magnetic_pole

Just because it was called the December posting meme doesn't mean we can't finish up in January, right? Doubling back to finish up with some of the prompts folks kindly left last month.

From

woldy: Stories you wish existed in fandom

I should start off by saying that I'm always impressed by the sheer amount of fic out there--there's uncharted territory even in corners of fandom I've been knocking about in for a while. So instead of talking about than stories I wished existed, I'll talk about stories I want to seek out, since heaven knows everything's already been done, somewhere, somehow.

You know how occasionally you run across something new (or new-to-you) in fandom and get this terrible sense of foreboding? This creeping suspicion that a particular idea, however it plays out, will not end well, and perhaps you'd better shy away? For example, with me, Pottermore's always sparked that sense of dread. I may be right, I may be wrong, but I've always felt that reading extra bits of information about HP will only get me upset and shut down options in terms of fic-reading and fic-writing. So I've done my best to ignore it, on the assumption that the internet is filled with things that get your blood pressure up, and half the battle is learning to avoid them and concentrate on the positive things the networked life has to offer.

Genderswap's always been on that list of dubious new-to-me ideas. It's my issue, I know--no offense to those of you who are enthusiasts. I tend to be overly sensitive about the handling of gender issues in fic anyway, and I've dreaded a scenario in which fandom substitutes one set of stereotypes and assumptions for another. And with HP specifically, I've always felt that one of canon's really rewarding qualities is its sheer variety of characters. Why spend more time on (what seemed likely to be, in my case) popular male characters when there are plenty of female characters to play with--indeed, female characters who deserve more attention? So I've consciously avoided genderswap thus far, much the same way I've avoided Pottermore.

Then

rotaryphones sent me a link to How the Mouth Changes its Shape, a Sherlock genderswap story set in postwar London. It's a novel-length story, and so it took me a while to get to it, but how could I resist? Lesbians! Historical fiction! And a wholehearted rec from rotary_phones, which decided the whole thing. I came down with a cold last month and read the whole thing in a day, caught up in that wonderful, down-the-rabbit-hole feeling of a story so good it can eclipse everything else for a few hours.

Without spoiling it too much for you, I'll say that "How the Mouth" is not just set in a world of butches and femmes, it's about how characters fit into that world. It got me thinking about genderswap and prompted me to reconsider my initial, not-very-generous assessment of the genre. It's an unusual story in the way it foregrounds the formation of gender identities and sexual orientation, to be sure--it's all about the way people fit or don't fit into established categories, and thus it addressed some of my concerns about the genre even before I had a chance to raise them. But it also made me wonder what else I've been missing all this time, out of sheer stubbornness. On the HP front, for example, I continue to be interested in Remus, Sirius, and Severus, after all this time. Are there new things we can say about them by playing with their gender? Have you run across some good genderswap in HP or elsewhere, flist? Are there pairings in which it's more common than others? For the first time, I'm seeing possibility here instead of disaster.

To sum up: After years of naysaying, I'm curious about genderswap. And I couldn't recommend this fic more highly:

How the Mouth Changes its Shape,

breathedout, female!Sherlock/female!John, explicit, 130,000 words
1955. Under the placid veneer of suburban playparks and middle-class conformity churns a hidden London: femmes and butches dancing close in basement bars; clandestine love between women. To Sherlock Holmes, struggling private detective and mistress of disguise, it’s a realm she renounced years before. To Johnnie Watson, daredevil ambulance driver turned auto mechanic, it’s become a little too familiar. But when someone is murdered in the washroom of the city’s most notorious lesbian club, the investigation will lead both women to reconsider their assumptions about themselves, each other, and the world in which they live.