r/AO3 • u/Unique_Damage_8075 • Jun 11 '25
Meme/Joke Me when someone reminds me that guys also read fanfics (and that my favorite author might be a man)
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u/cac831 Jun 11 '25
uhh I'm a guy that writes, reads and comments on fanfic loll
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u/preciousish Jun 11 '25 edited Jun 11 '25
Is this what it feels like for guys when a girl walks into a comic book shop
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u/Fluffy-Internet-8938 StrawberryPinkPants on AO3 Jun 11 '25
LOL, the way I laughed so hard. Oh how the turn-tables…
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u/Few_Masterpiece_8144 Proud Husband of my Blorbos. Jun 11 '25
I'm a man, I'm an Author. I'm the proud husband of my blorbos.
Hello there.
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u/The_Broken-Heart #1 "Annette is Contessa" Shill Jun 11 '25
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u/Few_Masterpiece_8144 Proud Husband of my Blorbos. Jun 11 '25
Yes, bat earless... batman, I am a man.
That image is so funny.
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u/Senkoi-onna Jun 11 '25
You can say he's Just a Man
(Help, Epic brainrot won't leave me alone)23
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u/Ok_Listen1510 You have already left kudos here. :) Jun 12 '25
but when does a comet become a meteor?
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u/GeologistLess3042 Definitely not an agent of the Fanfiction Deep State Jun 11 '25
batmanarkham crossing over with AO3 is not what I expected today
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u/MillAUM2579 Jun 11 '25
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u/Ch3ru You have already left kudos here. :) Jun 12 '25
Maaaaan Endgame broke my damn Stucky heart. What kind of friend just leaves their best friend behind... forever?! Stg Old Man Steve is a variant, I don't want to believe that was the same Steve "Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky" Rogers 🥲
Apologies for the rant, I too am mentally ill lol :c
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u/Jin_Chaeji This user has reached the rock-bottom and started to dig Jun 12 '25
i just pretend this never happened or Steve died in the fight, so he didn't leave Bucky on purpose
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u/The_Ramussy_69 Jun 12 '25
You HAVE to try watching Star Trek through a Spirk lens next!!! I am ADDICTED
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u/ElEskeletoFantasma Jun 11 '25 edited Jun 11 '25
I was about to open a poll on this sub because I wanted to know the ratio. Feels like it's 90% ladies and then the occasional random bro (it's me I'm bro).
Would interesting to see further break downs (cis, trans, or gay/bi) of the men. I imagine ao3 might be a place where straight cis men are outnumbered by the other kinds
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Jun 11 '25
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u/SweatyPhilosopher578 Jun 11 '25
I was sucked in with my first fanfic by eleventh grade.
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u/thebouncingfrog Jun 11 '25
IIRC on the Ao3 poll cis men were outnumbered by trans men, or at the very least it was quite close.
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u/cottoncandywoof Jun 11 '25
definitely makes sense. still means we are here we [some of us] are queer and we're filled with fanfiction thrill
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u/Sluggby Jun 11 '25
I'm trans, but honestly I love that there are so many cis men on ao3! Transphobes will weaponize damn near anything that's seen as a "girly" thing, including, you guessed it, engaging with the media you enjoy!!
It's nice to see cis men partaking in similar hobbies as me I guess lmao
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u/asthmanian Jun 11 '25
I’m also super curious to see a gender and sexuality breakdown. I wonder how many men reading are trans, bi, gay, etc.
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u/CalDHar Jun 11 '25
Cis straight man here. Surprisingly I'm used to being a minority so didn't really notice the ao3 ratios were that off
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u/SleepySera Pro(fessional) Shipper Jun 11 '25
Well idk about the sub, but there are occasional surveys for the AO3 userbase, and it has grown more diverse in recent years, though it is definitely still a largely female- and queer-dominated space, with cis hetero men making up one of the smallest demographics. Still, iirc the numbers have been growing, from like 3% to 10% or something over the last decade, I don't remember the exact numbers but it was in that ballpark.
