Really sad this series isn't getting more parts, it has way too much more potential content, also I thought you'd use this pic ;-; https://www.instagram.com/p/BTMDipcFXEU/
Between Preston and Troy, it seems like this is a series where sexual orientation is determined by the body, not the mind. I feel like that's the more common way things happen in the bodyswap/TG community. Which way - orientation-is-mental, or orientation-is-physical - do you generally prefer, and why?
This is a complex topic that I don't think anyone has a real answer to, is sexuality determined by your body or your environment? And body swapping and transformation just throws a wrench in to the issue.
Personally, I prefer when a body affects the mind to change their sexual preferences over time. I think that makes more sense, so much of our personality is determined by our physical bodies that if one's consciousness was transferred to a new meatbag it would have a large effect on how they view life.
In addition, I am a heterosexual male who fantasizes about being a heterosexual female; so I tend to write stories in that context. I think the story is more fun when a new body affects one's personality - it doesn't always have to set their sexuality to the same as what their new body used to be, but it's more interesting when it does have some effect.
When it comes to how things work in real life, I think it's informative to look at the sexualities of transgender people before and after they transition, since that's the closest thing we have to real-life gender swaps. A significant minority of trans people report some shift in sexual orientation, and among them, it's usually becoming bisexual rather than doing a complete 180. These shifts might be a result of the trans people's hormone replacement therapy, and/or of the changes to their bodies making them comfortable with sexual desires that they weren't before (to quote one trans woman from 1998, "I couldn’t be attracted to a guy when I was a guy because that would make me gay"). While far from conclusive, this seems to me like a pretty sensible approximation of what cross-gender body swaps would do: a majority of people keep their sexuality, some discover new sexual tastes that they didn't feel free to acknowledge before, and maybe some people experience shifts from their new body's hormones affecting their brain.
Personally, I'm not into most mental TF; it comes off as more unnerving than sexy to me. The kind of stories that I enjoy most are the ones where a body's new occupant keeps their original personality, and that causes them to use their new body differently from the original occupant. I also like it when a character's new body causes them to discover something new about themself, like (similar to the trans woman quoted above) a guy in a girl's body realizing that he's into guys, but he didn't know it before because of latent homophobia or something. It's boring if a character uses their new body to keep living their old life as if nothing's changed at all, of course, but it's also boring if the character acts exactly like their body's old occupant. That's part of why I like the Body Jury series: every character's life choices after the switch are determined, at least to some extent, by both their new body and their existing personality.
I don't think post-transition men and women are the best example to base body swap stories off of. If sexuality is congenital, which most research seems to suggest - then it would make more sense for sexuality to at least be influenced to large extent by a completely new body. Whatever body the character is swapped into is a body that was attracted to men or women largely independent of their environment so it follows that the new operator of the body would follow suit on that aspect. Here's a study on the topic of environment vs genetic sexuality: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100616637616
On mental TF, I completely agree! I hate it when a character acts just like their original body did. That completely removes the whole point of the swap/transformation in the first place! However, the opposite is just as uninteresting, that where the new owner of the body is unaffected by their new body. So I think the middle road is best, where the original personality is overlaid on a new body. A body that changes the personality without erasing it. And only changes it in a biological fashion - how they are viewed by society, their differing organs, size, differing hormones, and I think sexuality is mostly tied to the body as well which is why I tend to include it.
I appreciate your analytical approach to this fetish! :)
"If sexuality is congenital, which most research seems to suggest - then it would make more sense for sexuality to at least be influenced to large extent by a completely new body. Whatever body the character is swapped into is a body that was attracted to men or women largely independent of their environment so it follows that the new operator of the body would follow suit on that aspect."
