Could the casting have been switched?

[jkwilliams]

Instead of switching their genders, what about making Abby into a tomboy version of Eli?

Have her be a short-haired girl who's mistaken for a boy by everyone because of the way she dresses. That would create some interesting situations in the story whether or not you decided to keep Owen's character a boy.

[sauvin]

Instead of switching their genders, what about making Abby into a tomboy version of Eli?

Have her be a short-haired girl who's mistaken for a boy by everyone because of the way she dresses. That would create some interesting situations in the story whether or not you decided to keep Owen's character a boy.

The bulk of my thinking (and yes, the thinking does continue even if the posting is stalled at the moment) is in the possibilities suggested by the profound implications of gender role reversal. If a convincing case could be made that switching the two kids' genders would mandate some fundamental change in the story flow, it would mitigate against the frequent claim that both LTROI and LMI are essentially sexless. If no fundamental change in story flow is mandated by a successful re-assignment, it could be seen as upholding the "purity" of the love beween Eli and Oskar in the movie.

[lombano]

Instead of switching their genders, what about making Abby into a tomboy version of Eli?

Have her be a short-haired girl who's mistaken for a boy by everyone because of the way she dresses. That would create some interesting situations in the story whether or not you decided to keep Owen's character a boy.

Sort of like Saga in My Life as a Dog - a tomboy with short hair who can and does pass for a boy on occasions, though in her case passing for a boy served a practical purpose (so that the visiting team wouldn't object to her playing with the boys).

If no fundamental change in story flow is mandated by a successful re-assignment, it could be seen as upholding the "purity" of the love beween Eli and Oskar in the movie.

Not necessarily, the dynamics could change without that being the result of any specifically sexual issues.

[sauvin]

If no fundamental change in story flow is mandated by a successful re-assignment, it could be seen as upholding the "purity" of the love beween Eli and Oskar in the movie.

Not necessarily, the dynamics could change without that being the result of any specifically sexual issues.

"It could be seen as" doesn't necessarily mean "it is". I don't think anything can be proven one way or another, and different people are liable to assess sets of probabilities differently according to their individual life experiences and outlooks.

One quibble, though. Gender-related issues aren't necessarily directly sexual. As an example, girls wore only dresses in many parts of the world for centuries or millennia, whereas men tended to wear what I'd generically describe as pants for some considerable time - when men commonly started wearing them, was it because their manufacture on large scales had become commercially viable? This is an example of what I'm calling a gender-related issue that doesn't necessarily have a directly sexual component, consistent with a conjecture I have that dresses had practical utility that I'm guessing included modesty and related to easing the performance of "body functions".

I view traditional gender-assigned roles as being primarily metasexual. Male aggressiveness and suchlike, I believe, serve primarily to help a man acquire bigger farms or houses, "better" wives, more children, bigger bank accounts, and so on. The sex that comes with it in such a view is just a vehicle, and not an overall goal.

A second weaselly equivocation in this discussion is my claiming that what we're talking about here is a story. We talk about Eli and Abby as if they were real, but they're not. "Eli would do this, and Abby wouldn't do that", but when we say such things, often enough, what we're really talking about is "I would do this, and I knew a kid once who wouldn't do that". The kids have their own reality to interact with independent of ours, but it's valid to think in terms of "what if...", and it's valid to change some of the essential assumptions in the story or the characters to derive new works of fiction and examine what results in terms of plausibility internally - and in terms of what these changes mean to us, or say about us.

I think it's rather telling that a great deal of the discussion and fiction surrounding the "almost utterly sexless" LTROI is still sexually charged.

[Nicktalope]

If the roles of the casting have been switched, we don`t have let me in, we have a bad copy of twilight!!