Gender-bending fictional characters

[dalebert]

[Edge]

They're not exactly fictional, but...

[Amore34]

Yasaburō, in the anime Uchouten Kazoku ( The Eccentric Family)  can transform at will from a tanuki and his usual male self to a young woman.  His mother enjoys presenting as male as well.

[skin]

This is a bit of a stretch for this thread, but Marvel announced yesterday that this fall Thor will be found unworthy of his hammer, Mjolnir, and it will choose a female to be the new God of Thunder.  It is being said that she will not be She-Thor, Lady Thor, or Thorina; she will simply be THOR.

[Padma]

(Though she still has unfeasibly large breastplate stuff going on, because Odin forbid that a Marvel female deity be realistically woman-shaped, sigh...)

[dalebert]

(Though she still has unfeasibly large breastplate stuff going on, because Odin forbid that a Marvel female deity be realistically woman-shaped, sigh...)

It doesn't really make it better, but fwiw, Thor and almost every other male superhero is also completely unrealistically shaped.

[Padma]

That's true, of course, but then they tend to be just daftly bulgy rather than sexualised to the point of defying physics .

[skin]

(Though she still has unfeasibly large breastplate stuff going on, because Odin forbid that a Marvel female deity be realistically woman-shaped, sigh...)

That may be true, but at least it covers her entire torso.  That is major progress from the cleavage-baring armor normally seen in nerdy fiction.

[Ephemeral]

That's true, of course, but then they tend to be just daftly bulgy rather than sexualised to the point of defying physics .

I would argue they are still sexualized in the sense of being hypersexual but their target audience just don't happen to be women but other men who are supposed to appreciate how they represent and depict male power fantasies. One can of course argue the interesting possibly homoerotic subtext of that but perhaps for another thread.

[Padma]

For sure, I'm not saying the men aren't somewhat eroticised too, but the women are put in these mad poses to make their boobs and bums stick out, which would in real life would just make them fall over and require osteopaths. And their individual breasts are often bigger than their waists . Bleh.

[Edge]

but the women are put in these mad poses to make their boobs and bums stick out, which would in real life would just make them fall over and require osteopaths.

I've seen pictures of men like that. There is one of Daredevil that comes to mind. Seriously, people, people do not twist that way.

Speaking of Thor, http://geekxgirls.com/article.php?ID=2752