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[kradeelav]

The Curious Absence of Masculine Pride and Competition : Diagnosing Why Male Characters Sometimes Feel OOC in Fics

somebody mentioned recently i draw dudes in platonic/romantic situations remarkably realistically and ngl i feel like a lot of it has to do with the visual body language counterpart to this :v  anyway, the whole post's worth a read but this bit is p juicy: 

Aside from emotional vulnerability as something men avoid showing, there’s also male pride as a motivator. A guy who sets out to be the very best at something probably has a fair amount of masculine-typical pride motivating him or as a trait the creator of that character keeps in mind while writing him.

Stede from Our Flag Means Death is a fairly effeminate man and that’s actually a pretty big plot point. It’s a plot point in how it makes him lash out at those like Nigel Badminton who don’t take him seriously enough, and his wrestling with what it means to be a man is a huge part of his emotional journey in the show. If he just wanted to go to sea, he could have run off and joined someone’s crew, but instead, he built a ship and styled himself as a captain, and worked as best as he could to be worthy of the title of “Fearsome Pirate Captain”, often to hilarious results, but again those obstacles to him being what he wants to endear him to us. But make no mistake, he wants to be those things. He wants to be his own version of the masculine ideal of a powerful leader, killing with kindness instead of weapons, but he still wants to be one.

Conversely, Ed in the show wants to be soft but it’s a jealously guarded secret for him, because he has succeeded in the masculine ideal of being a fearsome pirate captain, and felt incredible pressure to hide that he wanted softness in his life. Even as he was trying to overcome those masculine restrictions he was intensely aware of them.

If one were to write these characters without them being aware of masculine desire to be a fearsome pirate captain and masculine fears around being seen as wanting softness in their life, that makes them behave a certain way to hide this about themselves, they’d be missing a huge chunk of what makes these characters tick.

Comments

[bleodswean]

oomph. I totally agree. But that's a deep deep deep rabbit hole and has been explored by those far more adept at discussing than myself. The tangential caverns that offshoot are almost more numerous than stars in the skies.

Do you take fanart commissions???

[kradeelav]

I-alas. yours truly wants *very* much to say yes knowing you'd have something clever in mind re: fanart comms, but unfortuantly been taking this year specifically as a "halt" year since I have an unfortunate tendency to say yes to too many projects all at once (and there's two in particular that are long overdue).

It's not a hard no, but consider asking mid-next year, perhaps.

tickled that the passages opened up room for thought, and thank you for the lovely comment as always ~

[bleodswean]

Enjoy your sabbatical! And I will leave myself a note for next year mid to reach back out!

[neotula]

super interesting read, and one I realized while reading i could definitely think about more in my writing.

[kradeelav]

all good - it seems like this one resonated with more than a few folks and gave us all something to think about. :)

[armaina]

Very good share. I don't read a lot of fic but I do see a lot of fanart and just general headcanon posting and this pretty succinctly describe the phenomenon I see with the way most men are encapsulated in fandom and why some reads are never quite right.

[kradeelav]

oh lord, you're not wrong with fanart having some similar trends about what kind of body language/scenes are drawn more often. that's a whole different topic, haha.

glad you appreciated the link tho! :)

[seasaltmemories_14]

while the gender element is certainly relevant, I do feel like this is applicable across boundaries. Even stereotypically feminine people might not have the introspective ability to be able to name so cleanly what they're feeling. The older and more experienced I get the more I appreciate art that can get at really hard, complicated feelings without just having characters bleed and breakdown at every turn

[kradeelav]

that's a really good point that it goes across that split as well ~ there's a deceptive amount of storytelling nuance/chops needed to be able to show that vulnerability without stating word for word an emotional breakdown, and vice versa!

[flowersforgraves]

This is really interesting! I avoid Our Flag Means Death like the plague (because it's so popular, mostly), so I don't have the context there, but I think about this a lot with fandoms like Stargate especially. The military aspect comes into play a lot, and there's that similar OOCness.

I also think there's a very narrowly defined idea of "good" masculinity that a lot of ficwriters buy into that stems from ostensibly progressive feminist spaces that's actually really restrictive. I could talk about this in terms of hostility in ostensibly progressive contexts toward queer/trans men and men of color, but I'm not gonna write an essay in your comments, lol. But I think that restrictive idea of "good" masculinity is what's reflected in many ficwriters' work, and that, imo, contributes heavily to the perceived OOCness.

