Geek guys no longer get the girls?

[roseveare]

I keep increasingly seeing snippets of a "nice guy/geek guy characters are bad" u-turn in fandom which to be honest, what? Because stupid me, I'm still wed to the notion that when I say a character is a nice guy that's a good thing, and I have no idea where the original meta is that this stems from or when but

Comments

[rheasilvia]

Yes, the waters are definitely very muddied. I haven't run into a general condemnation of geekish characters yet, but then I am generally pretty removed from fandom thse days, so I'm not surprised it's passed me by. And unfortunately it makes sense that this kind of overcompensation would occur, with fans who can't make clear distinctions more or less dogpiling on every character who fits a general profile.

Not every shy geekish character is the skeevy creeper type of Nice Guy - some actually *are* genuine nice guys. :-)

Personally, I am still creeped out by Stiles on Teen Wolf. Haven't watched that show in ages, but in the first seasons, Stiles was a Nice Guy of disgusting magnitude, and neither the show itself nor the fans ever realized it. The trope is that well-established. He drooled over and stalked an entirely uninterested girl, lied to get into her bedroom when she was drugged, and almost slept with her while she was drugged. The narrative presented it as great nobility of spirit on his part that he decided *not* to sleep with her at the last moment, because in her drugged state she mistook him for her boyfriend and would have gone along with it.

Try to mention that Stiles is a skeevy Nice Guy anywhere, and you will get driven out of fandom. Different rules apply to particularly beloved characters. I've been told that "Stiles really loves her!!", you see.

[roseveare]

It's not an outright stated general condemnation that I've seen anywhere, more that it's out there as a vibe? It's really weird because I feel like I've been stumbling over it on odd occasions because there are people who want to apply it to Nathan (to which I somewhat blankly replied, "but he's not a geek..." on first encounter, and on reassessment in this context it really doesn't fit -- partners first with Audrey, reciprocation, and the chasing has been to keep her with all the elements falling in on them from outside, though they've both done iffy things with the other's agency at times) and I've kind of noticed it in non-Haven things that I casually read.

I haven't watched Teen Wolf and tbh its fanfic scares me. Everytime I see a fic it seems to have an ABO or alpha male slant. (I have a squick. After all these years, the internet managed to find one.) I feel even less inclined to watch it now.

I think that certainly I grew up watching those narratives where the guy chased the girl and she was seen as mean if she didn't want him, and I wasn't much interested in that type of story or romance, I wanted reciprocation, I wanted better female characters, and one of my favourite movies has the female muscle/best friend as the one with the secret unrequited crush on the guy... but it's still almost like a part of the wallpaper? Which makes it hard to shift.