The Curious Absence of Masculine Pride and Competition : Diagnosing Why Male Characters Sometimes Feel OOC in Fics
For all the mockery that's been leveled at male writers fixating on the sexiness of female characters with lines like, "she titted boobily down the stairs," (deriding how male authors have POV female characters thinking about their own boobs an absurd amount) I think it's worth noting that female* writers often do the same for male characters, just not for physical traits, but rather for emotional openness, humility, and vulnerability.
(*There's going to be a lot of sweeping generalizations in this essay, but the gender nomenclature is being used as shorthand and is intended inclusively. Likewise, any mention of "cultural norms" is from a US/Anglosphere perspective and not intended or expected to speak to all experiences.)
Men in female-written fanworks often cry a lot more than their canon counterparts. They're emotionally available and vulnerable a lot more often, especially with their romantic partner. They're more permissive about letting another person tell them what to do or letting someone else see them in an emotionally or physically vulnerable state.
This is not a criticism of works that do this. Oftentimes, what fic is specifically addressing is a desire to see something that isn't in canon, or isn't in canon as much as the writer would like, and that often includes a character opening up in an emotionally vulnerable way, especially to their lover.
But, if you've ever wondered why a male character in fic sometimes don't feel quite right, please feel free to read on. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, mostly to address OOCness in my own works, and I wanted to share my thoughts with those who might have puzzled over this question as a reader or as a writer.
(Some fandoms mentioned below the cut: Our Flag Means Death, Captain America, and Punisher.)
Let's start with a common scene: a male character has gone through an incredibly difficult time, fighting bad guys, losing loved ones, or going through a stressful experience. Maybe they're falling in love with another character but don't know if that love is reciprocated. Everything would be so much easier if they would just talk about their internal conflict!
Then the man gets drunk. Finally, while inebriated and crying into his cups, he admits he's in pain, or that he's in love, or that he's scared. This is an emotionally powerful moment that reveals a lot about the character and fandoms tend to eat that stuff up. Yet, when fanworks include this character, they include facts we learned from that time they were drunk, but they don't get the character drunk. The character just says the same things.
The vulnerability of that male character's confession has been included in the fanwork but the obstacles to him being vulnerable and the build-up of what it took for him to reach a point where he could be vulnerable have been largely removed.
I can give a few examples, like Steve in Captain America 1 going to get drunk to deal with the loss of Bucky, only to find he can't which means he's struggling to open up even with Peggy about what Bucky meant to him. Or the often derided need for war movies to put men into extreme scenarios just so they can hold their buddy as he dies. Women sometimes tease the emotional constipation of the need for a man to get drunk or be in an extreme situation before he can hug his male friends, but men I've spoken to like my partner find those moments more true and resonant than scenes common in fic, where male characters start weeping about their feelings the moment they're asked. That's because there are a lot of social restrictions around showing vulnerability to other people, especially other men. And as cathartic as those moments might be on screen, they're also rare. This adds to the power of the scene when an emotionally closed-off or intimidating action hero kind of guy suddenly opens up about the pain he's in, but it's not just a deliberate use of scarcity to make the moment resonate.
The thing is, you'd never know how rare it is for a male character to cry or open up about his feelings based on how often they do so in fic. To go back to Steve Rogers in the MCU as a character, I think the man gets maybe one scene per movie where he has a short, stilted dialogue with someone very close to him about the pain he feels or the fears he has? Those moments are heightened because they're rare but they're also kind of realistically rare. A lot of guys just don't go "bleeding" all over the place. It's kind of a huge problem societally, actually.
To go to another example, I've seen a lot of fics for Our Flag Means Death predicting Season 2 and a lot of them have Ed as an emotionally shattered mess because of Stede's perceived abandonment. Now, OFMD is a very unique story in how often it does allow its male characters to be vulnerable. Fic writers can point to moments on screen of the characters crying and being vulnerable with each other, not the case with every fandom source material. But, I think what's being overlooked is that in Ed's "blanket fort" scene and in the final shot of him sobbing in Stede's bed, he is alone. He has hidden himself rather than be seen crying in public. When he does come out of the cabin to sing about his feelings, he specifically notes how scary it is to be emotionally open like that and Izzy as the voice of Masculine Restrictions shuts him down because of it, showing that there was a reason in Ed's mind that was confirmed by the narrative for why he might want to hide those feelings and that vulnerability from the world. It's not right, it's not fair, it's not the way things should be but that's not the point. The reason Ed opening up was powerful and a singular moment was because it was in spite of those societal restrictions and norms.
