The article is much more balanced than comments here make it out to be. Sure, the title got it on the front page, but the article considers different possibilities. For example, it addresses the issue of older books having plenty of male characters by arguing that kids have a harder time getting into older books due to the pacing / lack of lots of action. Watching today’s popular anime, I believe it. Whether you believe it or not, there’s more depth to this article than it sounds like from the comments.
Based on article, the male to female characters ratio is 2:1 in all published books and male main characters are easily available in top charts (they are not burried).
2:1 is assymetric ... but hardly a "lack of male characters" situation.
My kids read Harry Potter and Percy Jackson growing up in the US (both with male protagonists), and they were huge fans of the LOTR movie series (with its nine members of the fellowship of the ring, all male).
It's really hard for me to believe American kids suddenly can't get enough books with male protagonists. If that's the case, the fault must lie with whoever's choosing books for those kids.
That’s exactly it. If I suggest your children read LotR or Harry Potter or Narnia, I’ve done nothing special, nothing interesting, nothing worthy of accolades from my peers.
But if I convince them to read New Shit and the Current Thing then everything is golden.
Imagine how the teachers felt who suggested Potter before it went big. That’s a high many will chase.
My problem with books recommended by schools and parents are that they are the insipid kind of books.
Yes I'm a fan of Jane Austen's works but I needed to read some action fantasy books.
Boys love super hero oriented themes who are standing between the innocent ppl and the villain. And also video game mechanics in their stories.
We need to introduce the kids to those books.
Royal Road, webnovel have lots of such stories.
Maybe parents and the school authorities are not looking there.
I just read Phil Tucker's "Dawn of the Void vol 1" and it is so nice for any boy to read.
What the English faculty in colleges and schools need is to work with the authors of the "Levelling genre" or "Isekai genre" and modify those books with the reading abilities of those boys according to their grades while keeping the credits with the original authors.
You can't seriously be arguing for Isekai's and levelling.
You could fix it. Drop the levelling, keep the portal story-- portal stories can be fun, C.S. Lewis and Astrid Lindgren have done portal or portal-adjacent stories.
I don't think a fixed portal story is necessarily attractive to idiot-readers though. I think popularity of Isekai or levelling stories might have more to do with impatience and inability to tolerate uncertainty.
It's not the genre, it's the writing. Just because sausages are usually sold at a hotdog stand doesn't mean it's only a street-food level ingredient; there is always a place for some Michelin star gourmet bangers and mash or whatever.
There is an obvious retort about Narnia being an isekai, but I feel a more appropriate comparison would be Ascendence of a Bookworm, which is an actually well written Japanese isekai literature (written by a female author and featuring a female protagonist, ironic given the main topic) that explores the clash of Earth based norms and customs in a society where gods actually exist, and nobles are literally superior beings, since only their god gifted mana can turn a blank land into fertile soil. In such a world, what value does a mana-less peasant have?
But it does so in a narrative that's engaging rather than scolding; the MC realises that norms arise out of local conditions, and instead of going on some weird emancipation spree, mostly acknowledges local the situations, but still tries her darndest to change things given her constraints (with literal gods intervening, there is little she can do).
The story is titled Ascendence of a 'Bookworm' because her main tool of rebellion is democratising books and knowledge; by inventing the paper and printing press, she will (slowly) help peasants improve their lives over the next coming generations; they will never become equal to nobles who are literally god-gifted, but it's still an important ripple that will change the trajectory of the world.
It's an Japanese isekai, but it resists the urge to dabble in the other other tropes. Yes, Sturgeon's law still applies, 90% of isekai will still be trash and slop, but if you promote good isekai books, then there is still chance for future good literature, even in such a maligned genre.
Interested in some good ol' reading slop? maybe with a side-dish of a nice community? you like comments, right? you like discussions about a fast hard hitting chapter?
