A compilation of TSF Showcases released on Natalie.TF from January to June 2023!

Throughout 2023, I frequently discussed TSF throughout my weekly Natalie.TF Rundowns through a recurring segment dubbed TSF Showcase. This segment is meant to highlight a wide spectrum of TSF materials I encountered throughout my travels and works recommended by Natalie.TF readers. These showcases are evergreen writings buried in a topical post, so I decided to start compiling them into super-sized recycled posts for easy reading.

TSF Showcases are not meant to highlight the best TSF materials, but rather anything that I came across and found interesting or otherwise noteworthy. Meaning while there are some high quality works featured here, there are also more than a few oddities, relics, and miscellaneous monstrosities.

This post collects 15 segments originally published from January to June 2023 that were retroactively turned into TSF Showcases after I launched the namesake in July. Because of that, I did some re-editing, rewriting, and reformatting to keep these posts in line with what TSF Showcase became throughout 2023. I also added a new segment for Doron by Yuzuki Hikaru to replace a brief summary originally included for the My First Time showcase.

Edit 5/10/2024: I added a few additional facts to the segment on Boku no Shotaiken, citing creators who were inspired by the work and a preserved TV play adaptation.

I originally wanted to put all 2023 TSF Showcases in one super big post, but that would be an unstable 60,000 word post with over 200 images, so I broke things up into more manageable 20,000 word movie-length parts.

For those who don’t know what TSF is… first off, how did you get here? And second off, I would recommend checking out my 2022 article, Natalie Rambles About TSF, where I define TSF as the following:

“TSF is a genre of fiction wherein a character undergoes a change in sex through fictitious or fantastical means. With the ensuing narrative, assuming there is one beyond the initial transformation, following how they adapt to these changes. [The name] TSF is an abbreviation of Trans-Sexual Fiction or Trans-Sexual Fantasy, and the term has several different variants. This includes TG, Gender Bender, Gender Swap and so forth.”
Natalie Neumann, Natalie Rambles About TSF

Now, without further ado, let’s end this preface and get started with the recycled goodies!

TSF Showcase 2023-01
Chichi no Jikan [Breast Milk Time!] by Shirota Kuronosuke

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (1/15/2023) MILK TIME IS ALL TIME!!!

This past week, I read a TSF manga recommended by Natalie.TF reader Cassandra Wright, Chichi no Jikan by Shirota Kuronosuke. Which translates to Breast Milk Time! The comic centers around a college student who is tasked by aliens to nurse a human baby for a year, or else the world will be destroyed. Simple enough… Except the protagonist is a male student, incapable of generating breast milk, so the aliens give him a Famicom controller that he can use to change his sex for an hour.

Oddball premise aside, the story itself pretty quickly falls into a routine and develops into a slice of life comic with at least one prominent display of breasts per chapter. The student teams up with his neighbor to raise a kid, they meet a boob-loving YouTuber who wants to use the kid for clicks, and other malarky.

It sounds like something that would and could exist for the sake of existing, or possibly be a joke that warranted such a warm reception the creator just went along with the ride. Because nobody chooses how they go viral. But according to the translator notes in the unofficial English translation, this was all made for educational purposes. …And it actually does a pretty good job of educating the readers about the intricacies of breast feeding.

Breast Milk Time! offers a lot of information about the potential issues that people have when nursing children. Illustrates various techniques that children are breastfed, including various holds and peripherals such as nursing covers and nursing pillows. And sees the cast deal with the general labor that comes with caring for a newborn. From cleaning up after them, trying to put them to sleep, and even bringing them along while attending university. Which… is something I never really thought about, even while attending university.

It all made for a pleasant hour or so of reading, and what’s there is pretty good. The story is tropey with its characters and situations, but in a way that feels warranted and deliberate considering the whole educational angle. The artwork is cute and pretty high quality all around, with more than a few screen-grab worthy sequences and adorable expressions.

However, I would say that it’s a bit weak as a proper TSF story. The protagonist does turn into a woman, yes, but he is such at stickler and rule-abiding person that he merely views his breasts as tools to nurture the child the aliens put him in charge of. It does not affect his identity, he does not use this form to his benefic, personally or socially, and is often oblivious to the more sexual implications of his behavior. It’s a deliberate creative choice, and is clearly played for gags, but it is a bit underwhelming in practice. Cute idea, but for a comic with the amazing title of Breast Milk Time! I can’t help but crave something wilder… and wetter. But dI guess that’s what Boku no Milk o Meshiagare by Yoshida Gorou is for.

TSF Showcase 2023-02
Body Swapper by Mukigurikobo

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (2/05/2023) Incest Infinitum.

For the second retroactively assigned TSF Showcase, we have Body Swapper by Mukigurikobo! The comic follows Tanaka, a 35-year-old NEET who gains access to a body swapping app. After using it to swap bodies with some lady on the street, he realizes the true power of this app, but rather than go on a sexual escapade— a sexcapade if you will— he has a far better plan. Become an agent, sell his body swapping services to women, use their bodies for sexcapades, and then get paid!

Following six months of helping out idols, sex workers, and disgruntled housewives, Tanaka is asked by Mika, a busty young woman, to break up with her boyfriend, Hiroshi. It seems simple enough, but Hiroshi is not only a yakuza, but he really wants to experience sex while in Mika’s body. Tanaka is not sure about this, but he’s dealing with a yakuza, so he complies anyway. After swapping, Hiroshi is thrilled by the idea of screwing his own body, calls Tanaka brother, for some reason, and the two have sex.

That is standard so far, but what makes this comic special is the ending. Right after unloading a bucket’s worth of cum in Hiroshi’s body, Tanaka is apprehended by the police for sexually assaulting ‘Mika.’ Tanaka tries to explain the situation, only to see his body, with Mika inside it, hugging Hiroshi in Mika. It is then that Tanaka realizes that this was all a ploy by Mika and Hiroshi to steal the body swapper app from him, while ditching Hiroshi’s body in the process. Which is… kind of brilliant.

The protagonist had the swapper stolen from him, got stuck in the body of a known criminal who probably has a lot of enemies, and is going to jail! It is a ruthlessly dark turn for this story to take, but it also makes it far more memorable and interesting than it otherwise would be.

As a whole, I found Body Swapper to be a pretty good time. It has a good flow, a lot of wonderfully exaggerated expressions, and a surprising amount of energy considering how crude the art can be in places. There is enough creativity to make it feel far more unique than its boring title implies. And despite the official translation being a bit spotty… it works. Sometimes manga is just better with a worse translation, and I cannot articulate why.

TSF Showcase 2023-03
Rintarou Panic! by Keiko Takemiya

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (2/12/2023) Natalie Reviews Rintarou Panic! (And Other Assorted Treats).

This past week, I was given a positively delightful gift from long-time Natalie.TF reader Chari, who has graced the world with an English translation of what very well might be the first female-to-male TSF manga. A manga by the name of Rintarou Panic!

The comic follows Hinako, a young grade school girl who happens across a pin that transforms her into a boy… and also allows her to talk to her pet dog, Rintarou. With this power, Hinako starts assuming a second identity as Nova, a superstar football player and unintentional ‘chick magnet,’ and gets into an assortment of largely familiar scrambles. Hinako and Nova are invited to the same party, forcing Hinako to swap back and forth. The transformation pin gets lost or damaged or stolen. Hinako is just tired of girl stuff and wants to play with the boys. Or she stumbles into various forms of ‘boy trouble.’

The format’s largely episodic, chapters range from four to twenty pages long, and there is not much that I would consider to be wholly unique about the comic. …None of which is surprising considering this is a 30-year-old comedy series made for children. But that does not matter because Rintarou Panic! is executed with the finesse of a master of their craft. Which, considering this is a project from the legendary Keiko Takemiya, shouldn’t surprise me.

What do I mean by ‘a master of their craft?’ Well, let’s talk about the ‘energy’ of this story.

With such a short page count per chapter, there is only so much that can be accomplished with each chapter, but rather than viewing this as a limitation, Takemiya viewed this as a challenge. Reading through the comic at first, I was surprised that it was only 240 pages, as it felt longer than that. And flipping back through it, I am utterly amazed at how much information is conveyed in only a single page. Never does the comic ever feel rushed or too short. Instead, it is just as long as it needs to be.

There is a creative energy and enthusiasm that fills every panel. The comic is positively flushed with little details and sparks of passion. And, as a whole, it made for one of the most pleasant comic reading experiences I’ve had in a good while. Which is saying something as I typically go through a couple hundred pages of comics a week.

And then there are the characters. You of course have Hinako. She’s crafty, she has enthusiasm for days, and while she makes mistakes, they are almost a highlight thanks to her childlike exaggerations. When bad things happen, it is the worst thing ever, but when everything is all well and good, she’s happy as a peach!

Rintarou is often smarter and more cautious than his owner— as most talking dogs are— and he most often serves as Hinako’s confidant. The friend she can talk to, who can bail her out of sticky situations, and serves as her second set of eyes. Just like a superhero sidekick! Also, he’s a freaking dog, and the story knows when to use this to good effect. Like preventing him from helping Hinako when she’s in humans-only places, giving him his own doggy love interest, or having him run around when the story doesn’t need him. Just like a real dog!

But then you have the antagonist! Computer Granny! Or rather just Granny. She’s the only one other than Rintarou who knows about Hinako’s magic pin, and every few chapters, she hatches some harebrained scheme to steal it or use it to play a prank on her granddaughter. Or in other words, she’s basically the Team Rocket of this story, and she is the best character.

I adore her exaggerated demon-like grin, accentuated by wrinkles that one could only develop from a lifetime of profound tomfoolery. How she still ultimately loves Hinako and never tries to hurt her, but instead treats her… almost like more of a younger sibling than a granddaughter. But the biggest thing I love about her is what she represents on a meta-textual level.

The story is set in the early 90s, and Granny is clearly in her 60s, meaning… she’s seen a lot of stuff. She would have seen Japan embrace wartime fascism. Saw her home country get obliterated by the United States military. Entered into adulthood during the post-war reconstruction. And see her country enter a new golden age as it became a global economic powerhouse. After going through all that, working, raising a family, and living a full life, what does she do? Use her pension and savings to buy a bunch of computers, get super good at video games despite having old person hands, dye her hair blonde, and dress in the most casual youth fashions she can.

Rather than drift away from technology as she gets older, she embraces it. Despite seeing all sorts of nasty stuff, she still has the heart of a child. And why does she want the pin, anyway? Does she want to see if being a dude suits her better or something? Nah. She wants to become Godzilla and destroy Tokyo!

I wish she was real, I wish she was my grandma, and when I grow up, in a trim 35 years, I wanna be just like her!

…But wait! There is another antagonist, and I love her almost as much! Introduced halfway through the series’ run is Ruby, a wealthy transfer student from Hawaii who likes the same boy as Hinako. She has the dual purpose of acting as the only truly defined other child character in the story, and as a contrasting spoiled brat rival to the levelheaded and humble Hinako.

While Hinako is smart and liked, Ruby wants everyone to know she’s the best. While Hinako dresses in highly fashionable streetwear, Ruby looks like she has a stylist at home to make sure she’s ready to walk out onto the little tykes runway. Ruby freaks out a bunch and never likes to show weakness, while Hinako actually accepts that she’s just a kid.

Though, I think what I like most about Ruby is that, despite being a girly girl on the surface, she’s actually quite athletic. She’s able to outplay most of the boys at football, has very outdoorsy hobbies, and that’s a central part of most of her chapters. She is active, has a lot of enthusiasm, and is a more well-rounded human than most people with their own helicopter on call. Sadly, she does not get quite as much room to shine as I would like, and the comic feels like it stops a bit before she reaches the peak of her rivalry with Hinako.

Side note, but I’m pretty sure that Ruby is supposed to be Black, or perhaps a Pacific Islander. Why do I say that? Well, the artwork never fails to highlight her gorgeous curls, in the black and white latter chapters, she is drawn as a shade darker than every other character, and she also has… pronounced lips. …This might just be to show that she is wearing lipstick, but this was the 90s, so you never know…

Okay, that’s the characters, that’s the tone, but you know what smacked me in the face when I first started reading this comic? The art! Rintarou Panic! is clearly drawn by someone from a generation predating the more homogenized modern anime aesthetic, but it is utterly gorgeous all the same. There is a lot that I could talk about if I knew more about the evolution of the manga/anime aesthetic, but there are two things that I really want to talk about. The colors and the drip.

For as much as I believe the move to digital has been an excellent boon to artists in general, there is something that I dearly love about the aesthetic of an image colored by pencils. They assign a specific texture and shading that I seldom ever see attempted, let alone replicated, in a digital environment, and it gives Rintarou Panic! a distinct look. A soft, welcoming, and distinctly childish look, while routinely impressing me with the skill and detail that go into the illustration of each character. The way hair is given additional detail or waves, the texture and life given to background objects spanning trees to dirt to blank walls, and how white space is used to make sure the colors pop.

It is a shame that only about half of the comic is presented like that, but even when the comic is in black and white, it still looks great. The paneling, effects, expressions, and general design of the characters are all impressive… but what my eye drifted to, immediately, with every chapter, was the clothes the characters were wearing.

While I am by no means into fashion, or am even remotely fashionable, I have a love of seeing characters wear striking and possibly unconventional outfits. Outfits that serve as extensions of their personality, and are changed regularly as they experiment with what look works best for them. There is a good reason why a lot of media do not do this. Character designs are more marketable when they are static, and it is easier to draw a character repeatedly if they have a fixed look with simpler clothing. But that just makes me admire this extra detail all the more.

The clothing featured in Rintarou Panic! is amazing and also so gosh darn varied that the comic practically doubles as an early 90s Japanese fashion catalog. You have Hinako’s cute and girly outfits, mostly dresses, with a lot of bright red and yellows that really make her look like a bold and outgoing girl, without being a show-off. Well, unless she is in a kimono/yukata, which are pretty much for showing off.