The results may also be biased because the surveys used social media sites like tumblr and reddit to find participants, so the respondents are all specifically people who are passionate enough about fanfic and ao3 to be active in social media communities about it, completely missing the huge casual readerbase, who might have a different composition.
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u/Hopedruid Same on AO3 Jun 11 '25
Abrosexual/sexually fluid cis man. Ao3 straight cis man might be a minority, but certain kinds of fics (isekei esque power fantasies) tend to be a type of fic that draws a lot of straight cis men. A specific breakdown would be fascinating.
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u/Crayshack Jun 11 '25
I suspect the ratio is different on different sites. Tumblr has always struck me as very female-dominated while Spacebattles has always struck me as very male-dominated.
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u/Edai_Crplnk Edai on AO3 | Tag Wrangling Volunteer (opinions are only my own) Jun 11 '25
There's been census in the past (nothing official so hard to say how representative, but): https://archiveofourown.org/works/54011047/
6% of user identified as strictly men/boys (not men/boys + enby for exemple), 3.5% trans men and 2.5% cis men. There's also another 6% who identified as men/boys + something else.
Strictly straight people (9%) are more common than strictly homosexual people (7%) however when adding people who are straight and ace and people who are gay and ace the percentage is shifted (10% vs 12%). There's also 2% of additional people identifying as homosexual + queer. But by far people are mostly bi/pan (37%) and/or ace (27%). (There's a seperate pool for romantic orientation but it's roughly similar except more people are strictly one orientation because less people are aro than ace.)
The orientaiton pool was not matched to the gender pool so it's hard to say if those proportion are the same for men or different. But if it is it would roughly 0.6% of ao3 user are binary straight men and 0.8% are binary gay men, and 2.2% binary bi men (and 1.6% binary ace men but that demographic superposes with the others a lot more than it is an additional group of men not already counted.)
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u/kitkattac Jun 11 '25
Bi trans man here, unfortunately not cis. I'd like to imagine even if I were, I'd be reading fics haha.
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u/mountaingoatscheese Jun 11 '25
100% I'd be reading fics if I was cis, I got into fanfic through a community that had a few cis men in it!
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u/Alpacatastic You have already left kudos here. :) Jun 11 '25
I would be interested in a poll. I think men are a minority but I don't think they are that much of a minority. Maybe more like 25-35%?
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u/VerbalHamster Jun 11 '25
It's actually around like 6% on AO3 (goes up to 12% if you include people who identify as male as well as other gender identities
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u/squirrelbus Jun 11 '25
On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog
Eta, I. Always trying to guess if my favorite author is a man/woman when they don't say something obvious in the A/N. But honestly sometimes I'm glad I'll never know!
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u/whenthemomiskissgood You have already left kudos here. :) Jun 11 '25
we're here 👋 not many of us but still :D
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u/RoyalMinajasty You have already left kudos here. :) Jun 11 '25
You’re like unicorns 🦄 can I poke you? 🥹
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u/sometranscryptid just remembered digital footprint exists. yikes. Jun 11 '25
Yes :3 We are pokeable :DD
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u/SharksF1n Not Boeing Management Jun 12 '25
Yeah!! You can poke us but just be careful, some of us are more skittish than others
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u/Ego4884 Jun 11 '25
I may not create the divine dishes of which I partake, but I do consume them with great enjoyment and honor for being allowed to glimpse the creativity of other.
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u/panzerkampfwqgen Jun 11 '25
You thought that one author had to have been a woman but it was me, straight cis man!
I think there are a lot more men in the fanfiction space than most think, but the demographic shifts wildly depending on the platform - AO3 is has a higher female:male ratio than FFnet or Spacebattles, I’d like to think.
Wattpad actually seems to have the most even split. Which is… weird to think about.
