Oh, I love this! What an awesome twist on the original -- I love how you take that one parallel, the protective older sibling, and use it as a starting point for this switch. There are a lot of gender-fuck fics in SPN and a lot of them do a great job with it, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a transgender story - it's usually one of the guys gets swapped by a spell or something. To have it be deliberate and to show Sam trying to cope with it is new (to me) and awesome.
I love this: A weird, detached part of his brain notes that he has no trouble thinking of Dean as him, even when he's up close and personal with his breasts and this: He never saw the in-between. He just went away to college and then four years later, instead of a diploma, he had a brother and the way they underscore the problem that's stated shortly thereafter. It's not that he can't handle "Nadine" becoming "Dean", it's that he can't replace Nadine with Dean in his memories, and that's the struggle for him, or the struggle between them.
And I love that Dean doesn't answer, there at the end. That we don't get the easy wrap-up. This is just really terrific.
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Date: 2008-04-21 04:24 am (UTC)I love this: A weird, detached part of his brain notes that he has no trouble thinking of Dean as him, even when he's up close and personal with his breasts and this: He never saw the in-between. He just went away to college and then four years later, instead of a diploma, he had a brother and the way they underscore the problem that's stated shortly thereafter. It's not that he can't handle "Nadine" becoming "Dean", it's that he can't replace Nadine with Dean in his memories, and that's the struggle for him, or the struggle between them.
And I love that Dean doesn't answer, there at the end. That we don't get the easy wrap-up. This is just really terrific.