Men in general aren't being constipated with their emotions and their emotional truth because they're being deliberately difficult. They do it largely because there is a lot of cultural pressure put on the need to do so and a lot of social punishment leveled at those who cry in public or admit something hurt their feelings. This is where masculine pride comes in to, the need to be seen as strong is a huge social imperative thrown at men. The need to be the best at what you do, to not show weakness, and to show constant strength and mastery are enormous burdens they're expected to uphold.
On the one hand, it's why moments where those restrictions shatter are such catnip to fic writers, but on the other, I think it should be noted that they're catnip scenes because they're very rare. Works written created by men spend a lot of time building up to those moments and earning them, not letting a guy cry until his buddy dies in his arms, not letting him say what's going on or that he feels weak unless he's impaired with alcohol or in some other extreme situation like locked up in an elevator with another character until they finally admit what's going on inside them.
Now, let's get into the craft of writing for a second. One thing writers, especially newbie writers, struggle with is obstacles. Obstacles are what stand between your character and their goals. They can be emotional or physical or mental or symbolic. How a character deals with obstacles is what makes us get to know them and get to like them, it's how we learn about who they are as people. Stede and Ed from OFMD, or Captain America, or any other character you can think of would all approach a locked door in a different way. That locked door is an obstacle to what they want: what's on the other side of the door. How a character approaches the locked door tells us who they are. Do they shoot the doorknob? Bash through it with their shield? Test the knob and sigh comically when it's locked? Pick the lock? Do they go around back and look for another way in? When the character gets through the obstacle, the audience experiences a certain amount of catharsis and pleasure, if the creator has done their job right.
Now, masculine pride and social restrictions are an obstacle to the characters getting what they want. A really delicious and tantalizing one for many, especially if you're writing romance: what will it take to get this guy to admit he's in love? Some fic writers though want to skip cracking open the hard outer shell and just go straight to the juicy vulnerable center. And that's ok! Maybe you don't want to write an entire novel about Frank Castle, the Punisher, or any other macho tough-guy character getting worn down to the point he breaks down crying about the pain he's in. Maybe you just want to write the scene where he sobs in the arms of his best friend about it, just go straight for the catharsis.
But, if you're writing a longer work and you can't put your finger on why the Punisher feels out of character, well, it's because a tough guy character like that usually doesn't want to open up. It's gonna take some intricate rituals for him to be allowed to touch the skin of another man or a woman for that matter. These obstacles to him opening up tell us more about the character and they also serve as the meat on the story for the audience, who wants it to feel special when this guy finally does open up. If he was bleeding his innermost feelings and emotions all over the place, those moments wouldn't feel as special, or realistic, or important. Fic writers who just want more of that moment understandably write fics that just go straight for the pay-off, but the wait and the rarity of that moment is what makes the character, especially a male character, feel in character and plays to the traits like being the strong, silent, stoic type that attracted people to that character in the first place. Therefore, keeping or including or simply being mindful of those obstacles to a male character being emotionally vulnerable also plays to why people liked those characters in the first place and will make your story feel more authentic.
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.
Again, I don't want to tell people how to write fic. But for those this resonated for with an eye towards their own writing, keep in mind the qualities of masculine pride and competition when writing male characters, as something they're at least aware of even if they're not concerned about it within your particular story. These societal imperatives and obstacles are minefields in the lives of many men and are built-in as expectations for many male characters, especially those by male creators. To ignore these qualities and expectations will make the character somewhat OOC, it might make them behave differently in your story than they might in canon, if canon-realism is what you're going for.
Consider talking to a man in your life about how another man would react to a certain situation, what it would take for them to be vulnerable, or how they'd react if another man saw them in a vulnerable situation. Cis male writers aren't the only ones who get other genders wrong and while it doesn't have to be a consideration your fiction takes, it can help one write more realistic male characters to ask these questions and include these common emotional and societal barriers to vulnerability in your work.
You ever gt emotional thinking that Izuku saved three people in the moment he recklessly ran forward to save Bakugou from the sludge villain?
