There is some apparent confusion over the ending of Castaways, so I figured I would clear it up. Castaways is about a teenage girl and boy stuck on an island after a tragic airplane accident. With no rescue coming, Alex struggles with the scenario of being stuck with a guy that has no interest in her for the rest of her days.

#1. Sexual Frustration: Typically, romance stories involve the guy being sexually frustrated because the girl he's interested in does not reciprocate his affections.This can lead to the guy doing some unnatural and desperate things like (insert TG scenario). Rarely do I find a story about a sexually frustrated girl who is being totally ignored. In existing culture, girls are discouraged from aggressively going after boys. It looks desperate, horny, and uncivilized. So, girls are "supposed" to be passive and wait for the guy to make the first move. Well, what if no guy makes the first move and there is only one guy on the island? Weeks and months go by of sexual frustration and tension until it finally becomes too much.

#2. Hardship of the Island: The island itself can make a person mad, and it has nothing to do with magic. If you watch the movie Castaway, Tom Hank's character starts up a friendship with a volleyball. Similarly, Alex goes a little crazy which leads her to make the first move in a most inappropriate way.

#3. Female Rape: It does happen, although rarely, and I put that scene in the story to show Alex's final descent into madness which allows her to accept the sudden transformation female-to-male as she has just lost all sense of reality.

#4. Male Assistance: I wanted to challenge the notion that a guy would only be interested in helping a girl's survival because he was sexually interested in her. There was a chance this could have happened in the movie Six Days Seven Nights only to ruin it at the end. I felt there was a space needed for a gay guy/straight girl survival story.

#5. Ending: So, the existing trope is that reality changes for the character being changed. This makes it super convenient for the character changed since they don't have to explain to everyone their change or deal with all the paperwork for it. It also avoids the "I'm in love with the female version of my best friend" scenario as the second person in the relationship believes the first has always been a girl since the beginning.

So, instead I changed reality for Alex but also Ryan at the same time. While Alex was undergoing her struggle and change on the island, Renee was having her struggle and change in another unknown story. The two realities intertwine at the end where they're both changed boys. Not all twits and turns explain themselves out well on paper. Apparently, there was some confusion on the end and that's fine. I had considered changing the ending, but I also want to keep this
double reality change scenario alive at the same time.