On the other end, Hinako’s outfit gets boy-ified with every transformation, and… it really shows how much boy’s clothes SUCK next to girl’s clothes, but they still look fly as heck. Most of the drip consists of shorts with a graphic tee, sweater, or hoodie on top. But despite this, Nova almost always looks utterly precious. My favorite has to be the outfit from “The Most Popular!” where they’re wearing a backwards denim cap, a black and green sweater with “Rintarou Panic” written on it, and two layers of black and green shorts. Nova looks like a kid who gets dressed by a mom with a ‘dated’ sense of fashion, and that means he always looks fly as heck.

Something that I love about old women’s fashion is how you can pretty much wear whatever the hell you want, and can prioritize comfy before looking good. Which is exactly Granny’s MO. She always looks like she could nap in whatever she is wearing, whether it be a branded jumper, a baggy summer shirt, or even the occasional dress. She doesn’t need to impress anyone anymore… but she still likes to experiment, because dressing up is cool! And I think the best example of this is the wild multi-colored puzzle piece jacket from “I Can’t Transform?! Part 2.” She is a woman with the freedom to dress however she wants, whenever she wants, and she never dresses in a truly boring way..

Oh, and then there is Ruby! The fashionista! Most of her outfits are uncolored, which is a shame, but their designs are a thing of beauty. It’s all dresses, all elaborate and rarely all that practical, with big eye-catching designs no matter the occasion, even when she’s at the flea market!

While her hair is always up, with little stylish strands over her forehead she regularly switches up her accessories. She’s got themed earrings, a buncha scrunchies she changes up, and even sometimes throws flowers into her hair, because she knows it makes her look cute! Normally, I get a bit weirded out when I see little girls dressing up this much, but everything about Ruby makes her seem like she wants this.

This comic makes me wish I lived in an era where character designs were this fluid and could vary this much. In fact, I love the threads of this comic so darn much that I am going to STEAL these outfits and put them in Verde’s Doohickey 2.0! Because this drip is too good to waste!

All of this, all of this and more, are what make Rintarou Panic! one of my favorite TSF comics I have read this past year. As such, I URGE everyone reading this to check out. I mean, the art alone makes it an easy recommend, but throw in the TSF and comedic excellence… and you’re practically losing money not reading it.

TSF Showcase 2023-04
About Sex: Understanding the Body Swap and The Transformation Fetishes by Sr. Estranho

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (2/12/2023) Natalie Reviews Rintarou Panic! (And Other Assorted Treats).

Seeing as how I just talked about a children’s comic, let’s talk about… an article about SEX and FETISHES. This is another gift from Chari, as they directed me to this obscure article, which I want to highlight because it is something that I rarely ever see. A 1,000+ word essay by someone explaining their personal fascination with body swapping, and why it is their personal fetish. I did something (vaguely) like this with Natalie Rambles About TSF last year, but I always love hearing why other people like this malarkey.

The article, About Sex: Understanding the Body Swap and The Transformation Fetishes by Sr. Estranho, is not really an in-depth breakdown. Rather a primer on the topic and summary of why the writer finds body swapping so enticing, or rather, erotic, and I think they raise a few interesting points.

Their fascination with body swapping is geared around “being forced to be, to become, what you are not.” Not necessarily on the sensation of being in another body, but rather the more social ramifications. Ones where people need to undergo ‘opposite’ gender roles and are robbed of what they took for granted, while inheriting the problems of someone else.

As for why they are into body swapping as a fetish, Estranho takes more of a ‘sex researcher’ perspective and identifies it as fulfilling two kinks. The first being that of humiliation.

While women are allowed to be masculine to an extent, to wear what are extensively male clothes, the same is not true for men. Men are taught that it is humiliating to display signs of femininity, to dress like a woman, or do stereotypically feminine activities. This is, to Estranho, what makes male-to-female swaps so compelling, but they also highlight female-to-female swaps as having their own potential for humiliation. As becoming fatter, uglier, or less stylish is seen as more shameful than it is in men, who have less pressure to be thin, handsome, or good at dressing themselves.

The second kink involves authority and submission, with most of their examples centering around the power play with family members. With adults being forced to act as children, being denied the things they took for granted, and becoming submissive. While, simultaneously, the children gain the authority and power of a parent. Which, for anybody into more kinky stuff, is a pretty common idea. The dom becoming the sub and their relationship inverting.

Now, I think Estranho provides a valuable perspective, but despite their article’s title implying that it provides a more detailed exploration, it is a bit… narrow in my opinion. Estranho does not really acknowledge other sources of appeal. Or, in the case of FtM swaps, not acknowledge it in any of the examples. So let me try to expand upon their foundation.

The way I see it, humiliation is just one part of a male-to-female body swap’s appeal. It can be seen as emasculating, but at the same time, it can be seen as just the opposite. An M2F body swap gives a man the freedom of being able to act like a girl and engage with femininity in a way that was previously culturally prohibited from them. Some people find the loss of power to be arousing, others find its denial to be arousing, and both are equally possible under the genre of a body swap. Hell, a lot of the time all it takes is for the context to be different. To have the protagonist steal a body, or be forced into one.

The analysis of F2F swaps also only covers a few factors, such as weight, beauty, or style. Things that people immediately perceive when looking at someone, but there are so many other factors that go into defining a body or the life of someone else. Body type, weight, height, age, status, race, ability, and so forth. People come in all shapes and sizes, and I think to ignore this is a lack of curiosity in what it is like to be someone else.

It actually reminds me of this image I threw into my collection a little while back. I think it came from Blogilates, but SauceNao and Google Images failed to give me a clear source.

**If y’all can’t see how some would find this to be *hot as hell* to someone, then you ain’t got no place talkin’ bout fetishes…**

Estranho’s article also weirdly mirrors how disinterested a lot of body swap enthusiasts are into F2M and M2M swaps. Going so far as to dismiss M2M swaps as having limited potential by highlighting how “men can’t have a look so different.” Which… is not how men work. If you can’t tell the difference between two dudes with 30 centimeters, 30 kilograms, and a beard of difference between them, you gotta go to the eye doctor to get some new eyes, dude.

Though, I don’t really blame Estranho for thinking there is not much to explore. F2M and M2M are mostly explored within a dedicated niche of this niche, and are seen as just less interesting by a lot of body swap enthusiasts. I would ask why, but I know the answer is that most body swap fans tend to prefer girls and have a stronger reaction when the protagonist ends up a girl. Which is a shame, as I know that these are fantasies that some people have, and there is as much room for exploration here as there is with M2F and F2F.

Body swaps are fascinating to me because they are an exchange of so many things between two people. Their looks, their age, their sex, their status, their power, and their lives. Humans only ever get to experience life as themselves, and body swapping is a tool to explore a world where that is not the case. Where people can experience everything that comes with being someone else, someone far different than them, and change their worldview accordingly. From seeing what it is like to be a child while having the mind as an adult, having one’s privileges stripped away from them, or being seen as part of a community that once seemed so foreign.

It is a bottomless idea bucket, but it is also easy to get lost into thinking that people are here for a specific thing, when people are fascinated by body swapping for all sorts of reasons. For me, it is a fascination with the idea of people being able to change who they are and all that comes with it. While others enjoy the idea of people becoming someone they aren’t supposed to be. And I think that’s cool!

TSF Showcase 2023-05
Joka he… [To Joca/Joker] by Ooshima Yumiko

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (2/19/2023) Natalie Continues Reading TSF History.

Next, we have another manga translation treat from Natalie.TF reader Chari! This time we are going even further back into the past— all the way to 1973— with one of the first TSF manga ever made. Joka he… or To Joca/Joker by Ooshima Yumiko!

Now, this is an extra special translation as Chari could not find any existing scans of the manga online. Which is pretty terrifying as the work is 50 years old, meaning the risk of it becoming lost media was pretty high. So Chari shipped a copy of the comic from Japan, all the way to France, scanned it, and translated it. Meaning that what they are not only a TSF historian, but a manga archivist too!

To Joca/Joker is the story of two cousins, Joca and Simon, who share a sweet and close relationship that is growing distant as the two enter adolescence. Joca wants to have Simon always around her, while Simon is seeking more independence after being effectively raised by Joca, despite the two being the same age. Despite this, Simon is still protective of Joca, and does not approve of how she is spending more time with the taller and refined Jean-Claude. The rivalry between the two eventually leads them to declare a duel for Joca’s love, much to Joca’s dismay.

To improve Simon’s odds of winning the duel, Joca takes an experimental compound from her father’s lab and gives it to Simon, thinking it will make him stronger. Instead, the compound transforms his very biology, changing his chromosomes, and forcing him to undergo female puberty. After realizing this, Joca’s parents decide to send Simon away as he undergoes this puberty, and lie to Joca about Simon’s death. Because that won’t cause any psychological damage.

7 years later, Simon returns to live with Joca, this time as a woman named Solange. Their hair and eye color changed, somehow, and they developed an alluring feminine physique, causing them to enter a sort of love triangle with Jean-Claude. Or I suppose love quadrangle might be more appropriate. This is where the bulk of the story takes place… and it is something that I think requires a greater level of historical knowledge to fully appreciate.

As a 1973 work from a prolific shoujo manga author, Joca/Joker naturally has a role in the evolution of the shoujo genre and the growth of anime as an aesthetic and art style. I might be able to say more if I read Otaku and the Struggle for Imagination in Japan by Patrick W. Galbraith. But that book has been sitting on my desktop for nearly two years at this point…

However, there is another angle to this story that I could not help but fixate on, and it is how the story relates to or parallels the historical experiences of trans people. Now, despite being trans myself, I don’t really have the best grasp of the history of transgender people in modern times, and most of what I know is the ‘generalized’ history. That medical transition research began in the early 20th century, spread across the world as the century went on, and became ‘possible’ in postwar America. However, doing so was super hard.

Why? Well, in the mid 20th century, trans people did not ‘exist’ in the popular consciousness. The concept was not widely spread, the language to describe them did not exist as it does now, and if people did realize they were trans, they often only had one option. Leave their homes, save up money, get operations, and start up a new life as their preferred gender. Doing so was dangerous and often involved a lot of sex work, which came with its own truck load of risks.

The way that Simon/Solange returns was reminiscent of this history as I read the story, but perhaps not the best parallel. The more I thought about their story, the more I began comparing it to an intersex person going through puberty. Specifically, someone who was assigned male at birth, but underwent a female puberty, leading them to live as a woman, regardless of whatever their true identity is.

Now, the story does not touch too deeply on the gender of Simon/Solange. Instead, it chooses to explore the hardships of loss. This entire story could have played out so differently if Joca and Simon/Solange were allowed to continue living together, if Simon/Solange could continue holding onto their old identity even as their body changed. Alas, they were forced to divide themselves, and this only filled the two with grief. Joca was left with a hole in her heart she could never fill. While ‘Solange’ was forced to abandon their everything. It is a tragic tale, manifested by the limited realms of what society deems acceptable, and it comes to a… bitter conclusion.

…That being said, do I think Joca/Joker is a good story? Definitely! As a love story, I found it very effective in what it set out to do, taking great care in establishing its three central characters and particularly the longing felt by Joca, the main point of view character. I found the depiction of Simon/Solange as this profound beauty to be fascinating given the way people like them would typically be seen in any historical era. And I found the overall emotional drive of this story to be compelling for such a brief comic.

As a work of visual art, I found it to be a fascinating example of the evolution of the anime aesthetic. Irises are these weird sketchy donuts and every adult looks to be 12 heads tall, but it also manages to be beautiful all the same. I adore the reverence and meticulous detail that is assigned to plant life, making them seem rich and lively despite just being lines on a page. I love the way everyone and everything manages to look cute or pretty. And these gorgeous pieces of splash art that, despite being in black and white, no grayscale, impressed me with their detail and composition.

As a piece of TSF fiction though… It is very different from what I would have expected. As I said earlier, the story is not really about the identity of Simon/Solange, hence why I’m tip-toeing around their name and pronouns. Instead, it presents the idea of a transformation as something that takes something away. A force of science, not unlike a force of God, that robs this character of everything they knew.

It is an interesting reaction to have to a TSF experience, one less fiery than rage and more bitter than any shade of acceptance. And, much like with the humiliation angle that I discussed last week, is a reaction that can completely change the type of story being told.

However, as I mentioned earlier, there are a lot more parallels to actual trans and intersex experiences that I am not fully sure how to categorize it. It is so close to reality that, if the fantastical elements were removed, and an explanation of intersex people was in its place, the story would work pretty much the same.

TSF Showcase 2023-06
An Exchange of Souls by Barry Pain

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (2/19/2023) Natalie Continues Reading TSF History.

Following the historical dive into TSF history with the last segment, I got curious and decided to check out what is considered the first modern male-to-female body swap story. At least according to Estranho and this Wikipedia list I spent way too much time looking over half my life ago. The story, An Exchange of Souls, was written by Barry Pain back in 1911… and it really shows.

Something that I am painfully aware of whenever I read through anything pre-1950 is how… different the standards for English and general storytelling were. I ran into this issue when I decided to read 1915’s The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka back in 2021— which I still don’t ‘get,’ and why I had to use Sparknotes a lot in my high school English classes. Fortunately, An Exchange of Souls is a lot more straightforward than many other texts from this era… but it is also bad in different ways.

Let’s start with a synopsis. An Exchange of Souls is the story of Daniel Myas, an eccentric doctor and scientist fascinated by the Ego. Something beyond both the body and the mind, an invisible thing that determines one’s true self and identity. Or in other words, a soul. In his pursuit of knowledge, he develops an apparatus that, combined with the power of anesthesia, allows him to separate his Ego from his body, where it enters the body of his assistant and fiancée, Alice Laden. With no Ego, Myas’s body dies, leaving him trapped in the body of Alice.

