#I'm not saying authors have a free ticket to suck at writing characters

[echodrops]

If the "straight women are much more likely to write a spicy and well-written m|m romance with complex male characters because they're naturally attracted to men" claim is correct, then why do straight male authors have acquired the stereotype of writing one-dimensional female characters and lame romances if they're naturally attracted to the opposite gender? Why do they prefer to focus so extensively on the male characters and their bromances then?

First, I think we need to clarify: Absolutely nowhere did I say the spicy mlm fanfics were uniformly "well-written." 😂 There are beautiful gems among fanfiction that have moved me to tears like nobody's business, but there's also just a whole lot of... not very... philosophically deep works out there. I don't want to sound mean, but just being brutally honest, I'd wager if we considered all fanfiction across all fanfic sites, a pretty solid majority of it wouldn't meet most people's definitions of truly "well-written." (Which is completely fine! Fanfic writers aren't getting paid! They're usually amateur authors who are writing for fun and often include younger writers just learning the ropes of grammar and character building for the first time! A fic doesn't have to be perfect to be enjoyable for readers!)

On top of that, let's also just be real--a lot of the explicit-content-for-explicit-content's-sake fics out there aren't really trying to write the most realistic and three dimensional male characters ever. They're trying to write sexy fics; realistically depicting men with life-accurate emotional depth and nuance is often... not the goal. 😂

Of course there are standout fanfics and incredible fanfiction authors. But, if we're being 100% transparent, I think a solid majority of fanfic authors don't actually write male characters that well. A lot of them have limited development, unrealistic or unclear motivations, out-of-character behavior, or a lack of interiority to their thoughts and feelings. A lot of times male characters in mlm fics are even reduced to caricatures of what women want men to do and feel. (I'm not judging here though--if a woman author is writing for women and her women readers want to see men who meet women's expectations, then hey, give the audience what they crave!) Just like Disney princes, a lot of men in fanfiction would seem very unrealistic and flat if you compared them to actual men from the real world!

I think we fanfic readers are just a bit biased, you know. If you're an average fanfic reader, I'm sure you've had the experience many times of being willing to give fic writers the benefit of the doubt even if their works aren't perfect--far more than you would give an actual published author or TV showrunner.

We don't scrutinize fanworks to the same extent that we scrutinize published media. Most people aren't grabbing someone else's fic and writing a ten page essay on how their male love interest wasn't properly fleshed out. Fanfic is full of poorly written men too, we're just not looking for the writing flaws when we read fanfics, at least not to the extent that meta analysts notice flaws in published media.

Side note that I also think is worth thinking about here: Because most fanfiction readers are female (and statistics suggest that a majority are even cisgender women), I think we're already at a slight disadvantage. Do female readers really have the most accurate perspectives on what realistic and three dimensional men would feel or act like? People are people, of course, but my perspective as a cisgender woman is never going to be as "100% genuine" as the perspective of someone who actually identifies as a man.

Second, and sorry, I know this is already long, but I think it's actually a mistake to buy into the stereotype that a majority of male authors can't write believable and interesting female characters. I think this illusion comes because fanfic fandoms congregate around very specific types of media, and often (though of course not always) that media is geared toward younger audiences. The bulk of the fandom claims that "male authors suck at writing women" come out of the shounen anime and young adult genres which are so prevalent in fandom spaces.

The target audiences for both these types of media are teenagers, who (I'm going to be completely honest) are usually not that picky about the development of the characters in the stories they read. I don't mean that no teenagers care about well-written stories (obviously there are many who do!), but that the typical standard for philosophical depth and nuance to which media for young adults is held is, for better or worse, lower than the standard we hold media for adults to.

We don't expect Twilight to be as deep as Moby-Dick. We don't expect My Hero Academia to be Maus.

This isn't an insult to young adult media; we have different genres of content for different reasons, and I definitely would not have wanted every single manga I read as a teenager to be as mentally or spiritually challenging as Moby-Dick. Content for teenagers should be designed to resonate with teenagers, both intellectually and emotionally. Many works for teens can have excellent writing and punch above their target audience demographic too. But the bulk majority of teenage readers are not (yet) going to be experts in literary criticism and sociocultural theories, capable of pounding out advanced meta analyses of the gender dynamics of characters in their favorite stories. Some will, but most won't.

Stories for young adults just don't have to hold up to that level of scrutiny, at least among their target audience.

At its core, however, the issue with the lower standards for depth of character building in young adult media is that it corresponds with lower standards for becoming popular as an author in fields such as YA lit and shounen manga. You don't have to be Leo Tolstoy or Emily Brontë to gain recognition among younger audiences. Sometimes, you don't even have to be good. Twilight was a roaring success, even while people lambasted it for being poorly written.

You don't have to be a literary giant whose books will be short-listed for addition to the canon of classical literature to develop a massive online fandom; Voltron was insanely popular despite being terribly written. 😂 You don't have to be god's gift to storytellers to become a popular shounen mangaka; Naruto is still one of the most popular manga in history and I hope no one genuinely thinks its characters were masterfully developed.

