First, I would like to emphasize that this is an awesome thread. Awesome. There were so many posts I loved and they really got me thinking. Before I knew it my post exploded and became the behemoth that is found below.
Yeah, a gender bender can be good, but aren’t there any good stories where it’s just an actual girl who legitimately loves another girl?
One story that I really loved was "I Favour the Villainess". It's a translated story I found on novelupdates. An actual girl genuinely loves the villainess. It was a funny premise, but more importantly the execution of the whole story was excellent in addition to the romance. I have grown to hate stories that initially start out okay only for all characters to become weird and story plot to become ridiculous. I love serious stories, filled with real struggle, pain, and believable characters.
Also, I love all kinds of villainess girls, which is why I am writing a story with a villainess in it. (GB villainess, and I will make her suffer.)
www.novelupdates.com
If you need any help with a yuri story, whether it's asking basic or seemingly silly questions, or if you just want feedback on your story overall, you can go to the Yuri Writing Help Room. It's right here:
https://forum.scribblehub.com/threads/the-yuri-writing-help-room-18.754/
YUS! Incredibly helpful. Thank you for helping people and providing so much information.
I also hate genderbender. It adds nothing to the story 99% of the time. And I feel like people only do it because it's popular.
It's hard to accurately write the opposite gender. If you can't do it right, then don't do it.
I didn't know it was popular. I started writing a story with some GB in it, but not because I wanted to be popular.
What you point out is important for me to think about. I should try to justify why I wanted to write a GB MTF character into my story. I wanted my character to be psychologically disturbed, more aggressive, have an identity crisis, be uncomfortable, experience difficulties they would otherwise never experience, and be ill equipped to deal with their new life role. I wanted their romance to be distorted, and to justapose their appearance with their inner self. It's a bit intertwined with the GB, but I generally wanted to ruin my character down to their very core.
There was also some comedy that I wanted to include as well. I'm not sure if people can believe it after the above paragraph.
I think people write genderbend so they could compensate the halfway for the other half. Writing as a female would be hard but a guy in a chick's body would be presumably piss easy.
But considering the amount of genderbend Yuris were getting on the site with the average quality, people aren't using that to their advantage at all
seems like they all only focus on the group bathing scene
I only understand half of what you said, but I want to understand more.
I think a lot of the issues with Gender Bender stories, especially GB romance ones, is that some people barely put any focus on the mental aspect of it, and instead spend all their time talking about the physical (usually presented as erotic) changes. That's how you get chapters upon chapters of a character playing with their new-found "parts", and nothing about, for example, the long term effects of what it's like to see someone that isn't you in the mirror, or the feeling of losing your sense of self.
Regarding the whole "self-insert as female" thing, though, I've often heard people complain that GB yuri often reads the same way as a straight relationship, just with the guy replaced by a genderbent girl. So... it does actually show through in the writing, a lot of the time, if that's the case.
OMG. Then I'm doing things right! I want to focus on mental aspects and identity crisis for my GB character. The things I am most excited to write about are my character's mental breakdown and severe psychological distress.
One of the best genderbent characters I’ve ever read is, quite ironically, not the main character of the series they’re from. Kumo Desu Ga, Nani Ka’s Katia, and also the main character as well, who is changed not from one gender to another, but from human to spider.
For Katia, the mental aspect of how they view themselves is an extremely important part of her character development, and the main character can be seen to gradually change farther and farther from humanity. Katia’s inner thoughts as shown in the side stories of volumes 1-3 show huge changes in how she thinks differently compared to before.
Katia is my favourite GB character of all time. The uncomfortable way she is described is the best. It made me as a reader feel malaise, anguish, depressed, uneasy, and anxious. Uncomfortable, extremely uncomfortable and perplexing, where there is also some sort of feeling that the world is wrong, her life is wrong, something isn't right. Her uncertainty and discomfort with her body and thoughts is fantastic. The way she changes over time was impactful. How fickle her existence seems. Her life is fucked up and bittersweet. After a long time I stopped caring about the story "Kumo desu ga", but the few chapters of Katia and Shun were the ones I needed to read! The way she started fearing that she could no longer be friends with Shun and thus she started getting sort of romantic/sexual with him. The bromance went so wrong, but so right.
I hope to make my character deeply disturbed both mentally and physically. I want to completely inundate my characters with suffering! I don't want any "happily ever after" mojo to taint my story.
I support Moonpearl. She is like the resident Yuri expert. (Just check out NUF.com if you don't believe me.)
That is all.
Absolutely! Expert expert. Desu.