I've heard of spacebattles forum, haven't delved into it because of the forum structure makes reading awkward, i prefer RR's presentation, not the best but atleast it's a damn website and not a forum lol.
as for worm... i read it a bit but dropped it because i arrived too late (iirc author had already moved to the third series when i heard of it) and the backlog was too daunting. That said, apparently there ia graphic novel coming up so might look into it.
The same is true for teen books for girls, where like half of the bestsellers are romantasy, with many of them going into the softcore territory.
I am no pearl clutching moralist, but having the mainstream publishing industry push softcore smut onto young girls and even virtue-signaling about how girls read a lot of books, is not something I'm comfortable with.
It's like selling cigarettes to kids, and bragging about how they seem to like them.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is not the height of literature, but I wouldn't say it's harmful.
That said, I don't have a daughter of reading age, so actual parents might have better takes on this.
Where does this nonsense come from? I didn't nor did anyone I know. I snorted any kind of adventure books but superpowers? Nuh uh, boring and cheapest of plot devices, and yes, I thought so at 7.
My parents brought me to the library every two weeks and let me read whatever I wanted, I think that's most important. Also, show you read yourself, and if you don't, wonder why.
It was "ONLY like action heroes". And yes, if you by default assume they like ONLY that, you are assuming they are dumber then girls. Because girls get more nuanced and smarter literature mixed with junk.
What you will also achieve is alienation of boys who are indeed smarter and get bored with reading same hero action book again.
I remain firm in replying to precisely that sentiment. I don't believe many will admit it, but this is how many view boys: stupider and less-capable girls.
Ye gods; no, absolutely not. The isekai, levelling, etc. genre is almost entirely fanfic grade writing with a vanishingly thin coat of editorial polish on the few that get formally published. Characterization is trash, plotting is trash, and the background is the most generic of Tolkein/CRPG/JRPG rip-offs. Even the best of the webnovels are barely the literary equivalent of CMOT Dibbler's dubious sausages and the majority are far worse.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is marvelous, though. Threshold is also really good. Most of its terrible, but it's within error bounds for a lot of book quality.
"Harder to get boys into books" means "scholastic sales are down" - it's hard for me to believe that with 50,000 + novels that we can't find any that are appealing - but they're not scholastic "new" and they don't move the money the way they need.
A boy (or girl! They're allowed to read, too now, like Belle) buying a copy of The Hobbit doesn't help much, they need consumption of the new mass-produced stuff to keep the machine running.
I can't imagine how hard it is to try to make it as an author in 2026. Between the sheer number of people writing, the suspicions of AI use, trying to be discovered, it must be completely demoralizing.
My friend wrote a book during the pandemic before AI got too good, and gave up/deleted his work after no publishers called him. I guess a publisher found his manuscript about a year later and he got a call, but turned it down because he deleted his work.
I was recently lamenting to him that he probably lost the last chance he had before the flood of slop books really hit.
I would recommend Magician: Apprentice and the sequel. It's basically a group of 12-year-old boys growing up in a fantasy world - one becomes a magician, one a fighter, and there are others...
I think this is pandering to quietly misogynist people; books don't disappear after they're written. All of the hundreds of books with a male protagonist that I read as a kid are still around, so if the industry has over-corrected it doesn't meaningfully affect anyone.
Let's not forget that girls had no problem getting into books with male protagonists. If boys refuse to read books with female protagonists, maybe we should address that directly?
But they did. Didn't they? Isn't that the whole ass problem? That we live in a patriarchal society defeating women while they're still girls? If that's not the case then sure, boys will be fine. If it is the case then boys deserve the same consideration girls are getting and you can't just sit their intimating that 6 year old boys' malignant misogyny is the problem
kid humans are a perfect miniaturization of adult humans, lacking the corruption of society. are you saying that the perfect representation of humanity is incorrect in some way ? if so, that would imply our society has drifted from the intended purpose of its constituents.
Kids are influenced by their parents, their teachers, and their peers. It's no coincidence that kids raised in some environments are more likely to segregate themselves into gendered groups than others.
Finally someone said it!
