The Comfy Chair

I'm a big canon whore, but I can and do enjoy non-canon oriented stories, too (I love penguins and wacky AUs and other silliness.) I don't think a story needs to stick close to canon to be enjoyable, but, in this case, to accomplish what it appears to have set out to do, I think it does. If it is a twisting of the trope, then I think it needs to be canonical to be most effective at that. Helen's story, as I said before, took the D/s world a proposed that, were it really real, things wouldn't be all that happy in the garden, and it was a wonderful way to rethink the trope. Similarly, with this story, the more real the responses are, the more unreal WNG gets shown to be, by comparison. And I think it's possible that, in the same way that WNG lovers think the bigness of their love is made even bigger by the fact that they're, ohmigosh, not gay, just so in love! don'tcha know, Cath may be proposing that the twisting of this trope may be made even bigger if they began from a place that is only not "we have the big love" but also "we have no special connection"--that that makes the inversion even great, "embiggens" the anti-trope effect, so to speak. *g* And I don't think that's true; I think that, once you take the characters out of the more canonical place of close bond/sexual dorkiness, you take away the 'realness' that shows up a fannish trope for the unreal thing that it is. That John and Rodney are close friends, and that they have issues over being made women and now possessing strange, new bodies (and the embarrasing removal of their penises, oh noes!) dosn't make the trope twisting less effective--it heightens it. It's the real-vs-unreal thing that shows up a trope for what it is, and that's what's being analyzed, in this case. So, yeah, enjoyable story, in any case, but more enjoyable as a story, for me, if it sits closer to canon, and more successful as a refutation of the trope if it does, too.