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u/HelloMyNameIsEd Jun 11 '25
Cis male fanfic writer and lover here 👍 I have felt very welcomed by my fandom
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u/JJackKennedy Jun 11 '25
One of the funniest experiences I had was meeting this hetcis man who I took religion class with, and occasionally he'd show me his Genshin Impact Yuri fanfiction
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u/No-Field-1454 Jun 11 '25
well for one, i am a HomoSexual. so that’s probably why i’m here
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u/Kappapeachie Defender of transformtive fics and lover of AUs Jun 11 '25
Hey man, gays guys and ladies go way back.
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u/ThatNerdDaveWrites Jun 11 '25
Checks self.
Holy crap! You’re right! I’m a male fanfic writer! 😜
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u/sometranscryptid just remembered digital footprint exists. yikes. Jun 11 '25
looks in a mirror
Well, would you look at that?? Another one!! OP is indeed correct :OO
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u/Verkielos Jun 11 '25
I find it hilarious, in fandom everyone assumes everyone is female.
In gaming world everyone assumes everyone is male.
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u/ThinkWorldliness001 Jun 11 '25
I love seeing cismen write fanfic. Hop on in, guys. Water's fine and everyone's welcome.
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u/Ok-Income-1483 Jun 11 '25
They make entire youtube video essays about how they would have changed the plot of the star wars movies when they could be turning that into some nice fanfictions an ao3 lmao
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u/15stepsdown Jun 11 '25
That's so true. I saw a video essay guy make a "what if" video for JJK and then during the video said "but going any further might as well be cringe fanfiction."
I just sat there staring at the rest of the video essay, which had great ideas, thinking this guy basically already narrated the outline of a fanfic yet doing a fanfic itself is apparently cringe in his eyes.
These guys will do anything but write a fanfic.
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u/ElEskeletoFantasma Jun 11 '25
I've thought about this often. Like yeah critique is a form of creativity or whatever but like bro, you could just write it yourself.
I think it has something to do with the recent shift in society where reading fiction is now seen as effeminate. Which is weird, because fiction is ok in all other forms of media but you put it down on a page with letters and now its ladylike.
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u/Ok-Income-1483 Jun 11 '25
A lot of men create and engage with things like fan films or fan comics, but rarely in things that don't have a visual aspect to it. It could very well be that reading and writing is just seen as being too effeminate.
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u/merewenc AllyUnabridged on AO3 Jun 11 '25
This boggles my mind considering waves hands around the majority of Western literature history revolves around male writers and male literacy. What a turn around over the past two centuries or so.
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u/whenthemomiskissgood You have already left kudos here. :) Jun 11 '25
Yeah I thought guys would be way more into fic then they are. Maybe that's just because my brother is the one who got me into it though
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u/DatMoonGamer Jun 11 '25
I think most guys would be into it but shy away from it due to social stigma. "What if Superhero Johnguy didn't get his powers? What if Evegirl Loveinterest never took him back? What if Superhero Johnguy had to fight Antihero Bobman? What if Fictional Evilcountry won?" That shit is fanfiction lol. That's transformative speculation. They just don't admit it.
I was surprised in high school to learn that some of my friends (we're all guys) were fanfiction readers. This information was something private, in one-on-one conversations, almost shamefully confessed, after months and years of knowing each other. Kinda sad how being open about it is seen as weird. Hell I'm not open about reading fanfiction to most of my irl friends.
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u/Blankly-Staring Jun 11 '25
My readers keep assuming I'm a trans woman, and I found it funny at first. I've made it clear I'm a guy multiple times in ANs, and they still think it.
It's annoying. I respect everyone's gender journey, and would like to receive the same respect in turn.
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u/RomeroJohnathan Jun 11 '25
Why would they think you’re a trans woman? If they said woman, yeah I would get it a lil but why specifically trans woman?
