I've also discovered that I don't gravitate toward short fics. I want long fics. Not necessarily epic, but multi-chaptered that I can get lost in. If it's good, but only 400 words long, it doesn't last. I'll just want more. There's a lot on swing-set that I haven't read just because it's short.

And Dean? Was in love with Cassie. Now, sure, he might love Cas more or better or whatever, but he thought he was in love with Cassie. I hate fics that ignore he ever thought he'd made a connection to another person.

No, they weren't friends or comrades, but that doesn't mean it wasn't valid.

When AUs make them gay, I think it's too much change, unless the point of the story is that they're gay, and it's what the alternative is hinging on.

Cas can be gay in AUs, though. That's just fine.

kinda hurty

Dude, it's haruslex. She's mean.

eta:

There's a lot on swing-set that I haven't read just because it's short.

Ha! Me too. I think it's because she presented the word count, because usually I don't care. But for AU, I want worldbuilding, and to get really lost.

Mapping their characters onto girls, if they had grown up that way, is an interesting exercise for me, because (as I think Plei pointed out to me) a lot of things other than the obvious might have changed if Dean had been a girl, for instance.

Heh! And you answered for me! I tried (outside the Scooby Doo crossover femslash one) to write always-a-girl AU Dean for Anne once, and it just was so freaking bleak that it kept sending me fetal.

Like, bleaker than I can physically do flavor of bleak. I'm feeling a little oogy in the pit of my gut just thinking about it.

She really is. It's either pain or crack, I haven't found an in-between yet on her journal.

In trying to overcome my disdain of short fics, I offer you [link] "An Angel to Drive Over Me". Dean/Cas role reversals amuse me.

C'mon, Plei, give us an outline.

I realise I need to check the authors doing the D/C big bang and see who I'm excited about.

I have to ammend my earlier statement about genderswap. I've read a few that worked where Dean or Sam (usually Dean) were hexed or whatever and wake up as a woman. As a temporary window into the hilarious adjustment of being a woman I have been entertained.

I'm afraid, ita, they were wincest.

Similarly capable of entertaining me is temporary age regression.

Architeuthis better pony up, boyo. The way he explores Dean's issues and the gay-panic and Castiel still being Castiel, all alien and Not Broken . . . I haven't yet found anyone to rival him.

C'mon, Plei, give us an outline.

It was really just a series of snapshots going up till she goes to Palo Alto to get Sam. But there were all sorts of areas where my brain kept going, "imagine all the worst case scenarios applicable to Dean as a boy, now expand that to the XX set, now go whimper."

A lot of the adjustments to being female fics leave me wondering if I'm a real woman. I may not be doing it right.

Similarly capable of entertaining me is temporary age regression.

I love that shit. Weechesters plus someone having to cope with sudden weeness? Golden.

Architeuthis better pony up, boyo

I'm hanging a lot on him. I'm not in love with gay panic unless handled well, but I trust him.

Skimming over the minibang schedule, the names that jump out at me are: maychorian, bauble, thegrrrl2002 (but I don't remember why), janie_tangerine (she's a bit clumsy, but I like her ideas), and pyrebi. But I will have to check them all out in detail at home. It's very possible I've read fic by the others before I noted their names.

eta:

"imagine all the worst case scenarios applicable to Dean as a boy, now expand that to the XX set, now go whimper."

Oh, you're torturing me.

I don't get genderswap, really. If you want to write a girl in Dean's or Sam's situation, then do that, and don't try to map boobs and a vagina onto an existing character.

Poisontaster's A Kept Boy is an absolutely beautifully done slave fic. It's a long, multi-chap WIP that has spawned a whole community, called What We Keep, devoted to the AU where government regulated slavery has been instituted to resolve personal bankruptcies. As different authors contribute, the reader gets different takes on slavery, those who support and benefit from it, those who oppose and work to abolish it, and those who are victims of the system.

Nilchance's That Middle Road features Misha as a slave to Jeremy Sisto. Much of the What We Keep 'verse is intertwined, with authors using characters and situations from each other's stories as background for their own.