by Sherwood Smith
No, not tallship goodness.
By shipping, I mean writing relationships as fan fiction.
I also notice in exploring it that by far the greatest percentage of new terms has arisen out of the powerfully organized fanfiction network. (I don’t say community only because there are so many communities, in fact, there are distinct communities in Harry Potter fanfiction alone.) Gone are the days when definitions of fan terms took up about two sheets of mimeo, most of them being inside jokes like “crottled greeps” and so forth, plus a smattering of Heinleinian terms.
That aside, I was part of the groundswell entering fandom in the mid-sixties. So many of us baby-boomers were Tolkien fans, making a sidestep into Dune, Heinlein, and Georgette Heyer (there was an issue of Niekas devoted to Heyer—mine is crumbling, but I still have it, and wow is it…just sixties) and Star Trek. Some liked two out of the three, some only liked one, others veered off into other directions, following TV shows like The Prisoner, Man from UNCLE and Here Come the Brides (see Barbara Hambly’s Ishmael.)
Anyway, I was around for the fanfiction explosion, which made an exponential leap when slash hit the scene.
It seemed odd to me at the time that most of the fanfiction writers were women. I knew very few men who read or wrote it. I could get het guys not buying the slash, but what about other fanfic?
When I thought clear back to junior high, and some of the girls at school writing stories about the Beatles (Mary Sueing themselves into marriage with Paul, or imagining what stars the Beatles would fall in love with) I realized there was “something” going on with this whole shipping thing. Is there a hindbrain urge here that has us playing out possible relationship scenarios through storylines? Or is it the changing mores of the times that inspired us to play around with cultural scenarios that had nothing to do with the hypocritical-seeming “Don’t do what I do, do what I say” thing so many of us were raised with? I mean, in 1969, we still had skirt checks at school—but the minute the vice principal was out of sight, we rolled our skirts right back up.
So I ask you, do guys ship? If not, why not? I want to know why it seems to be more fun for females to imagine relationships between characters, while guys . . . don’t. If any of you guys ever wrote fanfic, was it all rockets and fists, or what? Or is the guy version of shipping playing out being a tough guy with unlimited weapons and a horde of orcs/Klingons/aliens/bad guys to fight/shoot/burn down? Give me some insight here!
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I wrote fanfic. Still do occasionally.
Out of all those different communities, I have to point out that not all communities use “ship” and its multifarious inflections to refer to pairings or trios or whatever. I wrote RPS or Actorslash, and never heard “Who do you ship?” until I wandered over into Harry Potter fandom. And gods save us from the “I’m sailing the Good Ship Somestupidnamepun” to indicate a favored pairing. [shudder] Yes, I’m a curmudgeon and I own it.
Anyway. Inter-fandom anthropology aside, I wrote fanfic, and yes, it was usually slashy. I had favorite characters, but have never been an OTP — One True Pairing — sort of person. I know folks who won’t read Joe/Bob fics if they consider Joe/Tom to be their OTP, because it’s like some other writer is making Joe be unfaithful, or something. I’ll read any good fic so long as I like at least one of the main characters, and don’t seriously dislike the other. I’ve read and enjoyed fics where I didn’t know the characters, and some where I’d never heard of — much less read or seen — the canon material.
When I’m writing, it’s usually heavily plotty, and sometimes there isn’t even any sex [gasp/grin] even if there’s an obvious or implied romantic relationship in there. PWPs bore me, as does pointless sex within a story that otherwise has a plot. Same with commercial fiction, for that matter — if the sex is duct taped on just to be sex, I start skimming. If I do too much skimming through the book, I start feeling rather surly about the purchase price.
I do like exploring relationships, though. Different kinds of people, different circumstances, different kinds of obstacles. Who fits together and why and how? Can you make these two or those three mesh in a believable way? Or how might they not fit together, if someone ends up disappointed?
I also like playing with different aspects of a character’s personality, or putting a character into a different setting. AUs are awesome, both to write and (when done well) to read. Making the character come across perfectly as himself or herself, even though they’re clearly different after having lived in a different time/place/circumstances, is a great exercise, and wonderfully fun to both do and read.
Or shining a light on different aspects of a situation. I never wrote much Harry Potter fic, but I read quite a bit, and my favorite fanfic era was in the middle of the series, when we were around book three or four or five, when everything still seemed very open and a writer had an open field for how to wrap the over all story arc her own way. Showing why Severus Snape was actually a good guy, for example, was trivially easy under the circumstances Rowling created, as was redeeming Draco. (And no, not all of the redeemed!Draco fics had him in leather pants. [sigh])
Pair-ups are part of that, but playing with the characters themselves was the main attraction, at least for me as a writer and reader both, with the romantic relationships an important subset.
