eat something with taste again for the first time in days. Digibro said the following about the scene: “So when [the characters] first bit into [tasty] food and literally cried, I felt a well of emotion knowing that I too would have cried my eyes out.” This line, and the ones around it, really stuck with me… because I can’t relate to them at all. When a character in Log Horizon bit into a burger and said “this is going to change the world,” I felt nothing but a bit of amusement. I would have been happy in this world, because the sound of eating wet rice crackers every day doesn’t sound bad at all. I just thought Touno Mamare, the author of Log Horizon, was some kind of food geek when I first watched the show. but when I watched Digibro’s video, I felt like there was something wrong with me…

This is not to say that I don’t like good food! I am actually very picky about my food, in that I really don’t want to eat something I dislike. I have found that simple food, ranging from simple chicken to noodles to literal crackers, are my favorite kinds of food. I would never make something out of a cook book, or order something I don’t fully trust in a restaurant. I will probably never spend the effort of cooking something complex when a simpler meal can suffice. Why bake a cake when you can buy something similar in stores? The way I experience food is fairly mathematical, where I can grade all food on a scale from 1 to 10 and I don’t need to worry of anything ever getting rated higher than the things I’ve set at 10. Sure, you can get bored of certain types of food if you eat too much of it (which is more likely for some foods than for others), but those are pretty much all the variables I need. In fact, allow me to draw up a chart.

Yes, I could live forever on noodles or even crackers (though I don’t think my body would like me much if I tried). I already eat three slices of bread, two of chocolate paste and one with peanut butter, every afternoon for the past ten years. I see no reason to step away from that, because it works. I don't like trying new kinds of food, because I run the risk of getting something I won't like, and there's no value in finding something new I do like because I already like plenty of food.

When I see a scene in which food is the major focus, I try to imagine that what is being enjoyed is music instead. There’s a scene in the first Scott Pilgrim book in which the character Knives Chau experiences rock music for the first time. Watching Knives get entirely overwhelmed by the sound of probably pretty shitty music was infinitely more relatable than the scenes Digibro spoke so highly of above and though it didn't have the same kind of build up as the food scene in Log Horizon, it had way more impact on me because it is something I care about. There’s a scene in episode 1 of K-On! in which one of the characters is deeply inspired by watching a concert on television, and though it was largely played off as a gag, I can’t say I didn’t feel for her.

So what I’m really getting at here is: less food, more music. More importantly, this has been an issue I’ve really been struggling with for a long time now. You cannot believe how much value people put in food in our world. Anime in particular has a heavy emphasis on food, and though I find a show like Shokugeki no Soma positively ridiculous and Amaama to Inazuma is adorable because of its gorgeous facial animations and because social interactions is where the heart of the show lies, these still make me feel… broken.

Webtoons, Turbomedia, and me

Webtoons

"Webtoon" is a movement of webcomics started in 2003 by people like JunKoo Kim, Kyusam Kim, and Kang Full. The movement is characterized by an infinite canvas layout with a large amount of negative space. Reading a webtoon, you will find yourself scrolling passively down a wall of images, each with a large amount of white space or black space in between. The amount of "empty" space in between each "panel" physically induces the amount of "time" one will experience passing. This is a very direct effect. In something like Kyusam Kim's Hive or Son Jeho and Lee Kwangsu's Noblesse, you'll see the whitespace compress and expand depending on the pacing of the story. The panels themselves are huge, big enough to fill an entire page of a book if given the chance. This style of webcomics was not a result of Scott McCloud's marketing of the "infinite canvas" as he described it in 2000, but it can be attributed almost entirely to JunKoo Kim. When Kim started Naver Webtoon (now internationally known as Line Webtoon), he was inspired by how Korean people use the Web pages already: scrolling down to read the text.

Korea's webtoon services have many other aspects to them that experimental webcartoonists love to make use of, like sound and animation. Companies like Naver and Daum established the kind of features that make webcomics like these possible. Webtoons weren't going to stay in Korea, however, and with the worldwide launch of Line Webtoon, works like SIU's Tower of God reached global popularity

Now in English speaking territories, short comic strips have dominated the webcomic market, so "webtoon" became a shorthand for "Korean webcomic". When Line Webtoon became available worlwide, "webtoon" beat "manhwa" in Google results. But I argue that unlike "manhwa", which refers to Korean comics in general, "webtoon" is an internation movement. This becomes clear when you find out about French webtoons, as you may find them on Didier Borg's Delitoon. Reading these webtoons is impossible for me as someone who can't read French, but just looking at them feels bizarre. One thing is unmistakable, however: these webcomics fall in the same family as those made in Korea.

Turbomedia

French webcartoonists don't just steal formats, though. On the contrary, a major movement in France has been Turbomedia. This format, first described by Balak in February 2010, stands in stark contrast with Korea's trademark webtoon format. Rather than taking place on an infinitely tall canvas, Turbomedia is only a single panel in size. Like a slideshow, a reader can click to see the next panel. For this, French webcartoonists use Adobe Flash and various Flash-based tools. This movement has resulted in a lot of gorgeous webcomics, like Paris Pixel by Forky, but like the French webtoons, I sadly can't read many of them.

This format wasn't new when Balak first described it. Artists like Dan Miller (Kid Radd) and even Scott McCloud (The Right Number) have done similar things in the mid 2000s. Whether they fall in the same movement is a different question, however. More modern examples of "American Turbomedia" like Ava's Demon and Neokosmos may take on the storyboard-esque style of Turbomedia (often even to a far larger extent than those inspired by Balak ever did), but they are all created through hyperlinks rather than Flash animations. These American Turbomedia feel more akin to the "adventure webcomics" created by Weaver and Andrew Hussie than their French contemporaries.

Me

So where does this whole thing leave me? See, I have never been able to get into webtoons. I initially blamed this on a thusfar unexplained anti-Asian comics bias. As someone who couldn't get into manga either, I figured there was just something about storywriting in Korea and Japan that I didn't enjoy. After doing research on French webcomics, however, my perspective has changed.

I love Turbomedia. Be it the works of Balak and those inspired by him or the corresponding American genre, I just can't get enough of webcomics with a single-panel format. The storyboard aesthetic and interactive aspects work very well on my imagination. Meanwhile, infinite canvas webcomics, be they the wacky mazes of Scott McCloud or the tall slow burns of webtoons, have never been able to catch my interest to a significant amount. The jungles created with Daniel Goodbrey's Tanquin Engine fascinates me more than Hun and Zhena's melancholically drawn-out Girls of the Wild's, but neither would be able to convince me to keep up with the updates.

Where do you lie on this spectrum, dear reader, and where do you think other webcomics may lie on this continuum? Are webtoons and Turbomedia movements, and how does their format relate to works that aren't inspired by these movements? I hope I've introduced you all to a few interesting webcomics in the process ^_^