…Meaning that An Exchange of Souls is not actually a body swap story, rather, a possession story, as the story is pretty clearly about a second soul entering a body, rather than any true exchange of souls. So not only is the classification wrong, but the title is also an outright LIE!

Tangent aside, while there are shades of familiar tropes here, something that I found utterly fascinating about this story is its interpretation of a possession. A component of this story is that the self is not composed of a mind and a body, but rather three things. The mind, body, and the Ego. The mind is where one’s knowledge and instincts/muscle memory reside. The body is the vessel that one uses to interact with the physical world. While the Ego is where one’s identity and memories are stored, and the force that controls and influences both the mind and the body.

This leads to a very… unique transformation as the story goes on. When Myas possesses Alice at the start of the story, he loses his memories, composure, and aspects of his personality in the process. His vast scientific knowledge and understanding of the experiment become lost onto him and he reacts to the sight of his body’s death much like how Alice would. Meaning he panics and breaks things out of fear, because this story is a product of its time.

It is a fascinating idea to me. That of being in the body of someone else, while lacking access to knowledge that one knows they should know, while knowing things that they shouldn’t know. It is something commonly explored in identity death or stories where someone is mind controlled to act like someone else. But here, it is presented as a part of a body swap, or rather, a possession.

As the story goes on and Myas comes to terms with his situation, he begins to undergo a transformation of body and mind. His hair and eye color shift, his facial features alter, his voice deeps and shifts into his original voice, and the female body of Alice becomes more androgynous. His knowledge of the experiment returns, he regains the ability to understand French, and he forgets things that he knew upon finding himself in Alice’s body.

It is a slow transformation, one that takes place over several months, but it is clear to Myas that his Ego is transforming the body and mind of Alice into that of Myas. That his ‘dominant’ Ego is taking control and reshaping the body as ‘a punishment from nature.’ Easily the best written and most captivating part of this story is chapter 12, which is mostly devoted to a detailed letter from Myas, describing the ramifications of this transformation, and how Myas wishes to stop it. How he wishes to relinquish his soul and rightfully return it to Alice.

The story spends a long time building up to this, dedicating chapters to discussing logistics involving clothing, research locations, and Alice’s reputation. …But then, Myas dies in a train accident.

Yeah, it is a possession story where, in trying to unpossess someone, the main character dies in a completely unrelated train accident. Which is just… bad writing. It reminds me of when I wrote stories as a kid, got bored, and decided to rush into an ending just so I could be done with it and move on to something else. Or to phrase it as harshly as possible: It’s a twist that reads like it was written by a 13-year-old in remedial English class!

However, that is not the actual end of the story. That’s the 80% mark. The rest of the story is a needlessly long ‘postscript’ that meanders between the fantastical and the overly rational. One that implies that Myas and Alice might still exist on some spiritual plane, or that the narrator character, Compton, is going insane. But it also tries to brush aside this entire thing as possibly being the result of trauma. Because that totally explains how one can change their hair color, eye color, and shift their speaking voice by three octaves.

As a whole though, I would say there is a compelling story in An Exchange of Souls. …But it is bogged down by what I would generously describe as ‘quirks of its era,’ and crudely describe as ‘fluffy rubbish.’

There are a lot of slow and meandering conversations that do not really relate to the main story and instead read like the ramblings of people who enjoy the sound of their own voices. The decision to follow Compton as an audience composite character of sorts does not really enhance much of anything. He is some wealthy former doctor with servants who spends his days reading historical documents and meeting up with other wealthy doctors, and is not really likable or compelling. There is a weird fixation on things like wills, estates, executors, and managing the deaths of others, which might be a cultural relic. As a tax accountant, I can vouch for the importance of a well-planned estate, but nobody wants to read about estate management in a novella.

The entire story is also written from the perspective of a wealthy White man, meaning there are a lot of minor things that really do not mesh with a progressive 21st century worldview. Especially with the amount of casual sexism imposed on Alice. Her mind is considered ‘plastic’ and malleable, ready to be forged by a man. The female Ego is presented as naturally submissive next to the Ego of a man. And one of the interpretations proposed in the postscript relies on the ‘hysteric woman’ or a ‘bitches be crazy’ theory/trope.

There is a pretty blatant undercurrent of queer and transphobia throughout a lot of the story. The best example is at the start of chapter 14, where Compton describes how “disgusted” he is by crossdressing, and things that blur the lines of men and women. With his rejection of all things not adhering to the gender binary being so extreme he calls Myas in Alice’s body a “creature.” And all of that is before getting into the classism or how carelessly Compton and Myas spend their fortunes.

An Exchange of Souls is a curious little relic from a bygone era, and while I do not think it holds up as a ‘good’ story, I do find its perspective on transformation and possession to be compelling. There is something I find inspiring about the idea of a possession that leads to the transformation of the mind. The idea of a body swap where two people eventually transform back into their original selves, or the closest approximation available using their new bodies and minds. It is an interesting concept that almost makes me want to write a reimagining of this novel.

Sadly, I’ve got a bit too much on my plate at the moment to write TSF Series #???: Soul X-Changer 02: Ego Trip. Maybe I’ll get around to it in 2024, but who knows with my idea backlog.

TSF Showcase 2023-07
Various TSF Critiques

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (2/26/2023) Natalie Talks About Some TSF Critiques.

In TSF Showcase 2023-04, I talked about an article by a body swap and transformation enthusiast about their thoughts on the genre, and why they found it so compelling. It was the sort of thing that I love to see from the TF community— analysis of what draws people into the genre. Of what makes TSF the best thing. Sadly, it is the sort of thing I do not normally see, largely because I don’t go digging around for it.

But you know who does go digging around for articles about TSF? Natalie.TF reader Chari! Yes, they brought me some more sweet treats and, like a good aunt, I have come to share them with you! I was originally planning on sharing and discussing all six links Chari sent to me, but I did not have much to say about Jimbo Explains His Transformation Fetish by Kendra Holliday and What Is the Gender Bender Fetish? by Boo Ritson. Still, that’s four articles, and four is a lot!

An Analysis of Magical Sex-Change (TSF) Manga by Chiaki Hirai

As the title implies, this article is more of an introduction and light analysis of the TSF genre, which is something that I previously tried to do back in 2022— five years after this article was published. And… this is WAY better and more professional than anything I ever spat out.

The first thing I want to discuss is the definition that Hirai uses to describe TSF:

“Transsexual fiction or fantasy (or TSF as it’s commonly known in Japan) is a genre of stories featuring the transformation of the main character from one sex to another, usually through coercion or by accident.”

It’s pretty much the same as the definition I use, but Hirai views it as a genre of Japanese media, namely manga and anime, which makes sense. The term TSF is mostly used in Japanese or Asian communities, and is not commonly used in the western scene. Which use terms like TG, gender bender, and gender transformation instead. Different terms are used… but they all mean the same thing, so I lump them together and use TSF as an umbrella term, as I find it to be the most descriptive and accurate.

Hiari is also more up front about how… most TSF is just porn, and not particularly nuanced or thoughtful porn.

“Often times the plot device used to propel a normal cis het dude into becoming a nymphomaniac is through rape. And the stories further argue that these transformed people, while initially portrayed as sexually abused, may have secretly or subconsciously desired it.”

…If I had a nickel for every ~~doujin~~ comic I read where that happened, and put all those nickels into a sock, I would have a weapon strong enough to beat a grown adult to death.

This is something that I do not talk about very often, as I tend to view stories that follow this structure and add next to nothing as… noise. Something without unique ideas worth engaging in. This is a dismissive attitude formed over the span of several years, and part of how I choose to engage with the TSF genre as a whole. I am primarily there for the story/characters, the creativity/weirdness, and (if applicable) the artwork.

This reliance on rape and what I call ‘the transformation into a woman-shaped cum toilet’ is a problem with the genre. Partially because a lot of it is porn, partially because cis dudes have been thinking that women must enjoy sex more for literal millennia, and because it is the lowest hanging fruit. But it is also a problem that I consider to be… ignorable when one is engaging with the genre.

However, something that I am less dismissive of is how LGBT issues are handled here, and how rigidly gender roles and norms are typically adhered to in most TSF stories. Gender identity, gender roles, and sex are presented as mostly connected binaries. Characters who are transformed tend to eventually accept/embrace their new body and transition to a new gender (ore becomes watashi). And the most queer identities that can commonly be found in the TSF genre pretty easily fall into three buckets.

Trans characters who actively or secretly want to undergo a physical transformation.
Gender fluid characters who want to become a girl when they feel like it, while having a male identity to fall back on as their default.
Lesbians or bisexual women.

This is a shame, as TSF is a marvelous tool for creators to write stories that play around with the idea of gender identity, gender roles, and queer identities. And without getting into some super obscure stuff from western creators, I cannot think of a good example of a character outright defying gender roles. A transformed character might retain more masculine/feminine interests and way of dressing, but they rarely ever embrace something that goes against norms. Such as an FtM character who still wears skirts and dresses because they just like wearing them.

Hirai highlights the reason for this being that “many writing within the TSF genre, queer perspectives on gender fluidity aren’t often top of mind.” Which is true. Most creators are simply not mindful or knowledgeable of queer subject matter. They are not exposed to it, they do not think about it, so they do not include it in their creations.

However, I feel that will change as time goes on. As the TSF genre ages it, like nearly every genre, will begin to attract more unique perspectives, and I like to think that has happened over the 5.5 years since this article was first published. Trans and non-binary TSF creators are common these days, at least in the western sector, as the genre spoke to them on a deeper level. …But I’d be lying if I said that the genre could be doing a lot more than it currently is.

That might sound like a slight against the genre, but I actually view it as a feature. I have seen TSF, as a genre, grow over the 15 years I have been infatuated with it, and I am excited to see where it goes over the next 15 or 30 years. After generations of creators build upon the foundation set before them, and the genre grows into something that one can only faintly imagine.

Pregnancy as the pinnacle of womanhood in TSF porn by Chiaki Hirai

This acts as something of a sequel piece to Hirai’s prior article, but this time focusing on the specific niche of TSF stories that end with an MtF character becoming pregnant. Something that I would argue has always been a thing, but might have seen an uptick in popularity in recent years. I’m not sure. I don’t keep stats on this stuff.

Now, the crux of Hirai’s analysis here is how this fixation on pregnancy emphasizes the “gender essentialist issues at the genre’s core.” Becoming pregnant and having children— becoming a mother— is viewed as the final frontier of becoming a woman, which is what these stories are so often about. Thereby reinforcing “conservative interpretations of gender and sexuality.”

Personally, I think this interpretation can be more broadly applied to how pregnancies are depicted across most media, i.e. as a good thing and ‘a woman’s greatest achievement.’ While under the banner of TSF… I tend to view pregnancy as one of the top ten things that anybody would think of when listing off the differences between an AMAB body and an AFAB body. As such, it is something that this genre pretty much needs to explore. However, it does not need to be in such a heteronormative way or be presented as something so positive.

Hell, reading this made me want to write a TSF Series installment where the MtF protagonist gets impregnated and refers to the embryo growing in their womb as a ‘parasite’ and describes how much they hate it. Society likes to view pregnancy as good, as societies rely on steady birth rates to increase population, GDP, and facilitate economic growth. But some people inevitably hate that shit.

An Introduction to The Ideas of Gender Bender Manga by Sylvia

…Okay, this one right here is the most academic approach to this topic that I have read, and I would be shocked if Sylvia did not take gender studies courses in college. Sadly, I don’t really have much of an ‘academic mind,’ and find the language and structure of academic writing to not really jive with my brainspace. You basically need to throw it into a food processor and mix it in with applesauce before I can nom it on up. …Or make it into a video essay. …Which is basically the same thing.

Tangent aside, this article is pretty much what the title says, an introduction to TSF (or rather gender bender) through the medium of manga, along with six common… things that are often found within them. Which I found especially interesting as a TSF writer who skirts around these tropes while doing weird and wacky malarky.

The MtF protagonist coping with their insecure masculinity as they are thrust into a “female-sexed body” (I quote because I love).
The moment of acceptance where the transformed realized they are transformed. Also known as the most repetitive part of writing a TSF story.
Learning how to perform as a different gender and affirm it through mundane acts. Also known as the part I rarely write, because I, from firsthand experience, find this transition to be far easier than many make it out to be.
Access to gender specific spaces, i.e. changing rooms and restrooms. Which is an element that I don’t really think about, despite having gained access to differently gendered spaces 5 years ago, because most gendered spaces suck.
Heteronormative assumptions that an MtF character will want to shag it up with dudes. …Yeah, I’m guilty of that. I’ll write more gay stuff, eventually. Pinky swear!
Gender identity issues as the protagonist asks themself if they are ‘okay’ with this. A question that I personally find more interesting when the transformation is more than a simple change of physical sex. Hence why the overwhelming majority of my stuff involves body swapping of some variety. Because that is more MESSY & FUN!

Now, this post was originally meant as an introduction, but three years after publication, the writer has not posted anything else to their Medium page. This is particularly upsetting to me, as I am sure that Sylvia has a lot of juicy analysis to share with the world, but alas, this is all they wrote. Still, it is a good primer on some of the more common tropes of the genre, and I can respect it for its more academic approach.

On ‘Genderbending’ by kagemxne-blog

…Gosh darn it Chari, why you gotta send me this kind of stuff? Tumblr during the mid 2010s was a… curious place for queer discourse. It was filled with a bunch of young people figuring out their sexual and gender identities, trying to educate others, and while that sounds like a good thing, there was a lot of… bitterness involved. People had big mouths, big opinions, and big… persecution complexes? People were very eager to call things out for being problematic, and people were constantly trying to take the purest and most moral perspective on a subject. Especially if it gave them an excuse to be incredibly rude to people who disagreed with you.