For settings, sometimes I stuck with canon (which in my case was mostly filming, publicity junkets, known homes and vacations and such) sometimes, and used other real-world settings sometimes, and went fantastical or science fictional sometimes. Sometimes it was all mind games and sometimes there were actual fights and chases and such. It depended what I wanted to do at the time and what story I was telling. Bottom line, though, it was always about the characters.
Angie
*raises hand*
When I was thirteen, I discovered fanfic through writing a series of stories which existed largely to allow my Marty Stu character to meet Lessa of Pern, and have an intense friendship with her of the same order as her canonical one with Robinton. There was quite a bit of her relationship with F’lar in the later episodes, where the Marty became more marginal: shipping didn’t occur to me, because it didn’t fit with my conception of any of the main characters at all.
When I was thirty, I returned to fanfic, this time by discovering a Dr Who ficcing community. I wrote quite a bit of comedy shipping – and one large tragicomic novel which was largely about Tegan’s complicated relationships with Nyssa and the Doctor, revisited ten years later during a crisis on Terminus Station. A main plot driver was Nyssa’s status as the last survivor of a high-order, high-empathy Utopia, and the fact that the sort of relationships she needed to function made insufficient emotional sense when mapped onto typically human ones, tending to fall apart in ghastly slow motion beneath a romantic and beautiful surface.
So, pretty much yeah. There were however also murders, battles, and a hairsbreadth escape from the total destruction of the Universe, but hey, Dr Who here!
Angie: in your fanfic experience, did you find other writers in your circles were mostly women, or were there plenty of guys?
Gray: same question–and your experience sounds like a lot of fun.
@ Grey – Hey! That Doctor Who fic sounds awesome! I want to read it!
I live pretty much entirely in the femslash community, only venturing into het or slash lands to follow an author I really like. But I do know there are at least a couple of guys in the fandoms, prolific good writers who are really involved in the community. I’m sure there are more, and probably quite a few readers, but proportionally minimal. You might think well, girls like slash, guys should like femslash, and some do. But the core of the community is more emotionally centric than “guys who like ‘lesbians’” would find comfortable.
I don’t think femslashers are quite as rabid shippers (although the Buffy/Willow Buffy/Faith wars of old may say otherwise), and of course, I’m saying this after two years of a sustained campaign to destroy an OTP. (I have converts! But the OTP is still going strong.) Okay, that’s a complete lie. Femslashers are just as rabid as anyone else.
I often wish that there was more fic-with-plot when I’m reading femslash. Every once in a while there will be something awesome, but it’s very rare. I think, though, that the purpose of fandom is to serve as a supplement to the main storyline. Unfortunately, that’s often tv, and I’m really not someone who feels satisfied by watching things. I’m weirdly text oriented. But it means that the idea of the fanfic as guy-and-his-fist isn’t all that necessary, because there isn’t a huge lack. Whereas I don’t think tv is particularly good at giving us romances that we can invest in. (Especially f/f ones.) To bring more evidence to my point, it’s often the 20 minute shows that hint at complexity and then never develop it that get the long plotty awesome fics. NB. Kim Possible.
I think everyone really wants a story with the right mix of plot and a strong believable romance. Maybe women are just less reticent about seeking out the romance part. And on the internet you don’t have to have a gender if you don’t want to. I know someone once asked me if I was a guy, because I wrote like one, because I had bloodshed and battles and lovely lovely violence in my stories. I was surprised, but not ashamed at all. Because I don’t write like a guy. I write like a person who wants something to actually happen in my stories. Hopefully, I write like a person who likes to write.
Fantasy-loving males with the story teller bent turned to Dungeons and Dragons a bit later on. Is it something about liking competition? Back in the ’60s, I don’t know. It’s possible there was an unconscious cultural norm discouraging originality among girls, where as boys could tell their own stories if they liked? ???
I am always surprised by the ratio of men to women in fan fiction. Personally I don’t object to slash as long as it’s cannon or at least not completely against it. I enjoy reading well written fan fiction.
I help out at one of the communities and in a highly male dominated field the women out number the men about 5 to 2 where as in the commercial world I would say that men outnumber women about 100 to 1.
I think i started reading fan fiction when the Harry Potter books became popular around 2000 and it was obvious to me how things would turn out shipping wise and reading Harry/Hermione just felt wrong….., I definitely feel if the epilogue of the Harry Potter books was a gift to the community.
