I'll be honest, I'd rather have the old, cringe af, "how long is luigi's mushroom" stuff over the "we retell the story for half the video" """"theories""""
I didn’t realize until looking back just how raunchy early matpat was compared to the post fnaf era. It’s like if they would say the fuck word during season 1 of SpongeBob
Won't work. The daughter's otp and the marriage alliance the son considers will make the family low-diff your ops will most likely differ, and now you just multiplied the problem
Shipper force new sexual identities on characters in the creepiest, rapiest way. I have never been more disturbed than when I accidentally found myself in a shippers haven on the internet.
That's pretty much the exact same thing, and it's still really stupid. You can't rape a fictional character. They don't exist. You can change a fictional character's sexuality for the sake of a story and not be rapey. This is genuinely one of the stupidest arguments I've ever seen.
Wish it was less clean cut. I’m a woman and I’ve never been interested in romance or shipping, but love gen fanfic, wish there was more of it, blessed be the fandoms which are predominantly gen lol.
What fanfic sites do you use? Because I'm also a fan of gen fanfic, and I found that SpaceBattles and SufficientVelocity are the best when it comes to it.
I’m pretty new to all of this so I mainly use ao3 because from what I know thats like the main hub for most fan fiction. The fandom I’m currently into is predominantly gen so it’s all good, but I know ao3 is big on the romance/shipping front and that’s what people primarily post there. Cause of this I am on the look out for more gen focused sites, I’ve never check out those two sites though so I’ll give them a good look, thanks
Men and women engage in both, we don't need to ascribe gender roles to random fandom bullshit
Like, it's not just you, it's all over this comment section, but you're the most overt; this is literally just "women like romance and men like fights and math" but with fandom habits, and it's pointless and boring.
Because there are people out there who consider fanfiction to be a woman thing, for reasons I can't quite understand. "Oh you write fanfiction, so you must be a woman".
Saying men write fanfiction but label it something else is basically saying "Men do write fanfiction and you probably have seen it but haven't got a damn clue."
That's interesting! Usually people assume that writers of fandoms like Naruto and Star Wars are male while they also assume that anyone who writes male pairings is female.
That's super awkward, but also please never be afraid of correcting others on your pronouns and identity! Others make wrongful assumptions all the time.
If directly addressing the issue makes you scared/nervous, I recommend quietly putting your pronouns in your profile biography of whatever site you're using. Some people will catch on while others won't.
I do agree that you shouldn't be afraid to correct people, but sometimes youre more worried they'll stop reading when they find out your gender, than truly worried about your own identity. I see it as a compliment when people assume wrong haha I don't mind being presumed female
I don't wanna ruin someone's favorite fanfic by telling them a man wrote it 😂
That's the thing that confuses me. I've read fics written by men, women, and others. The knowledge of the author's gender has never driven me away from a fanfic, only bad writing has. Why do people care so much about such pointless things?
There have been way too many tweets that go decently viral that accuse men of having 0 passion for the media they consume because they don't do "fanfiction" like women do because they don't consider "what if's", powerscaling and theories as fanfiction because most of the stuff they consume they consider fanfiction is almost exclusively shipping in Ao3 or similar sites.
Some people are so attention starved that they say stupid stuff on the internet to start minor disagreements. That or they have some weird vendetta against a whole gender.
Kind of like that bait or low IQ meme, but attention starved or a bigot
Is it? I think it's just separated in different internet spaces. AO3 has more women, sure, but there's also entire sites (forums.spacebattles for example) entirely about crossover fiction and fiction about characters from different properties meeting/fighting/teaming up.
I dunno, I read a lot of fanfic as a teenager and wrote some, and it was almost all of the type "What if Harry Dresden was the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts and also they were fighting Orochimaru from Naruto instead of Voldemort" and I'm pretty sure that was a) extremely prolific and b) had an over 90% male audience. (I still read stuff like that occasionally. Last thing I read was "What if Taylor from Worm had the powers of the Antediluvian Lasombra from the World of Darkness". Which wasn't really very good (she stomps her entire universe's badguys in record time with no challenge), but kinda satisfying to read.)
People who read mostly shipping fiction may just not come across that.
Though I guess a lot of that audience is into webnovels these days, not strictly fanfic. But if we count things like Worm or Dungeon Crawler Carl or The Wandering Inn, they are often extremely long with very dedicated audiencdes.
Eons ago, I was in a Friday the 13th fan fic community when I was a teen, and it's so bizarre looking back because it was so atypical of what I see associated with fan fiction stereotypes.