He saved Bakugou, his most frequent tormentor from suffocating to death. He saved All Might by giving him something and someone to live for. And he saved himself by staying true to his values and setting himself on the path to heroism
is there a braver person in BNHA 😭 And this is just so sad. 淀みなく as in ‘smoothly/steadily/w/o hesitation’, often used to describe fluent speech…“Thanks to/because of (Eri’s existence), I can unhesitatingly settle this with rationality” 😭
Let me tell y’all smthn, I was today years old when I found out that some people took or still take this panel/line:
as an indication that Hawks is motivated by his laziness and/or that he cares more about an easy life for heroes than protecting civilians. And these conclusions crush my soul a little because I interpret this panel very differently, and this panel is actually foundational to my understanding of the fact that—no matter how sketchy he acts—Hawks is good. He has so many layers of good, and it’s all summed up here in this one line cleverly delivered in a way that is still consistent with Hawks’ shallow portrayal up until this point.
Listen, y’all, a world where heroes have more free time than they know what to do with is a world free of conflict. That is what Hawks wants.
At first it seems like a no-brainer—who wouldn’t want a peaceful world, right?— but I don’t think that a single other hero in this story, not even the students who represent the most progressive cast, has expressed such a goal. The youngsters dream of becoming top heroes and defeating evil while missing the irony of the fact that the continued need for a hero profession indicates something perpetually wrong with the world they live in. Hawks, however, has noticed the irony (likely due to his unconventional hero education showing him that the hero profession is nowhere near the hero ideal), and essentially what he’s saying to Endeavor here is “hey… i don’t want to pass my problems to the next generation of pros. i want to make the world so safe that the profession dies out.”
It’s a ridiculously ambitious dream and surprisingly naive for someone portrayed so calculating and rational, but it’s so sincere. He has a dream and he is willing to dedicate his life to it, even if he has to do it all himself.
Deep down, he probably wants an easy life too, and he could if he just cared less. But he cares too much and thus would never enjoy the luxury of an easy life until he’s secured it for others. This is why he moves so fast. This is where his conviction comes from.
This, I believe, is also why Hawks is reluctant to mentor the next generation. If he does his job right—and he intends to—the next generation should be able to take it easy. If he achieves his dream, there would be no need to train up the next generation. A truly peaceful world has no place for heroes and that is what Hawks wants.
I’m always flabbergasted at how superficially many people read Hawks. It just goes over my head given the complexity and nuance of his character. Like, I’ve legit seen takes about how he’s a narcissist or arrogant and I am??? Are we reading different characters? I get having different understandings but we’ve literally been in his head…
Anyway! I fully agree with everything said here. And I love how pure Hawks’ goal is? It’s so different from everyone else and tells you so much about Hawks - his actual personality, how much he understands the world and circumstances around himself but also, how much he must have gone through to have reached this understanding and thus, developed his goal.
If anyone is curious what she says directly after this quote:
When one or the other of these thought patterns makes it hard to throw things away, we can’t see what we really need now, at this moment. We aren’t sure what would satisfy us or what we are looking for. As a result, we increase the number of unnecessary possessions, burying ourselves both physically and mentally in superfluous things.
The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t. Quests to faraway places or shopping sprees are no longer necessary. All you have to do is eliminate what you don’t need by confronting each of your possessions properly. The process of facing and selecting our possessions can be quite painful. It forces us to confront our imperfections and inadequacies and the foolish choices we made in the past.
Many times when confronting my past during the tidying process I have been so ashamed. My collection of scented erasers from primary school, the animation-related goods that I collected in junior high school, clothes I bought in high school when I was trying to act grown up but which didn’t suit me at all, handbags I bought even though I didn’t need them just because I liked the look of them in the shop.
The things we own are real. They exist here and now as a result of choices made in the past by no one other than ourselves. It is wrong to ignore them or to discard them indiscriminately as if denying the choices we made. This is why I am against both letting things pile up and dumping things without proper consideration. It is only when we face the things we own one by one and experience the emotions they evoke that we can truly appreciate our relationship with them.
There are three approaches we can take towards our possessions. Face them now, face them sometime, or avoid them until the day we die. The choice is ours. But I personally believe it is far better to face them now. If we acknowledge our attachment to the past and our fears for the future by honestly looking at our possessions, we will be able to see what is really important to us.
