How This Shift Started…

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TSF Showcase 2024-31
The Origins of The Great Shift

Last month, I took a look at True Stories From the Time of The Great Shift by Caleb Jones. One of the first TSF stories I ever read, and my introduction to The Great Shift. However, that was not THE introduction to The Great Shift, and I mentioned that I would get around to discussing its origins sometime soon. And soon is now!

For those not in the know, The Great Shift is a story premise created by Morpheus. A prolific TSF writer from the late 90s and early 2000s who, during his heyday, released hundreds of works. The premise sees the overwhelming majority of people in the world swap bodies. Some switching with the nearest person, some being flung to the other side of the world. Meaning parents switch bodies with their children, husbands switch bodies with their wives, and mass hysteria runs rampant as people try to adjust to this new, remixed reality. It’s treated as a fairly fluid concept, with the numbers and exact rules changing depending on the writer.

It’s a somewhat naïve concept when looked at from a more realistic perspective. To think that such a catastrophic event would not break, cripple, or irrevocably change the world on a foundational level. I personally would love to see a more grounded take that examines the structure of society, the way some people just refuse to give up prejudices, and the fragile nature of one’s very self. But I’m not here to talk about the untapped potential of this narrative premise. I’m here to talk about how it started. 

I would love to be able to give an inside look into how exactly this was all created, pointing to some manner of interview between the people who created this concept and first launched it off the ground. However, interviewing is a skill that I hopelessly lack, and even if I did want to contact these writers, I wouldn’t know where to begin. So, if you want that… you can do it yourself. It just involves playing email tag with people and hoping for replies.

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TSF Showcase 2024-31.1
The Great Shift: Genesis by Morpheus

Genesis is the aptly titled origin of The Great Shift, although I cannot say for certain when it was first published. The commonly cited Fictionmania release was published on September 7, 1998, making it a few days younger than other Great Shift stories hosted on the platform. But this was the late 90s internet, so who knows how it was originally released or distributed.

Before beginning, Morpheus thankfully includes a brief foreword explaining how this concept came to be, and the answer is about what one would expect. He wanted to create “the ultimate body swapping situation” and an “open universe” that other writers could add to and build upon. One that “mixes up the governments, marriages, families, and legal system, as well as many professions.” Though, he does insist on a few ground rules for the universe. The cause was an incident in New Mexico. The Great Shift can only transport people several miles at most. And that the Shift was more likely to swap people if they were making physical contact. Things that successive writers came to ignore as the premise was streamlined over the ensuing 25 years.

The story itself opens on the inciting incident. A group of scientists led by Dr. Bob Jensen is working in a secret lab located in New Mexico, creating a vaguely defined device based on alien technology retrieved from a crash in Roswell. A stock sci-fi premise that was naturally funded by a group of people interested in harnessing this technology for profit or military power. However, after twenty years of working on this ‘alien generator,’ it is finally time to activate it and, when they do… things immediately go wrong. The generator explodes, Dr. Bob Jensen feels his soul being ripped from his body, and the lab is completely destroyed, leaving behind a three mile-wide crater.

The remainder of the story then shifts over to David Howard, a 26-year-old bachelor, coming home to his apartment. While unpacking groceries, he switches bodies with one of his apartment mates, a 21-year-old woman named Andrea Steiger. He’s dazed and confused to be in her body, goes out to the halls to see that he is not the only one affected, and promptly runs into the real Andrea, in the body of “a large guy.” Andrea demands David to give her body back, David explains the situation, and with tensions running high, the two return to David’s unoccupied apartment, where they watch TV. 

Once the two are in the apartment, whatever human tension or connection this story could have pretty much dries up and things transform into a prolonged lore dump. Describing how The Great Shift happened. How 93% of the population were affected. How identity theft of famous and wealthy people is rampant. How couples were put in bodies of disproportionate ages and sexes (which was a big deal, as gay marriage was illegal worldwide in 1998). How this whole situation left David uninterested in sexually exploring their body. How he and Andrea remained friends and helped each other through this, but not lovers as that would be too risque.How this event brought forth a lot more interest in cults and religions. Basically, a second wave of the new religious movement of the 60s and 70s. Including the introduction of a cult called the Uncursed, which believes that those who were unaffected by the Shift were chosen by God. I have not checked if anybody actually used the Uncursed in one of their stories, but I kind of doubt it.

