Update as of May 24, 2020

Status/Progress: surprise! I'm working on another chapter! :D

Gender Bent names, appearance, etc master list:

Inuyasha - the title character, so name stayed the same. I thought "Inuyasha" sounded kind of masculine and kept accidentally writing "he" in reference to her, so Souta became my mouthpiece (he also thought the name sounded masculine) and came up with nicknames for her. Settled on Isha because it sounded the prettiest. She wears the same outfit as her canon counterpart, which is much baggier on her. She is surprisingly slender, and of average height (for a woman in Feudal Japan)

Souta - just switched Kagome and Souta's names. Easy-peasy. I prefer to spell it "Souta" rather than Sota or Sohta or whatever. Souta is the same height as Isha, which is embarrassing for him in both eras (because that would make him around 5'1", which is short for a 15 year old boy. Sadly I am only two inches taller than that). I've never addressed it but I guess Souta just wears his school uniform in the feudal era. I've never bothered saying that Souta was smart enough to wear throwaway clothes rather than his expensive uniform, so... imagine he wears a dress for all I care.

Kaede - still a woman, no change

Tsuta - Kikyo and Kaede are both named after plants in-canon, so I kept that theme. Originally his name was Momiji, but I changed that because it both sounded too feminine and kept reminding me of Momiji from Fruits Basket. So after some research, I had a couple names picked out. Tsuta means "ivy", and my superstition book had only good things to say about ivy (granted, that is WESTERN superstition, I don't know what Japan thinks about ivy), and it was just a bonus that Tsuta sounded vaguely like Souta. Tsuta is tall and lanky, and I also imagine he looks kind of tired all the time. I'm sure that would've come up if I'd ever bothered to write about Tsuta. He's in like 2 chapters, isn't he? Lol. Ironically I prefer Kikyo to Kagome (although I ship InuyashaXMy OC 5EVUR - dat mean more than forever)

Kannon - Readers of Inuyasha may recognize this name from the arc with the village of women with the eggs in their bellies. Kannon is a Buddhist deity, and a female one (obviously). I spent a long time trying to find more female Buddhist deities, but I came up pretty short. (Oh, Miroku is the name of one of the future incarnations of Buddha, by the way. Or at least, the Japanese version of the name). I'm still not sure what I'll do when I get to that village arc, by the way. Anyway, I see Kannon as being taller than average for a woman, maybe around 5'5, 5'6. I imagine she dresses similarly to canon Miroku, with slightly longer hair. I sometimes imagine her with a sort of headdress (like a sort of sheet draped and wrapped on her head), maybe she doesn't wear it all the time. There ARE honest-to-goodness Buddhist nuns, by the way. Look it up! The accent's on the "o", by the way. kan-NON, but it's a slightly long "o". According to one website I looked at.

Hagane - Sango, Kohaku, and Kirara are all named after minerals (coral, amber, and mica). I didn't want to go the "just switch the sibling names" route with him, partly because I kept messing up the pronouns in the early chapters when I was writing about Souta, partly because it would be lame to do that a second time. So, I spent a long time trying to find good mineral names. I could've sworn I was inspired by my favorite Pokemon, Honedge and Doublade, to get this name, but this appears to not be true. So, who knows? Anyway, Hagane means "steel". I go back and forth in imagining how tall Hagane is - sometimes he's just shorter than Kannon, sometimes he's a few inches taller than she is. He's only 16, there's still time to grow (just like Souta!)

Sesshoko - Should be obvious, I just swapped the masculine "maru" for the feminine "ko". Sesshoko I imagine is tall, maybe 5'8, 5'9. She's also slender, just like Isha, but it's more obvious because her clothing isn't as large. And Jaken of course is still male. Rin is male as well, although he hasn't shown up yet since the narration mainly follows Souta. Male-rin is as of yet unnamed, and about the same height as canon Rin.

Akiga - as explained in the some author's notes, the name can mean bright, intelligent, or autumn fang (and "bright" I'm not sure if it's supposed to mean bright as in light and shining, or bright as in smart). I wanted the name to sound reminiscent of Koga's name, so it still ends in "ga". It was supposed to be Kiga at one point but I vetoed that for sounding TOO much like canon. I was sure I'd end up just writing "koga" all the time instead. Akiga's height in relation to Souta will be addressed in-story, but she's several inches taller than him (and Isha; Koga I'm pretty sure was also taller than Inuyasha). She's very fit and muscular but not at like a professional wrestling extent. I kind of think of her like Xena: Warrior Princess. Also for a fun FYI, Rumiko Takahashi suggested that the female wolf demons probably had their own "girl gangs". My sudden headcanon is that the wolf demons are separated into bachelor packs and bachelorette packs, for unattached wolfies, and family packs. If the bachelors and bachelorettes meet up and take a liking to one another and decide to mate, they become part of the family pack. Perhaps once the male is satisfied he leaves to hang out with the bachelor packs until mating season rolls back in. And then there's of course the lone wolves who have been shunned out of all the packs, or just don't want to be in a pack, or whatever. That was entirely headcanon, though.

