The Truth About Fan Fiction - Helen Joyce | Maiden Mother Matriarch 60 

When I went through a period of wanting to be a gay man as a teenager it was about this - I wanted to be free to love men without the baggage of being a woman in a heterosexual relationship. A male homosexual relationship seemed to me free from hierarchy, free from gendered expectations, free from sexual submission and stigma. Obviously, now that I'm an adult I can see that gay men still have to deal with all of that, but to my teenage self it seemed a much less complicated way of being.

Yay, Helen is back

I'd like to put my two cents in. I'm a 27 year old woman who got into anime at 13, and into yaoi (and gay fanfiction in general) soon after that (it's been years since I've read it though). My reasons for reading it were: 1) I wouldn't have to or even be able to compare myself to the female character like I did in real life. I wasn't pretty or girly, and I was surrounded by girls who were. The female characters in romance stories would make me feel similarly inadequate, and I wanted to escape my reality where that was already the case. 2) in every FF story I read, two guys developing feelings for each other was more exciting than it would in case of a heterosexual couple precisely because it was something that wasn't supposed to be happening. There was the thrill of breaking the taboo and going against the societal norms, just like in Romeo and Juliet, there was wondering if the other guy really has feelings for the main character, or if he's just imagining things. There's still a few Harry Potter FF stories that I go back to from time to time because they're so well written. They aren't porny though. Interestingly, in such stories, every girl that would be interested in of the guys or at least somehow close to him was always described in unambiguously negative, even hostile terms because she was seen as competition and therefore was automatically considered obnoxious. Also, I never knew Mary Sue was originally a self-insert! I've always seen it used to describe an annoyingly perfect female character who's super pretty, super smart, effortlessly successful at everything she puts her mind to, etc.

Helen Joyce is always interesting. Something new, but incredibly disturbing. We need to mature, very indulgent, self obsessed culture. Not good a direction. Porn now is often grotesque. We are normalizing it.

12:48 This is why Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfic is always about Buffy and almost never Angel/Spike because Buffy is already the hero and an equal. It’s also why Spike is the preferred romantic partner because he always needs rescuing. I always wondered.

As someone who's been consuming fanfiction for most of her "tenure" on the Internet (over 20 years), I applaud Helen's understanding and insight into this subculture despite not being part of it. If I may suggest new avenues of research here, two interesting phenomena emerged in the last years that again change how fanfiction affects girls and culture: 1) Shipping as activism. In younger fandoms today, shipping two same-sex characters is not just a matter of preference, but a fight for queer rights and representation. Characters are proclaimed to be "obviously gay", and the only reason it's not stated so in canon is, according to them, because of restrictive government or societal norms. As a result, girls who ship heterosexual relationships or write self-insert fiction with these men are not just mocked, but also accused of being homophobic. This is especially egregious in communities for Chinese gacha games like Genshin Impact. 2) Anti-shipping. Perhaps in response to the oversexualization that Helen mentioned, large swaths of young girls are strictly opposed to "problematic" content from any platform, community or creator. Those who offend are targeted in massive harassment campaigns. People who disagree are called "proshippers" (originally meaning "live and let live shippers", but transitioned into "problematic shippers") and become fair game as well. This section of the community is used to algorithm-based websites and does not understand tagging and/or considers it endorsement. As such, they are actually *hostile* to sites like AO3 and FF.net because they host unsavory content. Overall thank you for the great talk, I'm looking forward to hearing the rest of it on substack 💐

About a decade ago, I read and listened to so much M/M romance that it’s embarrassing- period dramas, sports dramas, sci-fi…. mpreg, anthropomorphic, neurodivergent, you name it. I never read fan fic- I liked the pros- but I get the appeal. As a woman with a pretty successful- albeit single- life I could never relate to the damsel in distress trope. What traditional romance offers to women, let alone girls is fifty shades of sad. I never thought about becoming male since the books were obviously female fantasies. M/M romance felt like a female space. Two tough football players fall in love after competing all season for the same scholarship? They sit and talk - there’s yelling and passion but no one is an emotional crying mess. They respect each other. There’s satisfying/ considerate sex (no one wants to get punched in the face). They like spending time together... They're nice to women. Sign me up. Men and women rarely have relationships where the man is that amazing and still seems realistic. It's easier to believe that men would only treat another man with that much openness and.. humanity. From the time I began reading M/M to when I lost interest- successful female authors were starting to identify as non-binary, the category male/ male was being increasingly replaced by queer, authors who wrote historic M/M romance were starting to insert gender ideology where it made no sense. The characters were becoming more obviously gendered. It was no longer just the working-class rebel print shop owner ignoring his love for the hard-nosed constable. Kink also started to make more of an appearance. Books about age play and BDSM were becoming more popular. Standard M/M was no longer novel, creative stories with a bit of steam and the occasional Orc. It stopped being a female space and started being about politically correct "queerness". I was reading this stuff in my late 20s. I can't imagine kids reading anything like this now.

