Girls and Boys

[ninety6tears.livejournal.com]

Hey, all. Sorry this post is pretty late in the day - We had some connection issues at the house earlier :(

Today we're going to talk about Pilots and Gender.

Some time over a year ago was when I first became aware of this trend throughout different fandoms of genderbending characters, creating an AU in which one or more characters has always been the opposite sex. I recently got to thinking about the fact that this never took off in BSG fandom at all, but a good reason for that is that we simply don't need it. We have canon genderbend in Starbuck and Boomer being women, and we also have little to do with genderbend characters because the universe is impressively gender-neutral, and the way the characters would be treated by others or the behavioral expectation wouldn't affect much of a change on them.

On the topic of our beloved pilots, I think a lot of us are very attached to how they consistently subvert gender stereotypes. I love joking about Lee being a little bit of a princess and Kara wearing the pants in the relationship, but in my opinion it truly exists completely outside stereotyped relationship structures and is about them being equals. They both display a wide spectrum of unpredictable strengths and vulnerabilities, and it makes both of them great characters and is a big part of why the relationship always felt fresh.

So. I'm going to ask you to do something that might mentally be a little...uncomfortable, and ask yourself: What if Apollo was the woman and Starbuck was still a man?

Below the cut I have a couple casting choices for this switch, but as a general disclaimer, this was REALLY hard, especially with Starbuck. I'm a big believer in Katee's contribution being extremely important to the creation of Starbuck as Kara, and it's almost impossible to imagine her being played by any other woman, let alone...
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