Shippo - I always forget Shippo! I was seriously thinking, "Hm, well, Akiga was the last major character to show up, I guess that was everyone... Oh, wait, no! Shippo!" Shippo looks identical to canon Shippo. As mentioned somewhere in the early author's notes, whether Shippo is a boy or a girl will remain a mystery for as long as I can stretch it. Since I keep forgetting Shippo exists, and Shippo barely does anything in canon anyway, and Shippo-centric stories are unimportant and often don't involve Kagome(Souta) in a great capacity, well...

Konomi & Masami - Ginta and Hakkaku. Konomi was chosen because the site I was on listed its defintion as "nuts" and I just thought that was hilarious to me. Like, really blunt. "Nuts." It can also mean fruit, or fortune, or stuff like that. Masami means something about being beautiful, which was chosen because it's a nice name, and I referred to female Hakkaku ("Mohawk") as the uglier one. :3

Arc Titles

(Obviously) partway through Gender Bendered I started naming some of the chapters. I realized, as the story was getting longer, maybe some people would want to go back and reread specific sections, or something, and that's hard to do when you don't remember exactly when something happened and all the chapters are just called "Chapter ". Rather than naming EVERY SINGLE CHAPTER I thought I'd just mark off the start of the story arcs. Since most of them are pretty short, I think it works out.

Oh and I don't know why they're all parodies of existing titles. Especially since the story isn't entirely humorous on its own. Actually, only 3 of the 5 are parodies.

The Peach Man Cometh = The Iceman Cometh

Enter, Slayers = Enter Sandman - which was going to be Hagane the Demon Slayer but I thought that was kind of lame

She-Wolf of Edo = She-Wolf of London

Exposition Cave and The Earth Boy aren't referencing anything except the actual chapters.

Let The Bodies Hit the Floor = song lyrics. I couldn't think of anything that really fit the chapter. :

One of these days I may go back and retroactively name the existing story arcs (technically chapter 1 already has a name, "The Boy Who Overcame Time and the Girl Who Was Just Overcome," which is a genderflip of the anime's title of the first episode. But that was way too long to fit into the chapter title space. Also saying "the girl who was just overcome" sounds a bit... unfortunate to my ears (eyes?).

By the way I'm also vaguely planning to rewrite the earlier chapters to fit the tone of the later chapters a bit better, and also I know there's still at least one typo in one of the earlier chapters that I've never bothered fixing. Maybe, MAYBE I could also fix up the endings of each chapter... make 'em longer... Probably I won't do that, though. Uggh, so much work... Too much work for something I don't get paid to do. [

/rambling

Not an F.A.Q. because nobody asked:

1. Who's your favorite Inuyasha character?

Jaken. Nah, I mean, they've all got their flaws, right? I don't know, I'm just really drawn to Jaken for some reason. I've drawn him more than any of the other Inuyasha characters. It's partly because he's way easier to draw than the others.

2. So how'd you get into Inuyasha in the first place?

Back when I was a wee lass of 11 or 12 or so, one of my best friends kept pestering me to watch Inuyasha. She gushed about it, totally loved it. I didn't care much about it. Partly because this would've been back in 2002 or 2003 or so, so I couldn't just watch it online or anything. Actually the idea that you could watch tv shows on the internet wouldn't have even crossed my mind. This may surprise you younger readers, but the internet's been around for a really long time, but it was mostly just text for a while, until around when Youtube first came onto the scene, I guess.

Anyway, I couldn't watch it online. It did come on Adult Swim, but I wasn't allowed to stay up and watch it. And I didn't care enough to watch it anyway. It just seemed stupid to me. I was more interested in Rurouni Kenshin and Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh I guess.

Embarrassingly, what got me to finally settle on watching Inuyasha was... Sesshomaru. My friend had like this whole set of pictures she'd printed out from the internet of the characters, and she showed me Sesshomaru and I was basically like "Oh he looks neat. He's on this show? Okay let's watch it." So of course the first Inuyasha manga volume I owned was volume 2, where Sesshomaru first shows up.