So interesting and this explains so much! I work at a film production company and started to see an increase in these types of stories sent in to our intake by young girls and women. And I didn't understand why young girls would be fantasizing and wanting to see serie and films about androgynous gay men in relationships. Very interesting talk!

What does Helen think of Beauty and the Beast I wonder? I think it's a 'cope', to use her words. A story that might have been told to young women & girls to prepare them for the eventuality that they might be married of to an unattaractive, brutish older man. The story woukd be to convince them that underneath the less than attractive, unpleasant exterior, he's a prince in disguise really! Or maybe young women in unhappy, arranged or forced marriages indulging in the same fantasy. Peterson has a different take of it. He made it sound like a beast that can be tamed is what a woman really wants.....but that seems to me to be a male way of looking at women's desires, or what men WANT women to want.

When I was reading slash fanfic 18 years ago, there was a meme saying something like "if you like this, you might not even be a girl." It was directed at girls (although I don't remind the exact wording). I thought it must just be someone being quirky, but now I think it was someone grooming girls into thinking the longing to be a gay man means they're trans. You can currently see that same online grooming in redditt groups such as "egg_irl". People list things they like that they are not supposed to like as a boy or girl, then ironically say "still cis, tho!" "Cracking one's egg" means realizing one was supposedly trans all along. My current opinion on slash is that I agree with Helena Kirchner that it's a safe place for girls to explore their sexual thoughts and feelings. I think the problem is not with slash itself, but there needs to be an understanding that people often long for what we cannot have, and this longing will pass. Realizing this is part of becoming more mature.

Thanks for explaining the demand for "trigger warnings" -- not at all geared to the snowflake generation's hypersensitivity that I'd understood it as, but a mundane classification to aid choice among a huge repertoire of fanfic that I knew little or nothing about. There is evidently such a gulf between generations if you don't have kids to keep you up to date on huge unknown tracts of the internet.

Thank for this. It makes more sense of 'trigger warnings'.

I didn't know I would be interested in this topic, but Helen has the gift of making things interesting. I don't know where I place myself vis-a-vis female fantasy. I still think a good man is hard to find (one of my favorite titles of a book!l). When I was younger, I was dreamy and naive about this.

thanks for unintentionally explaining the issue with writing in movies. The guys are saying "leave our stuff alone," and the under 30 yr old ladies absolutely can't understand this

She is so brave lol it makes her enemies seethe and cry😂😂

What a fascinating subject.

Gosh, I didn't think I'd be learning the psychological reasons I spent years reading Harry Potter FF, in particular ones including Harry/Draco pairing but also others. I've to say there were plenty that didn't include explicit sexual content but still revolved around a same-sex relationship. I started reading FF at 17-18 (14 years ago) and I didn't become someone expecting trigger warnings everywhere nor suddenly felt I was really a man... I entered that world exclusively to read Harry Potter FF, be it slash or not, because I am a huge fan of the books, grew up reading them and both the books and movies were all over and I wanted more of that universe. That was it for me. One of my favourite topics to look for was a "what if Sirius Black wasn't sent to Azkaban and raised Harry". I was surprised you didn't mention the whole "omega verse" thing actually! Or maybe it's in the extended version of the episode?

As someone who has been writing fanfiction since 1980 it is interesting to see what you get right about fanfiction and what you get wrong about it. It isn't ALL about badly written erotica or wish fulfillment.

43:55 I think this idea of many women that they will be the one that rescues the irredeemable bad guy and changes him, or rather, he changes because his love for her is so special, is old as the Sun.

is it really that hard to understand? in writing/stories it's probably easier to abstract away the sex/gender thing. do that and suddenly you have "protagonist falls in love with story bad boy/heroic friend/wise leader". all things women love. her noticing the correlation with the fanfic and suggesting a causal link to FtM trans is brilliant though, a very important idea

I love Helen Joyce .

@44:00 those stories make me think of alternate versions of "Beauty and the Beast", turning the monster back into a prince.

