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Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls
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Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls (and many are yaoi fangirls at that).
Various theories abound as to why without real consensus. The cause is likely related to the fact that most visual porn is male-oriented (see hentai) while most written porn is female-oriented (see yaoi) and Fan Fiction, like porn, trades heavily in Author Appeal.
Because Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls, and because most girls are more interested in who's sleeping with who than who could take who in a fight, this means most Fan Fiction is primarily focused on relationships (romantic or otherwise) and shipping. Other side effects include a proliferation of Mary Sues compared with Marty Stus and the heavy favoritism of yaoi fanfic over yuri.
This trope is extremely common, even in fandoms that presumably lean heavily male, such as Star Trek, Naruto, and Transformers.
See also Shipping, Slash Fic, Everyone Is Gay, Estrogen Brigade. Compare Most Writers Are Male and Most Tropers Are Young Nerds.
A totally ubiquitous trope. Nonetheless, some examples stand out more than most. Note: if you plan to add an example that can be summarized as Complaining About Fanfic Tropes You Don't Like, please leave it out.
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Anime and Manga
- One Piece: A boys' comic about adventures on the high seas. Features not even the most chaste of affectionate physical contact, but even that does not save it from this trope.
- Death Note: A densely plotted supernatural melodrama where Jumping Off The Slippery Slope is inevitable and the nature of being is explored. (And potato chips are epic.) Fanfics rarely feature anything but romance between either the two Bishonen antagonists/protagonists/whatever, or between the loose cannon and a minor character that some readers didn't even notice in their fixation on things like the plot.
- To the shippers' defense, they probably lack imagination to conceive a Xanatos Roulette even half as complex as Light pulls off every day before breakfast. Don't be too harsh on them.
- And there aren't many het pairings that would reasonably work whilst providing the chance to add to the already ballooning number of over-angsty/badly-convoluted fics out there.
- This editor has had to explain "No, it's not really a yaoi anime" more than once while trying to get someone to watch it. Just to mix things up, someone once suggested it to him because of the yaoiness. You just can't win.
- While it has an innocent logic to it, the implications of Light and L being handcuffed for a long period of time don't help matters much.
- Nor does the foot massage scene. What Do You Mean It's Not Symbolic, anyone?
- Gundam Wing: The futility of war and mankind's endless desire for battle do not seem to interest writers nearly as much as the homosexual relationships between the five protagonists.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: Any fanfiction not taking the Wangst route often reads like that of a cheerful, fluffy harem anime. Wow, Shinji has all these gorgeous ladies (and one guy) to choose from! No mental anguish, mutilation, Cosmic Horror or death here! No sir!
- There's a lot of shipping fanfic for NGE that doesn't completely ignore the Mind Screw horror elements, but rather pushes them aside for a bit and tells a short story set in the interim of an episode or the area between two episodes. Plus, NGE is more conducive to shipping, as it's a combination of All Love Is Unrequited and Love Dodecahedron in that regard to begin with.
- Hell, Gainax itself made a series of computer games under that premise. Yes, that kind of computer game.
- Not only that, but of the three alternate universe Evangelion manga that have been written in the last few years, only ONE of them ISN'T a romantic comedy. Angelic Days
 is based on a dream sequence from episode 26, and Shinji Ikari Raising Project is based on a videogame based on that dream sequence from episode 26 — coincidentally, both are written by women.
- Rabid fans of the two main Bleach het pairings duke it out (with one side being decidedly more ah, dedicated than the other), with other characters dragged into it as Ship Mates. Bleach is one of the very few fandoms where the yaoi fans generate less Fanwank than het fans.
- Full Metal Alchemist
- This explains the lack of Winry/Sheska fic...
- The large majority of Mahou Sensei Negima fanfiction seems to revolve around Konoka and Setsuna, whose relationship, though
more or less canonical, was a central matter in only one volume out of (so far) more than twenty.
- Naruto, a show about members of Highly Visible Ninja armies which kill each other, falls into this hard. Considering the presentation of Naruto and Sasuke's rivalry, though..