Which makes it funny that his GenderBendered equivalent, Sesshoko, really gets the shaft in terms of storytelling.

Fun-ish fact: I had the first issue of the Beckett Anime Collector (when it switched from just being about Pokemon to being about all anime; I realize some of you have no idea what I'm talking about, it was a magazine that had news, and anime reviews, and a price guide for trading cards and toys), and it had a small blurb on Inuyasha, and boy did that blurb give me the wrong impression of the show. For some reason I assumed Kagome was also some kind of hybrid animal-demon thing like Inuyasha appeared to be, and I thought it sounded like she filled the role that ultimately went to Shippo - as the cute but kind of annoying small sidekick.

3. How'd you start writing fanfiction?

Er, well, I'd been making OCs for Pokemon since not too long after I started watching it, and that was the beginning. I made OCs for almost every anime I watched (not Hamtaro, though). I'd always be running through stories about the OCs in my head, but never wrote them down or anything. But I got ahold of an old computer - actually, like 5 of them; my mom got them from work - and started writing on there. I was weird, I made Powerpoint presentations of my OCs.

It wasn't until I was 13 or so that I started actually writing fanfiction. I never finished anything I wrote. The farthest I got was several pages of a damn Tom Sawyer fanfiction about Joe Harper getting abducted by aliens. I had a couple of fanfictions that just never went anywhere - one was about Inuyasha, Sesshomaru, Koga, Naraku, Miroku, and Kurama from Yu Yu Hakusho and Kenshin from Rurouni Kenshin in the modern day, being magical girls. Like they were men, but they turned into magical girls, with breasts and everything. I also had one that was a prequel focusing on Inu-papa growing up, but actually mostly on his sister, who was an OC of mine. This prequel I still have saved somewhere, maybe, but it's terrible and I will absolutely not finish it, or even post it if I can find it.

4. Er, okay... how'd you start writing fanfiction on here?

I have no idea. I don't know what it was that inspired me to actually write stuff, and finish it, and post it. Around the time I started writing on here, I also started going to bed way later. I don't know if it's a coincidence, or if one caused the other. But I honestly cannot remember why all of a sudden I started several fanfictions at once, and wrote several parts to all of them, and actually have managed to continue one (Gender Bendered) for several years, with the long hiatus.

For what it's worth, though, I've had a thing for gender bender stories for a while (see: "modern day men turn into magical girls" above; my favorite Rumiko Takahashi manga is Ranma 1/2, too). I don't know why I was so excited about the idea of having manGome and sheNuyasha enough to write it and post it.

5. Oh, cool. So, um, what about your other series? Greatest Fanfiction Ever and At the Movies?

Nobody reads At the Movies, don't play me like that. Anyway, those two... yikes. At the Movies has like 4 chapters that are partially written that I haven't touched in like 6 years. GFE... Well, it sort of ended, but I know it has a "I'm going to write an epilogue!" note in it... 6 or 7 years later... I guess I should just mark them "completed" and I can add to them later if I feel like it.

6. You gonna start writing anything else?

No. The only thing I'm considering is having a side story for Gender Bendered that has non-canonical lemons in it, but I'm awful at writing erotic content. "He kissed her on the nipple and she moaned. Then he put his doo-dad in her no-no place." Actually that sound like it could be funny.

7. So no more Inuyasha fanfiction? No fanfiction for other series, even?

Noooo. For some reason Inuyasha is the only series I ever felt compelled to write fanfiction for. And now that I'm older, I feel really self-conscious about taking other people's work and doing what I want with it. I prefer to let works stand as they are now, aside from me speculating "What if - "

I'm also a terribly lazy writer. You know why there's such a huge gap between the chapters of Gender Bendered? It's not because I'm busy, I'll tell you that.

If you have a true thirst for my writing, I do have a tv review blog, which, not coincidentally, also had a gigantic hiatus due to laziness, but as of July 2015 is regularly updating again.

8. Oh, I was going to ask what was up with all the gaps between chapters, but you answered that already.

Well, okay. To be honest, it's actually partly laziness, mostly writer's block, often laziness as a result of writer's block. Sometimes it's just so hard to figure out how to change the canon manga to the genderbent story, or how to write out the action scenes. I really want to just skip all the action and have the entire story be Souta freaking out about how he wants to kiss a girl who's in love with a dead guy, really. So when I come to parts that are sort of important to the story, but hard to write, it's just a chore for me to get through, so we end up with gaps where I don't post anything. Sorry.