This process in turn helps us to identify our values and reduces doubt and confusion when making life decisions. If we can have confidence in our decisions and launch enthusiastically into action without any doubts holding us back, we will be able to achieve much more. In other words, the sooner we confront our possessions the better. If you are going to put your house in order, do it now.
When a woman who is very anxious about the future chooses a partner, for example, she is less likely to select someone purely because she likes and enjoys being with him. She might choose someone she doesn’t really like simply because the relationship seems advantageous to her or because she is afraid that if she doesn’t choose him, she may not find anyone else. When it comes to career choices, the same type of person is more likely to choose a job with a large company because it will give her more choices in the future or to work toward certain qualifications as a guarantee rather than because she actually likes the work and wants to do it.
A person who has a strong attachment to the past, on the other hand, finds it hard to move on to a new relationship because she can’t forget the boyfriend she broke up with two years ago. She also finds it hard to try out new methods even when the current method is no longer effective because it worked up to this point.]
Couldn’t finish on time but posting this now since I won’t have time tomorrow orz Done for the Oct. 14 Hokage Itachi prompt! He is a proud and happy baby for finally achieving his dream ♥ ♥ ♥
Okay so when I got sucked into the phantom zone last week while watching youtube shorts a lot of the content it fed me was ADHD tips and a lot of it was either useless for me or redundant but there was one REALLY good tip about taking breaks that wasn't about taking breaks it was about RETURNING from breaks and the tip is: when you are about to go on a break, before you step away from your task (work, craft project, school stuff) decide what you'll do as the first thing when you sit back down at your task and set up your workspace to do that thing.
That means you've got an easy re-entry point to go back to doing the thing instead of sitting back down and having to make a decision or having to reorient from break mode to task mode. You have pre-reoriented and can just go back into working mode.
I've been doing this by circling what my next task on my tasklist is and bringing up the windows that I'll need for the task before I step away from my desk.
Brilliant hack, works great for me, hope it works great for you as well.
Oh also some knitters do this thing where the second you finish making one sock you cast on the second sock and do at least a few stitches so that you don't get killed by inertia and have one sock finished and one sock never started forever.
A while back there was a Tumblr post about doing the same thing while writing fiction - when you finish one chapter don't call it quits for the day, write a sentence or two if the next chapter do that you aren't starting from a blank page, you're continuing what you were doing before.
The same thing applies to work and homework and housework. If you finish your english homework *don't* decide that's the perfect moment to take a break, get out your algebra textbook and do a problem or two first.
Initiating tasks is a kind of executive function, but sometimes executive function is in short supply and you can bank some effort by continuing one task from another instead of having harsh breaks between tasks.
tags from capillata: #the perfect time to stop isn't when you're out of energy#it's when you have enough energy left to set yourself up for the next time you return#to the thing
Takaya Hashi as Tajin Crosser | David Harbour as Tajin Crosser
Yuichi Nakamura as Dan Gavash | Jordan Fisher as Dan Gavash
Produced by Trigger, Inc.
“The fact that everything must change and that things come and go through his life and that he can’t hold onto things […] is a basic Jedi philosophy.” –George Lucas
“The Jedi believe that you don’t hold on to things, that you let things pass through you, and that if you can control your greed, you can resolve conflict not only in yourself but in the world around you because you accept the natural course of things.” –George Lucas
“The Jedi are raised from birth so they learn to let go of everything. They’re trained, more than anything else to understand the transitional nature of life, that things are constantly changing and you can’t hold on to anything. You can love things but you can’t be attached to them. You must be willing to let the flow of life and the flow of the Force move through your life, move through you. So that you can be compassionate and loving and caring, but not be possessive and grabbing and holding on to things and trying to keep things the way they are.” –George Lucas
imagine you had a friend who constantly made jokes at the expense of something you loved. they're never funny, but they seem to expect you to laugh even though the punchline is just, "this thing you love sucks ass". it's not even really a joke, there's nothing funny about it, you can tell that they genuinely actually believe it. but they insist it's just a joke!
no matter what the situation is, they're always bringing the social interaction to a screeching halt with these jokes. nobody ever wants to participate in this joke with them. nobody agrees with the premise. nobody ever knows what to say afterwards, it's just an awkward moment and a subject change. but they just keep doing it.
you have to stop with the self-deprecatory "humor", it's not fun for anyone including you.