- Nothing is sacred when it comes to Naruto shipping. The amount of pairings with characters who want to fucking kill each other in the series can still clearly be in love and WHY DON'T YOU NOTICE ITS SO OBVIOUS THAT THEY DON'T REALLY HATE EACH OTHER! And that's not including the rampant amounts of incest...
- Prince Of Tennis. We have the yaoi fics, the het fics, the Dream Novels, the Tsundere Sues, the Die For Our Ship based hate of Sakuno or how she becomes a Possession Sue, the rabid Atobe worship...
- Yu Yu Hakusho. A good 95% of fanfiction that isn't the Mary Sue type is about Kurama and Hiei hooking up and having hot demon-sex. Ironically, most fanwriters either ignore or bash the canonical relationship between Sensui and Itsuki (it's Word Of God, BTW, as Sensui isn't all that emotional) because they're too realistically gay.
- I would expect a lot of the "ignoring" is actually ignorance. Both because it's never explicitly stated in the films or anime and because a lot Yu Yu Hakusho fanfics display complete ignorance of relevant facts.
- Also, almost every crossover with Inu Yasha features a Kagome who has miraculously gained incredible power and beauty and falls instantly in love with Kurama/Hiei/Yuusuke, who feel exactly the same way about her. Considering she has a long-term semi-relationship already, generally attacks demons on sight and acts much younger than the Yu Yu Hakusho characters despite being the same age as the main characters, it's a striking, if somewhat obscure, example.
- Sorcerer Hunters. Even though it's practically the patron saint of Stripperiffic costumes, more than half of the fanfic written is based on the Ho Yay that was also thrown in the series - especially the hot hot Carrot/Marron incest subtext.
- Around the time it was created, the Beyblade category on fanfiction.net consisted entirely of Shota Con Ho Yay fics.
- Never mind the robots; Code Geass has all the right ingredients to be a fangirl's dream come true - two Bishonen childhood friends turned rivals, pretty character designs by Clamp, and shipping options both het and slash galore.
- Though considering what has been going on in R2... Many ships have sailed, specially after Shirley's tragic death.
- You'll be lucky to find Digimon fanfiction that actually includes any digimon.
- Pokemon
- At least 80% of all Yu-Gi-Oh fics are about pairing two male characters together, the majority of these pairings including characters who share the same body. Giving these characters separate bodies as if they always had them is established fanon, and many of the fics who don't focus on them instead have a Draco-esque unhealthy infatuation with Seto Kaiba and his Destined True Love. Need I point out that Yu-Gi-Oh! revolves around a card game?
- A children's card game.
- Which is more interesting: A card game or paedophiliac, slightly necrophiliac identical-twincest between murdering, dark magic-using psychopaths and their better halves?
- Bearing in mind, two of the "better" halves condoned what amounted to murdering their darker halves, so every possible twosome of the six except Ryou/Yuugi has had one try to kill the other.
- No wonder Marik's confused.
- Leaving aside the gallons of Fetish Fuel in Ranma 1/2, you still have the uber macho gender shifting Jerk With A Heart Of Gold and his moody yet surprisingly sensitive Rival Ryouga. You can pretty much guess the most popular pairing, never mind that Ranma is really rather homophobic and Ryouga is obsessed with Akane almost to the point of being a Stalker With A Crush throughout the majority of the series, and that he actually acquires a girlfriend, Akari Unryuu, at the end of the manga. In fact, there is a sizable portion of fanfic devoted to curing Ranma's gender curse just so he and Ryouga can get together as guys...
- Takahashi inadvertently created ship herself, for only one volume and for gag value - Ryoga's magical gadget meant to make Akane fall in love with him misses and hits Ranma instead. Ryoga was absolutely horrified at the results (and even tried to kill Ranma, not because they're rivals, but because he was desperate to get rid of the attentions) and Ranma was not amused when he returned to his senses.