9. Speaking of, when ARE Souta and Isha going to kiss?

Your guess is as good as mine. I pick out a lot of different spots where I think it would be a good place for the kiss to finally happen, but whether I go through with it or not... Because I know when Souta finally does kiss her, or at least lets her know that he wants to, that'll change things. You can't just go on and pretend that it didn't happen, right? And I don't want the kiss to be too early in the story (we're on volume 15 as I'm writing this, out of, what, 55 volumes? 58??), but I feel bad for Souta and want him to get some lovin' already.

So I have vague plans but I cannot tell you a definite "Oh yes in chapter 167 they'll finally kiss".

10. Not all of the characters are gender bent. What's up with that?

I think this was partly because I'm not so confident that I felt like I could change EVERYONE in the ENTIRE SERIES from male to female or vice versa. Certainly that would REALLY change the dynamic of the series. If Souta lived with his businessman father and temple priestess grandmother? Old man Kaede? Lady Naraku? Lady Jaken?

The characters that aren't genderbent remained as their canon selves because it would be easier for me, and in some cases, for a change of pace. For instance, currently I'm planning on leaving Koharu as a girl. If you'll recall, in canon, Miroku was kind to her and was disappointed that she was only 11 when they met, and when they meet again she's 14 and plenty old enough to bear his child. So with Miroku now being a woman, that presented quite a challenge, and in the end, I felt Koharu worked more easily as a girl, even if that disrupts the initial "Sango is jealous" thing, since Hagane likely wouldn't be jealous of a 14 year old girl who's friends with Kannon.

OR WOULD HE?

11. What do the character names mean?

There's a guide father up, explaining origins, decision-making, and some pronunciation tips.

12. "'Scuse me, this is a factual error!"

If I've managed to horribly screw something up, I apologize, and ask you to kindly point it out to me. That said, I'm not overly concerned with being entirely historically and factually accurate here. I don't want it to be overly inaccurate, but this is a casual fanfiction I'm writing for fun. And of course, it's not as if the Inuyasha anime didn't make some weird dialogue errors - I believe in the dub Inuyasha complains that someone should "get off their soapbox" which is definitely not an expression a 15th century Japanese man should know (he also tells Kikyo "We've all got our cross to bear", which is also a very odd reference to find a half-demon making in 15th century Japan, although this one is a bit more believable, since crosses actually existed by then, unlike people preaching from atop soap boxes).

The most obvious in-story one is Kannon the nun. I believe I may explain this in the author's notes somewhere, but Buddhist nuns do in fact exist, and existed back when the story takes place. I've struggled getting any information on Feudal-era Buddhist nuns, but it seems that they were pretty similar to the monks, in terms of how they were meant to live. Inuayasha canonically features a Buddhist nun who's being possessed by a cat demon. Kannon follows the Miroku doctrine of not strictly adhering to the ways of the Buddhist clergy(?), although apparently Miroku likely belongs to a certain subset/sect of Buddhism where they don't strictly observe vegetarianism and head-shaving.

Most of the stuff featured in Gender Bendered is straight from the Inuaysha manga, anyway, so take your complaints up with Takahashi.

13. "'Scuse me, there's a spelling/grammar error!"

Once again, I ask you to please kindly point this out to me. I've noticed plenty myself and I find them rather embarrassing. The worst was the incorrect pronoun usage that was in some of the early chapters for a whole year before I noticed (in the early days of writing, I couldn't get it through my head that Inuyasha was a girl and Souta a boy, so I'd use "he" in reference to Inuyasha, and "she" for Souta. This was the worst when Kagome and Souta were in the same chapters.)

14. Are you ever going to do [something from the anime]?

Probably not. Since the anime is really not canon, after all. Also I write by basically holding the manga open and working from it, and I can't do that with anime. That would take so long. I think the fourth movie is the most likely to show up here, since all the little half-demons and such...

Incidentally, someone stole my copy of the second movie when I was in middle school. I let this girl borrow it and she never gave it back. Whenever I brought it up she'd just skirt around it. Ugh. Awful. Especially since I still have the lenticular sheet that came with the movie. But not the movie itself. Man.

I would also consider introducing an Ayame equivalent just so Akiga can get some shipping/closure later on, but I have no concrete plans, and I would not bet money on me doing so.