I don’t have time for a lot of fanfic any more, but I wrote a fair amount over the years and I can only think of one fandom in which I saw male ficcers.
It was a sentai based fandom and none of the male writers I read wrote slash and not many wrote relationship fic. Maybe one. The men were more into being better than the cannon characters and proving themselves.
Have you ever had any characters from your novels slashed by ficcers?
I wrote Mary Sue self insert fanfics as a teenager in the 70ies, but I had no idea it was called that. I just wrote stories with an additional female character inserted into War and Peace and The Three Musketeers (and one Hornblower story) who usually saved the day.
Fast forward to 2003. I had started writing again after almost 30 years, and I made up my own stories and characters and eventually posted snips on a writing site. I was playing with what would become the epic Historical Fantasy ‘Kings and Rebels’ (yes, I keep sticking with my first project besides other NiPs because it won’t leave me alone, heh), and two of the MCs are close friends though they should be enemies. I was influenced by things like the Song of Roland (whose predecessor, Girart die Viane, tells the development of the friendship between Roland and Olivier), Don Carlos, some Icelandic sagas and Greek tales, and I wanted to show a deep friendship between two men.
Well, some of you may guess what happened when I posted one core scene between Roderic and Kjartan, after Roderic, torn between his oath to the king and the promise he gave Kjartan to treat him farily as captive, decides to save Kjartan instead of delivering him to the king (and torture and death). The reaction was along the lines: Those two are SO slashable.
I admit, I had to look up slash. It went downhill from there.
I came across a LOTR slash fanfic site and was lucky to find some good stories before I came across the muckier side of it. (There was esp. some Aragorn/Boromir movieverse that worked really well – judging by the looks the two give each other in that library scene in the extended edition, I bet the actors played to the fans there. ) Well, I started writing some naughty fun myself, and for some time became co-admin and editor of a now defunct high quality LOTR fanfic site – we had a real submission process, and required editing before something was finally posted.
While the site included slash, we also had a lot of non slashy stuff, and some of that was written by men. They were a distinct minority, but they existed. I esp. remember one longer story in several installments about a tormented elf who had been prisoner of the Orcs once and who fought his ghosts that made him sympathise with the dark side. There was a fair bit action in that one, too. Another dealt with the dwarf culture (sort of a side story to the main plotlines). The guys also tended to write Silmarillion fanfics rather than LOTR proper.
And Kjartan and Roderic? Well, should I ever get published and somewhat popular, I know what to expect.
As a side note, I was there when the term ‘shipping’ (‘shippers’ first) was invented in the X-Files Usenet group, alt.tv.x-files, to refer to a romantic sexual relationship between Mulder and Scully. (It may have been independently invented other times/places as well.) It started as ‘relationshippers’, then was abbreviated to “‘shippers”, which quickly lost the apostrophe. April 1996.
Mary Eileen: I suspect that various versions have been floating around. (I recall the K/S then slash days of the late seventies and eighties)
Gabriele: I remember some high quality LOTR fanfic back in the sixties, though I was mostly aware of female writers. There could have been male, but then I was a teen, and my babysitting money never quite stretched to the mimeozines that other friends could buy, so I suspect I only saw the tippiest tip of the iceberg.
And good luck with your own project!
Janice: I don’t know how much slash is written about my characters as I don’t seek out fanfic about my stuff. Not because I disapprove of fic–FAR from it–it’s just that I know canon so well (like all the stuff not in print) I tend to get poinked out of the story too fast with thoughts like “But so and so would never . . .” or, in one, in the first line, someone pulled on leather gloves in a world where they don’t kill mammals or use their skins.
But. Sometimes friends send me links to stories I might enjoy, like this one that even though it goes against canon, is true to the emotional specta of the characters, and is lovely besides.
Sherwood, you’re right. That story is lovely. Thanks for the link.
I also feel that men shipping characters is tied into ye olde men vs. women theory: men want visuals, women want minds.
If you hop into more male dominated sites like 4chan and adultfanfiction.net (or a long time ago, the Grey Archive), it’s much more centered on fanart or fic that reads like a porn film.
A handful of years ago now I found myself immersed in reading Kim Possible fanfiction, to the extent that I located a lively community of KP fanwriters. There was a lot of shipping going on in that community, divided nearly equally between Kim/Ron (both before and after the 4th season of the show made that canonical) and Kim/Shego (aka the slash, or strictly, the femslash pairing).