However, the thing that will always baffle me about Tumblr is that people were not directly talking about politics, human rights, or anything that is important and related to the real world. Instead, most of the discourse was fixated on ‘fandoms.’ A term that, on its own, is so meaningless that I assume it refers to every Tumblr user. Or in other words, it was a website full of people complaining about other people on the same website. And if that sounds like an unproductive waste of a website, you would be right. But Tumblr is a shadow of its former self, and all of its vices were eventually merged with Twitter’s.

Anyway, this is not an article as much as it is a report from a deleted blog, made seven years ago, that tries to argue that ‘genderbending’ is transphobic. It is a bad scattershot argument that normally I would not even bother to fully read. But because Chari sent it my way, let’s go through it paragraph by paragraph and try to explain how… this poster does not know what the hell they’re talking about.

Also, for clarity’s sake, they are not talking about TSF. They are referring to when people imagine what male characters would be like if they identified as female and were AFAB. Also known as Rule 63. …I would complain about the terribly maintained terminology surrounding TSF, but I already have… several times before.

So, my problem with this argument, from the preface alone, is that it assumes that if one trans person thinks something is transphobic, then it must be transphobic. It assumes that trans people are a monolith, that there is no discourse about what is transphobic among trans people, and that any trans person can definitively declare something to be transphobic. Which is… not true. No matter how wise or worldly you may think you are, that does not make your opinion objective or reflective of an entire group, and some young queer people don’t quite seem to understand that. Also, if you are young, which this poster clearly is, please try to express some humility in knowing that you might not have all the answers. Thanks ;)

So, this is a problem I have with the name gender bender, as when people are talking about it, they aren’t talking about changing someone’s gender identity. They’re talking about giving boys tits and vaginas and giving girls abs and dicks. It is about changing someone’s primary and secondary sexual characteristics… and also hair. The writer here is looking at the name of gender bending and thinking that the word gender was deliberately chosen over sex. When that was not the case. The term was made popular by people who did not know the difference, because it was the 90s and 2000s, and cishet people hadn’t gotten updated on the lingo. But it is overcomplicating and exaggerating something with a conceptually simple solution. Replace a bad name with a new one.

You know what else assumes that everybody is cisgender by default? Every darn society on Earth. Unless a character is made out to be trans, why should someone assume they are trans? Trans people might be becoming more common with the younger generations, but they are still a teensy minority compared to the deluge of cisgender people. As for the “erases any possibility of these characters being trans” bit… I have no idea what that means.

In fandom, you should be able to do whatever you want. Reimagine a male character as a girl. Imagine a cis character as trans. Or make a character trans girl into a cis girl, because most trans gals would like that. But making something in fandom does not affect the official thing you are into. Choosing to believe that ‘gender bender characters push trans people out of media and remove representation’ does not make… any sense at all. This is just a mesh of arguments without any logical through line.

…Okay, that point is not being made well, but it does relate to how most TSF material, and Rule 63 material, tends to view gender as a binary. This is a problem with TSF, and I don’t really know what the solution is. Other than to give characters the ability to mix and match male and female traits as they like. Just like in TSF Series #006-3: OPPAI 3 – Let’s Go To Hell! However, the author here does not seem to know the difference between something not being acknowledged and its existence being outright denied. Instead, they search for every way they can to discourage people from creating Rule 63 art, including bringing out the argument that there is no such thing as the ‘opposite gender.’ When… there is.

If something is on a spectrum, then there is an opposite end of it. Have you ever heard of the phrase ‘opposite end of the spectrum?’ Have you ever seen a political spectrum diagram? Have you ever looked up a visualization of a ‘gender spectrum?’ Have you seen a spectrum of visible light in high school physics class? Every point aside from the center has a clearly defined opposite.

So, it is okay to make a male character female if the regular female characters are all one-dimensional. But it is still transphobic, and it gives people a further excuse to ignore female characters because… what? I… I genuinely cannot follow this…

‘If you don’t make a character trans when you could make them trans, you are being cissexist and transphobic’ is how I would abridge this paragraph. Not because I think that is what the author actually means, but because that’s what they’re saying. When people talk about how they find trans people ‘pushy,’ this is the behavior they are talking about. When a trans person tells them that what they are doing is bad and says so with such aggressive fervor. Which is how you build animosity, as people do not appreciate rudeness. If you want to convince people to see your view, try and make a calm argument and argue in good faith. Actually, this reminds me of a nearly decade-old image I have in my library from a Trans Pokemon Tumblr that summarizes my number one criticism with this entire post:

Yes, drawing fan art of binary characters as the other end of the binary erases trans, intersex, and non-binary identities. It does not just ignore them, it actively erases them… because this person said so, I guess. As for everything else… I’m pretty sure this person lives under a rock. If you actually want to do something about the system and ideology in which trans people are othered… get capital or get political. Don’t fixate on people drawing fan art and making remixes of existing fictional characters.

Okies. Guess I’m a transphobic trans woman. Thanks for putting this li’l faggot in its place! …I kid, but based on this person’s rhetoric, they’d probably say I’m transphobic for getting a vulvoplasty, or something comparably insulting.

TSF Showcase 2023-08
Natalie’s History With SapphireFoxx

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (3/05/2023) Natalie Remembered SapphireFoxx.

Continuing down this primordial path, let’s not ‘showcase’ as much as ‘talk about’ a particular creator who I think back to every few months. Sam Mokler, or as he is better known as, SapphireFoxx. And by ‘talk about,’ I mean ‘let’s do a bit of a history lesson centered around how I learned about him!’ Because Natalie is an old lady and loves telling long winding stories with paragraph-long tangents.

Starting with some establishing context, I have been into TSF stuff since the summer of 2008. I spent something like an hour a day searching for stuff. Browsing through then-decade-old Fictionmania stories. Trekking through Writing.com interactive fiction, before that site went to complete doo-doo. Searching through TG caption sites— especially ones without nudity, because what sort of freak would want to look at naked people?

But the place I did the most exploring was DeviantArt, where I would spend hours every week scrounging for every bit of TSF, or rather TG, content on the site. I maintained a massive collection of favorites, followed every creator I even sort of fancied, and developed a ‘refined appreciation for art of all skill levels.’ Which is a nice way of saying that I learned to appreciate illustrations even when they weren’t very good. …And most of it wasn’t.

Because of how most of the TSF stuff I was fixated on was limited to the mediums of text, images, and comics, I was always excited when something else promised a TSF element.

Video games were basically a no-go zone outside of schlock like X-Change (this was before I discovered Press-Switch by the way). At least unless you are willing to stretch things to an extreme level and count stuff like 1992’s Avenging Spirit for GameBoy. Or that potion from Fable II where the player character could permanently change their sex as a reward for clearing the endgame. Which definitely did not inspire me to clear that game twice so I could have an MtF and an FtM character.

Early web video was mostly a bunch of crap, with the only standout exception I can remember being Wand of Change and some 3D animations made using Lionhead Studios’ The Movies. Body swap and transformation clips were also a thing, but I was mostly interested in the ones in languages that I couldn’t understand. They were enigmas wrapped in mystery, but I always told myself that the ‘real thing’ could never live up to the promise of these clips. But then I looked up the source of that Japanese pool body swap camera clip, and was greeted with the wonderful RCT-024. An anthology porno film so good that I ripped it off… twice!

As for animation… Oh gosh. Brain, help me out here… There was that one bride on a train TG sequence. That French TG short film, Geraldine. The animations of TheTGArtist who, no exaggeration, was the best TSF artist in the western scene for a few years… before she erased her account.

Now that I have haphazardly set the stage, while indulging in my own nostalgia, imagine that, in November 2012, a new flash animator suddenly appears on DeviantArt. A platform not really well known for video of any kind. This was the debut of SapphireFoxx.

Looking back, the initial animations were very… ‘kid learning how to use Flash and still developing their artstyle.’ If you were big into Newgrounds in the mid-2010s, you would have seen a lot of stuff of a similar quality. However, not only was SapphireFoxx making things, he was doing so regularly, with a new animation dropping about once every two weeks, and his quality was improving at a good click. Hell, they were getting so ambitious that, a mere 6 months after dropping his first animation, he started adding voice acting. Now, the voice acting was about what you could expect from amateurs with bad mics and bad direction circa 2013, but still.

SapphireFoxx’s ambitions were high and, after making animations for 10 months, he decided to make TG animation, and comic, production his full-time job. Now, any modern person would assume this meant the Patreon route, but I don’t think Patreon was even a usable service at this point. Originally the plan was to use ads, but Google thought he was making porn (he wasn’t), so SapphireFoxx went the web 1.0 route and create a subscription-based website.

This basically locked me out of his work for a good while, as I didn’t get a job until June 2014. But come 2015, I started subscribing to the site, and I continued to be impressed by the growing visual quality and artistic ambition of these animations. This turned SapphireFoxx into part of my daily rotation for a good while… and then on May 22 2015, SapphireFoxx came out as transgender.

Now, this is not too unusual in retrospect. There is a good chunk of people into TSF/TG, establish themselves, and later come out as trans …But SapphireFoxx was one of the biggest creators to do this, and one of the first to do so this publicly. It was the first proper ‘trans HRT journey blog’ that I was exposed to, and… I found it inspiring.

Here was this guy who makes pervy animations, who was just a few years older than me, and even looked like me, starting his own gender transition. As someone who was teetering on whether they were trans— and had been for years— this pushed me right over the edge. By coming out as trans, SapphireFoxx gave me the confidence and relatability to realize that I was also trans. This resulted in an… almost parasocial relationship. SapphireFoxx, in my mind, was a trans woman cut from the same cloth as me.

…Now, you probably have noticed that I have been referring to SapphireFoxx using he/him pronouns, and that is because he announced he detransitioned on September 28, 2017. For the record, this was three months before my facial surgery was scheduled and I was set to start presenting as female full-time.

…This was not a good day for me, and after I heard that news, I started to resent SapphireFoxx. Back then, my opinion and understanding is that detransitioners were… basically traitors to the transgender community. To 2017 Natalie, detransitioners were the enemy. They delegitimized trans people, provided another way for bigots to criticize trans identities, and were ‘the anti-transgenders,’ whatever the hell that means. But now that I have gotten a couple years wiser (and after watching Mia Mulder’s excellent film-length essay on the topic) I just view it as something that will happen, and part of people’s journey to self-discovery.

Still, this bitterness stayed with me for years, and only started to fade away fairly recently when I was doing some file management and found the 127 videos and 1,815 comic pages from back when I subscribed to SapphireFoxx. Skimming through them, I was reminded of just how much effort, creativity, and skill had to go into these works. There is so much that SapphireFoxx, and his team, created over the years, and they produced a truly remarkable library of works that… I have all the respect in the world for.

Now, that might be an… overly generous takeaway given the quality of some snippets I included in this post, and I will admit that the artwork can often be… not good. A lot of the stories can be pretty cheesy. Animation never looked truly fluid due to its reliance on models. The pacing is so slow that it darn near necessitates boosting the playback speed. And despite having some legit-ass voice actors, like motherfucking Chris Nioshi in some of the animations, the voice work was cheesy at best.

However, something that I have been gradually trying to teach myself is that ‘even in bad, there is good.’ That even if something has a lot of problems or flaws, that should not prevent or discourage someone from finding the positives in any work and appreciating them. And with SapphireFoxx’s work, I find a lot to appreciate. A lot of ambition and good ideas that, even if not executed especially well, are executed to a conclusion, and executed with a clear intent to make something more.

Also, I simply cannot hate someone who introduced a character, a witch who was turned into a cat statue, who says she is “the one responsible for all the transgender people who have ever existed.” That shit is so buck wild that it circles around from being offensive to being hilarious. It has been a running joke in the back of my head for years.

Throughout 2023, I attempted to reconnect with SapphireFoxx’s work… but really I just wound up doing a lot of data extraction. Downloading years worth of comics, years worth of animations, and storing them on an external hard drive. Why? Because they are a prolific TSF creator, and part of me does feel that I should care about and focus on their work. Sadly, after having access to this collection for months, I still haven’t checked them out. I’d say that is potential for a future TSF Showcase… but that’ one would take, like, half a year considering it’s over 40 hours of video and over 6,000 comic pages.

Though, if you have a specific series you’d like me to do a showcase on… tell me in the comments below. I’m down for whatever.

TSF Showcase 2023-09.0
Doron by Yuzuki Hikaru

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (3/12/2023) Natalie Reviews The First “REAL” TSF Manga but it has been expanded as part of this compilation.

Let’s bring it back even more, all the way to 1972, because we have another vintage TSF manga translation from the lovely Charishal!

1972’s Doron is… very much a product of its time. The story centers around Daisuke, a horndog high schooler boy who writes a love letter for one of his classmates, the classical dark-haired hime-type Rie, only for him to hand it to Yukino, the kind girl who Daisuke considers… how to phrase this, revolting. Yukino thinks this letter is for her, and Daisuke’s childhood friend, Miyako, forces Daisuke to confess to her. Miyako falls for him and becomes his clingy girlfriend, but Daisuke still only has the hots for Rie, so he manages to sneak a letter into her hands. Rather than falling for a guy in an establish relationship, Rie decided Daisuke needs to be taught a lesson. And by that, I mean Rie, Yukino, and Miyako all get revenge on him… by beating the shit out of him and leaving him hanging from the gymnastics rings in the gym, stark naked.

Bitter at this emasculating experience, Daisuke chooses to enact his own using an ancient ninja drug that he just so happened to have in his house. This medicine, predictably, transforms people’s sex, and using his new female identity, Daisuke ruins the lives of the women who humiliated him.