However, the most ludicrous comment has to be “the only good things I think came out of this was that sexism and racism were pretty much a moot point.” Which… no, it really would not work that way. Sexism? Sure, I can sorta buy that, as every man shifted has a 50% chance of ending up in a female body. Or, per the actual rules implemented by these stories, over a 90% chance. But racism? Just focusing on America circa 1998, there are plenty of regions with over a 90% White majority, and I doubt this would have taught them to be less racist. If anything, it would make them double down on racism, branding themselves True Whites or some bullcrap like that.

Overall… this story is not quite the insight that I seem to remember it being when I was a kid, as it is mostly just a list of concepts and stating a few possible dynamics. It is more like a piece of lore meant to be consulted than a satisfying story in and of itself. 

…So let’s see what the first wave of The Great Shift writers went through. Specifically, the works by a few of Morpehus’s friends at the time.

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TSF Showcase 2024-31.2
The Great Shift: Teens by Brad Miller

Published on Fictionmania on August 29, 1998, we have the debut work of Brad Miller. A writer might be better known as mbrad, SwitchHitter, or the dude who has been running TG Caption site The Swapping Grounds for the past 11 years. Since the site launched, he has produced about 8,000 captions, and if you ever dug through the TSF gulags to find something basic to masturbate to, you probably came across Miller’s work.

Starting out, the story’s pretty straightforward. Steve Edwards is the archetypical 15-year-old White dude, going to high school, making by, and harboring a crush on Rachel, a girl in his class. However, Rachel already has a boyfriend, meaning Steve cannot ask her out and must endure her constant “tempting of him.” This comes ahead quickly as Steve goes on an animated tirade while pronouncing his love for her, which does not go well. Rachel storms off, Steve is comforted by his friends during lunch, and right as Steve is trying to apologize, an earthquake happens, and everybody passes out. 

Also, for the record, this story takes place in Maryland, so people were immediately moving past the New Mexico explosion as being the cause of The Great Shift. You could say that the entire earth shook from that explosion, but that’s not how planets work.

This naturally leaves all relevant characters in this story body swapped in some manner. Protagonist Steve and his crush Rachel swapped bodies. Big Black guy Tommy and tiny Asian girl Alyson switched. Rachel’s boyfriend, Zach, is in the body of a girl named Sam. Sam is in the body of her older brother, Paul. Steve’s friend Rob is in Ashley— some other girl. And everyone not accounted for is not important.

You can definitely tell that Miller wanted to tell a larger story with a cast of this size, but once they get into their new bodies, they don’t really know what to do. Some shout to give their bodies back, some are in disbelief, some get angry at others, and Zach is the resident pervert of the group. But they mostly just stand around in their own little bubble, not really swept up in the chaos of a high school after a global body swap. They just accept this for the time being and decide to walk back home.

This sees the trio of Steve, Rachel, and Tommy all venture back to Rachel’s house, because it was the first one on their way home, and… they find a lot of things. Paul wound up in his and Rachel’s mother’s body. Somebody swapped bodies with the family cat— an idea that I’ve rarely seen implemented in Great Shift stories, as it creates countless problems. Rachel’s older sister, Dara, is covered in bruises and never wakes up, so I guess the cat switched into her body, fell down the stairs, and died or something. And Steve’s deadbeat dad swapped into Rachel’s younger sister, which… is a weirdly common trend in Great Shift stories.

Over the years, I have read at least half a dozen Great shift stories that did this plotpoint. Have the deadbeat abandoning father of the protagonist reappear into their life in a new female body. It’s not a bad plot point— I actually think it’s pretty smart. It is the reintroduction of something that was lost is paired with a new beginning. A source of additional tension less abstract than being in a new body. And something that can vastly change the way the teenage protagonist views gender roles. The father is the archetypal male role model, so seeing him learn how to do femininity, deal with women problems, can be the source for some great reflection and introspection. Have I seen an example that does these things? Not that I can recall, but we’re talking about decade old memories here.

After setting this all up, after having characters hash it out and try to get this household somewhat organized… the story just kind of stops. The group acknowledges that Paul lacks the skills to live as his mother, that their family is dysfunctional in its current state, and then Steve starts talking about how… this is fine.