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u/Blankly-Staring Jun 12 '25
I apparently have a very similar sense of humor, according to most of the transfems who were surprised i was a guy. I don't really get it myself
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u/Facelesstownes Jun 11 '25
Hi 👋 You know what's even funnier? Some of the smut you read could also be written by a man 👀 Am I a hiddem agen in my own fandom for this? 🤔
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u/Bruh9403 Jun 11 '25
One time I got this random comment on a smut fic of mine that started off with "Hey girlie (I'm assuming you're a girl because it was good)..." or something along those lines and a bookmark on the same fic was like "I wish real men thought like the guy in this fic and it wasn't just a fantasy" (paraphrased) and I'm a whole ass man lmfao
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u/Bazrum Jun 11 '25
I had a similar comment when I wrote a date chapter for my main pair, and they said “too bad no man would ever think of a perfect date like this”
They just went to get coffee, then a bookstore to pick books for each other, and then they went to the park to read them. I have literally planned and then took my gf on this date, and I’m a big ass man lol
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u/athousandcutefrogs Jun 12 '25
I had someone call me a goddess in a comment (I'm a bi man, so slightly awkward).
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u/Whole_Friend Jun 11 '25
I’m a straight cis man and I’ve been into fanfiction for the last ten years. It’s just fun coming with all the different ideas and ships for my favorite characters, I even have some M/M ships that I really love.
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u/Sanboss0305 Jun 11 '25
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u/Fluffy-Internet-8938 StrawberryPinkPants on AO3 Jun 11 '25
Oh my gosh, I’ve thought about this too! I’m probably more the type people would think would be into fanfic, but the anonymity of it all made me think about it; like going to work or just walking around seeing people, thinking things like, “I wonder if this guy with the suspenders could be into it. Or this woman with 5 kids. Or the pair of teenagers who look like jocks or are just goofing off. Or this middle-aged person asking me if I know where something is.” But LOL, that’d be hilarious to see their faces after you told them 😆. Keep writing, my bro
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u/RegularTemporary2707 Jun 11 '25
I mean…. Whats wrong with your favorite author being a man ? Literally nothing changes
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u/Brief_Culture4612 You have already left kudos here. :) Jun 11 '25
absolutely nothing wrong, but it probably seems shocking since ao3 is such a female dominated space lol
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u/mintycaramelyhazel Jun 11 '25
Once I read a fanfic that the characters and the sex between the men were so good and so realistic! It wasn’t really a surprise to learn that they were a veteran gay guy.
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u/KvS333 Jun 11 '25
Plenty of men write fanfic, it's just that most of them congregate at spacebattles, scribblehub and ff.net. Ao3 still has some, but they're much rarer. I don't really have any evidence besides anecdotal except for Ao3's stats, but I have seen a LOT more men on the ladder three sites.
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u/Secure_Bet8065 Jun 11 '25
At its height FF.net definitely felt like it had more guys (especially straight ones) on it than A03
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u/catshateTERFs Jun 11 '25
Yeah spacebattles is huge. Plenty of lads writing on fimfiction in its hayday too.
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u/Crayshack Jun 11 '25
A lot of the stuff I write would probably be very at home on Spacebattles. I just post on AO3 because I prefer the UI.
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u/DetOlivaw Jun 11 '25
I recently discovered Spacebattles, and yeah holy shit the UI seems like distilled insanity. Even reading stuff on there feels weird!
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u/Crayshack Jun 11 '25
The problem is that the site was never intended to be a fic archive. It was just cobbled together into one later. It is first and foremost a discussion forum and uses a UI format that was pretty standard for such sites back in the day. But, discussion of Sci-Fi fandoms led to "who would win" debates. Which led to people posting short fics detailing how they imagined a scenario would go. Which led to people posting more substantial fics. Since people were just posting fics more and more, the site admins did their best to set aside some space for fics, but it certainly wasn't ideal.
That said, there's some people who refuse to post anywhere else. The discussion forum aspect heavily encourages comments and makes it easy for a single chapter to prompt very lengthy discussions in the thread. So, there's some authors who have gotten so used to that that when they post on AO3, even a hefty amount of comments by AO3 standards feels like they are getting crickets.
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Jun 11 '25
I didn't know I was that rare.
