I don’t mean to be rude; but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this, does anyone have any examples?
- Supernatural
- Doctor Who (Steven Moffat specifically)
- Sherlock (Steven Moffat specifically)
- Actually Steven Moffat is basically just this sentiment given human form.
- A version of this happened with The Magicians, tbh. Though instead of expectation: men, reality: women it was expectation: smug nihilists, reality: mentally ill queer folks.
- Arguably Game of Thrones.
If we broaden it outside of television…I think Star Wars falls into this, at least the sequel trilogy. Maybe the MCU as well. And I can’t help but think of every band that’s ever complained that their fanbase is mostly women. 5 Seconds of Summer comes immediately to mind.
In general, most white male creators seem to have this massively entitled mindset where they want–and think they deserve–the time, attention, and enthusiasm that creative fandom (i.e. the side of fandom more dominated by women) is known for.
They want our eyes for ratings, our word-of-mouth for free publicity, our metas for social media buzz, and our spending power for merch and cons. But they don’t want us. And they don’t really want the responsibility of telling a story to a thoughtful, engaged audience, regardless of that audience’s demographic makeup. They just want to be praised for whatever schlock they cough up.
And like any other spoiled brat, they will break their toys before they share them.
It goes all the way to the top for kids shows. Toy sales will crash a show. Makes sense, but if those toys are gendered for boys instead of the female viewers, they won’t usually switch up the marketing and move them to the girl aisle. They cancel the show outright.
Mind you it is perfectly possible to make the switch in marketing, but execs would rather throw it all out than have something that doesn’t perform well with male viewers. For example the Rey merch was not expected to be popular, for some reason, there had to be public outcry to get merch of one of the main 3 protagonists. A PROTAGONIST. The fact that she wasn’t a huge part of the 1st launch says a lot already.
And what happened when female fans got too invested in the Sequel Trilogy? The entire writers room didn’t necessarily lash out, but they sure forgot how to behave.
Paul Dini: Superhero cartoon execs don’t want largely female audiences
#WhereIsRey (initial)
#WhereIsRey (ongoing)
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was designed to be the opposite of The Last Jedi
You’re all sitting on the hot take of the decade tbh
And yet when they fond out that boys were watching MLP:FIM in droves, they had NO PROBLEM with it.
#SONS OF ANARCHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!#LITERALLY SONS OF ANARCHY IS THE BIGGEST EXAMPLE OF THIS LIKE EVER#kurt sutter wrote that show for MEN and ended up with an overwhelmingly female audience#because he’s actually a good writer and knows how to develop characters well and wrote excellent female characters#but once he realized that his audience was almost entirely women he literally took it out on tara and gemma in the show#but like tara specifically#he resented her character for being a huge draw for female viewers so he tore her development to shreds and killed her#in the most brutal gut wrenching way possible#kurt sutter you will pay for your crimes#i actually wrote a manifesto about this on one of my old blogs i should try to find it sldkjsldfjsdljf#long post (via@m-oonknight)
OMG YES. I LOVED Sons of Anarchy, especially the women and then I got to season 6 and it was like - everything was just tossed in the trash? And like, why did Sutter hate that Tara drew tons of attention? That should have been a good thing! He should have been like “Hey folks, this girl’s getting us more viewers, let’s put her in more scenes!” It just doesn’t make sense to me. MEN don’t make sense to me.
The 100 too. I’ll never forget how Jason Rothenberg would attacked female fans on Twitter and mock them in interviews, and then post links to male fan discussions on Reddit to praise and thank them. In his goodbye letter to the show he SPECIFICALLY thanked Reddit and it was so disgusting.
Star Trek from TNG on was also a boy’s club, even though the TOS fans were mostly women. Women, in fact, who literally created modern fandom with their zines. But after TNG it was all, “Women don’t understand Star Trek, only smart men hur dur.”
I think it would be harder for us to find examples of when this DIDNT happen than when it did. It happens all the time.
Doesn’t stop it from boggling the mind
(though it could probably start to make some sense if you follow the money past audience bases to maybe a couple of investors or like a rich patron … 🤔)
Stooooop I just wrote a masters thesis on this shit. Media creation and distribution is a means by which dominant power structures consolidate their hegemony. Dominantly situated creators get upset when the audience they attract isn’t the audience they wanted, because they view the whole creation and sharing of the fiction as an exercise to sustain kyriarchal conditions that benefit themselves. When the audience is Other, they see it as a failure of those efforts and lash out.
Simply, they’re trying to assert a particular worldview via fiction, and upon getting confronted with something else, begin foot stamping. It’s not just men wanting male attention and gatekeeping. It’s that the fiction in the first place was an attempt to curate dominance and whoopsie! they miscalculated.
(anyway if anyone wants to read 35k words of philosophy about this, hmu)
I think a lot about an interview I heard with Bo Burnham a few years ago, where he talks about this phenomenon with his own work. He gained a large audience of teenage girls, and people in comedy spaces would look down on him for that or say what a shame it was, but he responded differently:
“The real truth is, I would perform my show and I would meet kids after and young girls would come up to me and they understood what I was expressing in that bit onstage way more than guys my own age. Way more. So if there was a bridge between us that I had to cross to write the movie [Eighth Grade], it was built to me by them. I felt understood by them before I presumed to understand them.”
