History Doesn't Repeat But Fandom Does

On the sameification of male main characters in fandom

Nothing New Under the Sun

If you read slash fiction, at some point you have almost certainly read this character:

The man is emotionally vulnerable, no matter that he tries to hide it, but not particularly emotionally intelligent, particularly about himself. He’s hypercompetent but secretly insecure, both about his abilities and about his relationship. He probably hasn’t had many close relationships, and he approaches relationships with the wariness of a neurodivergent high schooler, assuming nobody likes him and everybody is talking negatively about him behind his back, if they talk about him at all. He takes every negative comment to heart and assumes everyone is always mad at him. He will cut off pieces of himelf to try to make himself palatable.

He probably is neurodivergent, but specifically autistic and/or ADHD.¹ He tends to internalize his hurt. He makes himself smaller or only talks about light and unimportant things, hides his feelings, and when they spill out it’s through crying, panic attacks, and/or dissociation. He may be an asshole sometimes, but it is always because of his insecurity or to hide his pain or to keep from being hurt first. It’s not really his fault. He needs constant reassurance of other people’s love, whether or not he asks for it. When anxious or traumatized, he regresses and/or he isolates himself. He needs caretaking. He needs looking after.

If it’s an AU where one of them is famous, he’s the ordinary one.

He’s the bottom in their sexual relationship and more submissive. He’s the one who gets picked up and carried, who is physically smaller, who is physically weaker. He is the omega. If one of the characters is trans, it’s him.

He is softer.

His partner is probably solid or hard. He is less emotionally vulnerable but often far more emotionally intelligent. He knows how to talk someone out of a panic attack or an anxiety attack and it works every time. When angry or upset he may lash out, but when needed he talks like he ate a therapy textbook and a gender and sexuality textbook.

He is competent, too, but it is less relevant because it is less in question. People know him. People like him. Or he is a stoic loner, but a respected one.

He’s not neurodivergent. If he has mental health issues, they are related to depression, PTSD, or anger management issues. He probably externalizes. He gets loud or goes out and makes bad decisions. He makes himself bigger.

He is from a broken home of some sort, and it has made him secretive but also protective. He has an almost pathological need to take care of people he sees as vulnerable.

He is the top and more dominant in their relationship. He is the one who picks up. He is the one who carries. He is larger, he is stronger. He is the alpha. He is rarely trans.

He is the protector.

A Blank Canvas

The man is a more consistent character across fandoms, even beyond slash fiction, than the partner. This is, across various fics, Shane Hollander, Stiles Stilinski, young Obi-Wan Kenobi, Tony Stark, Peter Parker, Charlie Eppes, Evan Buckley, Tim Drake, Sam Seaborn, Ryland Grace, Spencer Reid, Tony DiNozzo….

And so on.

This is not to say that every iteration of these characters is written that way—but it’s enough that this was a pretty easy initial list for me to come up with. You’ll also notice that it lines up pretty well with the Special-est Men.

He is the fantasy character. They would be the female character if this were a straight romance. They are the reader proxy. They are an opportunity to have someone carry us and talk us down from our panic attacks and give us permission to talk about our feelings and reassure us that we are loved and nobody hates us and everyone thinks we’re actually really smart and cool and special.

He is more likely to be the focus of fics. He is the main character. He is the hurt that gets the comfort.

The partner is a more nebulous characterization. It tends to be a bit more true to the canon characterization, probably because there are more options that fit with autistic-vulnerable-insecure-hypercompetent-bottom.

But this dynamic pops up whether or not it matches the characters’ personalities or whether it fits within the broader dynamic of the universe. We know how characters canonically react to trauma, stress, anxiety, fights—but that often becomes less relevant to these stories than fitting this characterization and dynamic that often becomes the fandom default for these characters.

(Too) Nice

One of the outcomes of this sameification of these characters is that certain characters will end up nice or even guileless to a degree that simply is not remotely reflective of canon.

The wide-eyed, emotionally vulnerable, takes-everything-too-personally vibe doesn’t feel as great when housed in a character who is kind of an asshole, so the rough edges often need to be sanded away to make the rest of it work. They’re rarely mean, and when they are, it is almost always either presented as funny or done as a defense mechanism.

Less pleasant canonical personality traits or habits get laundered through this smol bean wash until they are so guileless that you can’t imagine them actually being an asshole, or they are ignored entirely. In some cases, those traits, habits, or actions are given to others, to give another way for this character to be hurt and, more importantly, comforted.

For many of these characters, competence becomes specific to book smarts or a specific skill—or, sometimes, nearly every skill—but it is often at the expense of their emotional maturity, regulation, or competence. They need someone to take care of them, whether or not they push back against it, because they are emotionally vulnerable and not taking care of themselves properly. They don’t eat enough (though they never overeat, because we wouldn’t want them to get fat), they don’t sleep enough (though they never sleep too much, because we wouldn’t want them to be seen as lazy or unproductive), and they are using their hypercompetence as a shield to hide the cracks that only their partner (or their father figure, in a gen/non-shippy fic) truly recognizes.

Who Needs Canon When You Can Have Hurt/Comfort

There are no rules against writing out-of-character characters in fanfiction, but I do wonder sometimes whether people always realize that what they are writing is out of character. Sometimes it’s because they haven’t engaged with canon, or because they’ve only engaged with selective parts of canon, or because they have read so much more fanfiction than they ever engaged with canon. Other times I think it just becomes a habit—this is how you write That Male Character in a given fandom, and when you join a new fandom you identify That Male Character is and write him that way, because that is how you write That Male Character.

I think some kinds of hurt/comfort also get harder to write when the character who is hurt is also kind of awful sometimes, who is mean and it is his fault, who doesn’t have this patchwork of characteristics that fandom has decided make a character sympathetic and relatable and The Main Character.

Writing the character as more canonically accurate also makes him harder to turn into the reader proxy, because how he reacts becomes about how he would react and not about how we wish we could react if we were allowed to, if someone gave us the permission and the safe space to cry or to shut down or to let someone else take care of us instead of us needing to do it all ourselves.

There’s less emotional catharsis in a character just gritting their teeth and getting through it, even if that’s what that character would actually do.

1. In stuff like this, “neurodivergent” and “autistic and/or ADHD” are often used synonymously. There is a lot more that counts as neurodivergent, but it much more rarely appears.