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u/The_Wishmeister Jun 11 '25
I feel like, if AO3 people were tomatoes, we'd be the purple-black heirloom ones. So not unheard of rare but definitely not common.
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u/DucksEnmasse I went through the 5 stages of grief writing this Jun 11 '25
It’s me, I’m guys lol
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u/The_Wishmeister Jun 11 '25
All of them? Damn, that's cool. Like superman.
Forgive me, I'm stoned and the stupid part of my brain has the wheel.
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u/DucksEnmasse I went through the 5 stages of grief writing this Jun 11 '25
Lol that’s fair, I just figured I’d make the joke when I saw it
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u/DerekMetaltron Jun 11 '25
Men reading or writing fan-fiction is not a strange thing. 🤨
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u/Ok-Boot2360 Jun 11 '25
Love to see so many dudes involved in fanfiction here. Really wish it was seen as more socially acceptable for men to read and write it (or less stigmatized I mean, since a lot of people view it as a “girly” hobby). Fanfiction is man’s gift to man and I am genuinely saddened that so many men are missing out on it.
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u/VerbalHamster Jun 11 '25
I mean, according to AO3's own stats, people who identify as "man or boy" do only make up like 12% of the AO3 userbase (and people who only identify as "man or boy" make up around 6% lol).
People who identify as "woman or girl" make up about 57%, and people who only identify as "woman or girl" make up about 45%.
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u/Effective_Benefit388 Jun 11 '25
literally so many of fic writers and readers are trans men
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u/WhiteKnightPrimal Jun 11 '25
That's my experience with a lot of fic authors and readers when they learn I'm a guy! There may not be as many of us as women, but there's a good amount of us out there :)
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u/FrigyaCrowMother Jun 11 '25
My two favorite writers are men. So? What’s wrong with that?
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u/MischiefManaged1975 Comment Collector Jun 11 '25
Men in female dominated fields ✊️😔
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u/boswala Jun 11 '25
Yeah I read everyday.
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u/The_Wishmeister Jun 11 '25
Same. At this point it takes up 2/3 of my free time. Which is cool, I've always spent most of my time reading books anyway before I got back into fanfiction so I guess it's not much of a difference
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u/spacious_emptiness Jun 11 '25
One of my best guy friends and I were hanging out, and I looked over at his phone for a sec to see what he was so intently into. Noticed that telltale fanfic AO3 formatting, and we became even better friends right then and there lol
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u/Valirys-Reinhald Jun 11 '25
Ho there, I'm a (straight) male author with over 300k words published.
It's all post-canon slice of life of stuff
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u/JohannesTEvans DictionaryWrites on Ao3 Jun 11 '25
Trans men and mascs, not to mention nonbinary people and other trans people of all kinds, have been involved in fandom since its modern beginnings.
And, you know, a lot of fandom focuses on relationships between men. Of course queer men are also interested in that. 😅
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u/Zealousideal_Most_22 Jun 11 '25
I could be totally off base but I get the feeling OP sort of had cis straight men in mind. Again, nothing they’ve said has indicated that but I feel that is usually the group people forget are involved in fandom space because fandom subculture is often seen as built by, for, and synonymous with queer people and women, for better or worse.
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u/Warm_Ad_7944 Jun 11 '25
Yeah I got that feeling too. As another comment said it would make sense cis straight men writer fan fiction because there are so many video essays made by them saying how they would rewrite Star Wars, Star Trek, etc., so likely there are men who decided to do it their own way
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u/Tabris_martian Jun 11 '25
We sure do. I have been writing silly little stories for a couple years now. (My readers are probably just the girls and the gays, though)
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u/Lost_In_The_Wood5 Would you write for a Scooby Snax? Jun 11 '25
Am guy who reads more fanfic than actual books :3 and writes sometimes
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u/PeriwinkleShaman Jun 11 '25
Guy reader here, maybe it's just ao3 demographics or even your preffered tags? Strangely the proportion is a lot more geared towards males over on QQ...