And strangely enough, the membership of that community was and is largely male — with good to spectacular work coming from guys in their 20s right up to guys in their 50s. (Mind, there were and are also female writers in the group, some very good indeed — including one tween/teenager who was sharing an account and a byline with her father!)
I have no explanation for why KP fandom drew that particular demographic, but I find it fascinating that it did — and even more fascinating that the quality of the writing was, by and large, quite good.
John: that’s interesting–and I’ve never heard of Kim Possible!
It may be a temporal thing. My impression is that men cared much more about relationships in the 19th century, and that this faded out of the male side of anglophone culture in the 20th. This may have something to do with the transformation of work outside the home from craft to industrial: there is less opportunity to form open-ended long-term relationships when one is stuck working in a factory.
…or maybe not. That’s a hypothesis. Making it real (or finding out that it isn’t) would be the work of at least a year.
I wrote fanfiction as a teen long before I knew that other people did the same thing. Most of mine were continuing adventures or stories that filled plot gaps. Sometimes, I also wrote stories that fixed issues with the canon, when the canon got things wrong.
I shipped characters, too, though I never wrote same sex pairings at the time, unless they were explicitly canon (and there were no same sex canon pairings in the 1980s). Instead, I paired up characters from male heavy franchise A with characters from female heavy franchise B. Or I paired up main male characters with female walk-ons that I liked. If there were absolutely not enough women available (and there weren’t in most of the works I wrote about), I also made up female characters. Many started out as Mary-Sues, some eventually developed nuances. I didn’t write any explicit sex at the time and only did fade to blacks, though characters would get pregnant a lot.
By the time I discovered the internet and that my hobby of making up stories about my favourite characters wasn’t quite as unique as I thought, I had grown beyond fanfiction and was writing mainly original fiction, so I never got involved in the various online communities. I occasionally read fanfiction, if there’s a book/comic/film/TV show I really like and I have a hankering for more stories. However, quite often the fanfiction, even if technically well written, doesn’t quite scratch the itch, because what attracts me about the canon often isn’t the same things that attracts other writers.
These days I hardly ever write fanfiction and if I do, I don’t post it. However, I still make up stories about other people’s characters and worlds in my mind, a sort of mental fanfiction. It’s something pleasant to do before falling asleep or during life’s downtimes. And if I come up with a scenario I really like, I can always file off the serial numbers.
I forgot that in my classes I notice distinct differences between stories written by boys and stories written by girls. Girls are more romance and relationship focused and less likely to write fantasy (though there are exceptions). Mostly girls write everyday scenarios. Boys write action, crime and horror. It’s often quite bloody, e.g. a dumpster was needed to dispose of all the people the vampire killed. The heroes are often detectives or contract killers (a lot of contract killers). Women and romance don’t exist.
I sometimes see fanfiction stories and again there is a notable difference. Boys like to retell the source story with themselves and their friends in the starring role, e.g. Jurassic Park with the young writer and his best friends as heroic paleontologists. The girls I’ve seen do something similar I did at that age – mix up elements from different story universes and add their own Mary Sue characters into the mix. There always is romance, but it is usually chaste (accidental nudity is as risque as it gets). There also is a lot of focus on clothing and on glamorous locations. Usually it is notable that the author has no idea what the glamorous location actually looks like. I saw one story where a character traveled from Germany to Japan (land of anime and the writer’s dreams) and somehow managed to visit every international hotspot that had been in the news along the way. I suspect the writer learned about those places from the news and decided to include them.
Heh, there was a bit romance in my early fanfic, but a log of action, too. After all, the sources I picked had wars, duels and naval battles, and my Mary Sue was really good at that stuff.
Gabriele: my early fic was all either satire or adventure for female characters, too. I totally did not want the romance–though I began reading romantic fic when I was in my late twenties. (I was already writing “serious” novels by thirteen or so, so my fic was mostly satire–”Flatman and Flubbin” and some MAN FROM UNCLE satire, mostly. Oh, and one about James Bond where all the women take revenge on him for being a jerk, written when I was around 14. It was exactly as terrible as you might guess!
The ten-cent Kim Possible tour:
This was a Disney animated series (2002-2007) in which high school student Kim Possible — cheerleader, A student, good at (almost) everything — finds herself regularly saving the world from mad-science super-villains, aided by her best friend Ron Stoppable, who is perpetually inept but nearly perpetually cheerful, academically mediocre, The tone struck a balance between action/adventure and deliberately screwball comedy, and the writing was unusually clever for TV animation.