This gets into the issue of what it means for two people to "swap bodies" in the first place. When Troy is swapped into his new body (let's call her Chloe for simplicity), what exactly is changed about the physical structure of Chloe's body (including her brain) such that the mind in it becomes Troy rather than Chloe? Do the synaptic connections in Chloe's brain get re-wired to resemble those in Troy's brain? Do the DNA, or the epigenetic expression, of Chloe's individual neurons get altered to make them act more like Troy's neurons? Is Troy's brain straight-up physically transplanted into Chloe's body, with the immune rejection and brain-to-body interface problems solved somehow? If we wanted to make the behavior of "Ash" as much like Troy as possible, we could even alter Chloe's neurons so they respond to Chloe's natural hormone levels the way Troy's neurons respond to *his* natural hormone levels. (Male sex drive in a female body, anyone?)
What happens to a personality trait of Troy's, such as his sexuality, when he becomes Ash depends on whether he retains the properties of his brain+body that produce that trait (not to be confused with the processes that originally caused it to exist; even if sexuality is genetic, for instance, it might be the case that what the relevant genes *do* is cause synapses to arrange themselves in a specific way early in brain development, and if Troy's synaptic structure is recreated in a(n adult) brain with Chloe's DNA, that DNA is too late to make Troy attracted to men instead of women). Depending on what combination of things are changed about Chloe's brain+body, Ash might even start out with a near-identical personality to Troy's, but develop mentally in a Chloe-like way in the long term. Some outcomes for Ash's mind are more likely than others, but for any outcome that you, the author, want, there's probably *something* you could do to Chloe's brain+body to make it happen. And of course, for body swap stories that take place in settings where souls exist, all bets are off.
"I appreciate your analytical approach to this fetish! :)"
Yep, it's a complex topic with no real answer to. I tend to imagine most swaps as more of a total transfer of memories without an interrupt in the flow of consciousness so as to avoid the whole problem of death by teleportation. The brain structure, other than the memories, remains intact as much as possible. I don't know and afaik no one really knows how memory is stored in the brain so I don't know if something like that is even possible but that's the way I choose to interpret reality for my fantasies.
"Ash might even start out with a near-identical personality to Troy's, but develop mentally in a Chloe-like way in the long term"
Yeah, I can see how thinking of body swapping as memory swapping is sensible given your desires. If I wanted to press you, though, I'd question how much of a person's identity consists in their collection of memories (episodic and otherwise). Is Ash really Troy in Chloe's body, or is she Chloe, artificially deluded into thinking she's Troy? Did the real Troy die long ago, while under a delusion that he was a criminal who had stolen his own body? Or is Ash neither Troy nor Chloe, but a novel arrangement of some mental parts from each of them? Should we be mourning the death of half of Troy, and of only half of Chloe?
My own bodyswap/TF fantasies are more about having a (potentially permanent) new life experience than they are about becoming a new person, so I tend to fantasize that almost everything mental, not just memories, comes along for the cross-body ride. I usually do imagine, though, that the swapped minds are affected by the potentially-different hormone profiles of their new bodies. I mean, people go through plenty of personality-affecting hormonal fluctuations over the course of our real lives, and in at least that regard, hormones are more of an experience than they are a component of personality.
I don't think our preferences are very different, we just have a different interpretation of the physical aspects of the event. The biggest difference seems to be the interpretation of the effect of hormones/the body on sexuality. I don't like someone's personality being overwritten by their new body, just being affected by their new experiences. As can be seen how Ash's new personality is very similar to her old one - maintaining her maturity and many of her interests.
On the identity death issue, I intend for the person's "soul" to be exchanged, whatever that may be. Not just their memories. I don't have a good way to address the issue but here's a good article on the topic if you're interested: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html
This is a detail that I gloss over, assuming that the actual consciousness is being transferred to the new body.
I'm a philosophy minor, and the sort of issues addressed in that article have also been addressed in a couple of my courses. The view I've formed on the subject is that just about everything we care about when we talk about personal identity is jointly captured by the four concepts of [psychological/bodily] [similarity/continuity], and it's not worth positing a "soul" to fill whatever gaps in our intuitions might remain, considering there's no empirical evidence for such a thing existing independently of the physical body and its structural-functional properties. Upon reflection, I don't even know what I could mean by "my consciousness" beyond "a consciousness that has my long-term memories, short-term memories, and other psychological traits (psychological similarity) because my immediate past self had those same traits (psychological continuity)". Any other attempted explication of mine ends up circular.