He talks about how much he likes his smooth skin, how tightly his clothes hug his body, how much he wants to explore this pretty Latina body he wound up with. He ends things by saying he wants to try finding his family and that, even if he is a girl now, he wants to get on with his life. “THE END… for now.” But seeing as how this story was written nearly 26 years ago and saw no follow-up, it’s safe to just call it ‘the end.’

To give a more generous reading… I cannot help but feel that this story was innovative and helped lay the foundation for future writers. This was 1998. School-wide body swap stories did not really exist as far as I am aware, and there is a lot of DNA here that feels eerily familiar, despite the fact that I never read this story until now. There is some clear effort being made here to make a large-scale story, but that effort did not carry the writer past the 5,000 word mark. 

Characters are barely characters, a lot of little details are not addressed, and you can tell the writing process only went on until the writer got bored with the whole idea. I’d criticize that approach, but Miller was probably a teenager himself when he wrote this and he likely just saw this as a cheeky bit of fun to crank out before school started up again.

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TSF Showcase 2024-31.3
The Great Shift: The Shift Hits the Fan I by Raven

Oh cripes, do I need to talk about this? Because this is really just fanfiction. Fanfiction involving real people, and fanfiction of something I am deeply unfamiliar with. While I respect American pro wrestling in many ways— as a form of long-form storytelling, as a physically intensive and stringent performance, as a complex form of live theater— I don’t really care about it. I’ve never watched a single show. I only know what little I do via cultural osmosis and video essays.

However, this is one of the earliest Great Shift stories, and it leads into a crossover involving many prominent TG writers of the early internet, so… here we go!

The first story is from Raven, a TG writer who was very active in 1998, writing 35 different stories. They were well on their way to becoming a big writer with a track record like that. But their output quickly slowed to a trickle. Propped up only by collaborations with Caleb Jones and Morpehus. They said goodbye with a napkin-length story in 2001, and released a final novella in 2002, ending with a teaser for another story that just never came..

The first entry in this ‘series’ centers around Steve attending a wrestling show with his buddy Eric, a fellow TG writer. And Steve is one of those dudes who was just obsessed with Miss Elizabeth. Real name Elizabeth Ann Hulette, she would have been 37-years-old at the time this story was written, and she served as a sexual icon for a generation of teenage boys. As for why, it probably has something to do with her being the primary female figure in what is otherwise an unabashed display of muscly men. 

Throughout the entire story, Steve, and by extension Raven, comes across as an absolute creep with how frequently he fawns over her body. He does not have any particular love for her, just her body, and is so eager to get close to it that he reaches past his seat to touch her arm. Then, at this exact moment, the shift hits the fan.

Per the rules laid out by Morephus, physical contact increases his odds of a body swap occurring, and Steve finds himself inside Elizabeth. Steve, naturally, is frazzled by this sudden body swap and sight of disarray all around him, but he has enough composure to greet his original body, now occupied by an 8-year-old girl named Emily. He tries to reassure her, but before he can tell her the truth, she winds up complimenting Steve, thinking that he is the ‘real Miss Elizabeth.’ 

Combined with an encounter with Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan), who knows Steve shifted, Steve’s brain starts buzzing with uncertainty. He knows he should just tell the truth of who he is, give Bollea his name, and come clean with the members of the wrestling organization, but he still hesitates. And before he can figure out why, Bollea tells the organization that Miss Elizabeth was not affected by the shift. Something that should be met with some scrutiny, as there’s no way Steve knows how to look natural in a female body. But they buy it, and the organization executives explain that people need escapism and stability in their lives more than ever, so the world of wrestling must go on. And… it does.

Cutting ahead six months later, Steve has fully acclimated to his life as Miss Elizabeth, and has shifted it to their liking. They transitioned her on-stage persona from a good girl to be a bad bitch. They embraced their new sex appeal and began catering to the sort of thing that got them off when they were a man. And they became a workplace groopie of sorts, having sex with the male wrestlers who had to be swimming with diseases. I don’t know much about wrestlers, but I do know that in the 80s and 90s, they fucked. They fucked often. They fucked HARD. And for a lot of them, they got up to four digits of pussy. That’s a lotta herp, and hella crabs.