Watching people discover fanfiction is so funny. Back in the day I read a lot of Glee femslash when I was figuring out my sexuality. I haven't read anything in like 5 years and I don't think I'll ever read fanfiction again. For me it was a development phase and it intersected with Glee interest.

I live in Japan. Manga includes an entire category, enjoyed almost exclusively by young women, of stories dealing with gay relationships emerging between young men. It’s HUGE here.

I've noticed how a lot of fanfiction is using tropes and themes from IRL porn in the last few years too. I stopped caring as much about fanfiction past my mid-20s but when I read fics age 14-24ish, it was mainly stories written by men that were similar to porn, but now teenage girls and adult women write it too. The climate of fandom is also completely different for gen z as it for older millennials and gen Xers, a lot of the women who wrote slash fic had a life an identity outside of fandom and fanfiction. When I was a teenager most fandom and fanfiction writers on Livejournal were college students, many are married or have careers now. But a lot of younger millennials and gen z grew up online and/or surrounded by pop culture, so they form their identity around media/fanfic consumption. That's where a lot of "fanfiction as activism" (I've seen more complaints about how female characters need to be written about just as much as males) and queer-identified young adults who say fanfic influenced their identity comes from.

My psyop to subtly manipulate Louise into appearing like the low-key queen of goths, is less effective in early springtime.

Fascinating! My best friend was a straight girl, she was always writing fanfics. I just couldn't get it, because to me as a gay girl those characters didn't seem like men OR women at all and the love/ sex stuff was enormously unsexy.

Unfortunately I don't have the money to subscribe to the extended versions, so I don't know if you've talked about this specific part of women's fanfiction called G!P or Girl penis. I stumbled over it on Archive of our own (AO3) when reading lesbian fanfiction about a female couple from a show in 2016. I was quite astonished as I thought women who love women wouldn't be interested in this. Not sure about the group of women who are interested in this. I think this phantasy of girls/women being mentally a woman but having a penis is part of the whole dynamic of todays trans culture.

I'm 37 & a man & read a LOT of this stuff. Not so much the romance side. Moreso, what if or crossovers. What if Anakin didn't fall or crossovers? What if these two cultures clashed.

I don’t agree with the comment that it’s the female equivalent of porn for several reasons but the primary being it is not generally the main motivator for why women gravitate towards ff or slash in particular. I’m a gender critical female academic and writer who cut my teeth on fanfiction (slash) and for me it’s simpler - being a female sucks in a society where we are objectified and sexualised. Slash fanfiction removed that but still maintained a space to explore everything else I was grappling with - family, relationships, and yes - inevitably sex. I think the increase in pornified sex within ff is because females are expected to perform this sex, whether they want to or not - ff is a safe place to get your head around this and become familiar with it. Our gendered expectations from society will of course play out in ff - whether it’s the subconscious acceptance, the attempts to reconcile reality with how we feel, or to push back against it either through identifying with the character who is control by subversion, or ‘punishing’ the characters who are seen as causing the issues. Without a doubt I would have been susceptible to gender ideology in my teens. I was a self harmer who wanted to escape what I considered an inescapable reality. Fiction has always been by haven. I’d love to co-author something on the topic.

I was a teen in the early 2000s when the HP fandom really got going in the time between books 3 and 5. It was a teen activity, but many of the 'big name' hits of slash fiction were adult women (probably active since the fanzine /trek slash era) and there were plenty of p*rny tropes then that would shock you it sounds like. The involvement of adult women in this, and the hardcore p*rn influence goes deeper and older than you've identified. Consider the ideologies in Star Trek DS-9 in its proper cultural context and you'll see it clearer.

I like Ron myself but him ending up with Hermione is so forced. Ron being with Luna or, say, a nice squib girl would make far more sense.

I somewhat agree with this but not entirely. I think another reason why we can see more male main characters in fanfictions is that in most fictional worlds, or at least in the most famous ones, male characters are more interesting than female charactes. So for example in Harry Potter there's a predominantly male set of characters and most of them have a more important role than the females ones; Harry is obviousbly more important than Hermione, the marauders as a whole are more interesting than Lily whom we know not much about despite her crucial role. So it's logical, if a character catches your attention you'll probably be more interested to write about them than to continue or extend storylines of some character you found flat or unimportant to the story. If you took a fictional world where you find the opposite situation, the female characters are the most multi faceted and lead the fictional world they live in, like the Bridgerton series for instance, I think you'd find the opposite thing happening. Bridgerton is not old nor nearly as popular as Harry Potter, though, so obviously there will be less fanfiction material available. Just to give an example.