He frames Rie as a lesbian in front of her boyfriend (remember, this was 1972). Tricks Yukino to participate in a ‘Miss Ugly’ contest (again, 1972). And finally tricks Miyako into eating one of the magical Doron medicine tablets, transforming her into a man. Because… she is a ‘violent woman’ type of character and this is meant to punish her for her insufficient femininity. This revenge ploy gets the most attention, and is easily the most brutal, seeing her get screamed out of the local bathhouse, being filled with dysphoria for an entire night. The next day, when confronted with a medical examination, she heads up to the roof of the school to commit suicide (there’s a reason those roofs have fences now).

Daisuke goes up to prevent Miyako from killing herself, she confesses her love for him, he gives her the sex change ninja drug. …But in doing so, Daisuke reveals that he was responsible for her suicidal depression and Miyako decides to make the most of her surroundings. She grabs Daisuke by the arm, flings him off the roof, and he DIES!

…Yeah, needless to say, Doron is a curious little 50-year-old manga, filled with things that would not be treated kingly if they were done today, but is probably one of its biggest strengths. The comic has a creative energy, rapid pace, and adult cartoon logic to it that is considerably different than what you can find in a lot of modern manga. It is raw, unabashed, and deeply sexist, but not in a way that I find to be particularly hateful, as it’s not clear how much the reader is meant to root for or relate to the protagonist. Daisuke is a scumbag, vengeful, cowardly, and very much does not respect the women in his life, which makes him a good comedic foil, as every bad thing that happens to him is deserved, if a bit too extreme.

As a TSF story though… it’s a bit strange. Daisuke uses his female form mostly as a disguise, rather than something for him to take enjoyment in it. He is pleased when he sees a “cutie” in the mirror, but almost immediately runs away, terrified of the idea of being a g-g-girl. Instead, I think the transformation is just meant to be a form of ninja magic, a way for Daisuke to get revenge by taking on a different persona. And it is easier to take revenge against a girl as a girl, as girls tend to trust girls more than boys. …Or so I think. I’d say it’s not a particularly great example of the genre as it is understood now, but nevertheless a very interesting historical footnote that we almost LOST!

TSF Showcase 2023-09.1
Boku no Shotaiken [My First Time] by Yuzuki Hikaru

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (3/12/2023) Natalie Reviews The First “REAL” TSF Manga.

Natalie.TF reader Chari continues to bring the goods with yet another fresh translation of a piece of TSF history. She has been on an absolute tear as of late, translating 1973’s Joka he… or To Joca/Joker by Ooshima Yumiko, and 1992’s Rintarou Panic! by Keiko Takemiya. But this past week, they shared with me the great grandma of all TSF manga. The first ‘gender bender’ manga found in every database, and a work that spans nearly 500 pages. Boku no Shotaiken (My First Time) by Yuzuki Hikaru.

If that name sounds familiar, that’s because I just covered their 1972 manga Doron, which can be thought of as a predecessor of many concepts featured in Boku no Shotaiken (in more ways than one).

The story follows Eitarou, a prudish romantic high school boy who wants nothing more than a devoted girlfriend, but constantly strikes out on the first date. Following his latest twentieth rejection, his first girlfriend, Michitu, pulls a prank on him. And by prank, I mean she gathered the entire student body for an assembly so they could mock him for being so bad at romance. After being made a laughingstock yet again, Eitarou decides that this world is too cruel to his gentle soul, and jumps off a cliff.

He should have died, but instead his mind and body were saved by… Adolf Hitler? Well, no, the character’s name is actually Hitora Kyoji, but he looks just like Hitler, because… I don’t know. The 70’s were a wild time for Japanese cartooning, and you could find Hitler look-a-likes all over the place.

Anyway, Kyoji is a disgraced scientist who puts Eitarou’s brain in the body of his deceased wife, Haruna. Meaning that we are dealing with a classic case of brain switching, not straight TSF. Eitarou is naturally shocked to be in a woman’s body, while Kyoji wants him to perform the ‘wifely duties’ of Haruna. In a more modern hentai comic, this would result in Eitarou being sexually assaulted into submission and identity death. But Boku no Shotaiken is from The Halcyon Era, so it instead takes things in a less sexual direction, and hits what would become several familiar MtF TSF tropes.

General discomfort with possessing female anatomy despite lusting after it
Struggling to put on a bra for the first time (which is not unfounded)
Avoiding the toilet out of concern over seeing a girl’s ‘front butt’
Spreading legs while in public
Running into a men’s room and reaching for his penis only to find ‘nothing’
Presenting as a girl in order to enter an elusive female clique
Losing one’s first kiss to a man
Becoming an object of desire for a sexy man

I would go on describing the story in more detail, but I would honestly just recommend you read it for yourself. Boku no Shotaiken is a positively wild ride and, despite being nearly 50 years old, is definitely one of the best TSF comics I have ever read.

Why do I say this? Well, let’s start with the tone. Boku no Shotaiken is a comedy series before anything else, so there is a large focus on awkward situations, slapstick violence, and exaggerated reactions. Characters make bad and corny jokes, there is a running gag involving matchstick ‘puzzles’ of all things, and the art features such exaggerated cartooning that it goes against most modern manga conventions.

Despite the comedy seeming a bit simple, or even childish, the manga remains genuinely funny throughout, and made me laugh out loud several times while reading it. It has an infectious energy, avoids feeling anywhere near as sexist or bitterly entitled as Doron, and unlike most comedy-centered TSF stories, there is a storyline that progresses.

Boku no Shotaiken is not content with just being a body swap story, and it keeps introducing new ideas and elements to make things more interesting. Such as when Eitarou’s body gets stolen by truck-kun and he needs to steal it from his grieving family. Or when other-truck-kun murders Michiru and she gets put in Eitarou’s original body. Or when Eitarou’s brain gets borked up by hormones and this prudish man becomes a slut.

It never runs out of steam, never gets boring *glares at every 30+ chapter slice of life TSF comic*, and it never stopped impressing me with just how much TSF stuff it tackled. And when it does tackle these things… it’s actually better than a lot of the more modern stuff I’ve read.

The dichotomy of ‘cartoon funny animal horny’ and ‘phobically prudish’ is extremely refreshing compared to a more ‘realistic’ reaction to sexual content. I love how it reinforces how ‘girls make the best boys,’ as seen by how Michiru kills it in Eitarou’s body, becoming such a sex symbol that every girl in school wants to touch his penis. And its general creativity is something that I feel has been lost as works have tried to conform into bespoke genres. Here, you can go from a story of star-crossed lovers to a story about teenage knuckleheads trying to resurrect a man by exploding him, and at no point does it ever feel that something is ‘wrong’ or ‘off.’

Then there is the pregnancy plot point introduced in the later third, which just goes to show how RIGHT I was when I talked about how pregnancy is a natural avenue for TSF two weeks ago! And you know what? It is freaking nuanced compared to every other depiction of pregnancy I have ever seen in TSF. (Though I could probably find some better written content if I searched hard enough in the gulags)

I could do a chapter by chapter breakdown of this work’s triumphs if I wanted to, but I would be lying if I said it was perfect, and want to acknowledge its faults. There are some inconsistencies with how Michiru views masculinity. A few of the gags feel like they are beaten to death before being discarded, and the ending, while fine conceptually, is confined to a mere two pages.

Then there are more… antiquated elements. I already mentioned how Kyoji looks exactly like Hitler, but there is also a very… seventies attitude to a lot of things. Suicide is presented either mockingly or as a goof, horny is depicted as the natural state of men, bullying is seen as something simultaneously harmful yet permissible, and unwarranted sexual advances are plentiful.

Then there is one character introduced near the end of the story who… I think might be a sort of mammy caricature. She is a giant woman who speaks in sentence fragments, cares for children and mothers about to give birth, and has giant lips. But she is also so exaggerated that I’m not sure if it is, or is meant to be, racist.

Now, aside from that? Well, I don’t like looking up to the past as a source of great art, but Boku no Shotaiken is wonderful! It is a bold and innovative comic that almost certainly sent a ripple effect throughout the genre of Japanese TSF, and I think it is still an impressive work by modern standards. I know that its more dated elements might not be to everyone’s cup of tea, but for everyone else… I’d say this is up there with Trans Venus as required reading for TSF enthusiasts.

**Hitler mustaches are forbitten on Natalie.TF!**

So please, if you are a fan of TSF, read this comic. It’s free, you can finish it in an afternoon. I normally hate it when people tell other people to read, watch, or play something, because they phrase their recommendation like an order. But I am not telling you to do anything, I am BEGGING! Because Boku no Shotaiken is that bloody good! And unless you read Japanese, I know you haven’t read it before. Because you COULDN’T!

A Minor Addendum to the Boku no Shotaiken Showcase
(Added 5/10/2024)

As an addendum to what I had to say on Boku no Shotaiken [My First Time], I have three bits of additional information I would like to share.

There was a TV play adaptation of Boku no Shotaiken released on July 14, 1985. This broadcast was uploaded to YouTube back in 2017, where it has amassed over 2.2 million views. It is untranslated, but still a very interesting historical novelty, and one that speaks to the influence of the original work.
In a 2019 interview by Weekly Shonen Sunday, Ranma ½ creator Rumiko Takahashi mentions Boku no Shotaiken as an inspiration for her highly influential work. At least I think so. It is a Japanese video subtitled in French, but Charishal cites it as a noteworthy connection.
As mentioned in my showcase of Futaba-kun Change!, the author, Hiroshi Aro, explicitly cites Boku no Shotaiken as an inspiration. In the same writing, I also theorize that the creation of the TSF manga Mr. Clice by Osamu Akimoto might also be inspired by Boku no Shotaiken.

Based on this information, I think it is safe to say that Boku no Shotaiken was a highly culturally and historically significant work in establishing the genre of TSF.

TSF Showcase 2023-10
A ‘TSF’ Playlist From Charishal

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (3/19/2023) Natalie Watched A “TSF” Playlist.

The great and mighty TSF translation wunderkind, ChariShal, has regaled me with even more offerings. …By offerings, I mean she sent me a bunch of links to videos that discuss TSF, gender bending, and various other semi-related things. Some of them I had a lot to say about, others just sparked an idea in my head, and when you put everything together, it’s extra messy. That’s just what happens when going through eight different videos and trying to find something to say about all of them. And seeing as how this section is a trim ~3,700 words, I would say that I had a lot of things to say about them.

Unfortunately, this makeshift playlist is not specially TSF related, with only the first four videos really being about TSF, and the rest being about other stuff that often gets lumped in with TSF. Stuff that is TSF related are the Ranma ½ video essays she sent me, but I’m saving those for next week.

Boku Girl and the Anxious Body by Pause and Select

I probably should sit down and actually read Boku Girl sometime. I tried, but after the first three chapters, I really was not feeling it, as it did not strike me as something ‘spiritually TSF.’ However, an understanding of this manga is not really necessary for watching this video, which mostly examines the work through the ‘gender performative theory. Something that I really have not discussed before, or played around with in my writings… and there is a reason for that.

When discussing the concept of gender, I tend to view it as being of three general things. The first and most important one is the matter of identity. What gender a person believes themself to be. The second is gender presentation, the gender that one presents as, determined by their clothing, hair, and general look. The last, and least important, one is gender performance. This idea that actions are perceived to be masculine or feminine, and in order to be seen as a man or woman, one must repeatedly perform actions and gestures to reinforce one’s gender to others.

This is something that I have seen in plenty of video essays before, but it’s something I never really… got. If you were to ask me to present a list of gendered behaviors, I would produce a list that simultaneously reads like it came from a 6-year-old and a bunch of wackadoo nonsense that NOBODY else would suggest.

This might seem a bit strange to some people, as I am transgender so, in presenting myself as female, would that not have necessitated changing how I performed? …No, not really. While I might avoid certain behaviors, I have never given much thought into how my behaviors will be gendered.

I present as a timid and quiet person when around people I do not know very well. I am more confident, comfortable, and sassy when around people like my boss and mother. And when I am hanging out with friends who know my work, I tend to be myself with no filter, and embrace my more eccentric element. And throughout all these behavior modes, I pretty much never consider anything I do to be too masculine or ‘insufficiently feminine. ‘

Though, I will say that this could be due to how I don’t always view things in the ‘correct neurotypical way.’ Some things just don’t click with me, and ‘gender as a performance’ is just one of those things.

Inside Mari – The Psychology of Gender Bender Manga by Otakukahn

I have been sitting on bad memories of Inside Mari for… 7 years. Why is that? Well, because I read it as it was coming out, and was promised a TSF body swap story… when the comic turned out to not actually be either of these things. This really irked me as, up until the final few chapters, Inside Mari had the potential to be an all-time favorite body swap story of mine. Largely because of its approach to body swapping as a concept/genre.

For as much as creators and writers like to present a body swap as an opportunity for fun shenanigans, the very idea of waking up in the body of a stranger is utterly horrifying. Needing to act like someone you don’t know, being surrounded by strangers who know ‘you’ better than you do, and existing in a form where all of your senses are slightly askew. It is discomforting, alienating, and downright uncanny.

These are the feelings that Inside Mari captures so brilliantly in both its story and its incredibly atmospheric artwork. Through the use of careful framing and shading, the creator was able to make even the most mundane thing imaginable feel sinister or foreboding. When combined with the prevailing mystery of how this body swap happened, the comic started off with a positively excellent foundation.

A foundation that subsequent chapters built upon by expanding a cast, and thrusting the protagonist into situations that should be mundane, yet carry this unnerving wrongness. Because everything the protagonist experiences is something he is not supposed to experience. Because the life he is living does not belong to him. Because he does not want this life.