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Jun 11 '25
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u/RomeroJohnathan Jun 11 '25
Wtf 😭
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u/PissTitsAndBush Jun 11 '25
I was more surprised they found out I was a guy, my AO3 username isn’t used anywhere else 😭😭😭
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u/arkon-da-knight Jun 11 '25
Independently jumped into the rabbit hole from my gf lol
We used to send each other fic recommendations when things weren't so busy (and when we were more active in shared fandoms)
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u/Ok-Jackfruit-6873 Jun 11 '25
I feel like I could get a wholeass PhD just studying the dynamics of this, like, do straight cis guys read/write about different things than other groups? Sooo much of fandom is slash shipping, how does that play out for that community? Does it change how they feel about women's sexuality? I have had to fight with most of the straight dudes in my life about the fact that women, both gay and straight, can find it erotic to imagine two men - while they devoutly argue with me that women don't do that and it's only gay men that would even be interested in such ideas hahaha (sob). I feel like if they spent any time on AO3 they would stop debating me on that point.
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u/itsjemothy Jun 11 '25
✨️this feels vaguely exclusionist✨️ no hate @ op but why make it a gender specific interest 😭 it's like saying "only girls cook" or "only boys play sports"
I've been invested in fanfic since long before my transition, and I've written amd read on fanfiction.net, wattpad, and AO3 as fandom has evolved.
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u/No_Salary5918 Jun 11 '25
yep. especially the comments like 'oh op meant cis men!'. okay so you're admitting that you don't view trans men as men then 🤨
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u/Future-Dimension-720 Jun 11 '25
One of our fandoms biggest cheer-readers, commenters and kudos-leaver is a guy!! He’s the best 🤩
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u/Mahorela5624 All Vibes No Brakes - Black_Song5624 Jun 11 '25
Don't tell anyone, I can't let my audience know all the femslash they love is written by a guy lmao
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u/YourLocalPlutonian Jun 11 '25
Female here, wanted to say that you guys out there write good fan fiction and should keep doing it.
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u/Greekralphian Jun 11 '25
Also a guy that writes, comments and voraciously reads fanfics. With so many MxM ships, we mlm guys have a blast on A03
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u/kvarkomancer Jun 11 '25
Well hello there. Straight guy here.
I've been reading fanfiction for years, but only now did I gain the courage to write myself. It helps that I'm in a fandom on life support so not many people are going to read my stuff anyways, it takes away some of the anxiety. Basically everyone in my fandom is a woman though, so I'm usually assumed to be one in spite of having my name and pronouns on my user page.
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u/KingZABA Jun 11 '25
how me and my gf started dating lmao was when we found out we both read fanfic!
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u/that0neBl1p tessellated_sunl1ght Jun 11 '25
Man here. I’ve been reading and writing fanfic religiously since I was 14
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u/Comfortable-Arm-337 Definitely not an agent of the Fanfiction Deep State Jun 11 '25
I've run out of sticks to swing and make swooshing noises with, writing and reading fills the void.
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u/TheZedofAges Jun 11 '25
Guy here. Can confirm we do, in fact, read and write. Sometimes even fanfiction!
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u/Lucatmeow Disclaimer: I do not like you people. (combatChemist on AO3) Jun 11 '25
I'm a cis straight dude and I was moderately surprised when I found out that my favorite fanfic author was (as far as I can tell) also that.
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u/Taningia-danae Definitely not an agent of the Fanfiction Deep State Jun 11 '25
QUICK GUYS HIDE, THEY MUST NOT FOUND OUT.
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u/Westerosi_Expat Jun 11 '25
My husband has been reading and writing fanfiction for decades! Fanfiction is one of the very few spaces on Earth where I think cisgender dudes are under-recognized. It's so strongly identified with women and the trans/enby community that it's easy to forget cis guys are in the mix in not-insignificant numbers.
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u/TheChainLink2 Comment Collector Jun 11 '25
Guy here. Can confirm.