Narrative voice is one of those things editors and agents look out for as a sign of raw talent. It’s something people say can’t be taught. Either you have it or you don’t.
This may be true, partly, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t make any conscious decisions about your narrative voice.
I love playing around with my voice in different pieces that I write, and I thought I would share some advice on how you could have some fun with your own narrative voice as well.
I would argue that in most novels, about 50% of voice comes from the author’s own voice and natural storytelling abilities. This may change overtime, but mostly it’s just you. Writing as you write. The other 50%, I’d say comes down to writing like your narrator is telling a story to an audience. This means asking yourself two questions.
1. WHO IS TELLING THE STORY?
This is pretty simple in 1st person point of view: know who your character is and let them tell the story. Know what their opinions are. What interests them. The things they like and dislike. If they’re angry or optimistic or scared. If they use slang or speak like a professor. A voice should grow naturally out of that information.
In 3rd person, when your narrator is a non-participant, there are two options:
The first is to tell the story strictly as yourself, in 100% your own voice, and let it change naturally as you suit it to fit your story. This means being confident in your abilities as a storyteller and just telling the story.
The other option is to put on a costume. This narrator is you, but perhaps it is you as a grandfather, or you as a historian, or simply of yourself as someone funnier or wittier than you think you actually are. It’s still your voice. It’s still you telling the story, but you’re drawing out a particular aspect of your voice that enhances the story you’re telling.
This option is more complicated than the others. This is consciously changing your voice. I believe it can be done: that grandfather might help you get into a certain mindset if you want your story to have that kindly touch of “Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of Number 4 Privet Drive were proud to say…” Thinking of yourself as a historian might add a formal sort of flare to your high fantasy novel. Believing you’re hilarious may give you the confidence to put sillier elements into your story.
2. WHO ARE THEY TELLING IT TO?
I don’t mean this in terms of who you imagine is going to read your book. That’s a different matter entirely. What I’m talking about here is the narrator’s audience. This is usually just an audience imagined by the author, unless the format of the novel is epistolary or journal entry, or the narrator references them outright. Even so, it can be helpful to remember, however, that every story is told to someone. This can be intentional or unintentional, but it drastically changes how the story is told.
Here are some types of audiences:
A friend, which means they’re telling the story in an honest and casual manner, as though the reader is someone they trust with their innermost thoughts. I would say this is the most common “audience” for a novel told in the 1st person.
ex. The Shades of London series by Maureen Johnson
Someone they want to persuade, which depending on their character could mean being unreliable and defensive, or confessional and apologetic. They might be keeping a few secrets about their thoughts and feelings from the reader, and maybe even lying to the reader and/or themselves.
ex. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Historical record, which is not actually for historical record, but a more formal 3rd person that doesn’t focus on interacting with the reader so much as honestly reporting thoughts and events as they occur. I would say that this is one of the most common “audiences” for a novel written in 3rd person.
ex. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin
An audience referenced in the text itself. This is a book in full story-telling mode, where a 3rd person narrator both refers to the imagined audience and the fact that they are telling a story directly on the page. This is an older style of storytelling used to be more common than it is today. The imagined audience can be a certain type of reader (children in many classic children’s books). It can also be an audience that only exists in the word of the story itself, like prospective dragon naturalists.
ex. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
ex. A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan
Once you’ve settled these two matters, you have a structure for your narrative voice in place. The rest, depends on your voice as an author, and for that I can only give the following advice:
Read. Pay close attention to the voices of the books you admire, the way the narrative interacts with you as a reader and with the events of the text. Consider why you admire certain storytelling features and how you might implement similar features in your own writing.
Write and write a lot. Every word you put on the page is a choice you’ve made. Every choice you make will hone your voice, completely subconsciously.
Have fun telling your story. Don’t worry about the voice being polished or “good,” just tell the story in a way that’s enjoyable for you. If you’d like, experiment with different styles. Practice telling stories in the voices of people who don’t sound exactly like you. Try on ridiculous costumes. When you have fun telling a story, your reader will have fun listening to it.