Just skimming through to refresh my memory, I was impressed by just how wonderfully it captures a sense of dread and discomfort. However, it also makes me realize the comic was never primarily a body swap story. It was primarily a psychological horror/mystery story, with a body swap as part of its central premise. As such, the ultimate conclusion of the story makes sense, and it really isn’t a ‘body swap story that was ruined’ like I remembered. It was the story of someone’s fractured identity and psychological traumas manifesting in an identity crisis that takes the form of a simulated body swap. While not strictly TSF, gender bender, or a ‘real’ body swap in my book, it is still a powerful story with an ample amount of artistry and care behind it.

In conclusion, Inside Mari is a good, but it’s definitely better if you go in expecting psychological and identity horror as the primary draw. Not a ‘body swap’ story.

Jun to Kaoru – The Small Gender Bender Manga That Had Potential by Otakukahn

…I was seriously considering Jun to Kaoru for my Natalie Rambles About TSF Comics showcase. It was a cozy TSF comic about a pair of neighbors who underwent their own ‘gender transformations’ at the cusp of midnight. Nobody else is seemingly aware of this, and through their shared circumstances, the two have formed a close friendship. It was a genuinely great premise, but to paraphrase a common sentiment of mine, ideas are cheap, and what’s most important is the execution. …Which is where Jun to Kaoru fumbled.

While the shifting semi-romantic dynamic between the two characters was delightful, the story didn’t have much of a central goal or plot it was building up to. It has excellent vibes, housing a relaxed down-to-earth tone, and every chapter managed to be evocative of a do-nothing summer’s day in its own strange way. But things didn’t really progress, only 16 chapters were ever created, and it felt like it stopped just when it was getting ready to evolve into something more.

Still, the comic is good for what it is, and makes for a relaxing breezy afternoon read that I would recommend to TSF enthusiasts. Nothing too unique, but it gets an A+ for its sensation.

Everyone is Wrong about Onimai by Gomi-San

I brushed aside Onimai as ‘not being my thing’ earlier this year, but that was only based on lightly reading a few chapters and giving my first impressions. However, Gomi-San here dug far, far deeper than me, and produced this… surprisingly detailed video essay on how Onimai is the product of decades of otaku culture.

To summarize, much of the reason why otaku culture came into being and has continued to grow is because it presents an alternative lifestyle, particularly for young men. Decades of a stagnant economy, poor work-life-balance, and dwindling opportunities to form romantic relationships have caused many men to lack a purpose in the same way prior generations didn’t. This has led many to seek out manga and anime as a low-cost way of finding meaning and fulfillment. A way to understand their sexuality, gender, and… grow up in a society that seemed to only want to mold them into workers.

Where Onimai comes into play is that it depicts an archetypical otaku being freed of the harsh expectations placed on him by society while becoming the cute girl he, and the audience, idolize. While probably not meant to be read literally, it presents an otaku fantasy of someone undergoing a transformation where they are able to return to society, no longer held back by oppressive restrictions.

Now, I think that a lot of the points raised in this essay are deeply interesting. But I cannot help but find this presentation of otaku as the societal result of high expectations being placed on men to be a bit narrow.

Otaku are often presented as a distinctly Japanese thing, but I view them more of a ‘Japanese version’ of a greater societal problem. It has become increasingly harder for members of younger generations to obtain traditional metrics of success. Stagnant wages have turned home ownership or a family into a fantasy. Gig economies, temp work, second jobs, and rampant layoffs have led to a generation of people with limited leisure time and even more limited savings. The boom and bust nature of modern capitalism has left people in a perpetual state of economic uncertainty. And the insulated nature of work and home life has made many doubtful they will ever have the time, opportunity, or ability to form or maintain a romantic relationship.

Success is harder to obtain than it was in decades prior, and what were once accepted masculine ideas have been questioned or rendered obsolete. There is little consensus as to what a man should be in 21st century culture, and what guidance exists is either nebulously defined or leads people down a path of self-destruction. Some have doubled down on the idea of ‘traditional’ masculinity, as seen with ‘movements’ like the manosphere, hoping that they can force a broken system to function again. But a lot of others are left listless and powerless in an increasingly complex world, searching for whatever pleasures they can find.

Is It Wrong To Genderswap Characters? – Art Commentary by Fionapollo

Now this is the sort of thing that I like to see. For as deep in the weeds as I can get into TSF, I also acknowledge that there is an entire group of people who view ‘gender bending’ or ‘gender swapping’ as something very different. I tried to define these terms holistically in Natalie Rambles About TSF, but there are subsets that I have precious little experiences with, and Fionapollo clearly does.

Though she does not outright say it in this video, her perspective on ‘gender swapping’ is more based on how it was used in ‘fandom.’ A nebulous term that I don’t have a good definition for, as describing them as ‘a collection of loosely connected communities devoted to a specific series or franchise’ does not seem adequately descriptive. So I’ll just add that this specific idea of ‘fandom’ originated with fan sites and forums, flourished in places like Tumblr, and still persists to this day across various social media sites.

Fionapollo describes ‘gender swapping’ in ‘fandom’ as referring to two things: When a character undergoes a physical ‘gender transformation’ of sorts, or a version of an existing character who was assigned a different gender at birth. This… fluidity of terms has always bugged me, but I have just sort of accepted it at this point.

After introducing this concept, she goes on to describe it as a tool for people. A tool used by young girls so they can reimagine a male protagonist as a female protagonist, making them more relatable and self-insertable. A tool for queer people to used to explore their own gender and sexuality, using characters as vessels to express themselves and learn more about their own identity. And a tool to view or play with gender norms/expectation, either those of a fictional world, or those more reflective of real life.

This is something that I personally have never really… gotten. Largely because I was writing (terrible) original stories during the time ‘fandom’ really took off. But I will say that recontextualizing characters by changing parts about them is… one of the most fun things a creator can do. It’s part of the reason I am so fascinated with the idea of physical transformations in general.

Despite this utilitarian defense though, Fionapollo also highlights some of the perceived ‘issues’ that some have with gender swapping. The first being how it treats male to female gender swaps. Commonly, these gender swaps redesign male characters around hypersexualized beauty standards, with even the most uggo of uggos becoming a hottie.

I would say this is indicative of a bigger problem with female character designs in general, but it is strangely worse when it comes to gender swaps. Because instead of acknowledging that ugly, fat, or not conventionally attractive female characters can exist, it implies that ‘female’ only refers to specific body shapes. Which could really screw someone up if they, say, spend their entire adolescence infatuated with gender swap related stuff. *Coughs*

The next issue comes from gender swapping trans and non-binary characters… which I’m not convinced is even really a thing. Trans characters are still pretty rare, non-binary characters are even rarer, and the amount of times that somebody has made a gender swap a trans or ~~nebby~~ enby has to be extremely low. However, I will agree that it raises an interesting philosophical question.

The conclusion Fionapollo comes to is that if someone is ‘gender swapping’ (not transforming) a binary trans person, they should remain trans, but go to the other end of the binary. So a trans man character’s ‘gender swapped’ counterpart should be a trans woman. Which… I can see the logic behind that. Making a trans man into a cis man could be seen as transphobic and erasing their trans identity— and making them into a cis woman would be super transphobic.

However, my counterpoint is that the overwhelming majority of binary trans people, and by extension binary trans characters, would want to become cisgender. Not all of course, but wouldn’t taking a heavily dysphoric character and transforming them into their preferred form be seen as… preferable? As a nice thing to do to them? That’s what I do with my trans characters— give them the bodies they prefer and allow them to experience a gender euphoria that they otherwise couldn’t.

Some might say that this is transphobic, that it is ‘robbing’ these characters of a trans body, and makes them ‘not really transgender.’ …But being trans is not something physical. It is something mental. It is about having a sense of self, of gender identity, that changes over time. It is most often accompanied by physical changes via HRT, surgeries, and stuff like voice training. But… making them cis is just a fantastical and better version of that shit.

As of non-binary folks, Fionapollo does not really come to a firm conclusion on how to properly gender swap them. But I do! You can loosely map non-binary gender identities on a spectrum, and you can flip that spectrum 180 degrees! Do that and you’ve got a gender swap! Make the masc parts femme, invert their sex bits, and all that fun stuff.

Now, should someone do that? …Um, maybe not. If you are going to all that work to reimagine a character, making an original character might be a better call.

That would be it, but something that I noticed as an undercurrent of this video is this need to justify the utilitarian purpose of something. To defend it as a moral good instead of a moral bad. This is something that I’ve noticed in ‘fandom’ spaces like this. The need to moralize everything. And it is something that I find to be a worrying trend. Not everything needs to benefit the greater good, art can just be something that somebody made for fun, and not everything should be hyper-analyzed to determine its moral value.

This sounds innocent enough, but as I have been slowly learning more and more about the world and modern history, I have come to view ‘moral values’ as a euphemism. A euphemism that has historically been used to endorse genocide, systematic oppression, wars, segregation, and all sorts of stuff. Including the ongoing attempts to legally ban the very existence of trans and non-binary people.

In conclusion, gender swapping is good and fun, while morals are bad and have no place in a modern society. NEXT!

Are gender swaps ever successful? by Bookborn

So, this video discusses what I would refer to as ‘gender flipping.’ Which is when a character’s gender is changed in an adaptation or new version of an established story. This is something that has gone on for quite a while and to me honestly is so far removed from TSF that I just view it as something completely different.

Gender flipping, and its cousin race flipping, is a way to change a story to be more palatable to an increasingly diverse world and explore existing concepts, or dynamics, in a different way. However, Bookborn argues that they are rarely successful in these goals, and for a few reasons.

Dedicated fans of a work are conditioned to view a character a specific way, and they do not always take kindly when they are changed. If a character/story they like is being adapted, they want it to be a faithful adaptation.
Just because the gender and design of the protagonist or central characters are changed does not mean that a male story becomes a female story. The story itself would need to be reworked around a new protagonist.
The decision to do a gender flipped retread of an existing story can be seen as the creation of a derivative work, rather than a more creative work. It is taking something familiar and using the gender flipping of a character (almost exclusively male to female) as a ‘twist’ on something familiar. When it would take about as much work to create a new story set in a new world centered around female characters.
Gender flipping is often met with a lot of outrage, leading Bookborn to wonder if gender flips are worth the trouble, as people are going to get angry at them. Which I consider to be a societal problem due to… ‘some dudes’ really hating the depiction of women as anything more than ~~toilets you can fuck~~ sexual objects.

Bookborn also posits how this ‘gender flipping trend’ is emblematic of an idea that “male is universal while female is niche.” Which… is true. As children, boys are generally fed on stories featuring boys as the protagonists, while girls are directed to stories featuring both boys and girls in the leading role. Girls are trained to exist in a world designed around men, while boys lack that experience. …And the world is substantially worse because of that.

Make boys learn to empathize with girls and stop grooming them to be men!

The general takeaway with this piece has less to do with anything related to gender swapping or the like and is more of a call for more unique works and intellectual properties with female leads. Which is something that has been echoed for quite some time, but is part of a systemic issue that would take decades, if not generations, to change. Hell, I remember when this was a common discussion point in gaming about a decade ago, and basically nothing has changed…

The Unexplored Ethics of Body Swaps by Council of Geeks

There is an utter boatload of ethical questions that come into play with a body swap. Because it is not just being responsible for someone’s personal information, with their finances, with their possessions, or their health. It is being responsible and in control of their everything. If someone is in control of someone else’s body, they have the ability to defraud, defame, endanger, rape, injure, or otherwise invade someone’s privacy and steal their identity for themself.

The idea of losing everything one built up over their life, let alone putting a stranger in charge of it, is a genuinely terrifying concept. When you get into more niche stuff, the concept of ethics is given more attention, but it is rarely explored in extreme detail. Partially because the creators want to get on with the actual story and don’t want to deal with prolonged debates about the terms of a body swap. And partially because most people tend to have a level of trust when dealing with others— because that is a foundational element of all modern societies.

With a lot of long-form TSF media— especially Student Transfer and its gulf of scenarios— I would argue that the concept of consent and the ethics of taking someone’s body have been explored regularly. The formation of a verbal contract is routinely made a part of the body swapping process, and the ethics of doing X in person Y’s body have been explored. …Even if a lot of them are ‘to cum or not to cum.’

In mainstream depictions of body swap however— television and movies mostly— this exploration is not as common, as highlighted by this video. …Which honestly does not do a great job of exploring these topics. Instead, it mostly just highlights how most mainstream instances of the body swap “trope” are played for laughs, and do not really explore the idea of being someone else. Also known as something I recognized when I was 14 or 15 after watching a bunch of body swap movie clips.

…Honestly, I am so deep into the TSF hole that I sometimes forget that body swapping is ever used outside of niche circumstances.

What the HELL are GENDERSWAP Episodes? by Saberspark

Okay, this one I had actually seen before this Rundown. I watched it while doing some light preliminary research for Natalie Rambles About TSF as I wanted to get a more mainstream perspective in trying to describe what TSF was. As for the video itself… honestly, it just strikes me as a pretty surface level exploration. One that seeks to understand a genre through decade old kids’ shows, and does not really distinguish the difference between a transformation and an alternate reality.

I can’t really blame the creator, Saberspark, for not really getting this. He’s a ToonTuber who puts out a video a week, and probably did not have the time or interest to go this far in depth into something like this. But I am a bit miffed that this video is one of the first things that someone will find when looking up the term ‘gender swap.’

…That’s all I have to say about this one, other than I think it’s cute that Nicole from Class of ’09 does the VO for most of this video. Whenever I hear her voice, I think about Arabic tramp stamps.

TSF Showcase 2023-11
One Year After Body Swap Terrorism Incident by KPmouse

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (3/26/2023) One Year After Body Swap Terrorism Incident is DOPE!

Something that I have made well known on Natalie.TF, especially in my Student Transfer Scenario reviews, is my stance on ‘ideas.’ I am strongly against the notion that a good idea makes a good story, or that merely having a good idea is something worthy of praise. (And also that an idea can only be done once, which is a genuine argument that I have heard from adult human beings.) As a creator, I consider ideas to be cheap and fickle things, with their only value coming from how they are used/executed.