The intended target audience was tween girls (with whom it was indeed very successful), but the show also picked up a sizeable viewership both from boys and grownups. In the latter context, it may be useful to note the episode in which Ron’s favorite TV character, a superhero known as the Fearless Ferret, was closely modeled on the Adam West version of Batman…and voiced by Adam West himself, playing the actor who’d played the Ferret. [Yes, this is at least as insane as it sounds...and it works!]
John: thanks!
In the Star Trek Group I am a member of ASCEM (it’s a newsgroup, but I can’t remember what the initials stand for) there are many male writers, some of whom write m/m and some of whom write m/f, some of whom are truly awesome writers. it seems that more men have drifted away from it (being the newsgroup) though.
Sherwood — mostly women. I only remember three guys, off the top of my head, but I knew hundreds of women who were writing in various fandoms I read off and on, aside from my own main fandom.
Note that I read and wrote mostly m/m slashfic, so it’s not at all surprising that straight guys wouldn’t be into it. I’m a straight woman and rarely read f/f, for what I imagine are similar reasons. I don’t mind it, and I’ve read some if a favorite writer wrote it, or the plot looked particularly good, but I don’t go looking for it because the idea of two women together doesn’t do anything for me. I’ve heard there are some fandoms where there are more guys than girls, but I’ve never visited one.
One thing I notice is that a lot of folks (including a few people here) want everything to be canon. Frex., no relationships or slash relationships unless they’re canon, or whatever. I never got that. To me, the whole point of fanfic was to be creative, to take canon as a springboard or a foundation and then do whatever seemed interesting with it or on top of it or beside it or just inspired by it. To me, if I want canon I’ll read or watch the canon source material. Smooth inclusion of canon is great, and a sharp deviation from canon has to be sold to me (and for something like, say, Orlando Bloom being afraid of heights, it’d take a LOT of selling) but creativity that works and feels organic to or from the source is what I’m there for.
And if anyone ever writes fanfic based on my commercial fiction, I’ll be ecstatic.
Angie
Sherwood: It was a pretty mixed circle, newsgroup-based, with a male majority if any, but no overwhelming skew either way. There wasn’t a huge divide on subject matter between the Stuff Men Wrote and Stuff Women Wrote, if my memory’s any guide at all. One notable quirk was the relatively mature population, with my age about typical, and very few teenagers indeed.
Yes, it was a lot of fun, not least because of the high quality of the feedback I got. Also, this was the first time I went into a story and lost my chief argument with one of my characters, coming out with a somewhat changed mind thereby. The first, but not the last…
I really don’t know. I never paid much attention to whether the writers were male or female. I can easily give examples of both, though.
Personally, I am male, and while I don’t write a lot, Lord knows I am an avid shipper. Some canon, some not. But that may come from something else – characters were always very important to me. My main problem with LotR (though it took me a few years to figure it out) was (as I saw it) lack of character development for quite a few characters. Which is why I liked the Silmarillion much better. The point is, relationships (to me) mean character change and development. And that is why I ship. I have a few favored ships/OTP’s, but I also favor general shipping. For example, I would be willing to read almost any Emma Frost relationship-oriented fic (that is not with Scott) because what would most develop her character would be such a relationship. Same thing applies to Azula, and to other characters.
Rarely do I go into actual specified ships or OTP. I have preferences; for example, I prefer Willow (from BtVS), Emma Frost and Azula to have a female pairing, bbut that’s because I believe such a pairing would be better for their character development. I think my only OTP’s are Willow/Tara, because that relationship was so beautiful, and Melisande/Phedre (Kushiel series) because I love the idea of them together (and indeed, my only fic where I specifically ship is those two).
So, in conclusion, I don’t think men ship any less than woman. Writing, possibly. Women may tend to write more relationship-oriented fic than men. But I think we all equally share favored pairings and relationships, just as we all have the characters we like best.
Koby: Thanks for that explanation!
Gray:: That’s quite interesting.
Angie: You’re right–some really great stuff has been done outside canon (and sometimes you see people wishing it was canon!) Re my own stuff, I feel honored and delighted that anyone would want to imagine further stories involving my characters . . . but because it and the characters live inside my head, I get this weird reverb effect if I read a fic and hit things outside canon. Might be part of being a visual writer–but I do not expect everyone to duplicate my headspace!
Sherwood, the one with the romance – besides lots of adventure – was the Three Musketeer stuff. I had a crush on Athos, you see, so noble and tormented a character. He deserved a bit happiness (though he did not deserve the Mary Sue I foisted upon him
).