Steve has zero reservations or doubts about his new life. They seemingly divorce Elizabeth Ann Hulette’s real life husband, Cary Lubetsky, to get back together with Randy Poffo (Macho Man). They never heard back from Elizabeth, who very well might have died in the shift. And despite living and dealing with being a woman approaching middle age, Steve is all smiles and not bothered by the high stress and highly demanding work they must perform. Or maybe Raven didn’t want to distract from the fantasy.

Then, in the epilogue, Steve meets up with Emily in their original body, who reveals they now go by Emilio and have taken on the role of an adult man, working and no longer attending school. Which… is wrong. Even if one or three years passed (the story is vague on this), Emilio does not have the proper education to work, and should not be treated as an adult. They lack the experience and academic knowledge needed to be an adult. I can buy that a child can learn things faster with a fully developed brain— even though kids already have sponge-like brains. But that just ain’t right.

However, things get so much worse when Steve invites Emillio to their dressing room… and has sex with them. …Meaning that Steve’s a pedophile. Emilio might physically be an adult, but Steve knows this person’s a minor and lacks the full understanding of the adult world. Now, I know the actual appeal and intent with this is that Steve fucks their old body. Raven probably wasn’t even thinking of the mental age of Emilio. But it’s still a bad look.

And that’s the note the story ends on. This creepy bastard stole this woman’s life to live out their fantasy of being a sexual icon, becoming a sexual icon backstage, and loves every last bit of it. …Before the years of hard work, drugs, and STD development eventually cause his body to collapse, but that’s outside of the scope of this story.

I want to say that this story is remarkable but… it really isn’t. A lot of body swap stories, especially of this era, are just ways for the writer and readers to project on the fantasy of becoming an attractive and successful woman thanks to some magical transformation. It’s the power fantasy of becoming a hot lady who gets to do hot lady things. Because if you’re a dude, it’s really expensive and takes a lot of work to become a hot lady.

Is it a good example of that? I’m going to say no. A lot of the reason why is just the fixation on real-life people. By focusing on existing characters and images in this story, Raven does not offer many details into the experiences Steve undergoes. Let alone describe their lives outside of the wrestling shows. 

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TSF Showcase 2024-31.4
The Great Shift: The Shift Hits the Fan II by Raven

Now this is a curious and significant relic of the early TG fiction scene of the late 90s. A crossover featuring the writers Raven, Caleb Jones, Steve Zink, Morthien, Morpheus, and Eric as they attend a pro wrestling show and get swapped into some of the… Nitro Girls. A group of female performers who were brought in because… it was the late 90s. Scantily clad twenty-something women were kind of big at the time.

For the first half of this entry, it’s mostly just Raven dorking out about wrestling, boasting about dragging all his friends here, and making some slight comments on their quirks. Namely how Eric hates wrestling and how Morpehus is always writing in his notebook. And the lads playing the TG fan staple of ‘which body would you take’ with the women around them. (If you haven’t played that with someone else, then do you really have friends?)

 It’s pretty charming imagining this group of writers all coming together like this, chatting about, bouncing ideas for their own silly stories, and being friends in the early eras of the internet. They’re all a bunch of weirdos who probably wouldn’t want to share their interests IRL. But with the power of digital anonymity, they were able to form a friendship strong enough for them to help lay the foundation for something that would grow far beyond their wildest imaginations.

As the show is underway, the Nitro Girls come on stage, the TG writer boys all nudge each other to pick their favorites. The performance ends and as the Nitro Girls head off the stage, the Shift happens! Predictably, all the TG writers wind up in the bodies of the Nitro Girls, with Raven landing in the body of the “Oriental” Nitro Girl, Chae An. …Yeah, there’s no excuse for not calling her Asian or Korean in 1998. 

Raven revels in this discovery, as he “always did like the exotic woman” and simped for Chae so hard that he had a poster in his bedroom. But rather than offer some prolonged prose about what it is like to actually be in the body of a real woman, he pulls the cowardly move of saying that “the reality of it far surpassed the written word.” 

Seeing as how this is his fantasy come to reality, Raven is committed to staying in this body by any means necessary, and has zero desire to go back to his old life. Which I’m sure his parents would appreciate. Lucky for him— or I guess not lucky, because he’s the one writing this— Chae did not land in his body, but rather the body of Bill Goldberg, the reigning WCW champ. 