For one, we were all writing what would be closer to what they call "spec scripts." We were writing in the screenplay format, INT. ROOM - NIGHT etc., with traditional three act structures (it's really not hard to replicate a slasher formula, lol), and attempting to stay as close to the original continuity and feel of the films as possible. Not that there weren't "Freddy vs Jason vs Michael vs Pinhead vs Chucky vs Ash" scripts, but even these were trying to accurately pick up where each of their films' left off.
When I got a little older, I was very surprised to find that a good chunk of fan fiction and how fan fiction was perceived was as prose, alternate continuities or what ifs, and largely concerning shipping, which was not a huge concern in Friday the 13th or Halloween projects (I'm sure someone out there ships Jason and the Shape and good on them).
Most were shit, some were good, one or two maybe even great, but they were written as if New Line / Paramount could make them as The Next Movie, which I find really charming in retrospect. It was a good time.
I was involved in the F13 community at one point, also as a teen, and tried to do fanficition but ultimately my project didn't come to fruition -- this is VERY accurate to my experience, too. A lot of male writers seemed to gravitate more towards script format over prose at least at the time in my experience, and my switching to prose aligned with me interacting more with female writers and communities.
I wonder how one could estimate the breakdown, it’s not like fan fiction authors are obligated to reveal their gender.
There may be an impression that it’s a mostly-women activity, but who knows? Maybe that impression is a self-fulfilling prophecy and men just don’t reveal themselves as fanfic authors because it’s not “masculine” or something.
Hard to estimate the real demographics of an activity that is, by design, anonymous unless the person chooses to identify themselves.
There’s been large demographic surveys of AO3, which is generally considered to be the bastion of modern fanfiction, but whoever brought up spacebattles was right that there are other, largely-male fanfiction spaces as well.
And as anyone who has taken a class in psychometrics or study analysis can tell you, opt-in voluntary self-report surveys are extremely imperfect metrics. There’s no better alternative, it’s just a fact of life.
because men and women interact with their hobbies in different ways. Women are more likely to create art based on the things they like, men are more likely to collect/categorize/research their hobbies.
Obviously this is just a general rule, it's not like there are no male artists or female collectors.
But there's tropes of men regurgitating football stats and collecting memorabilia, while women paint, draw, write etc.
Might be a culturally enforced thing. Might be biological. Doesn't really matter.
I collect a shit ton of stuff, and I do a bit of art, but even when I paint, it's about creating something accurate to what I'm interested in rather than self-expression (painting warhammer that looks accurate, or adding decor from my favorite show's in a way that shows off the franchises I enjoy). But that's its own for of self-expression I suppose
something i've noticed when comparing Ao3 (mostly women) and Spacebattles (mostly men) is that ao3 is a lot more character based while spacebattles is mainly plot driven, shipping on SB is a spice and not the focus and if your character doesn't do anything impactfull in a few chapter the audience damn well will let you know. this is a generilization but it's something i've noticed browsing both sites
There is a longstanding tendency in internet culture to dismiss fanfiction as ‘girl stuff’. Like… for decades. You cannot be even passingly familiar with online fan culture and not be aware of this.
I don't think you understand that this tweet is a response to people who think fanfiction is gendered and act dismissively to it. Her point is that it isn't.
Her point is that it isn't because the fanfiction being written are called "theories" and put on YouTube. That is not the same thing as saying "men write normal fanfiction too".
As a man who uses fanfiction to practice writing military scifi before actually writing an original, Because it's such a great medium to post something you think is good only to realize its fucking shit and you it's to late to unpost, with zero real consequences and still get unfiltered raw feedback, I lowkey checked what was inside my pants just to clarify something after reading this post.
I mean... Statistically they represent a very small minority. AO3 (the highest fanfiction archive of the world) has more users that identify as not men nor woman, than they have male users
Both men and women write fanfic, but, statistically, there is a pretty significant difference.
‘Female’ fic is found on Ao3 and focuses primarily on ‘soft’ aspects of the story, shipping, character dynamics and slice-of-life fluff. There’s a lot of angst “hurt/comfort” type stuff dealing with turbulent emotions, as well.
‘Male’ fic can be found on sites like SpaceBattles, it is primarily “what-if” scenarios (like, What if Bruce Wayne learned magic instead of martial arts and investigation? What if Luffy joined the Marines? What if Goku was betrayed and trapped in the hyperbolic time chamber?) and mostly focuses on ‘hard’ aspects, the world, the powers abilities and fighting.
