Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Most Fanfic writers are female, and most are teenagers and young women.

Various theories abound as to why, but the cause is most likely related to the fact that most visual porn is male-oriented (see: any adult video store or site) while most written porn is female-oriented (see: your local bookstore's erotica section) and Fanfiction, like porn, trades heavily in Author Appeal.

This trope is extremely common, even in fandoms that presumably lean heavily male, such as Star Trek, Naruto, and Transformers.

This trope has been in effect since well before the internet made it much easier to proliferate fanfic. Studies of early Star Trek fanfiction showed as many as 90% of authors were female in the 1970s, even though at the time such stories could only be shared through fanzines or through sending self-addressed-stamped-envelopes to the authors and having them mail you a manuscript.

This phenomenon has been subjected to academic analysis by ethnographer Camille Bacon-Smith and MIT's Henry Jenkins. Jenkins suggests in Textual Poachers that fanfiction is a reaction on the part of a female audience trying to find their own pleasures in media that caters mostly to males.

See also Shipping, Slash Fic, Everyone Is Gay, Estrogen Brigade, Het Is Ew. Compare Most Writers Are Male. Combine with The Internet Is for Porn to get All Women Are Lustful.

Creates a paradox when faced with the trope There Are No Girls on the Internet.

Only examples where a character in the work writes a fanfic are to be added. Parodies and deconstructions should not be added.

Examples of Most Fanfic Writers Are Girls include:

Anime and Manga

Fan Works

Live-Action TV

  • Supernatural features a female slash fic writer as a recurring character, with serious stalking tendency. Supernatural has an entire in-universe slash fandom writing about the show's main characters. They're almost as creepy and disturbing as the real thing they make fun of!
  • In the season two Psych episode with the case at the school for smart kids, one of the (male) students says to Shawn:

Student: Any leads? I'm adapting this into a Nancy Drew fanfic.

  • Inverted with Glee; Sandy openly admits to writing fanfiction.
  • It's implied that Willow of Buffy the Vampire Slayer used to write Doogie Howser, M.D. fanfic. (This is probably a Shout-Out to Neil Patrick Harris, the star of that show, who is a friend of Joss Whedon. And ironically, her eventual co-star on How I Met Your Mother.)
  • In Degrassi: The Next Generation, Clare starts writing Mary Sue fanfic based on a fictional vampire book series called Fortnight.
  • In an episode of Monk, Monk's self-proclaimed biggest fan asks him why doesn't he use his gun during a case. When he tells her that he doesn't carry one, she remembers that she made that detail up in a fanfic she wrote about him.

Video Games

  • In Dragon Age II, Isabela writes "friend fiction". We only get to hear a bit featuring Aveline and Donnic but according to Isabela, she does it for everyone.
    • However, she does it only as a fan of Varric, who is also a professional writer, who uses his friends as thinly veiled "inspirations" all the time.
  • In the Fable III side quest, The Pen is Mightier, one of the books is entitled The Pangs of Sunset. It is essentially just an erotic novel featuring the Heros from the previous game. It is implied to contain both Slash and Femslash and is written by a woman named Ilona Pureheart

Web Comics

  • Garnet and Gure features this strip, wherein the largely female culture of fanfiction is explained.
  • Questionable Content features two female fanfic writers, Tai and Marigold; Tai's stuff is apparently good (she writes a raved about Harry Potter piece), Marigold's, not so much. After a near miss where lesbian Tai hits on straight Marigold, the latter seeks to make up for the awkwardness by posting a story to Tai wherein Hermione and Ginny "go all the way."
  • Aeris from VG Cats writes erotic fanfiction about Tidus and Auron, has dreams about Fox and Falco, and likes the idea of a hot molotov throbbing in Bill's hand.
  • Rose in Homestuck writes really awful wizard fanfic.
    • Andrew once said that said fanfic is supposed to be Rose's subconscious retelling Hivebent.
    • There's little evidence to suggest this was actually fanfiction. Only Dave ever called it fanfiction, and its status as a book series in post-scratch Earth suggests it's just a wizard story, not a fanfic.
    • Additionally, the female troll UranianUmbra admits to writing fanfic about the Alpha Kids.
  • In Shortpacked, Amber writes a Web Serial Novel that is a pastiche of Twilight.

Web Original

Western Animation

  • In an episode of Family Guy, Peter insists that Meg is going to write Ugly Betty fanfiction for a career.

Other Media

  • This Time article on fan fiction mentions this phenomenon.
  • An article by the Guardian also mentions this observation, linking directly to The Other Tropes Wiki's version of this very page.