…That being said, one of my favorite TSF mangas over the past year is pretty much nothing but ideas, and I just read its fourth chapter, so lemme do some gushing!

One Year After Body Swap Terrorism Incident by KPmouse is a series of vignettes that follow the lives of people who were affected by… well, you can figure that out from the title. If that seems like an odd premise, it really isn’t. It’s probably derived from the Aum Shinrikyo subway terrorism attacks in 1995, but with a body swap twist! Instead of trying to rack up MDKs, this terrorist sought to swap the bodies of people for unknown reasons and through unknown means. They died in the process, meaning that the hundreds of people involved were left with no recourse but to continue living in their new bodies. (Yes, I know the header image implies less than 100, but it’s wrong.)

I love the idea— and I hope to eventually borrow it one of these days— but there are four specific things about this comic that really stood out to me.

The first is the sense of time. Something that I find tiresome about a lot of transformation-driven media is a fixation on the transformation itself, when I find the aftermath to be more interesting. By being set one year after the initial ‘body shock,’ the assorted characters have had time to settle into their new bodies and rework their lives. Which, to me, is the most interesting timeframe for a story like this. (Though, that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone at this point.

The second is the scale. Rather than be a ‘global swap’ or be isolated to only a bus full of people, this swap affects hundreds. This means there is enough evidence to support that people really did swap bodies, but few enough for people to have a wide variety of reactions. Some people don’t believe it was real. Some characters used the poor reporting to lie about who they are and steal lives. And it is clear that not everybody is aware of or knows someone who was affected by this incident.

This scale also gives the story the ability to feel… not necessarily worldly, but it involves people of different backgrounds, ages, and so forth. From children to students to businessmen to homeless people to criminals to wife beaters to perverts. …Actually, lots of them are perverts in their own way. But that is to be expected from a TSF peddler.

That’s all before getting into the fact that this story actually has some loose connective tissue. Sometimes characters from other vignettes interact, and every now and again an extra detail about this mass swap incident will be dropped. Such as a government support group meant to help children who have been abandoned by their parents. Or a cult that plans to launch a second body swap attack so its members can attain beauty.

Good thing number three is that KPmouse has an excellent understanding of the body swap genre and continuously impressed me with their creativity. To name one of my favorite examples, let’s look at the fireman and little girl swap. The FtM side of this swap sees a little girl just trying to live her life, as a little girl. She’s mostly oblivious to the fact that she has the body of a muscular young man, and the whole situation puts an extreme strain on her family. They want to love her and support her, but everything about this situation is so screwed up that it puts strain on their relationships. While the MtF end of things experiences a complete ego death after losing everything that made him the person he was, mentally regressing to a little girl and losing the respect of his daughter.

To name another, there is a two page story that depicts a terminally ill little girl switching bodies with her mother. The little girl is thrilled that she can do things and wishes to use this new lease on life to become a nurse and help other people. …But the mother is a lot more conflicted, as while she is glad that she helped save her daughter’s life, she is in constant pain and will probably die soon.

This is a dude who gets the appeal of a good swap!

Four, the comic is just plain old cute. As in, the art style would not be out of place if it were used in a children’s book. This goes to soften the sometimes cruel or extreme tone of the series, which touches upon suicide, pedophilia, rape, and abandonment among other less savory topics. But it is also impressive in its ability to convey information through visuals alone. You can tell a lot from each character and body just from the shape of their eyes. Expressions are captured well, without ever feeling too exaggerated. And I honestly love the gendered coloring applied to the page. For as much as I love manga, the grayscale color palette can feel a bit plain, and I consider this black, white, and accent color approach to be a nice middle ground.

This comic makes me wish I had the time and attention needed to do a full multi-part series. One that follows the same premise, with every chapter following a different person’s perspective, and showing just how varied and nuanced the body swap genre is. But unfortunately, I have too many commitments already.

Also, KPMouse has continued to release this series regularly. The seventh chapter was released on November 1, 2023, and was saw an unofficial English translation in December 2023.

TSF Showcase 2023-12
Ranma Video Essays

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (3/26/2023) One Year After Body Swap Terrorism Incident is DOPE!

Alright, I teased it two segments ago, so let’s go over some video essays on the most influential TSF series of all time, Ranma ½. Ranma ½ has the honors of being the first anime series I watched online, the first anime series that I binged (I watched it all within 8 days), and the first thing that truly chipped my eggy shell. And by ‘chipped,’ I mean that shit fucked me like a truck, and I ain’t ever been the same since.

However, I remember precious little in regards to specifics about the anime, and have never attempted to revisit it. So these video essays provided to me by TSF translator and historian ChariShal proved to be a nice jog down memory lane. …They actually sent me five, but I only wanted to talk about two of them. Not because they were bad videos, but because I didn’t have anything interesting to say about them.

Ranma ½ Changed Me by Mathwiz

Ranma is such a common topic in a lot of ~~anime-enjoying~~ trans women’s lives that I consider there to be two core types of relationships a trans woman might have with Ranma. Those who grew up watching Ramna and had their egg cracked by the show, or as I call them, Type A. And those who encountered the series later in life, where it helped inspire them as they went on their transition, Type B. Mathwiz is firmly in the type B camp.

The video is loosely broken up into three segments. The first highlights how, despite regularly reinforcing that he’s a boy throughout the series, Ranma has a rather playful relationship between his male and female identities. When he’s a boy, Ranma presents as a strong protector, someone confident and comfortable in his masculinity. But when he is a girl, he is a flawed goofball who engages in more typically ‘feminine’ mannerisms as it suits him. From eating girly sweets, making use of more exaggerated and cuter reactions, letting a girl carry him home, or use his own cuteness for his own personal gain.

His change in behavior is mirrored by his change in appearance, as he loses a few centimeters in height, causing clothes to hang loosely off his smaller frame, making them more puffy or skimpy depending on the outfit. Which itself is merely a single flavor of clothing in the multitudinous flavors of drip Ranma wears throughout the series. All in all, it’s a good analysis of little details that I definitely didn’t notice 15 years ago, yet help make the series remain so visually appealing, even when only provided in small snippets.

While the second explores some of the more… explorative elements of the show. How it sometimes veers into typically transphobic territory, but in a way that does not really feel harmful, and can be weirdly affirming in its own way. The first example of this is the 49th episode, Ranma’s Declaration of Womanhood, which sees Ranma bonk his head, get amnesia, and wake up thinking that he has always been a girl. It’s a simple ‘what if’ bottle episode… but it’s also more than that.

The episode sees Ranma become his most primal idea of what a woman is, someone who rejects all masculine traits, and is deeply uncomfortable with the male parts of their body and identity. Or, as Mathwiz puts it, Ranma reads as a trans woman in this episode. The Ranma in this episode wants to be female, be seen as such, and be respected as a woman, but is rejected by various other characters, who insist that he isn’t being himself.

The episode is also the source of a snippet I’ve seen shared around from time to time. Where this female-identifying Ranma talks about how they perceive their life. How the experiences they felt before now did not feel like their own, the real them suddenly awakened, and with that, they realized they are a woman. Which is how some trans people feel— that their identity and gender suddenly changed some day. It’s how Mathwiz personally felt, but I feel a bit… differently.

There was never a switch in me that clicked and changed, and I’m still the same person that I was when I was a 2-year-old learning math at my paternal grandmother’s house. I tend to view the subject of identity as something that shifts and morphs and trans-es over time, rather than something with distinct stages. Hell, I made that part of the character arc for my author surrogate character, Verde Dusk, in Psycho Bullet Festival 2222. No matter how many times she killed herself, she is still that abused mentally disabled little kid who killed their parents before killing themself!

Still, I am not one to say that someone else’s experiences are wrong because they don’t match my own. I just don’t quite ‘get’ it. And that’s fine. I don’t gotta fully understand something to respect it.

The second episode that is highlighted is the introduction of Tsubasa. A male crossdresser whose ‘true’ identity is used for shock value, but it is used in a context where the trope is exaggerated by putting multiple ‘gender’ reveals after another. First with Ukyo, a girl who abandoned her womanhood, then with the gender fluidity experienced by Ranma on a daily basis, and finally Tsubasa. It all becomes what I would describe as a ‘queer mesh of gender exploration.’

Which, personally, I think is the most anyone can ask for from a 30-year-old piece of media. While Mathwiz tries to apply a more modern framework here, I view everything as being a product of its time. A lot of modern language and concepts in queer analysis were fringe or did not exist that long ago, and I brush aside the more problematic elements as remnants of another era. If I didn’t, then it would be way harder to futz with older stuff.

Oh, and the third element of the video is mostly just Mathwiz reflecting on the past year, how important making videos is to her, and how this series got her through some rough times. Which is a common sentiment amongst people in a transitory state of their life. …That pun was not intended when I thought of that sentence, but it was by the time I wrote it.

The Anime That Cracks Your Egg – Ranma 1/2 & Queerness by ShaggyJebus

So, despite the title implying this is from another trans woman, this is actually from a non-binary person. Someone who watched the anime as a middle schooler in the late 90s, and how it helped them come to terms with their own gender identity and expression due to how the work explores queerness.

The most obvious starting place is Ranma himself, as his ability to switch between a male and female form is basically a dream come true for non-binary, gender fluid, trans, or bi-gender folks. At first, Ranma views this as a curse, an inconvenience, but as time goes on, he eventually begins treating it more as an asset. Using his female form to participate in contests, or just being sexy for the sake of… being sexy. While also learning to take more pride in his appearance as a woman and being less inclined to whip his tits out.

But rather than just be a series with one character who plays with gender expectations, norms, and presentation, Ranma ½ is positively full of characters like that. And, most notably, they are never seen as being wrong to live life the way they do, with most characters accepting people for who they are.

Akane is a tomboy who can kick ass while looking cute as a button. Uyko is a girl who lived a significant portion of her life while presenting as a boy. And Tsubasa being a straight cis male crossdresser who just likes to wear dresses and keep his hair long, because why should girls have all the fun?

It is sometimes played for laughs, but everything is played for laughs, and everything is also treated as permissible.

…Which I personally think is one of the major ways to achieve ‘good’ queer representation. Treat them as people living in a world, living as they please, and have people just sort of accept them. Yes, there is an argument that queer representation should deal with contemporary queer issues. But I also think that it is important to look beyond the current climate and imagine what the future might hold. The best representation might be to depict the world that queer people want. A world where queer people can… just be themselves.

So, um, what did I learn from this? Well, that my memory really craps out after about 15 years, and that Ranma ½ probably holds up pretty well given its age. This all sparked a certain desire in me to reconnect with the series. But that would require actually reading 38 volumes of manga… gosh, a full Ranma 1/2 review would be a mess.

Seeing people talk about this 30-year-old anime also made me ask whether a revival is possible. Normally that would be a somewhat needless question, but I don’t think it is considering how Rumiko Takahashi’s other manga experienced a revival. Inuyasha got a sequel series from 2020 to 2022 with Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon. And the OG queen Urusei Yatsura just announced its second season for its reboot. So I think a Ranma ½ revival is absolutely possible.

However, I also feel that a revival would just inspire the worst type of discourse. One side would see discourse from ***young*** trans people and ***supposed*** trans allies over how the series is sexist, transphobic, or, the worst thing a thing could be. Problematic! While the other side would probably complain about the anime being contaminated by ‘woke’ western values that are ruining the purity of anime with LGBT stuff.

I would watch a hypothetical re-adaptation, and I would probably enjoy it no matter what, but a Ranma ½ remake would probably be a mess of clashing values. Instead, I would rather see a new anime/manga to come along and capture the ‘gender liberation’ spirit and action romcom tone of Ranma ½. Or if you really want more Ranma… literally none of the five videos I watched people mentioned anything from the original manga, and only about half of that was ever animated. I actually tried to read it 15 years ago— via crusty and low res scans— but I had to stop when I got to the antagonist whose weakness was boobs. That was too lewd for 13-year-old me.

I think it was this arc from volume 24, but I could be wrong…

I was a prude back then, but now I openly talk about sex comics and my gymnophobia (fear of nudity) is super limited. I don’t like it when people, aside from doctors and my mother, seeing me naked, and I don’t wanna see anybody naked IRL. Human bodies are gross and if you see a human body on the street… throw it in the trash!

TSF Showcase 2023-13
Darcy’s Breeder’s Guide to Alola Nuzlocke by Jamsnjellies

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (4/02/2023) Darcy’s Transformation Nightmare.

Jamsnjellies is a TF artist who I have been following for nearly a decade, and one who always stuck out in my mind for how… interesting their development as an artist was. Early on, they were a fairly typical TG artist, mostly focusing on MtF sequences and keeping things pretty ‘standard’ beyond their distinct art style. …I would link to some of these examples, but their earlier work has been deleted from DeviantArt, and I’m not one to dig up corpses.

As the years went on, their style shifted, and their subject matter started branching out. Their original characters became more complex and detailed. Sequences went from TG to straight up TF, with a lot of them just being humanoid to animal TFs. And their art style continued to develop into something more distinct and, overall, better. But then things went from sorta weird to really weird. Like… whatever the hell this is supposed to be.

However, of all their works, the one that always stuck out to me as being this beautiful catalyst of their skills was their long-running comic Darcy’s Breeder’s Guide to Alola Nuzlocke. A comic that was loosely based around a Pokémon Ultra Moon nuzlocke, before becoming an erotic epic that… I honestly struggle to consider fan fiction because of how insane it is. Seriously, this was one of the first things that I read with the coveted e-hentai content warning and it deserved it.

The story follows the titular Darcy, a Pokémon Breeder new to the Alola region who participates in the Island Challenge to learn more about Pokémon. With the twist being that Darcy transforms into Pokémon as she is exposed to their DNA. Whether that be through attacks, food, or… sexual fluids.

