Fanfic clichés meme, and a writing question

[john_amend_all]

Memed (with a certain amount of delay) from justice_turtle:

Pick a trope from this list and provide a fandom/pairing/moresome and I’ll tell you something about the story I’d write for that combination (i.e. write a snippet from the story or write not!fic or tell you the title and summary for the story I would write).

1. genderswap/sexswap
2. bodyswap
3. drunk!fic
4. huddling for warmth
5. pretending to be married
6. secretly a virgin / asexual
7. amnesia
8. cross-dressing
9. forced to share a bed
10. truth or dare
11. historical AU (specify an era or make me pick one)
12. accidental-baby-acquisition
13. apocalypse fic
14. telepathy
15. High School / College AU

While I'm on the subject, a thought is exercising me concerning that variety of bodyswap where the two characters are of opposite biological sexes. I've read one or two, and found myself stumbling over the pronouns. Taking (say) a male character temporarily occupying a woman's body, which pronoun would you as a reader want to see: 'him' or 'her'?

(I suppose I could take a third option and try to write a fic without using pronouns, but that has its own pitfalls).
This entry was originally posted at http://john-amend-all.dreamwidth.org/58815.html. Feel free to comment there or here.

Comments

[justice-turtle.livejournal.com]

I'd vote for using "him" in that case, since... for example, Amy/Rory bodyswap, Rory as a person is still male even though he's temporarily occupying Amy's body, and vice versa.

[daibhid-c.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what I'd say.

After all, we (or at least I) use someone's psychologically preferred pronoun for the "mundane" version of "a man in a woman's body"...

[john_amend_all]

That's the approach I was thinking of taking, for pretty much those reasons.

(The fic I was mainly thinking of made the pronouns follow the sex of the body rather than the gender of the occupier... most of the time, anyway. I was wondering if other readers found that approach easier to read; I didn't.)