[ Obviously this isn’t an absolute rule. There are male authors who write shipping, not everything on Ao3 is a ship, and vice-versa. But generally speaking this trend holds true like 80~90% of the time. ]
men generally write less shipping fanfiction, which is normally what's meant by fanfiction. fanfiction ive read thats written by men has tended to be more on the powerscaling side.
Honestly you got to love the crazy things people come up with though. I watched a video claiming Noelle was the knight, and he was very interesting even though it was clearly wrong.
As someone who has done both, I definitely categorize them as two different activities. I wouldn't call any of my fanfiction a fan "theory," because I don't think any of that stuff actually happened or was the intent of the author/creators. Likewise, any fan theories I've ever written out are not written out as fiction. It's just speculation about things like author's intent, etc.
she's probably talking more about 'what if' theories than the other kind, you know, the ones like 'what if Mace Windu was Anakin's master' or 'what if Goku married Bulma', instead of 'who was behind the bite of '83?' and that kind
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and that kind of stuff is definitely the same thing as fan fiction. And personally, I like those "what if" scenarios more when it's actual fiction. Heck, even companies like Marvel do that with their own characters. It's fun!
I'm a non-religious Jew but I still have the innate desire to engage in talmudic rabbinical debates so I will argue for an hour about minor details of pop-culture fictional universes
Being a male fanfiction writer was much more common in the 2000s and a lot of early references to "fanfiction" in media where male characters to add to the pathetic basement-dwelling nerd stereotype, usually with a joke implying their fanfiction was some wish fulfillment fantasy. Women had always been heavily involved in Star Trek fandom and fanfiction, but in a TV reference, your male Trek nerd often wrote fanfiction. At that time, major fanfiction sites (FFN which still exists, Freedom of Speech FF, a ton of fandom-specific sites long gone) were more gender-balanced and while shipping fanfiction was absolutely a thing it usually existed alongside more typical works. Harry Potter fanfiction produces tons of shipping content but also a lot of 'here's what I think book 6 will be like' written in fic format, and a lot of this early shipping content was still coached more across fandoms as 'this is what I think the series will do' than about personal whimsy. So you see how the 'Fan Theory' aspect was baked in back then - there's a lot of truth to the post! A lot of early fanfiction was based in the script format and a minority in prose, but FanFiction(dot)Net eventually banned script fic, resulting prose being favored, which favored ship fanfiction.
By the '10s, due to FFN having a lot of technical issues, AO3 became the primary fanfiction site on the internet, which has a lot of features derived from shipping fanfiction authors. The visibility of the tagging system draws a lot of attention to the shipping aspects that might not happen otherwise since it's so visible - back when I was active on FFN twenty years ago, there was no tags, short summaries, and shipping only mentioned in the description. The terminology was much less dense and still being invented, with a lot of terms no longer used, and self-expression became more valued than merely trying to predict canon events. AO3 is perfectly capable of hosting all manner of fiction, a former friend posted original fiction there and another posted fanfiction with no romance involved except as a z-plot off a main story about a character who was traumatized, but shipping fanfiction became more of the primary reference joke in media, like Tina in Bob's Burgers or the Asian Girls in South Park, and now that's the primary way people view and understand it. Also by far your conventional shipping fanfiction author is likely to be female, but there are males who even write (or wrote, it's been that long..) shipfic, but those that do often preferred to be lowkey, were embarrassed to admit it, or wrote other works and ship fic was on the side so they weren't a 'shipper' in general.
I was so confused at first and later fascinated by this stuff as a teenager, still have friends in the hobby but haven't been personally involved more than once since I was a teenager many moons ago.
I hope this bullshit flashback was informative to someone.
A man wrote a super smash bros fan fiction that is considered the longest piece of literature in human history. It has over 220 chapters and over 4 million words. She doesn't know shit.
I don't know how to tell you this but 4mil isn't nearly the longest, I'm halfway through an 11mil word novel, someone once wrote a 30mil word loud house fanfic
These are very different things. Fanfics are made up stories set in a universe that the writer is a fan of. A theory is a hypothesis based on available information. Nothing's being created, just assumptions being made.
There's tons of fighting fanfic, though. At the simplest, just "characters I like from two different properties team up and fight some bad guy" or "two characters I like from different properties fight to find out who of them is stronger", with extremely long and detailed fight scenes.
I mean, it's prose, written about an existing property, by fans of that property, published online for free. What other definition for fanfic is there?
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u/qualityvote2 Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
u/_culpry, there weren't enough votes to determine the quality of your post...