[kradeelav]

it is honestly a relief knowing somebody else also avoids popular fandoms for so many reasons :D; or at least currently-popular ones. sometimes going back to a dead one 20 years is its own treat.

100% to your mention of that idea of "good" masculinity, yeah, and the whole set of unsaid restriction. think you've mentioned it in a few of your journal entries but i can totally see how that same attitude of "no icky cis men in deez spaces" could have some very deceptively subtle and not great repercussions on fictional spaces as well.

[helicoprion]

Eh, I'm not convinced that the issue here is some fundamental failure to respect masculinity. Characters being OTT emotional is a really common failure state of inexperienced writers in general. It takes practice to develop an emotional range from the subtle to the overt. Early on if you just have your characters stomping around and hollering and crying and flipping shit about whatever, no hidden motives, no withholding - it's easier to feel like "yeah! I'm really doing something here!" You remember works of fiction that Gave You Feelings and you want to mash all the same buttons, without the craft knowledge to appreciate all the groundwork that was laid to get to this point. So you just kinda... gun it? I see this lack of subtlety/sanding-off of rough edges from people whose woobies-of-choice are female or NB, too.

And fanfiction being an amateur space, there are plenty of people at this skill level and plenty of other people who are content to read stuff at this skill level. And hey! It doesn't work for me, but I respect the earnestness, and the community aspects of it. As such I don't think anyone has an obligation to learn how to dial it back... Because if you're someone who defaults to playing everything really loud, that can take ages and a lot of concentrated thought, and for any given hobbyist, maybe that's not the fun part.

...And even among people who do have better writing chops, in fandom some people make a conscious stylistic choice to just slam the catharsis button whenever and wherever possible. Because that's The Shit They're Here For, and they're riffing off the established canon characterization to give it a little more punch. Maybe these are people who'd do the buildup themselves and set a more reserved baseline for the characters if they did original fiction, but! Oh, look, someone's already done the time-consuming part! Meaning it's time to just jump in there and start hurting people's feelings! Assume the issues of ego and pride and repression have already been overcome and let's cut right to the marrow!

I dunno - I'm coming at this as someone who makes a conscious effort to play stuff quiet, and write prickly jerks with weird hangups. But I do it that way because it's a fun puzzle for me and almost all my favorites are jackasses. I think it's a matter of experience and personal preference, not that people who write softer are necessarily lacking in understanding.

[kradeelav]

(sorry for the lateness to the reply here~)

your mention of "It takes practice to develop an emotional range from the subtle to the overt." is a really good one, and is absolutely something I've seen as well in fic. (quite frankly, art as well, subtle body language versus ... not).

Appreciate the thoughts here, was good to sit with for a bit :).

[vsitante]

Just 1+ this post, the article and the (6 so far) comments here. A lot of viewpoints that all hit the nail on the head, unironically.

I WAS actually thinking recently on...this dealio that I see often, but it's been pervasive lately in some fandoms I used to lurk in (or maybe I never realized it fully, but I had some wandering idea before paying attention *now*) where when it comes to super masculine characters (who may or may not be jerks), there's...some fans want to figure out the tender side, but more like ultra-woobify them to the point where it's a totally different character -- and not to figure out their tenderness but to almost justify their love of the character to other fans. "See, he's not a bad guy, he's really cool!" And an odd sense of ownership but that's always existed lol.

I'm not sure how else to describe it, and I feel like I also may have insulted someone by mistake in the above, but it *looks* too reminiscent of the idea of purity fandom and having to make sure your faves are also moral.

However, I also sometimes wonder if these same folks are surrounded by "bad" men, that to them, the correction has to be the opposite and they haven't realized what the same article says: that often times, a man isn't allowed to emote due to pressure. Heck, even crying at a parent's funeral (something normal) is commented on other people as weird if you're a man :\

[kradeelav]

so many great thoughts in this comment (and apologies for the belatedness!)

it's funny you mention "bad man" in hindsight because i too have 100% seen that woobification in villainous dudes especially. it can be funny/cute sometimes if it's done well but a lot of times with fanart sometimes i get the sense that it's the woobified little meow meow characterization that's the "main" one for some people, and not like, the actual war criminal LOL.

def a lot of nuanced emotional threads that can get winded up in it too, especially with the wish fulfillment side too.