I understand Shakespeare introduced many pearls into literature but I personally know no one who has said that Shakespeare induced them the love of reading in their formative years. So why are we teaching Shakespare to grade school children
Shakespeare has 2 problems for school age children:
1) The language is middle English and difficult to read
2) Its public domain so publishers can't make money from it
When Shakespeare is made into a movie, even when it doesn't modernize the language, those movies are hits. There was an entire generation whose love of stories came from a movie based on Shakespeare using middle English. So this entire line of thought is complete nonsense. The books being published ATM are ideologically driven and that's why people don't want to read them. People acting ignorant about this are the problem and always will be.
I didn’t want to like this article but it was quite good. And I didn’t want to believe its thesis but then I realized I was subject to the same phenomenon.
I never developed an interest in watching movies or tv and still don’t. I mean it was interesting to see people in different situations, but in the 60s and 70s they never had people who looked like my family, so they weren’t that interesting or engaging for more than a short time.
So there’s at least some evidence that this phenomenon is real.
> Out of curiosity, she compiled a database of 2026 releases and combed through them, analyzing their protagonists. Umesi found[1] a surprising disparity: Girl protagonists outnumbered boys by a ratio of 2 to 1. Some categories, such as realistic fiction and mystery, were especially lopsided, she told me, with ratios of more than 3 to 1. “Girls are taking over!” she said, with a laugh.
> Umesi’s survey offers just one snapshot of the publishing landscape. But others I spoke with in the children’s-book business shared the perception that today’s protagonists are predominantly female. The dearth of male protagonists, some told me, has made it harder to get boys in this age bracket interested in reading.
> The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde, even to the boys themselves. Kids rarely state such preferences outright, Melissa LaSalle, the children’s-book buyer at Old Town Books, in Alexandria, Virginia, told me. Their parents sometimes will, albeit “in a slightly embarrassed way.” Of course, individuals might not connect to a book for any number of reasons: sense of humor, narrative stakes, cover art. “But the unifying theme that I hear resoundingly from parents of boy readers,” LaSalle said, “is, at the end of the day, there are not enough boy protagonists.”
Maybe it was just because I was a precocious reader at 8-12, but at that age almost none of the "age-appropriate" books in my school library actually interested me. You start to think about difficult "adult" subjects like relationships, mortality, conflict etc, yet no material available to you really addresses these ideas in a way that doesn't feel like they're just completely coddling you from reality. I had to go to the public library to find actual novels I felt were at my maturity level. You had 8 year olds using racial slurs against each other playing call of duty and you're worried they're scarred for life reading "fuck" in a novel? Come on children aren't idiots, expect more from them.
I was at my typical bookstore lately and I walked right out again. All the recommendations by staff and bestsellers all anchored around "I'm a woman and I see the world like so and so". I wanted inspiration on life in general (think The Alchemist or whatever). Not how it is to be a woman. Not hating, but I'm a dude in my mid thirties and an avid reader. The whole bookstore was remade to cater to young women, tiktok viewers (has selfie walls and shit), and table top games. I get that there's market pressure, but it was already hard to buy books already (like english books taking 3 weeks to be ordered and such). I don't want to order on amazon ...
Really a pity. Another big store opened 100m from them. Hope they get their ass whooped.
Frankly, while it might be jarring no longer to be the prioritized demographic, I've realized that the proper response is to be grateful to the romantansy fans for propping up the genre fiction publishing industry. My fellow sci-fi/fantasy fans sure aren't doing their part to buy books, so I gotta appreciate romantasy booktok for subsidizing the books that I like to read with their purchases of books that I don't want to read.
We just spent the last several years hearing how representation matters, and when the numbers flip sufficiently that a new group is now under represented they get told "that's too bad".
When you look at where money is spent and by whom, keep it in mind as you shift the demographics of who's watching / reading. The money moves with the groups interest, and it doesn't necessarily get filled by the new demographic.
> We just spent the last several years hearing how representation matters
this reminds me of the green piccolo meme (from 4chan, i think?). Piccolo, fyi, is a green alien character from the famous anime/manga series Dragon Ball Z, which is popular with young boys all over the world.