Now that I think about it, our preferences are pretty similar compared to some of the others that I've seen in the community, and your view and mine don't come apart much in the sort of stories that we both like. However, when it comes to stories of the genre "I've stolen your body, and your long-term memories, and your knowledge and skills, and..." I imagine you'd say that such situations make sense if the thief and the victim's consciousnesses really were switched. Meanwhile, I usually ask, "Are you sure that you two didn't just switch short-term memories?"
Thanks! I may do another similar idea in the future. Two main ideas for interactives like this are:
A few humans get transported to another dimension, one where classical fantasy races exist. The audience would vote on which empty bodies the humans are placed into - the bodies the fantasy people left behind when they entered the human realm.
The second is a game show where contestants enter and the audience chooses how they redistribute the bodies. Maybe a lottery is used so more attractive people enter. Got to find good motive for the entrants, may end up just using a dystopian government running it.
Ooh, I really like the races idea! Would love to see that.
And your second idea reminds me of the Body Lottery caps by Twisted TG Files. Basically, hundreds/thousands of models are paid thousands of dollars to have their bodies entered as an option for any of the Body Lottery winners.
But since there are so many models, and only a few winners, it is a low-risk, high-reward gamble for all of the models. Until their bodies get chosen ;)
I really liked how you developed this story line. I like the bit of jealousy, the obvious affection, and how Troy is being encouraged to accept his now life by dating.
Really sad this series isn't getting more parts, it has way too much more potential content, also I thought you'd use this pic ;-;
ReplyDeletehttps://www.instagram.com/p/BTMDipcFXEU/
It had to end somewhere, I didn't wish to drag it out much longer.
DeleteThat's a great pic! If it was higher resolution (and I was aware of it) I would have used it for sure.
Between Preston and Troy, it seems like this is a series where sexual orientation is determined by the body, not the mind. I feel like that's the more common way things happen in the bodyswap/TG community. Which way - orientation-is-mental, or orientation-is-physical - do you generally prefer, and why?
ReplyDeleteThis is a complex topic that I don't think anyone has a real answer to, is sexuality determined by your body or your environment? And body swapping and transformation just throws a wrench in to the issue.
DeletePersonally, I prefer when a body affects the mind to change their sexual preferences over time. I think that makes more sense, so much of our personality is determined by our physical bodies that if one's consciousness was transferred to a new meatbag it would have a large effect on how they view life.
In addition, I am a heterosexual male who fantasizes about being a heterosexual female; so I tend to write stories in that context. I think the story is more fun when a new body affects one's personality - it doesn't always have to set their sexuality to the same as what their new body used to be, but it's more interesting when it does have some effect.
What do you think about the issue?
When it comes to how things work in real life, I think it's informative to look at the sexualities of transgender people before and after they transition, since that's the closest thing we have to real-life gender swaps. A significant minority of trans people report some shift in sexual orientation, and among them, it's usually becoming bisexual rather than doing a complete 180. These shifts might be a result of the trans people's hormone replacement therapy, and/or of the changes to their bodies making them comfortable with sexual desires that they weren't before (to quote one trans woman from 1998, "I couldn’t be attracted to a guy when I was a guy because that would make me gay"). While far from conclusive, this seems to me like a pretty sensible approximation of what cross-gender body swaps would do: a majority of people keep their sexuality, some discover new sexual tastes that they didn't feel free to acknowledge before, and maybe some people experience shifts from their new body's hormones affecting their brain.