Interesting convo, wish I was there to contribute! I'm only mid way through....but I'll add that as a pre-teen in the late 90s/early 2000s I was heavily into fanfiction, hentai and yaoi. I've seen Jordan Peterson say how women are naturally drawn to written erotica, historically, versus visual erotica. In my pre-teen days I was just beginning to get interested in sexual and intimate images and was introduced to (p)orn around that time too. The visual (p)ornography was too risky so I think I enjoyed the written variety instead because it was far more covert. I also preferred gay couples. Even as an adult I go through waves of watching gay (p)orn online. I'm completely straight, possibly on the spectrum, have never questioned my gender or heterosexuality but seeing/imagining two attractive men being together - one giving, one receiving, stirs something up in me lol, it is erotic, like lesbian content is to men. I don't personally understand the appeal of lesbian content because there is no real penetration, as a woman, penetration is very important in the act of sex. I will say I don't believe Helen's theory about how the authors purposefully write male characters as effeminate as a way to insert themselves into the character is entirely correct, at least not in most cases. Maybe the confused youth who've been sucked into the gender ideology world do that now. Fanfiction or the more graphic category, smut, is written by girls in their early-mid teens. They haven't had sex or have ever been in a relationship. They don't understand what men are like or what sex is like so they cannot effectively write a realistic story about the subject. I never got super heavy into it, I've written a couple of terrible, short, smut stores in my time but it was a phase I grew out of. Some people live in these fantasy worlds, go look at the "Larry" community, they swear their life on Harry and Louis from 1D having been in a romantic relationship and they harassed the band to such an extent about it that Harry and Louis have publicly stated it affected their friendship. That's where I think the fanfiction community has become more sinister. It used to be underground and private but now more and more celebs are being exposed to their alter egos sleeping with people they know and the fans intentionally confronting them with content for a reaction. It is inappropriate. Just go on pinterest and there's a ton of AI generated images of One Direction in very homoerotic scenes, sucking on bread sticks and wearing dog collars etc. All made by the very same young women who would flip their lids if a boy did that to a female celebrity.

I'm rereading Jane Eyre for the first time in years and it's such a forerunner of all this. Mr Rochester is so patently the fantasy of a woman rather than a believable male character. He's quite cringey, especially when he proposes. Also it's interesting that both Rochester and Heathcliff prove their love by being worse versions of themselves, whereas in Jane Austen's novels, her heroes prove their love by becoming better versions of themselves (Darcy very obviously but arguably with the others too).

TIL “Mary Sue” came from a crackfic LMAO 😂🤣😂🤣

I had to stop reading fanfic around 2004 (I was 13/14) because I couldn't stand wading through 20 absolutely horribly written stories just to find one mediocre one. Smut or no, the writing quality makes you want to rip your eyes out. It's been so disconcerting to see this stuff become semi mainstream though. Like guys, keep it secret, keep it underground. It's smut. Have some shame.

I must be, like, the only 10 women in fanfiction circles who don’t get m/m slash fiction (especially when it’s written and consumed by other women). It’s not even that I’m traditional or close-minded or something. I’ve even written about polyamorous relationships (provided, as a plot twist in detective fiction), but fetishizing gay males? That shit is pretty weird.

There is a way to make money of fanfic, for example book series After was originally written about One Direction member Harry Styles on Wattpad , as 50 shades of Grey was "inspired" by Twilight just with grown ups 😅

This is so funny to me because I read so much fanfiction as a teen but nothing explicit and no slash

Appreciation of gay media or literature is a form of artistic expression. The marginalization and pathologization of this expression can be traced back to the influence of homophobic societal structures. They result in an unjust and imbalanced assessment of non-conforming preferences. Women have a right to consume the gay media of their choosing, provided that they understand the desire to witness the subversion of homophobic, misogynistic societal norms through the illustration of two men attaining emotional, physical fulfillment with one another does not denote an alteration in their own gender or sex. We would still be women at the end of the day

I'm actually a gay man who has red hundreds of H/D fics and watched some BL series :D And I have to say that the characters are way more emotional and romantic compared to real life gay men. I think some gay men are kinda frustrated of the gay hookup culture and these slash fics and BL are kinda escape from that reality. When I was younger I used to hate romantic stuff and only watch horror films but now when I've grown up the horror movies have changed to romance novels and BL series. Helen said that when she showed the fanfics to her gay friends they were laughing and I have to say some fics are bad and the characters are so laughably emotional so it's a turn off... But like she said some of the stories are really well written and I can as a gay man enjoy them even though I am not the target audience. One other thing what's funny... As I have grown older I started to value the actual plot and well written relationships over those porny smut fics.

