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.

I get messed up just reading those descriptions, and it's even more so with RPF. I grew up on horror stories of slavery. I just can't read scenarios of people actually justifying and endorsing the system.

Well of course it's anti-. A cautionary tale for how things can get fucked up an increment at a time, and you're not really sure how they got that bad without anybody noticing and putting a stop to it.

As for the RPF, I've made my peace with the concept of "characters who look like, and possibly share mannerisms with," the public personas of real people. Not actually those people.