Because I never do this nonsense by halves, in response to Dave’s comment, here’s some notes!
Goals:
- The point of the Pidgeverse is to see how gender roles affect our favorite characters’ story arcs. Leah Snow is inspired by different mecha anime than Leo Snow, so her life as a hero looks different.
- The Pidgeverse is not the place where female empowerment or representation must live - those things should be present in the Prime universe already. Leah Snow’s hero career is different than Leo’s, but she’s no less a hero.
- Did we make good characters? Flip their gender, watch their story play out, and see if you had as much fun watching it.
- We do not excuse sexism. If it happens to a character, tell us how the character dealt with it or overcame it, not how bad the character is for being a girl now. We can also celebrate women without bashing or excluding men.
- Gender differences should be in details, never basic competence. Amelia wants to dress cute and Adam doesn’t, but they’re both powerful, brave, and compassionate main characters.
What’s different from Menagerie Prime?
- Most Modern Generation supers in the “Menagerie Prime” universe are gender-flipped in the Pidgeverse
- Exceptions include actual aliens (e.g. “Bob”), agender or NB characters (e.g. Agent 1337), or other characters where a gender flip wouldn’t be appropriate
- Silver and Bronze Generation characters are flipped when they are the dominant force in a character’s life, e.g. Jason and Leo’s fathers become Medea and Leah’s mothers
- The reason for the flip might have an in-universe explanation (e.g. a quirk of super-genetics, manipulation by a time or dimension traveler) or simply be a feature of a multiverse
- Identity, sexuality, and other defining traits stay intact wherever possible - if flipping the character would hurt their self or core story, don’t do it
- Social dynamics and backstory can be changed where appropriate and interesting, e.g. Leah Snow built twin motorcycle robots named Ai and Yu, there’s no single Otto equivalent
- Non-super characters in relationships are flipped to preserve the relationship for story reasons, e.g. a female TK has a girlfriend based on Evan, Sunny is dating a girl named Calla Jones
- Some other mundane/civilian characters can be flipped if interesting, or kept the same (e.g. we don’t know whether Nono is male)
Some links:
- Original idea
- Character equivalents (Google sheet, allows comments) - go scribble all over this if you want to make changes to the lineup