This research shows a deeper need for people to remain in control in relationships, by creating alternate universes to cope with their insecurities and the unpredictableness of reality. It's so sad to hear. Becuase the end goal of this coping with uncertainty is less relationships, less wasting time (in wasting time comes the possibility for sometimes truly special to appear) and more control of your consumer taste (prediciting what you like before you watch something. At first i thought Joyce's point of lecturers misunderstanding the "snowflake" tendency of young people was interesting. But now it's just sickening to hear the autistic manic control-issues that even young people have, at an age where their brains are highly felxible and adaptive. You might not want to read something that doesnt entertain you. But how are you ever going to find out anything truly novel to your mind and soul, if you never recieving anyhting foreign, uncertain and truly new and strange? Very interesting talk. And also very sad. Keep up the good work, Louise !

Helen for P.M.

Wouldnt it be awesome if Males and Females were told from an early Age how the other Psychology of the opposite Sex actually is (In General obvioulsy, Individuals are different)

Good information. I hate that i have to raise 4 young kids in this world. I still hate that a friend had me watch Wolf Creek. So i may be a pussy.

I appreciate the efforts to rationalize it, but it still looks like.. err... Insane? Psychotic? Batshit crazy?

Why not mention Catherine Salmon by name, the evolutionary psychologist, who wrote her thesis on Slash?

I’ve been a professional paranormal romance author for ten years and it’s fascinating to hear Helen discuss my profession. I never understood the appeal of M/M erotic romance for women until now. I think I personally favored fiction with traditional relationships, particularly those with men interested in having children. For me, having grown up a liberal, a man who wants marriage and kids was the ultimate fantasy 😂

Arrested Development reference in slash fiction boards. 😂

Jeez women are hard work.

What about the phenomenon of gender-swapped Harry?

Helen Joyce, hastily throwing all her hard drives in the microwave: "Uh, no, it's for... research."

this corner of RU-vid is weirder than any fan fiction i've read

😘😋😛💋💋❤

Interesting. Hook up with a high-T man, have his child, end up married to him down the road. That's the plotline to the very forgettable Indiana Jones 4 - Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. One or more of the writers was channeling their inner bodice ripper.

What the hell?

Hey wait a minute, sometimes I suspect Louise subtly meta-trolls me...did she read my story/description, on my latest holy.knights playlist? That would be hilarious, though less fanfic, more like a jokingly ironic, stylized account of what actually happened with Soundgarden and Chris Cornell, his statue is literally in downtown Seattle for one thing. Edit: plus I kept referencing Israel and relevant cultural differences in comments, then that last episode on Israel appeared. I think I'm influencing content here, this is a responsibility. Ok, for next episode, I'd be interested in convo with a niche advocacy group, that figures out how to pay anon trwls a million dollars, for the indispensable feedback they provide.

Helen researches so well that it infuriates her enemies, love her ❤

Fascinating talk. A world I knew nothing about but do now.

LOL "Korean boy bands".

As someone who read a lot of K/S in my early twenties, and who probably has a few pieces of my own K/S writing uploaded somewhere that I haven’t looked at in a very long time I wanted to answer one of Louise Perry’s questions a little differently. In K/S there was definitely always an understanding that Kirk was the more “feminine” of the two and that Spock, as the alien “other” was also very much a stand-in for the male “other” for intellectual girls and women in particular. As an older Millennial, we were the first generation to go through puberty knowing we all were at least sneaking a peek at internet porn, and that a boy we might genuinely want to be friends with and talk to was already comparing us to internet pornography, which was also by that time quite different to the X-rated movie theatre stuff of the ‘70s that still had things like women with pubic hair. The appeal of K/S definitely is the idea of a more egalitarian romantic relationship than what seems possible between men and women when you are a young woman. I’ve been checked out of fan fiction for a long time now, and Harry Potter was never a fandom of mine, but it was for my younger sister who now considers our mother to be a “Terf”, and I do think online subcultures have contributed to a lot of the gender dysphoria in girls and young women. I’ve been busy raising a little boy and a little girl for the last decade so it is pretty wild to see something like this just now coming to the attention of a wider audience. There was some pretty sexual explicit stuff even in K/S back in the day, so I would caution against seeing it as a recent trend. When it comes to good sex (a lot of the sex young women have is not particularly good for them even when in love with a man, especially if he is like Mr. Spock! which is a tragedy of nature as this is when women are most likely to be sexually desired and taken off the “market” so hopefully they get “lucky” as you say), but the level of trust that has to be there for most women to really blossom sexually is just such that I don’t think women experimenting with it in creative writing is an unhealthy thing at all. If you describe a particular sex act in a less “pornified” way, it is still that sex act, and multiple partners in particular is absolutely not something only men fantasize about, but women being honest about it dishonors men and that is the last thing a woman who genuinely loves a man wants to do to him. I’m not sure what can be done about it, but pretending that women are less sexual, and that them spending time significant amounts of time thinking about sex is somehow recent, rather than it being more a matter of social consequences for honesty about it just feeds into the sister problems of female sexual repression and dysphoria, let alone the way it relates to things like prostitution.