I'm not saying it doesn't take talent! It absolutely does! What I believe is that there's just not a guaranteed correspondence between "this author is popular and has a huge fandom" and "this author is actually good," especially in genres where the target audience is younger and therefore a little less likely to deeply critique the media they consume. Even if your characters--male or female--aren't that well-written, you can still get very, very popular in internet fandoms, especially with younger and more forgiving audiences, where only the rare few in the fandom will dedicate hours of their lives to performing meta analysis of your work, picking apart the writing quality and development of your characters.

So, long story longer: It's not that male writers overall are incapable of writing women. It's that a lot of fandoms spring up around kind-of-poorly written stories in the first place, and male authors who are not great at writing in general are equally unlikely to be great at writing women.

In fact, I'd suggest that male writers who are poor at writing women are probably also not great at writing men. Like, come on, don't tell me you think Bakugou and Midoriya's writing was good by the end of My Hero Academia.

Many popular authors with big fandoms are just being given more of a pass when it comes to writing poor male characters than they are with their female characters, and I'd argue that's likely because of the same reason I highlighted before: Their fandoms are dominated by women who like men and are willing to do more work to flesh out/fix the male characters they're interested in.

(It also helps that, with an overwhelming number of fic writers being female, they have less insight into truly depicting the male experience in authentic ways in the first place; if you are a woman, you're more likely to recognize a poorly written female character on the spot, while having at least slightly less ability to identify the unrealistic or inaccurate elements of male characters.)

Essentially, it's confirmation bias in action: We think men don't understand women, so we scrutinize male writers' depictions of women very closely, all while giving a pass to the fact that a lot of these writers just kind of suck at writing men too.

The "lame romances" in stories written by men aren't exclusively lame because of flat female characters--if the female character is flat, half the time the male character is flat too, and the romance is lame because the writer overall is... kind of lame... 😂

But why all the bromances? I wrote about this in my big long essay before, and I think there's plenty of very complicated reasons that men write so many male-male friendships and relationships into their story (re: coming from genuinely misogynist cultures, deliberately baiting fans with hints of BL, an actual internalized desire for greater emotional connection with fellow men due to perceived male loneliness, self-projection into their own characters, having been told they aren't good at writing women so they've given up, etc. etc.), but I honestly think one of the simplest reasons is genre. The majority of these "bromances" are coming from shounen manga, and shounen manga has some very common recurring tropes, chief among them being the whole "me and my ~RIVAL~" dynamic.

A lot of mainstream shounen stories have had such enormous success with this "young male protagonist and his best bro/rival/arch-enemy" dynamic that, frankly, I think many modern manga are just piggy-backing on the trope. "Dudes who beat each other up and become besties" has worked for so many series now that it's just become a staple of the entire genre.

I also think the market for Japanese manga in particular is very unique, with male manga artists recognizing--and capitalizing--on the power of the "fujoshi" reader early on. It's easy for shounen manga artists to see the benefits of over-stocking their stories with male characters and queerbait, because hinting at mlm ships they have no intention of ever paying out on 1) rarely reduces their male readership and 2) actually broadens their readership dramatically by deliberately bringing in female readers.

Basically, so long as the endgame is a het ship (or at least no ship), male readers will still read a story even if it has mlm shiptease, while more women will be drawn to the story for the mlm shiptease when they otherwise might not be that interested. There's no way to lose.

In essence, on the topic of queerbait, the shounen manga artists were just really savvy and realized faster that "having your cake and eating it too" is possible by incorporating a higher number of male-male relationships in their stories in order to broaden their readership and sales. Comparatively, western media was just much slower to cotton on to this technique, and I'd say it wasn't until relatively recently that western series have begun hyper-emphasizing male-male relationships specifically to appeal to women readers and viewers (see Supernatural, Good Omens, probably Teen Wolf [I don't actually go there so I can't confirm but I feel like this is true lol], etc.).

And, one final sidenote: I think it's difficult to compare published media to fanfic in terms of "featuring what you're sexually attracted to" because in published media, people are at least supposed to pretend their own sexual preferences aren't entirely warping the story, especially in young adult series (which have the biggest fanfic fandoms). Like... Compare: If you're a shounen manga artist you can get away with some panty shots but you can't be a flat out gooner--conversely, if you're a fanfic writer, you can write hardcore porn without hesitation. If we want to make an actual comparison in how much sex appeal sways character gender ratios in fanfic versus published media, I'd say the only comparable match would be comparing the ratio of female characters in harem anime and straight up hentai to the ratio of men in fanfics. We can't be out here comparing like... the original story content of Harry Potter (made for children, cannot be overly sexual) to its AO3 content (where nearly 40% of all HP fics are labeled explicit/mature). You gotta compare 18+ apples to apples.😂

Phew, sorry, that was a lot.

tl;dr: Tons of factors--yes, including misogyny--affect how men write women, but the issue of male writers being bad at writing women is likely being exaggerated in fandom spaces because 1) Fandoms are overwhelmingly female and women are better able to identify and critique poorly written female characters than anyone else, 2) Most of the biggest fandoms on the internet center around stories for younger audiences who haven't had enough time to develop strong media literacy and literary criticism skills, allowing writers to become popular without necessarily needing to be of highest quality, 3) Female fans are more willing to forgive poorly written male characters because they're more likely to be interested in and attracted to those male characters, and 3) A lot of writers just suck in general; it's not localized to just being shitty at writing women.