15. What's your favorite pairing?

E-heh... I actually dislike almost every single canon and non-canon pairing in Inuyasha. Rin/Kohaku are my OTP, though.

I do of course ship Souta/Isha. I may have mentioned this in an author's note, but I always really hated Kagome, and was kind of neutral on Kikyo, so it's hilarious that I love Souta so much and hate Tsuta. He's so boring. I know that's partly my fault that he's boring, but... oh, well.

My favorite pairings of the non-bent characters (other than Rin/Kohaku) are entirely canon character/original character. I had an OC lined up for everyone - Inuyasha, Sesshomaru, Koga, Miroku, and Naraku. None of the girls, though, because ew. Girls.

16. Can I draw fanart of your fanfiction?

YES. ABSOLUTELY. Please tell me about any fanart you draw, or that you see.

17. How tall is everyone?

I believe I mention this farther down, but here it is: Souta and Isha are around the same height. Isha is of average height for a Japanese woman. Souta will grow later on. Hagane and Kannon are both a couple inches taller than them, with Kannon being the tallest in the group. Hagane is also meant to grow a bit more. I imagine Kannon's only an inch or two taller than Hagane, anyway. Tsuta, Sesshoko, and Naraku are all much taller than that.

Ah, to put it into numbers, I'd say Souta and Isha are around 5'1", with Hagane around 5'5", Kannon 5'6", Akiga 5'5" maybe, Tsuta 5'8", Sesshoko 5'9", and Naraku around 6' or taller.

Souta, Kannon, and Tsuta are of average build and body type, Hagane's just a bit beefier than average. Isha and Sesshoko are both slender, with Isha being much smaller than she looks because of how her clothes drape. Akiga, as mentioned by Souta, is a muscular woman, built like Wonder Woman, or perhaps even Xena. She's also the bustiest female character on the Feudal side of things. Naraku isn't genderbent so I don't know why I included him.

18. How long will you keep writing this?

Well I'm intending to see it through to the end, now. There's a poll on here somewhere asking for reader feedback, and everyone's in favor of going to the end of the manga, except for one vote for going to the end of the first anime. Of course, time will tell. And as we get further along in the series there may be more sizeable skips between storylines, because it starts getting really repetitive and pointless for a while, right? I do have the very ending planned out at this point, though, so even if I decide to just stop writing this forever, at least the ending will go up.

I was also considering ending this right before the Band of 7 show up, because there's sort of a natural lull in the story there. There's a transition point, I guess, seems like it would work as an ending point. But, who knows? I'll probably keep going.

Sorry if this doesn't make a lot of sense, I'm kind of sick right now.

I'm a little sad about the prospect of ending Gender Bendered, though. Fanfiction.net is the only place in the world where I feel like I'm doing anything of value. I'd hate to finish writing and then have nothing left to put on here. But like I said, I feel weird about writing fanfiction now.

I do wonder some times about variations on this premise - for instance, what if we had Souta, male Inuyasha, Miroku, and Hagane traveling together? Or Kagome, Isha, Kannon, and Sango? Or maybe Kagome, Isha, Miroku, and Sango? All manner of variations on the sexes of the characters, I find interesting. Particularly like a Kagome/male Inuyasha/Akiga or Souta/Isha/Koga deal, with Kikyo or Tsuta thrown into both scenarios. Koga would have no use for Souta beyond finding shikon shards, so that would throw out the jealousy between Koga and female Inuyasha, and vice versa. It's interesting, I think. But would take so much more time and effort to write out, just forget it.

I also have to say that many of my fanfiction ideas are absolutely terrible. I mean, I know if I was reading them, I'd hate them. At this point I'm really more an "idea guy" - I have lots of scenarios and prompts I come up with for series and stories and stuff, but I have no desire to actually write any of them out.

So I suppose, anyway, I'll keep writing this until I don't want to anymore, and then that'll probably be it for my account here.

19. When will [whatever] happen/show up?

We'll get there when we get there. Nobody's showing up earlier than their canon counterpart, and it's all a matter of if I skip stuff or not, or if I'm a roll, or whatever.

BUT I'm more likely to write someone showing up in the series if you ask about them. No guarantees, but I do aim to please.

I mostly write by the seat of my pants, with not much planned in advance, and I don't have a writing schedule, so I can't tell you when or if anything will happen for sure. Except odds are really good that if it's a mostly modern-day set chapter, it'll be featured. I did skip most of the early ones, though, but I like the later ones better, with Kagome's friends pestering her about Inuyasha all the time.