Hi louise, I recently discovered your work and am loving thie podcast so much! I was wondering if you have any resources or could maybe chat to someone about the history and role of stepmothers? Thankyou so much❤

Someone who wrote a lot of slash fanfiction in the early 2000's, the "overcoming barriers to be together" acts of devotion is spot on. In a world of porn where it makes budding women feel completely disposable, seeing men act like this was exactly where I could retreat and find the romance i yearned for in real life. Really sad in hindsight.

As an obsessive fic reader I have always been puzzled about why the heck I like reading about two guys. However, if it helps, for me it started cause female characters in fiction were terribly dull, and it continued cause it helps avoid stereotypes, or doesn´t feel as weird when you use them. I think male characters in women's fiction are not really male characters as much as they are female characters minus the social expectation. What kept me interested though is that, since there is no specific character you must identify with, you get to be both simultaneously or alternatively. Some women are protective and like having the male role, but can't get over how a guy protected by a woman is emasculated, so identifying with another guy fixes it. Plus who doesn't like the idea of having male strength? I certainly do

What I like about Ron is he's a very humanly "flawed" character and he's actively choosing the "right path" despite there is always a part of him that wants to do otherwise. Eg: When he didn't believe Harry didn't put his name on Goblet of Fire at first or when he leaves the group but comes back later. There was even a dialog between him and Harry (or Hermione) about why Dumbledore left the Deluminator to Ron at his will, Ron said sadly "So he always knew I would left you" and Harry replies "No, he knew you would want to come back" It is even more fascinating if we remember Dumbledore was all about "the choices we make" Harry is an inherently "right" character, he always lean into the right thing to do, despite that he actually didnt want to be a hero, the Chosen One. He is almost always noble, brave and resilient. Hermione is even more so, she is just solidly little miss perfection. She doesn't pretend to be, she just is. So when there's a challenge, Hermione and Harry are always "suck it up and deal with it". They don't complain, they don't get miserable. Whilst Ron always complains and whines, he likes being in a comfortable space, doesn't like challenges, easily gets pessimist... But in the end he always do the right thing despite all of those. Hence in my opinion him doing the right thing is more valuable than Harry and Hermione. And he is one of the many reasons why I adore J.K Rowling's storytelling😊

Somwhere along the way fandom became all about activism.

Such an interesting conversation. It seems to me that Gen Z's reading with filters externalises into the physical world as adults who expect more control over day-to-day experiences than real life will provide. No wonder they have higher levels of anxiety and depression than previous generations. It explains the videos of extreme outrage and public meltdowns we see on social media. I believe Gen Z will need to discover trust in life and their life path (automatic experience for previous generations) and that they are safe and/or can cope when they have no control, and cannot envision the way forward. Perhaps a new hashtag? #unfilteredlife PS the normalising of outre sexual practices is terrifying.

Now we have actually writers writing fan fictions for official studios and fan favorite Ips likes Lord of the rings, staR wars etc

Fujo to FTM pipeline is real

My advice to young people about porn is: "Don't expect a tour in Afghanistan to look like playing World of Warcraft in your Mom's basement, and don't expect your sex life to look like porn. One is entertainment, one is reality.

What an unexpected title. Gonna be interesting.