Delete(Source: https://www.them.us/story/sexual-attraction-after-transition)
Personally, I'm not into most mental TF; it comes off as more unnerving than sexy to me. The kind of stories that I enjoy most are the ones where a body's new occupant keeps their original personality, and that causes them to use their new body differently from the original occupant. I also like it when a character's new body causes them to discover something new about themself, like (similar to the trans woman quoted above) a guy in a girl's body realizing that he's into guys, but he didn't know it before because of latent homophobia or something. It's boring if a character uses their new body to keep living their old life as if nothing's changed at all, of course, but it's also boring if the character acts exactly like their body's old occupant. That's part of why I like the Body Jury series: every character's life choices after the switch are determined, at least to some extent, by both their new body and their existing personality.
I don't think post-transition men and women are the best example to base body swap stories off of. If sexuality is congenital, which most research seems to suggest - then it would make more sense for sexuality to at least be influenced to large extent by a completely new body. Whatever body the character is swapped into is a body that was attracted to men or women largely independent of their environment so it follows that the new operator of the body would follow suit on that aspect. Here's a study on the topic of environment vs genetic sexuality: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100616637616
DeleteOn mental TF, I completely agree! I hate it when a character acts just like their original body did. That completely removes the whole point of the swap/transformation in the first place! However, the opposite is just as uninteresting, that where the new owner of the body is unaffected by their new body. So I think the middle road is best, where the original personality is overlaid on a new body. A body that changes the personality without erasing it. And only changes it in a biological fashion - how they are viewed by society, their differing organs, size, differing hormones, and I think sexuality is mostly tied to the body as well which is why I tend to include it.
I appreciate your analytical approach to this fetish! :)
"If sexuality is congenital, which most research seems to suggest - then it would make more sense for sexuality to at least be influenced to large extent by a completely new body. Whatever body the character is swapped into is a body that was attracted to men or women largely independent of their environment so it follows that the new operator of the body would follow suit on that aspect."
ReplyDeleteThis gets into the issue of what it means for two people to "swap bodies" in the first place. When Troy is swapped into his new body (let's call her Chloe for simplicity), what exactly is changed about the physical structure of Chloe's body (including her brain) such that the mind in it becomes Troy rather than Chloe? Do the synaptic connections in Chloe's brain get re-wired to resemble those in Troy's brain? Do the DNA, or the epigenetic expression, of Chloe's individual neurons get altered to make them act more like Troy's neurons? Is Troy's brain straight-up physically transplanted into Chloe's body, with the immune rejection and brain-to-body interface problems solved somehow? If we wanted to make the behavior of "Ash" as much like Troy as possible, we could even alter Chloe's neurons so they respond to Chloe's natural hormone levels the way Troy's neurons respond to *his* natural hormone levels. (Male sex drive in a female body, anyone?)
What happens to a personality trait of Troy's, such as his sexuality, when he becomes Ash depends on whether he retains the properties of his brain+body that produce that trait (not to be confused with the processes that originally caused it to exist; even if sexuality is genetic, for instance, it might be the case that what the relevant genes *do* is cause synapses to arrange themselves in a specific way early in brain development, and if Troy's synaptic structure is recreated in a(n adult) brain with Chloe's DNA, that DNA is too late to make Troy attracted to men instead of women). Depending on what combination of things are changed about Chloe's brain+body, Ash might even start out with a near-identical personality to Troy's, but develop mentally in a Chloe-like way in the long term. Some outcomes for Ash's mind are more likely than others, but for any outcome that you, the author, want, there's probably *something* you could do to Chloe's brain+body to make it happen. And of course, for body swap stories that take place in settings where souls exist, all bets are off.
"I appreciate your analytical approach to this fetish! :)"
Thank you! I appreciate yours too!
Yep, it's a complex topic with no real answer to. I tend to imagine most swaps as more of a total transfer of memories without an interrupt in the flow of consciousness so as to avoid the whole problem of death by teleportation. The brain structure, other than the memories, remains intact as much as possible. I don't know and afaik no one really knows how memory is stored in the brain so I don't know if something like that is even possible but that's the way I choose to interpret reality for my fantasies.