Instead of trying to change his comedy, he decided to lean into and celebrate the audience that he actually had by making a movie specifically about the experiences of a teenage girl. It’s fascinating to hear him talk about how he got there, but also to acknowledge how rare that reaction is.
This is all true but help-help-i-need-an-adult asked if there are any examples where this didn’t happen. And I literally only know of ONE.
Behold! The ONE thing that bothered to relate its female audience with positivity:

Source: June 1998 issue of Newtype, in a special supplement/booklet titled 「まるごと富野」 (“Marugoto Tomino” / “All About Tomino”)
Clip from the NHK documentary where Tomino says this AGAIN and continues on to say that if they wanted a movie he knew they had to hold on to this part of the fandom. https://x.com/tayuta0079/status/1577387893135384577

Shout out to Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino for being a real one.
basically begging people to look at the the onion headed infowars shit theyre putting out this is fucking me up badly
i dont care for fnaf at all but something about the way Freddy's face is built is like....i get it
no! not him!!!
POST CANCELLED
what the fuck is going on in the fnaf fandom
You guys… defeated… wereralph?????
I JUST LIKE WEREWOLVES AND WARIO IM NOT LIKE YOU FREAKS WE ARE NOT THE SAME
They're sending a trans woman to prison for life over the fact that she attended an anti-ICE protest where a cop died (she had already left the protest when the 'violence' started)
please stop making stuff up to fit this nonsense separatism and read what hill actually has to say
I do not believe in 50 years. I don’t. Maybe I’m in denial but I still kind of don’t believe that I’m actually going to serve out this whole sentence and I think there’s a little reason for optimism in that regard. There is a big movement of support for a political pardon for us from the next Democratic president of the United States. My mother told me that my father said that the next time a Democratic president is in office, he’s going to write him a letter to ask for a pardon for me. And that was the first positive interaction that I’ve had with my dad in five years. And when I heard that, I just burst into tears and, like, just became hysterical for five minutes because it was just the perfection of the absurdity of the time to me. My arch-conservative father, who I can’t really stand to be in the same room as right now because of his transphobia, that he would do this thing, right, like appeal to a Democratic president on my behalf. And it really shows this bipartisan sentiment that this is obviously unjust, this is obviously political. You know, if this arch-conservative and I can find common ground over the belief that this is a political persecution, I think that there’s a very strong chance for some future good thing to come our way out of that.
...
[interviewer]: Is there anything else I didn’t ask you that you want to get out, that you wanna say in this context? Obviously, people will see this and I know you have limited connection to the outside world.
AH: I would say the same thing that I’ve said before, which is: Be brave. We’ve been accused of being terrorists, but terror is the power that this administration wants to ply in order to keep people quiet, in order to keep people content. Fear of incarceration, fear of homelessness, you know, it’s this fear, this fear that we’re going to lose our privileges, that we are going to use our comfort, that keeps people docile, keeps people from speaking the truth. Don’t be afraid.
https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/autumn-hill-speaks-from-jail-after
i have to bring this up every time I see this: nobody died at the protest Autumn Hill was at. A cop suffered minor injuries. Autumn Hill wasn't even present when that happened.
as for the tweet that was screenshotted: her fellow protestors are in prison alongside her, that's why they're not protesting to demand her release. Here's a website with more information about the whole case. We're still trying to bring them all home, regardless of gender
i hate constantly seeing this fucking post on my dash spreading misinformation to make trans women feel like they will be abandoned.
There has been a lot of organising and protesting and fundraising and solidarity around the prairieland defendants, and actually autumn hill has been one of the main people in the spotlights for that, out of all the arrestees.
I dont know what the original post is meant to do except spread misinformation (no cop died) and giving activist left-wing trans women a false sense of abandonment and defeatism.
Someone will point out the disproportionate popularity of White male characters and people will come out of the woodwork to go 'that's not racism or misogyny it's just this character is more interesting/hot/relatable' as if the very notion that White men are more interesting/hot/relatable than women or characters of colour isn't literally racism and misogyny. Thanks for proving the point!
"Disproportionate"
Wow, it's almost like the majority of fans are white people and they best relate to characters of their own race, just like you're doing.
As a European, I knew Americans have been asking for walkable cities but i had no idea it was literally this hostile
WHERE DO YOU WALK YOUR DOGS!?!
lol yeah
Its to the point where most Americans can’t conceive of a walkable community because everywhere is like this and several generations have now grown up in a world like this. There’s hardly anyone that can conceive of a world that isn’t like this. Most people either cave in and get a car or end up isolated. I live in a city that’s mostly walkable by North American standards and I still end up walking in the dirt on the edge of a stroad a lot of the time.
And don't forget, we can't get decent public transportation either.
