I'm too old to know anything about this, and I found it fascinating. (My only exposure to fanfic is proper, professional authors writing Sherlock Holmes stories or Cthulhu Mythos stories, and Holmes and Watson are never depicted as sexually active, thank god! Although, shipping Holmes and Moriarty might be an interesting exercise... 🤔.) As I was watching, a voice in my mind kept saying, I hope Helen's writing a book about this. 'Trans' is the definitive introduction to gender ideology, imo, so I would definitely read a book by Helen on fanfic; hell, she could write a book about golf and I'd probably read it! 🤩

To clarify- a Mary Sue isn’t a self insert. A Mary Sue is a young, inexperienced woman who is essentially overpowered for no other reason other than trying to become the “main character”. There is a male version of this as well “Gary sue.” While many Mary sues are self insert- not all are.

HJ: He’s a slaughtering machine Fanfic readers: uwu that’s my babygirl/cinnamon roll 💕😍💕

9:06 curious how this fetish maps onto brokeback mountain? Or is that just realistic depiction of a time where homosexuals had to keep up double lives? Did that film do well with women?

On Reddit AO3 many, many girls say they "realized they were gay men" when reading fan fics. It's funny when someone posts asking how many writers are male and you see how many girls post saying they are men and talking about being trans.

Excited for this one!! I love Helen!

Maybe y'all got there in the bit that's behind the paywall, but I'm simply gobsmacked that in all that discussion of rough brooding men dangerous enough to protect you Beauty and the Beast wasn't even mentioned. Indeed, Helen seemed to treat the "heroin captures the heart of a villain/vampire/werewolf who is ruthlessly murderous to all but her his treasure" as if it were an utterly new trend, but the warlord/mafia don tenderly doting on his darling wife in between episodes of psychotic violence is a tale as old as time. Indeed examples of "gender-bending" and queering are for in virtually every pagan culture, if the culture was obsessed enough with sexual self indulgence two things are almost universally found, transvestite temple priests and infant human sacrifice in exchange for a promise of material blessings or access to power from their demon gods. It's not for no reason Shakespeare has the hags in Macbeth scream "unsex me now!" when they call upon the devil.

Maximum quantity, minimum quality, is the nature of fanfic imo.

Really interesting talk. Been following both of you for a while, and I’ve been into fanfic for over a decade, so I was excited to hear you talk about this topic. One question I still have is why straight women would be into slash? Helen tied the rise of young female transgenderism to it, which I think is true, but I don’t think that’s the only crowd that’s into fanfic since I’m straight and many girls I know are also straight and into it.

As someone who read fanfic for about 15 years, Helen Joyce is wrong about their not being 'mascs' and 'fems' in m/m (male/male vs female/female and female/male) slash fic. Tell her to look into the terms 'uke' and 'seme' and 'top' and 'bottom', in relation to fanfic.

I miss the days when nerds didn't have so much influence over culture. No offense nerds.

As someone who has been into fanfiction for many years, not everyone is into shipping male characters together because they’re attracted to the male characters or because they find the idea of two men together sexually arousing. Although there are people who are drawn to yaoi and shipping for those reasons.

To be honest there are tags for Harry Potter fics that are "epolouge compliant" if you want to read about the characters kids, or the older characters getting divorces and falling in love with a different character, but they are much fewer in number.

Yep. I read a shed load of fanfic a few years ago, including HP. One fic, hinge of fate, was so good the writer started her own stuff.

She described 50 Shades of Grey to a T at the end, there. Surprising that this one didn’t come up being originally a fanfic that is now very well known to the public and may be also relatable.

17:35 could that be because the more recent fan fiction is more often written by men posing as women?

I've not watched all of this (I'm old and have to go to bed!) but I'm so glad that Helen is talking about this. I've been reading fan fiction since the late 90s when it first started appearing online (old gimmer alert - I used to read Farscape fan fiction), and now, as a mature adult, can see how it might be influencing young girls who don't feel comfortable in their own skin.

As someone who used to read A LOT of harry potter fanfic in the 2000s, it really did start as just wanting to know how the series might finish. As I got older I started reading the more explicit stories. I am straight and typically chose to read straight instead of slash, but the slash stories i did read, their was definitely one of the males that was deeply feminized. They spoke, thought, and acted like a woman. I would often need to remind myself that the character was a guy, because other than the physical description of the genitalia, he was essentially female. There has always been a prolific number of age gap stories as well. In what I read Snape was a favorite, particularly Snape/Harry or Snape/Hermione.

I am a man, but when I was a teenager the films Cruel intentions and Mullholland Drive got a lot of attention from boys for their lesbian scenes, this was before wireless or broad band-internet porn was not a feature of our lives.Given it's ubiquity-Helen can't understand shipping, the case for the opposite is rare amongst men- I think her explanation seem forced, it feels more anthropological.

