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That’s me adding an extra layer of complexity to a story

Yeah, I wasn’t necessarily saying you shouldn’t. Just putting forward my view of the issue. For me, I write a lot in the Buffy fandom. It wouldn’t make sense to have the main character be a male character. I wasn’t necessarily thinking of the gender bending as a plot point where a character was one gender and become another as part of the story. Mainly introducing a character from canon as a different gender.

Some people want to do the thought experiment, the “what if” the original author penned the character differently. We all do this to some degree, there’s an innate amount that’s subconscious as we write a fanfiction. It’s most definitely out-of-canon, however, I certainly won’t berate anybody for doing it. Heck, even in canon, might be a genderless name that can go either direction (Zabini Blaise comes to mind from the potter universe). And a “gender bender” could add in some serious considerations…like what if the Dursleys abused Harry bad enough (some accident) that they forcibly “transitioned” Harry to hide it? Or, maybe after Cedric Diggory’s death (or Sirius’), Harry shows up to Hogwarts demanding to use the girls bathroom while wearing dresses (to cope)?

I would say so personally. I mean, most characters are the gender they are for a reason. Particularly if the character has appeared on screen, like most of mine have. So I prefer to create an OC rather than gender bend a character. Or I just shift the sexuality of the character. More than a few of the female characters I write about have intense relationships with other women. Though most of them aren’t explicitly lesbians. So occasionally I just give them a broader sexuality, usually bisexual.

As an obsessive perfectionist, I find that I'm constantly over thinking things and constantly marring my work, by focusing on things that don't need the extra attention. In a few days, I'm sure I'll have the free time to finish and post a new story in the archive. I looked at the story codes and started thinking, (obsessing needlessly), about two tags in particular. GB - the gender bender tag, and OC - the original character tag. This really made me wonder, wouldn't a gender bender character, also count as an original character? I'm interested in hearing anyone's thoughts on what makes an 'original character', in the face of such a change. How much can that character change, before that character is considered, a different character?

I have a tendency, when writing fan fiction, to take a fairly obscure character form canon and flesh them out, in essence creating a character where there was merely a placeholder. But as much as I create a back story, and use that obscure character in ways the original creator would never have anticipated, I always have it in the back of my head that this isn’t my character. It’s my perception of (or perhaps aspiration for) the original author’s work. I think @Desiderius Price has a point in saying this is a step towards being able to write original characters for someone who hasn’t taken that leap before, much in the way writing fan fiction in general teaches the necessity of plot, and character arcs, and so on. Now, from the moderation standpoint, many readers absolutely hate genderbent characters, or characters that are seriously out of character, which is why those tags do matter. Other fandoms make a cottage industry from swapping genders of main characters. Either way, as long as there’s a proper tag, readers are forewarned (if they stop to read the tags).

To me, gender bending would be a step toward the characterization skills needed for original characters. I’d suspect that an older abbreviation “OOC” (out-of-character or out-of-canon) would definitely fit this scenario, as gender bending is a specific modification of that canon character, but it’s still based on a canon character. Some canon characters are...like a name only, so lots of fanfic writers take one of those and fill in the details. Obviously, if I hit the random name generator, create all new details, and insert that, it’s an original character (and I’ve done that repeatedly with my fanfic where I need characters).