Fanfic / Broken Men
Fanfiction has a tendency to focus on male characters, especially traumatized male characters.
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"There's nothing fandom loves more than emotionally broken men"
(some fic writer on AO3 or Tumblr that I didn’t think to write down the name of because past-me wasn’t expecting to cite them in anything other than my journal and now I can't find again even after hours of looking)
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There's any number of reasons for fanfiction's love for broken men but the simplest one is that there are more male main characters and people get most attached to the characters they know the most about.
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A Tik Tok pointing out the lack of female character-centric stories in fanfiction (9:09-9:19)
When you know more about a character, you are also more likely to know about their goals, their relationships, and their trauma.
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This isn’t a hard and fast rule, and there are other factors, but a good first way to predict which characters will get the most time in fics is to see how much screen/page time they get in the original canon.
In the MCU this is especially true. Fan-favorite Tony Stark (Iron Man) is a main character in nine movies, three about just him. Steve Rogers (Captain America) is a main character in seven (with at least an appearance in nine). Peter Parker (Spider-Man) is a main character in five.
Conversely, Natasha Romanov (Black Widow) is a part of the main cast in four and appears in eight. She is the has the most screen time of any female character in the MCU so far.
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Before 2021, there were three works in the MCU (out of 34) with a female lead: Jessica Jones, Agent Carter and Captain Marvel. When Endgame came out, Agent Carter got sacrificed as an in-universe work for the sake of the controversial happy-ever-after of Steve Rogers.
Post 2021, the MCU added two (or three) more works with a woman as the main character: WandaVision, Black Widow and Hawkeye (kinda). I'm including Hawkeye because the main character status seems pretty evenly split between Clint Barton (Hawkeye) and Kate Bishop (who also uses the alias Hawkeye). Black Widow was successful but fans weren't happy that Natasha Romanov only got a movie after she was dead.
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To be fair to Marvel, the diversity of characters in the comics increased with time, which is a progression the MCU is also following. Phase four of the MCU has a much more even split between male and female leads, so we'll have to see how that changes which characters star in fanfics.
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** current as of April 10, 2022
I could go on theorizing as to why male characters get more fics written about them, but what really matters in these conversations is that they do.
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** check out "on 'fetishizing' gay men" and "Why Do Queer Women Ship Gay Men (So Damn Hard)?" (post 1, post 2) for other opinions on why so much of fanfiction is about male characters (these specifically talk about the prevalence of m/m relationships and sex, but since shipping and fanfiction are so intertwined, I think many of the same ideas can apply to the broader topic)
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This isn’t an entirely positive or negative thing, but it does shape the stories about trauma told in fics.
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Also, because of this, most of the examples I point to will feature male characters.