I'm a straight man, in his late 30s, who is also a husband and father. I read and write fanfiction, and very little of what I've seen matches what you describe, barring the prevalence of Slash fics. It's definitely a thing, but it seems to me a minority...

FWIW I just want to put it out there I'm a Ron fan and slightly disappointed with the clear lack of support for Ron. Go Ron!

Fascinating. It just shows that Jordan Peterson is right how “Beauty and the Beast” is the original female wish fulfillment.

Who knew ?

This matches very well with what I've found since I started reading fan-fiction since the late 2000s. Particularly Helen's synopsis of the types of plots most women seem to just gobble up. I can name fics and fics and *fics* that that fit into each of those descriptions. And I don't understand the appeal of those as those are the types of guys you should get the heck out of a relationship with ASAP. There is writing fiction to *cope* with a problem... but there's also learning to *expect* that is how things work rather than learn to *avoid* the situation and fan-fic does a horrible job modeling the latter type of behavior. In a major way, fan-fic writers I've found tend to write stories that describe what people are currently going through rather than writing stories that center on the kinds of behavior people should *aspire* to emulate. Which is a problem given how much it's being read. One question I have asked female fan-fiction writers for years is why they don't take the opportunity to write better female protagonists when they constantly complain about the canon ones... especially as that is one of the most common reasons they give for why they write M/M fics rather than M/F ones. And I have never found a satisfactory answer until now. Helen's point that women see the other women in the story (including the female protagonist!) as competition for the guy is enlightening. It sure explains why I can't get into most romance stories. I'm much more the type of woman who wants to cheer other women on in their pursuit of the guy than view them as rivals (then again, I'm an asexual woman, so...). Just so long as they're not pursuing obviously abusive guys... I do wonder if there's any type of link to how "conscious" people are that they are *not* characters in a story while experiencing the story and their tendency to see other characters as competition for the Love Interest. Or maybe with women it's got more to do with how much they empathize with the character? I myself can never see myself *as* the character in the story, I'm always an outside observer *of* the story. However, that might also be a result of always having a very strong sense of identity ever since I was a kid... and exploring their identity is what *a lot* of fan-fic writers seem to really be using fan-fic for. I just never felt the need to do that as I always knew what it was or wasn't. So it's not hard for me to tell where my identity stops and the character's identity begins. The issue of stumbling over porn/erotica while reading fan-fic is very real. It was the first place I stumbled on it myself... I just didn't know that is what it *was* until I was quite a bit older... in part because of how *boring* I found it. It's the same thing... *every* time. And the descriptors people use for it... a good chunk of it is like the written equivalent of a set of IKEA furniture directions. Nowadays I just know to avoid the Romance categories of bookstores entirely because they don't have anything I want to actually read in them. That said... Even I have to admit that fan-fic did impact me as well as how I saw myself and my identity.... Or at least, the terms I used to describe part of my identity. It was a major contributing factor to figuring out I was asexual. In part because once I figured out the porn/erotica didn't do anything for me, I wanted to know why that was. On the other hand, I had never been interested in boys in the way other girls were for as long as I could remember... I just thought that all the other girls were *very* weird for thinking about attracting guys' attention. So in that sense... it didn't completely change how I saw myself... as it more confirmed something I had known for a very long time about myself. It *did* cause me to completely rethink how most other women saw their own sexuality as well as what types of relationships they fantasized about wanting. Which just further reinforced how *unlike* other women I was (and had always known I was).

Interesting..🤔

This certainly puts into focus what I intuited about the effect that fan fiction, manga, and online tropes in general had on my Harry Potter obsessed daughter, now 33 and in a long term relationship with a demasculinised man. Carry on Helen, we need you!

Fujoshi Ruin Everything.

I'm a woman over 30 who just found fan fiction again after writing it back in middle school. Some of these people are excellent writers. I say this as a lifelong bookworm that generally avoids popular fluff. I can't stomach Sarah J Mass. I'm a little embarrassed that I enjoy it so much, that I've even started writing it again. However, it's such a fun way to be creative, get feedback from fellow writers/shippers, and it feels like I get the story-ending I want because the actual show, which is still ongoing, probably won't do it. However, I don't understand the slash stuff either. I'm straight and love the female heroine I write about. Also, fortunately I'm well old enough to know that the male hero is nearly always wish-fulfillment from a female pov, at least it is in my little shipping sector.