For the first stretch of the comic, this mostly manifests in Darcy getting trapped as Pokémon, where she is thrown into some variety of erotic nightmare. Her sense of self is routinely threatened as she adopts the mindset of a fucking machine, before her menagerie of friends save her and help her regain her human form. As her powers become known however, people classify her as an interspecies abomination that has no place in this world of humans and Pokémon. They try to kill her, but this only inspires to become the monster they tell her to be, as her primal side is awakened and her forgotten past is revealed to her.

Following an utterly buck wild encounter with the leader of the first island in Alola, Darcy is branded a fugitive and begins traveling across the Alola region. There, she continues her path of self-discovery, gets sold into indentured servitude as a ‘rental girl,’ and is subjected to a time skip that… honestly raises more questions than it probably should.

That is the short version anyway, and what I find so compelling about this comic is the fact that it is utterly insane, yet completely dedicated to being what it is. The creator knows they are making a gross fetish comic, but they want to make it the best gross fetish comic, and go needlessly hard.

The world of Pokémon is re-contextualized as one full of danger, death, and fragility. Pokémon are referred to as monsters, legendaries are gods, and technologies like Pokéballs are presented as weapons as much as tools. The culture of Alola is presented as something more rooted in traditions and hierarchies, with humans as masters and Pokémon as tools that can only be wielded by a worthy trainer. There are naturally more ‘mature’ elements, like booze and human trafficking. Also, every Pokémon has a dick or a pussy! Even the fish!

Darcy is a tragic figure haunted by the ghost of her former identity, trying to determine who she is in a hostile world that hates her. She has deep emotional baggage, constantly has her very identity and humanity questioned, and has every reason to present herself as a victim of immense trauma and suffering. …But she is also an adorable goofball whose constant optimism and good nature make her an absolute treat to watch. She can’t read, she is a slave to her pheromones, and is constantly being fucked against her will, but I still rooted for her every step of the way, hoping that she would finally get the freedom she deserved.

Then there’s the artwork, which consistently amazed me with its level of expressiveness. Characters may as well be made of slime with how much their bodies shift, stretch, and morph into something only vaguely humanoid. Established designs, for both humans and Pokémon alike, are radically changed into something only loosely recognizable. And the artwork teeters a delicate line between absolutely adorable and utterly disgusting that I don’t think I have the vernacular to properly articulate.

Everything is also rendered in a ‘Halloween themed’ color palette that only adds to the artwork’s rich personality. There’s enough color here for the characters and world to stand out and be immediately recognizable, no matter how squishy their form is. Harsh reds, soft pinks, and pure yellows, while part of this palette, are used sparklingly enough that their inclusion is eye-catching. And there is something fitting about this island adventure being rendered in the colors of a perpetual afternoon sun. It is an excellent showcase of how a limited color scheme can enhance a work, and it is so effective that… the idea of a full-color version of this comic just sounds ugly to me.

I deeply admire Jamsnjellies for everything they are trying to do here, as there are few people on this Earth with the skill and passion to bring a project like this to life. …That being said, this is one of the most creatively overambitious comics I have ever seen, and I don’t think it is actually completable. Not because of any lack of faith in the artist, but Darcy’s Breeder’s Guide is aspiring to be a bunch of things.

It wants to be a reconstruction of ideas and concepts seen throughout the Pokémon series, rendered in a different and darker light. It wants to be a semi-biographical adaptation of a nuzlocke run, with some key events and characters determined by RNG. It wants to be the story of someone who was denied the right to humanity, emotions, and identity due to the circumstances of their birth. It wants to be an art experiment that re-contextualized Pokémon as animals and makes them fuck in weird ways. Even weirder than real animals, and those fuckers… fuck like animals! It wants to be an epic story with a massive cast divided into opposing factions (yet frequently forgets about characters for upwards of 20 chapters/parts). It wants to be a lot of things, it has also been going on for nearly five years, on and off, but is only maybe a fourth done with its total story.

However, I have been forced to appreciate works like this for what they currently provide, and in its current form, Darcy is an utterly wild ride that I would recommend to anybody half as woefully desensitized as me. You don’t need to be literally shaking your fist into the air at the sight of cock vore, but you need to be willing to look at it.

Darcy’s Breeder’s Guide to Alola Nuzlocke is currently only hosted on FurAffinity, where you need to create an account in order to read it in full.

TSF Showcase 2023-14
A Gray Day by Maideneir

This segment was originally featured in Rundown (6/25/2023) A Gray Day Is DOPE!

Something that I utterly love about being a TSF fan is sticking my hands in weird places and seeing what I pull out. Sometimes it’s bad, most of the time it’s blasé, but occasionally I find something that leaves me dazzled by its craft, creativity, and commitment. Normally, I would give a broad overview of the plot here, but… this is a comic where things build up, and up, and up some more. So I’ll just give an overview of the first 30% or so.

A Gray Day is a 1,200 panel Koikatsu comic that… honestly, starts as one of the most unassuming Koikatsu comics I have ever read. Gray James is a dorky high schooler with a zero batting average when it comes to romance, despite the aid from a magical ‘matchmaker,’ Bella, helping them at every turn. But that all changes with the introduction of a new transfer student, Mavis, who is Gray’s best shot at getting a girlfriend before the end of high school.

Bella sleuths around, figures out that Mavis has a thing for crossdressers, and… basically orders Gray to start crossdressing to finally get a girlfriend. He agrees, ends his first date in Mavis’s bed, learns she is intersex, and has sex with her because he’s cool like that. The next day though, Gray needs to go back to his house, in Mavis’s clothes, where he gets caught by his parents and… gets disowned. With no place to go, Gray winds up moving in with Mavis, but she requires him to be her girlfriend in private. All because she thinks Gray is a repressed trans woman, which is why she also gives him special ‘medicine.’ Gray does not think this is a good idea, but Bella bullies him into doing so, because what other choice does he have!

That’s the first three of thirteen chapters of the story, and if you told me that synopsis, I would not honestly care about it, as it seems like just a forced feminization story. Something so generic that I actually thought it was based on an anime/manga series at first. …But then chapter four begins with Bella busting her titties out and using sci-fi tech to contact future Gray, who informs her that the timelines have not been sufficiently diverged. And then ends with Gray having a vision with their inner woman, who informs them that if they continue down this path, they can become her.

It is here when A Gray Day establishes the type of story it actually is. A story that escalates, grows, and develops until it is something almost unrecognizable by the end of its run. Every chapter brings things to a new level, adds complications and layers to its characters, and just gets flat out weirder. A Gray Day is a story that reaches levels of creativity and insanity that I envy as a creator, while also feeling surprisingly composed and deliberate. I mean, the final chapters are just an emotional rollercoaster that leads you flying off into the sunset at the end.

It’s definitely not perfect and has plenty of odd narrative quirks I could nitpick if I wanted to (I don’t). Which is before getting into the crummy typography and the crusty shadow effects that try to make things look better in later chapters. But for a creator’s premiere work? This is something special. This is the beginning of something wonderful!

**This line is SO MUCH that I think it is one of the best panels to try and get someone interested in this story.**

Now is the part where I want to talk about where you can and should read this comic. It is pretty easily readily available on e-hentai, and Maideneir (she/her) has prepared handy PDFs that she started releasing on DeviantArt before stopping for some reason. However, both of those releases… look like ass. The images are 1280 x 720 JPGs laced with artifacts all over the place, and the PDFs don’t look much better.

Fortunately, she posts 2560 x 1440 PNGs on her Patreon that look beautiful by comparison. Unfortunately, Patreon does not want people to download images, because tech companies hate the idea of digital ownership! So you know what I spent several hours doing? Going to a site that pirates Patreon content, using DownloadThemAll (my backup bulk downloader) to download files, and double-checking the downloads to make sure everything was grabbed.

**Look at the JPG crust lining that sleep shirt!**

I really want to distribute these batches to people… but high res images are a patron exclusive feature, so just email me a Patreon receipt and I’ll send you a download link, I guess.

But no matter how you read it, you’re in for one helluva trip, and a TSF experience with so many ideas that it makes mine look tame and blasé by comparison. Seriously, do yourself a favor and have A Gray Day!

Huh. Looking back, it’s almost like ChariShal was trying to get me to make this into a weekly segment by giving me things to talk about or discuss. They really weren’t though. They just knew I had a fascination with this stuff and wanted to share their findings with me.

That covers part 1 of 2023 TSF Showcases! But if you’re still hungry for more, and was something a bit less scattershot, you can find part 2 here!

If you have any TSF comics, writings, or really any form of media you would like me to cover in a future TSF Showcase, please let me know in the comments below!

TSF Showcase – 2023 Compilation Part 1

Table of Contents

TSF Showcase 2023-01
Chichi no Jikan [Breast Milk Time!] by Shirota Kuronosuke

TSF Showcase 2023-02
Body Swapper by Mukigurikobo

TSF Showcase 2023-03
Rintarou Panic! by Keiko Takemiya

TSF Showcase 2023-04
About Sex: Understanding the Body Swap and The Transformation Fetishes by Sr. Estranho

TSF Showcase 2023-05
Joka he… [To Joca/Joker] by Ooshima Yumiko

TSF Showcase 2023-06
An Exchange of Souls by Barry Pain

TSF Showcase 2023-07
Various TSF Critiques

An Analysis of Magical Sex-Change (TSF) Manga by Chiaki Hirai

Pregnancy as the pinnacle of womanhood in TSF porn by Chiaki Hirai

An Introduction to The Ideas of Gender Bender Manga by Sylvia

On ‘Genderbending’ by kagemxne-blog

TSF Showcase 2023-08
Natalie’s History With SapphireFoxx

TSF Showcase 2023-09.0
Doron by Yuzuki Hikaru

TSF Showcase 2023-09.1
Boku no Shotaiken [My First Time] by Yuzuki Hikaru

A Minor Addendum to the Boku no Shotaiken Showcase
(Added 5/10/2024)

TSF Showcase 2023-10
A ‘TSF’ Playlist From Charishal

Boku Girl and the Anxious Body by Pause and Select

Inside Mari – The Psychology of Gender Bender Manga by Otakukahn

Jun to Kaoru – The Small Gender Bender Manga That Had Potential by Otakukahn

Everyone is Wrong about Onimai by Gomi-San

Is It Wrong To Genderswap Characters? – Art Commentary by Fionapollo

Are gender swaps ever successful? by Bookborn

The Unexplored Ethics of Body Swaps by Council of Geeks

What the HELL are GENDERSWAP Episodes? by Saberspark

TSF Showcase 2023-11
One Year After Body Swap Terrorism Incident by KPmouse

TSF Showcase 2023-12
Ranma Video Essays

Ranma ½ Changed Me by Mathwiz

The Anime That Cracks Your Egg – Ranma 1/2 & Queerness by ShaggyJebus

TSF Showcase 2023-13
Darcy’s Breeder’s Guide to Alola Nuzlocke by Jamsnjellies

TSF Showcase 2023-14
A Gray Day by Maideneir

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Table of Contents

TSF Showcase 2023-01Chichi no Jikan [Breast Milk Time!] by Shirota Kuronosuke

TSF Showcase 2023-02Body Swapper by Mukigurikobo

TSF Showcase 2023-03Rintarou Panic! by Keiko Takemiya

TSF Showcase 2023-04About Sex: Understanding the Body Swap and The Transformation Fetishes by Sr. Estranho

TSF Showcase 2023-05Joka he… [To Joca/Joker] by Ooshima Yumiko

TSF Showcase 2023-06An Exchange of Souls by Barry Pain

TSF Showcase 2023-07Various TSF Critiques

TSF Showcase 2023-08Natalie’s History With SapphireFoxx

TSF Showcase 2023-09.0Doron by Yuzuki Hikaru

TSF Showcase 2023-09.1Boku no Shotaiken [My First Time] by Yuzuki Hikaru

A Minor Addendum to the Boku no Shotaiken Showcase(Added 5/10/2024)

TSF Showcase 2023-10A ‘TSF’ Playlist From Charishal

TSF Showcase 2023-11One Year After Body Swap Terrorism Incident by KPmouse

TSF Showcase 2023-12Ranma Video Essays

TSF Showcase 2023-13Darcy’s Breeder’s Guide to Alola Nuzlocke by Jamsnjellies

TSF Showcase 2023-14A Gray Day by Maideneir

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TSF Showcase 2023-01
Chichi no Jikan [Breast Milk Time!] by Shirota Kuronosuke

TSF Showcase 2023-02
Body Swapper by Mukigurikobo

TSF Showcase 2023-03
Rintarou Panic! by Keiko Takemiya

TSF Showcase 2023-04
About Sex: Understanding the Body Swap and The Transformation Fetishes by Sr. Estranho

TSF Showcase 2023-05
Joka he… [To Joca/Joker] by Ooshima Yumiko

TSF Showcase 2023-06
An Exchange of Souls by Barry Pain

TSF Showcase 2023-07
Various TSF Critiques

TSF Showcase 2023-08
Natalie’s History With SapphireFoxx

TSF Showcase 2023-09.0
Doron by Yuzuki Hikaru

TSF Showcase 2023-09.1
Boku no Shotaiken [My First Time] by Yuzuki Hikaru

A Minor Addendum to the Boku no Shotaiken Showcase
(Added 5/10/2024)

TSF Showcase 2023-10
A ‘TSF’ Playlist From Charishal

TSF Showcase 2023-11
One Year After Body Swap Terrorism Incident by KPmouse

TSF Showcase 2023-12
Ranma Video Essays

TSF Showcase 2023-13
Darcy’s Breeder’s Guide to Alola Nuzlocke by Jamsnjellies

TSF Showcase 2023-14
A Gray Day by Maideneir