While I work on whatever ends up being my next story, I wanted to take a few minutes to revisit a conversation I had with reader Gideon Wordsworth. He asked me a while ago if there were stories that I would consider worthy of my personal “Hall of Fame.”
I offered a few titles, but the more I think about it the more I felt there were a few items missing from the list. I’d like to share with you today the candidates for my TG and Transformation HOF.
To start with, I didn’t really lay out any criteria, it was more ‘vibes’ based, but the two deciding factors would probably be memorability and influence. It has to be something that sticks in my mind years after reading it, and it should be something that had some kind of impact on the writing I do. I would put quality as a distant third criterion — I’ve read a lot of stuff that was memorable, interesting and influential without being good, and presence in this HOF is not a guarantee of quality. Conversely, if you are a fellow writer and your work is not represented here, don’t take it personally, since the main two criteria would seem to indicate that most of it is going to originate from before I launched my website in 2020.
And now, the canon as it exists so far:
Transplanted Life/The Trading Post
At the risk of flattering Jay, my colleague over at the Trading Post, I would probably be a different writer if he hadn’t told the story of Marti Hart all those years ago. I encountered Transplanted Life years into its existence, so it was like reading a fascinating book, and not a short one. Prior to finding the Trading Post on one of many TG Fic link sites I trawled, most of the writing I had encountered was… just fine, at best. It got the job done, told the story, and if it had a minimum of amateurishness to it that took me completely out of the moment, I was satisfied. Transplanted Life was the first thing I read that I knew for a fact was better than anything I could come up with, and there was so much of it, and it was so dedicated to the premise and the twists were so interesting, I was like, “I need to do this.”
It also helps that Jay is Jay — very logical, and very analytical, and he imbues that into his level-headed, perceptive and persnickety characters. Jay being nothing like me means that he writes a lot of things I couldn’t or wouldn’t, which makes me like his work more.
When I say “The Trading Post,” I am of course talking about the two-year period before I joined (which was important for me because if I couldn’t play in that sandbox I would probably have gone nuts, not to mention gotten the requisite number of reps to become a half-decent writer eventually.) The combination of level-headed Art/Liz and more emotional Jake/Ashlyn made for an effective two-pronged approach to exploring the premise early, in a way that made the story that much more fulsome. In particular the Ashlyn story introduced me to a kind of character path that I have probably emulated way too many times, of someone basically being romanced or seduced into liking their transformation. I actually never crossed paths with Tig, the writer of Ashlyn, and I don’t know anything about them, which probably helps vacuum-seal my memory of that time.
Obviously good stories have been told since I joined — I may even have been responsible for some of them — but I can’t be as objective about them.
Altered Fates:
It isn’t that I have read a lot-lot-lot of Altered Fates stories, but of all the open-source ‘verses available to young TG Fic writers, I think this is the best one to learn the trade. Once you know the “rules” of the Medallion of Zullo, you can manipulate the situation in any number of ways. As hackneyed as it is to just happen across this mysterious necklace and feeling drawn to it, that’s a necessary ugliness that can result in quite pretty results.
I posted two Altered Fates stories to Fictionmania in my early years. One of them I had taken down because it relied on tropes that I specifically did not like anymore — a gay man becoming a woman — and because I’ve always had my eye on potentially rewriting it. Altered Fates also played a role in the wild-and-wooly “Fiction Branches” site where I was active as a teenager, which, along with the “Wishing Stone” branch, could merit an entry itself in this hall.
“The Venus Metamorphosis“ by Bill Hart
This one can be found in the suspended-in-amber TGFA.org site, which was my first “in” to the TG Fic scene. It’s the archetypal “Mad scientist invents a girl-ifying process” story, and the descriptions of the transformations stuck with me. I’ve got this one on the list of stories to pastiche somewhere down the road.
“The Wachsmuth Syndrome“ by Stefan Heym
Like a lot of content on the TGFA site, this one is of an older vintage. The story itself is quite tame and ultimately a bit of shaggy dog fluff — over a period of time, every man on Earth transforms into a woman. It captured my imagination as a young reader to where I basically lifted the premise for my Sexual Automorphogenesis stories like Steven: A Love Story and “The Girls,” with hopefully more to come.
Ovid Stories by The Professor*
Okay, this is one of those cases where it’s not in the Hall of Fame because I like them or think they are good. The truth is, I’ve probably never read an Ovid story in its entirety. I always seem to lose interest a little ways down from where the transformation happens and the characters go off and start doing whatever-it-is-they-do in Ovid. But the premise of Ovid, where an extremely archetypal person, like a chauvinistic mogul or a chauvinistic pilot or a chauvinistic — er, well, you get the idea — becoming a different archetypal person, is a bullseye. I also love the transformation scenes, and I used to go back and read them all the time when I was bored.
However, Ovid is pretty famous in my circle for the amount of flack it attracts, and not wrongly. It feels representative of a time when gender roles and norms (as well as sexuality) were a lot more concrete in western culture than they are today. It comes off as old-fashioned and stodgy, with a huge investment in the virtues of simple small-town culture rather than subverting it. But hey, maybe that was just my takeaway, like I said, I never got through the damn things. I also didn’t love the twist that — sorry if this is a spoiler to you — everyone who goes to Ovid would have died if the Gods (“Gods”?) hadn’t intervened. But on the other hand, the idea that there is a larger story going on with the purpose of Ovid is appealing, even if it didn’t grip me to find out what that actually was.
So Ovid is one where I love the idea but can’t quite get on board with the execution, and I chalk it up to a generational thing. I paid homage to Ovid in my metafictional story “Life in Ridgefield,” which I’ve always wanted to expand upon.
Every Day by David Levitan
We get into the more “professionally written” section of the Hall. When I first laid eyes on a copy of Every Day, I declared it to be one of the best ideas I’d ever heard. When I read it, I thought, “Okay, that was pretty good.” The movie watered down the concept a little and shied away from LGBTQ aspects, but it was still neat to see it play out.
More recent works that I would canonize for my own personal taste:
Pulse: This body-transfer story had really weighty themes and proved that this sort of thing can be art sometimes. Very much not for everybody.
Back to 15: A Brazilian TV series. Actually not a bodyswapping story, but a mental time-travel story about a woman who revisits her youth and the ripple effect that creates (like an even better version of CBC’s Being Erica, for my fellow Canadians.) Back to 15 also features a transgender character.
Along the same lines I would also add Drop Dead Diva, about one type of woman learning to live as a very different one after being sent back to Earth following a fatal car crash. There was going to be a TG remake called Drop Dead Dave, but it never materialized.
The Roots of Liam:
Getting their own wing in this hall are works, some of which are comparatively minor, that helped the very young version of Liam find his interest in TG and transformation fic:
- Futaba-Kun Change: Which was for me what Ranma 1/2 was for so many others, even though I only got to read it in scraps
- Nintendo Adventure Books: Brain Drain: A Choose Your Own Adventure-style story in which Mario and the Princess switch bodies and you, as Luigi, have to decide who to go with.
- I wrote about both of these early on, here
- Any number of Saturday Morning Cartoons where boys and girls swap places, most specifically one from the obscure series Mummies Alive! and the cult favourite Eerie, Indiana.
So what do you think — does this list resonate with you, intrigue you, remind you of anything? What would be in your Hall of Fame?
Breaktime’s over — be kind!
-Liam