Warning: Something To Talk About is mostly, if not entirely subjective. Potentially controversial opinions may be found. Thank you for your understanding.
Gender flipping, in my eyes, is a marketing practice to appease the Internet. But let's be honest, that's some lazy crap right there.
Rather than develop a new character, why flop someone else's? From what I've seen, it's laziness and pandering.
Laziness:
Swapping a character's gender simply takes less time than creating a new one. You already have a name, backstory, and rough view of the appearance, that you can draw up a character model and you're pretty much finished. It's requires less time, less creativity, and keeps production fast. However, a large amount of people may find it distasteful. Certain characters being gender-swapped ruins the original feel of the story, especially if it's a nostalgic feel. Imagine if a game you played forever ago gender-swapped the protagonist in a remake, if a movie swapped the main love interest from the book you read, this changes a lot of the original feel of the story you remember.
Pandering:
The world is focusing on equality right now. Thus, businesses think "this story seems more "male-oriented", please the people with a gender-swapped character." They can endear themselves to a larger audience by making the game seem more "equal."
However, in my opinion there are some good gender swaps. This is because they reformed the story around the character, not reformed the character around the story. This added an effective twist that required some effort, and actually rocked.
In television:
Erica Goldberg was an impressive way of Adam switching his brother Eric over to Erica in The Goldbergs. It added some more wacky scenarios to the story that I typically would not have expected. Since it was more or less based on a true story, it definitely changed some things around.
In video games:
FeMC in Persona 3 Portable added an entirely different storyline based around a female protagonist rather than a male one. Sadly, this has never been introduced in another mainstream Persona game, making it a kind of wasted feature. With ATLUS adding the female protagonist, the story changed so much it actually is set in another universe.
So, basically, most of the time they suck, but if done right, it changes a lot around.
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