Chae is pissed to have lost her body and wants it back, but Raven is just… rude to her. He jumps to the conclusion that this is probably a permanent swap, says his name is Chae now, and when Chae tries to defend her identity, Raven says that she’s “the champ” now. I would have grabbed someone for pulling that shit on me, but Chae is a woman in a late 90s TG story. Her job is to man up or shut up!

From there, Raven sees that Morpheus wound up in another Nitro Girl— no idea which one— and everybody in the body of a performer is called backstage. …To be continued! Except not really, because Raven flew away hella long ago.

This is yet another story about some dude taking a real woman’s body for himself, but at least the story ended before Raven could take Chae’s life for himself. Because after what Steve did as Miss Elizabeth, I cannot imagine he would behave with grace.

Also, and I know this does not matter, but Raven wrote this story a week after the first one and just botched the continuity. This story is supposed to take place in parallel with the first Shift Hits the Fan and the peripheral 450 word story written by Eric, where he body swaps into a New York Rockette. But not only would that mean there are two Steves and Two Erics, the first story takes place in New York City, and the second takes place in Miami. Space is warped, time is bendable, and this story… just is not very good.

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TSF Showcase 2024-31.5
The Great Shift: Cute by Morpheus

Okay, okay, we saw two stories with finer points that just… chose not to stop, and a creepy real person fanfic. I can keep going though, I have time, so… back to Morpheus! 

Following Steven Farrel— why are there so many bloody Steves? Was a Steve a prerequisite for a Great Shift story? Ahem. Steven is a 19-year-old getting ready to head off for college in the fall, working a pizza delivery job to make some cash for when he moves out. While on his latest delivery, driving his trusty Geo, the Shift hits, throwing him into the body of Gina Simmons. A short cute girl with an almost pixie-like appearance. Whatever that means.

He tries to recover his body after landing in Gina’s, but quickly realizes that whoever landed in his body died in a brutal car crash. I’d ask how, but this was released right after American cars had to have airbags so… maybe Geos were just unsafe pieces of crap— but that’s besides the point. Morpheus wanted to write a scene where someone, shifted into a different body, looks over the remains of their old body and vomits in disgust, so they did that. And the scene is highly effective, one that speaks to the intent of this story. To tell a story more about the sense of loss over one’s life and body, knowing that they are stuck like this, with no body to ever return to, and forced to just… accept it.

…And then the latter half of the story transforms into a list of things that happen.

Steven learns that his mother shifted into a neighbor, who is slightly older and fatter than her. His father shifted into his 12-year-old bratty sister. His 12-year-old bratty sister, Allie, shifted into a 16-year-old girl who’s taller and bustier than he is. Steven is peeved about being cute instead of gorgeous, wishing he was a leggy blonde woman instead. And while Steven wishes that things turned out different, he’s still moving on with his life, like everybody else after The Great Shift. Das ende.

I know I should not expect much from a story that’s under 2,500 words, but… Morpheus could have just made it longer instead of rushing to get this out in a week. It’s fine for what it is, but rather than deliver a finished story, it sets up a premise and then rushes to an open end, not really resolving anything. It gets points for ending, but those are basically the participation points of writing something for the internet.

Goldarn it. I need something with some zest. Something longer. Unfortunately, the next two stories from Morpheus are even shorter and involve pre-teen characters. School Daze is just a premise about a little boy— named Stevie— who winds up in his teacher’s body, and it barely does anything with it. While Jeremy is the start of a story about a 9-year-old boy who gets shifted into a pregnant woman. After traipsing through the first night, it has the balls to end with this line: “Finally, two long months after the Shift, Jeremy gave birth to a healthy baby girl.” Now that’s something that doesn’t even deserve participation points!

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After searching for something more remarkable, I DID find something that I really want to show people. And it is about as good as you could expect for a piece of 20th century TSF fiction made for weirdos on the internet. However, this post is already long enough for my liking— I need to pace myself with these things— So I’m going to hold off on sharing this until next week.

Until then, see ya!

…But before you go, as a reminder, if you have any TSF story, comic, or whatever you like, think is neat, or warrants a discussion, please leave a comment down below, and I will add it to THE LIST.