Delete"Ash might even start out with a near-identical personality to Troy's, but develop mentally in a Chloe-like way in the long term"
That's what I'm going for! :)
Yeah, I can see how thinking of body swapping as memory swapping is sensible given your desires. If I wanted to press you, though, I'd question how much of a person's identity consists in their collection of memories (episodic and otherwise). Is Ash really Troy in Chloe's body, or is she Chloe, artificially deluded into thinking she's Troy? Did the real Troy die long ago, while under a delusion that he was a criminal who had stolen his own body? Or is Ash neither Troy nor Chloe, but a novel arrangement of some mental parts from each of them? Should we be mourning the death of half of Troy, and of only half of Chloe?
DeleteMy own bodyswap/TF fantasies are more about having a (potentially permanent) new life experience than they are about becoming a new person, so I tend to fantasize that almost everything mental, not just memories, comes along for the cross-body ride. I usually do imagine, though, that the swapped minds are affected by the potentially-different hormone profiles of their new bodies. I mean, people go through plenty of personality-affecting hormonal fluctuations over the course of our real lives, and in at least that regard, hormones are more of an experience than they are a component of personality.
I don't think our preferences are very different, we just have a different interpretation of the physical aspects of the event. The biggest difference seems to be the interpretation of the effect of hormones/the body on sexuality. I don't like someone's personality being overwritten by their new body, just being affected by their new experiences. As can be seen how Ash's new personality is very similar to her old one - maintaining her maturity and many of her interests.
DeleteOn the identity death issue, I intend for the person's "soul" to be exchanged, whatever that may be. Not just their memories. I don't have a good way to address the issue but here's a good article on the topic if you're interested: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html
This is a detail that I gloss over, assuming that the actual consciousness is being transferred to the new body.
I'm a philosophy minor, and the sort of issues addressed in that article have also been addressed in a couple of my courses. The view I've formed on the subject is that just about everything we care about when we talk about personal identity is jointly captured by the four concepts of [psychological/bodily] [similarity/continuity], and it's not worth positing a "soul" to fill whatever gaps in our intuitions might remain, considering there's no empirical evidence for such a thing existing independently of the physical body and its structural-functional properties. Upon reflection, I don't even know what I could mean by "my consciousness" beyond "a consciousness that has my long-term memories, short-term memories, and other psychological traits (psychological similarity) because my immediate past self had those same traits (psychological continuity)". Any other attempted explication of mine ends up circular.
DeleteNow that I think about it, our preferences are pretty similar compared to some of the others that I've seen in the community, and your view and mine don't come apart much in the sort of stories that we both like. However, when it comes to stories of the genre "I've stolen your body, and your long-term memories, and your knowledge and skills, and..." I imagine you'd say that such situations make sense if the thief and the victim's consciousnesses really were switched. Meanwhile, I usually ask, "Are you sure that you two didn't just switch short-term memories?"
That's why I put "soul" in quotes. Whatever matter makes up the common definition of soul - what makes us, us. Is what I envision being swapped.
DeleteThis was a great series! I loved the interactive element, and how in-depth you went with all of the different characters and bodies. Well done :)
ReplyDeleteThanks! I may do another similar idea in the future. Two main ideas for interactives like this are:
DeleteA few humans get transported to another dimension, one where classical fantasy races exist. The audience would vote on which empty bodies the humans are placed into - the bodies the fantasy people left behind when they entered the human realm.
The second is a game show where contestants enter and the audience chooses how they redistribute the bodies. Maybe a lottery is used so more attractive people enter. Got to find good motive for the entrants, may end up just using a dystopian government running it.
Ooh, I really like the races idea! Would love to see that.
DeleteAnd your second idea reminds me of the Body Lottery caps by Twisted TG Files. Basically, hundreds/thousands of models are paid thousands of dollars to have their bodies entered as an option for any of the Body Lottery winners.
But since there are so many models, and only a few winners, it is a low-risk, high-reward gamble for all of the models. Until their bodies get chosen ;)
I really liked how you developed this story line. I like the bit of jealousy, the obvious affection, and how Troy is being encouraged to accept his now life by dating.
ReplyDelete