I am friends with Erin. Quite good friends, I would like to think. So, when I'm talking to a friend of mine and they're a bit miffed because of response to a story they're writing, naturally I want to see what's going on.

For those of you who haven't read it yet, Sam and Del is one of Erin's most recent stories, and is shaping up to be one of her next major series to post here on BCTS. Like a lot of her stories it's quirky, and cute, and is setting out to play with trans fiction genre expectations in an unexpected way, because that's just what Erin does.

There in lies the problem that she is facing as well.

Trans fiction is more than just a term for stories featuring trans characters. In fact, I would argue that the majority of trans fiction isn't about trans characters *at all.* At this point, it is more akin to a form of genre fiction, with all the tropes and expectations tied up therein. These apply not only to expectations authors often have when writing stories, but also to what readers expect when reading them... and not all of them are good.

Sam and Del is a story about a lot of things. It's a story about teen angst, both deserved and undeserved. It's a story about family, and relationships, and perception, with that final word being *very* important. The story is told from Sam's viewpoint, with Sam's biases in mind.

Let's be honest: as readers, we have been trained by a lot of the "trans fiction" out there to expect the worst of side characters. If a guy is interested in a transgirl and they know she's trans, they're a chaser. If someone is the slightest bit pushy with the character, it's forced femme. If there is an organization involved at any level with the transformation or transition, they're up to no good. We expect these things because, more often than not, these are the way these tools are used by authors who write within the genre, and there are many, many more that are used in the same way. Learning to recognize a lot of these traits is, I would argue, necessary for navigating the oceans of trans fic on the internet, since it helps you recognize the early warning signs of a story you may or may not want to continue reading.

Having said that, let's now talk about why you should still give not just Erin, but even other authors the benefit of the doubt.

Erin is a great writer. She's written a bit of everything, from the classy to the sassy, from the slapstick to the serious. She's written stories that fit nearly every subgenre of trans fic, and she's written tons of stories outside of it too.

She isn't the kind of author who looks at her tool box and uses its contents as expected. She's the kid who colored outside the lines on purpose, who drew wings on the cats in her coloring books and gave the dogs purple heart-shaped spots, because it was more fun to do what SHE wanted rather than to do what was expected.

Sam and Del is the same kind of thing.

It's a story being told from a limited perspective, and yes, it's using a lot of classic tools from the TG fic starter set to lay its groundwork, but I think anyone who's familiar with Erin's stories knows just how creative she can get with those when she wants to. When she writes her characters, there's almost always more going on than what a surface-level reading of things will provide, clues here and there to help the reader develop a deeper understanding of events than they might simply taking things at face value. As a reader, it is our job to recognize that, when we are reading a story from such a narrow perspective, we are getting not the story being told so much as the story the character it telling themself, in this case viewing the world around us through a set of Sam-tinted glasses, where the sky may or may not be the same color blue as what everyone else sees.

A lot of comments on the story so far have focused on the surface-level, and on reading into actions subtext based not on what the story actually says, but on what folks have come to expect from years of reading genre fiction that sticks to its tropes like velcro.

That isn't, and never has been Erin's style.

Sam and Del is a cute story about cute characters. It's not a story without its problems, but if you expect those problems to come from Erin coloring inside the lines and doing what's expected... then you need to read more of her work.

Melanie E.