The original fiction was mostly school assignments though those often turned out MUCH longer than the teacher anticipated. I particularly loved those where you had to come up with a story about a painting. I remember one, Alpine setting, with two men fighting and a dead ibex lying by the side. I came up with a Heimatroman (Cora may know that old-fashioned genre; novels where the German landscape played a role, with foresters and counts, and bad Bad Guys, innocent maidens some of whom turned out to be born noble) which had ALL the cliches: the evil poacher, the poor guy who only poaches because his sick mother needs food, the innocent girl – daughter of the old forester of the Noble Count – who falls in love with the good poacher, while the noble count is in love with her (she cured him when he was wounded by the evil poacher) …. In the end the noble count stood aside for her happiness with the good poacher whom he made the new forester; the bad guy ended up in jail after he killed the old forester. There was a lot of emotion, some nighttime chases through wood and mountains and all sorts of fun. I had a blast writing that thing though I never took it serious.
Gabriele: I think I read a couple of those in German class, way back in the mid-sixties. My professor, an elderly gent, had a fondness for the Heimatroman. O, the fraktur!
Gabriele, yup, I remember the Heimatroman genre. They still exist, too, mostly in Romanheft form, complete with all the clichés of evil poachers and noble forresters and innocent maidens in dirndls. Take a look at this publisher’s offerings.
Though if I had been given a picture of two men fighting in the mountains, I probably would have come up with a Heimatroman type story, too.
Oh, I can totally see the stories of the Kitzbühl series. Rich young man is betrothed to society girl whose father is going to build some luxury hotel in a nature preserve because he bribed the right people, Somehow rich young man mets simple girl in dirndl whose grandfather had to leave the ancient home because of that hotel project. He falls in love with her because she’s so much more natural than society girl. After a series of misunderstandings, rich guy buys the land to make it a nature preserve again, and marries girl in dirndl. Society lady’s daddy ends up in prison and she moves to St. Moritz.
I’m pretty sure I saw that story in a Heimatfilm from the 1950s.
That said, I’m almost tempted to write a Heimatroman just for the fun of it.
I was involved in a fanfic community back in-around 2000; it was a fairly even split that skewed only slightly toward male. It was Pokémon themed.
Writers of both genders would often write about young trainers getting their first Pokémon companion and going on a journey… and few of them actually finished their stories, but oh well. Not too many stories were written about canon characters; the focus for most of the writers paralleled the plot of the games and the anime, but involving their self-insertion characters.
Female writers tended to have more relationships, but male writers did have plenty of their own. Several took the opportunity to explore aspects of the world and culture that were implied but not fully realized in the canon material, and I really liked those ones; they’re the core of what I always felt makes good fanfiction.
I do not generally approve of fanfiction, but I appreciate what it can do. There are a ton of stories and contributions made to the Star Wars universe that exist far beyond the scope of the movies, and a lot of those stories started out as “sanctioned fanfiction.”
Would Star Wars Universe be as big as it is today if not for the fans who would not let the story end with the movies? Most of those “Expanded Universe” writers are, if I recall, male.
Most men I know who write fan-fiction focus on plot and the relationships between the characters following the plot. They tend to be driven more for what appears circumstantial and essentially “what keeps the ball rolling”. Their drive for action or extreme characterization seems based on the appeal of how they wish their characters and stories to be perceived. However I have noticed that the older the man, the more complex the characters become, but he may also be less obvious about his characters’ reasoning for behavior. Their method for appearance of relationships appears more based on how the introduced female/male characters suit the plot and how they affect the primary female/male characters contextually.
However, women often appear to desire to explore all options besides choosing a singular; but this may be done across more than one fan-fiction for the same initial scenario. Plots are more driven by the relationships than relationships being driven by the plots. Women explore more of the emotional routes and aesthetic environments. The characters also appear more driven by strict formats of behavior based on the characters’ culture or personal views. There is more frequently less variety in behaviors if the author does not purposely create a diverse environment. An example of this would be a female author who was born and raised in a Western culture will more likely create a story where all the countries and cultures are individualistic, monogamous, potentially aggressive in relationships with other cultures, characters are goal-oriented, and there is inherent gender tension between male and female characters of any relationship dynamic. Whatever the author’s origin culture, there may be strong value judgement tied to behaviors within the story that limit the scope of potential behaviors as is expressed by other cultures.
Male authors appear more likely to be exploratory in expressing alternate and other-culture based behaviors within their stories.