I love the whole "Malfoid" thing, I really do. And i'm not even the target audience. I've enjoyed writing it, and its totally unleashed my muse. I've been thinking about why the whole Malfoid fanfiction phenomenon is doing so ridiculously well, and I think I've figured something out. Men are absolutely STARVING for good romance. Plenty of women, too, I guess. Not pornography. Not harems. Not some elaborate sexual power fantasy. Romance. Two people who who are confused by their feelings, who make mistakes, who struggle to understand one another, and who slowly, awkwardly, sometimes painfully fall in love. You know. That thing human beings have been doing to each other for thousands of years. In story form. Somewhere along the way, the publishing industry decided that men don't like romance. (xitter.cf/ShamashAran/status/210…) The alternatives everyone's been offered for the past couple of decades have been, to put it delicately, a radioactive dumpster fire. On one side, you've got male-oriented harem fantasies where every woman within a fifty-mile radius is aching for a sexual encounter, in graphicly written detail. On the other, you've got the darker corners of romantasy, where the height of romantic fulfillment involves being kidnapped, abused (physically, mentally, or both) or literally raped by a seven-foot-tall monster with the emotional maturity of a malfunctioning garbage disposal. I'm sitting here thinking: CAN TWO PEOPLE JUST FALL IN LOVE WITHOUT SOMEBODY GETTING RAPED OR DEVELOPING A HAREM? Apparently that's too much to ask. This brings me back to Malfoid. Here's a huge set of stories written by many different folks, about two fundamentally decent people, raised in very different worlds, struggling with their feelings, their prejudices, their loyalties, and their expectations. Neither is perfect. Neither always knows what they're doing. Sometimes they're absolute idiots. They have something, and we get to watch it develop in story form. The romance isn't about sexual conquest or domination. It's about vulnerability, trust, affection, and the terrifying realization that another human being has become extraordinarily important to you. And people are eating it up. Which brings me to my theory. Malfoid has caused a false vacuum decay in the quantum field of romantic literature. For decades, we've been trapped in a metastable state where the publishing industry insists that men don't want romance, and male readers have been conditioned to believe there isn't any romance worth reading. Now, comes along comes a wholesome little love story about two emotionally constipated school-age British wizards, and suddenly the entire field collapses into a new, lower-energy vacuum state. The resulting energy release is absolutely catastrophic. Instead of gamma radiation annihilating the universe, we're getting seventeen metric gigatons of YEARNING. Turns out men didn't hate romance. They just wanted something worth falling in love with.