- The most prominent themes among Fushigi Yuugi fanfics are the following: 1) Replacing Miaka with
someone else an Author Avatar while keeping Tamahome/Hotohori/Tasuki/any other Seishi there (or vice versa); 2) a new Miko (usually Suzaku No Miko) is introduced, either acing out Miaka or repeating the quest; 3) a new girl an Author Avatar shows up and befriends/antagonizes Miaka and the gang, falling in love with one of them in the process.
- Monster, despite being seinen, has attracted a fanbase that prefers writing about how Nina wants to sleep with her twin brother.
- To say nothing of the Johan/Tenma pairing.
Comic Books
Literature
Live Action TV
- Modern fanfiction was invented by Star Trek Fan Girls in the late 1960s/early 1970s. The term "slash" originally came from how the Kirk/Spock pairing was denoted. "Mary Sue" was coined by the 1974 fanfic "A Trekkie's Tale".
- Supernatural. Almost every fic seems to be written by a girl who either wants to sleep with one of the Winchester brothers, have them sleep with each other, or be their younger sister.
- House: A series surrounded by medical mysteries? Let's just enjoy a nice fluffy House/Wilson fic instead!
- Despite having no characters between the ages of 10 and 40, if you only read the fanfiction you'd think at least one of LazyTown's main characters was a mopey teenage girl, though who the mopey teenage girl is depends on the ship written. Most frequently she's Stephanie, but quite a lot of the time "she's" Robbie Rotten. In a significant minority of these fics, the other one of the two is a rival for Sportacus's affections, and therefore an evil, conniving bitch.
- Meet Daily Show/Colbert Report fandom. If you've never read a fanfic slashing a comedian with the President of the United States...
- Power Rangers: For a show with a target audience of 6-10 year old boys, there are an awful lot of ship fics, but I suppose that's what happens with a universe with Loads And Loads Of Characters.
- PR has experienced an interesting inversion of this trope. Back in the early days of the fandom, while Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls was still heavily in effect, the majority of stories at the time were more Original Flavour than romance, though there was often a suitable mix of the two. Fifteen years later, things have changed to a straight example of this trope, with a bit of Het Is Ew sprinkled in here and there.
- Most of them are ether written by or for Tommy/Kimberly shippers, though ships with Trini have been growing increasingly popular in recent years, especially Billy/Trini ships.
- Similarly, Kamen Rider. For a series geared towards young boys about kicking monsters in the face, male members of the fandom are all but extinct.
- Mock The Week. MOCK THE BLOODY WEEK. Yes, seriously. Frankie has hilariously mentioned, on the show, the existence of Frankie/Hugh fics...
- Pro Wrestling is supposedly the male answer to a soap opera. Judging by how many different people Jeff Hardy's been banged by in fic world, you could almost argue against it being the MALE answer to anything.
- Eureka has a pretty small fic community, but the Carter/Stark slash ship has triple the fanbase as every other ship on the show combined.
- Doctor Who ficers often pair the Doctor with his one of his Female (sometimes Male) Companions, past or current. Common ships include The 4th Doctor/Sarah Jane and the 10th Doctor/Rose Tyler (or 10th Doctor/Jack Harkness, if you swing that way).
Video Games
- The Legend Of Zelda: Sheik/Link, Dark Link/Link, anyone?
- Kingdom Hearts: The main plot (and 70% of the cast) is usually ignored totally in favour of the speculated love lives of Organization XIII. Or rivalslash between Sora and Riku (often making Kairi the target of Die For Our Ship.)
- The Final Fantasy series, especially the more recent games, are the target of ravenous shipping and slashing that has nothing to do with the airships and big swords that the creators obviously intended to be the games' draw card, to the extent that the creators of FFVII were stupefied by an interviewer asking them "Who was Sephiroth really in love with?" They've gotten savvier now, though...
- Ace Attorney fandom is all about the Phoenix/Edgeworth rather than mysterious murders with quirky witnesses.
- The game Psychonauts has a lot of potential to generate interesting stories about Raz's adventures or the psyches of the campers that we didn't get to see. But no, stories about 10 year olds making out are much more interesting apparently.
- The Sonic The Hedgehog fanbase has no shortage of romance fics and especially slash. Apart from the massive amount of fans with crushes on Shadow (that is, the ones that don't hate him) and a Relationship Sue to match, if you look further down the rabbit hole you'll find every possible pairing no matter how improbable, ridiculous or just plain wrong. Apparently, The Hedgehog Can Be Buggered After All.
- Explains (partly) why, Knights of the Old Republic fanfic depicting a female Revan outnumbers that depicting a male Revan about five to one, despite Revan being "canonized" male. Female Exiles outnumber male ones only by a three-to-one margin.
- Despite the relative youth of the Mass Effect fandom, the sheer number of Garrus/Female Shepard fics out there is rather impressive, especially considering a female Shepard is pretty much a ready-made self-insert, and Garrus is an avian alien with a naturally-occurring tribal warrior facemask and who is only vaguely humanoid.
- Bully. That ought to be enough, but do I have to elaborate? The game's damn fun to begin with, but something about the appealing combination of playing a 15-year-old redheaded badass in a practically all-male environment (moreso if you pretend all those strange leggy creatures in skirts and high socks are cleverly concealed transvestites) with a uniquely twisted bad boy villain leads to either oodles of Slash Fic or oodles of self insert Draco In Leather Pants fic.
- Inverted for Gears Of War, which has losts and lots of Dom/Marcus slashart. Except that most of it comes from 4chan, which is mostly male...
- Slash-thread (and threads of a attractive males characters) are fairly common on 4chan indicating either posters allowing them because they think they're funny, because Even The Guys Want Him, and/or there are really far more females on 4chan than most people will admit.
- That's any girls, right?
- Or the guys might be more into yaoi then they want to admit.
- Largely averted in Halo fanfiction, in spite of the tremendous potential for Ho Yay.
Western Animation
- Not even Transformers is safe. The most common pairing appears to be Megatron/Starscream. They're freaking robots, for crying out loud!
- That's what you get when your race is 90 percent male. They're not called the Deceptinuns, after all.
- Unfortunately, when a new female love interest is introduced to compensate for the gap, its generally a spectacular Mary Sue. Who generally goes after Megatron or Starscream, for some reason. Anybody else either goes for one of the two known females, or pairs off with another male, regardless of machine-like disinterest in canon.
- Starscream Glomps Megatron.
- Of particular note here is that, although transformer reproduction has been shown to consist of applying the local Mac Guffin to a convenient empty shell, reproduction and mpreg abound anyway. Primus help us all
- Good luck finding a South Park fic that isn't slash, High School AU, or with a Mary Sue OC. You might get a oneshot or two.
- From the fanfic, you'd think the main theme of Kim Possible was forbidden love between Kim and Shego. You'd think that would mean that most are Yuri Fanboys, but as far as this editor could tell from dipping a toe in the fandom, most of the "Kigo" shippers are indeed females.
- Can't say about the "Kigo" shippers, but Kim Possible fanfic writers in general seem to range from kids to parents of kids, college students to, well, anyone else.
- Nope, definitely not all gay. Bicurious, on the other hand...
- The impressive thing about Avatar fanfiction is not the amount of shipping fics, but the sheer variety. Every possible combination with every possible orientation in every possible genre with every single character, and not just the main characters either. It seems, though, the single most popular pairing remains the one hooking up The Hero's True Love and the guy who spent most of the series trying to drag The Hero in chains before the Evil Overlord. Why, fangirls? Why?
- Danny Phantom fangirls will pair Danny with anything, including Vlad, Dark Danny, Ghost Writer, Sam, even the Fenton Thermos.
- The largest fan forum in existence for Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! is virtually all girls, and the rest of the internet fandom follows suit.
- The majority of Futurama fanfiction is Fry/Leela romances, often set exclusively in New New York. Who needs insane space adventures and satire when you can have Fry and Leela wangsting about their feelings like any twentysomethings? There is no shortage of Sues and Stus, either.
Real Life
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