The meme is that boys, regardless of the race and language or other physical conditions, see themselves in a green alien character that looks and sounds nothing like them, and will happy play with a Piccolo figurine.
Meanwhile girls (supposedly, according to the meme) require a Barbie doll that looks and feels like them, and hence all the various dolls that are made to represent the diverse young female audience.
I don't know how true it actually is, but this stereotype tends to format a lot of the representation discussion online. Boys grow up to be men who chafe at the 'diversity' and 'representation' topics, because they would happily see them selves represented in anything, even if it were a green alien. To them, looks are less important than actions. Piccolo was a good father figure to Gohan, and they aim to be as good as him.
therefore, books written with the (supposedly) feminine themes (even if the MC is a boy) tend to not click with boys.
>Boys grow up to be men who chafe at the 'diversity' and 'representation' topics, because they would happily see them selves represented in anything, even if it were a green alien.
Frieren is a manga that has a female protagonist and is wildly popular with boys, elsewhere in this thread I talk about Ascendence of a Bookworm, another story with a female protagonist, popular with boys.
Yes, female MCs are less likely to be common in boys literature, but if the story is good, then boys will read it. What makes the story 'good' in the eyes of boys, is about the themes, at least to my understanding.
I believe Japan does it best, they clearly delineate young/mature, male/female categories in terms of themes, and then have stories can still have a female MC but thematically targeted towards the category 'young+male'(Shonen) or 'mature+male' (Seinen)
>When you look at where money is spent and by whom, keep it in mind as you shift the demographics of who's watching / reading. The money moves with the groups interest, and it doesn't necessarily get filled by the new demographic.
I'm not clear on what exactly you mean. My best guess is: "media is produced to satisfy an audience's desires" but I'm not even confident that's what you mean.
Media is not produced to satisfy an audience's desires; that's only indirectly and coincidental; more and more.
Media is produced to satisfy an executive's desire, which is often based on what they think the audience wants, but sometimes is based on what they think the audience should want.
I don't think that's the incentive. Executives don't care about such things. It's just that they are risk adverse, they try to avoid drama as that's a risk.
Media is rarely passive and never just follows where consumers point to, is it. Eveeybody with some power has some agenda to push on others.
I dont even mean cia/military-backed ultra patriotic movies from hollywood of the past, eveeybody simply has their opninion and even journalism is rarely objective.
Representation never mattered, what mattered was to get a different group on top. It's not just men vs women, you see it everywhere. It's like how a poster of black and Asian people is "diverse".
Have you considered that when people use the phrase “increase diversity,” they mean across the entire medium? That a movie or book can have, in a vacuum, a fairly limited cast, but if that cast is otherwise unrepresented across film or literature it does increase diversity?
I'd much rather have a diversity of stories with appropriate casting than artificially-induced representation via race-swapping cast members. By all means, use diverse casting for modern and future-facing stories, but give me fewer black elves and asian dwarves in old, exclusively European stories and more stories from Asian, African, South American, etc. cultures.
As a small example: I'd love to see more about Anansi, the African spider trickster god elevated into mainstream media. I can only recall him appearing in American Gods and an episode or two of Gargoyles in the 90s.
Are people saying "that's too bad?" Or are they frustrated to see endless criticism of this argument when it is applied to other groups over the past five years while this topic continues to get litigated.
I support grants for authors to create a wider variety of literature. Too bad the NEA and NEH have been slashed to ribbons.
Current generations deserve all the same fairness. It's not a good argument to say that group X deserves less fairness because people trust belonged to group X decades ago had an unfair advantage.
There is an implication of advertising; old books obviously exist but no longer advertised not are the front and center when you enter the book store.
I guess the implication is that without such advertisements, old books are lost media for young kids. Their first brush is with new media that IS advertised to them, and upon finding it not compatible to their tastes (at least acc to the article) young boys tune out of the reading hobby altogether.
Obvious retort is that this where parents should step in... but that's a whole different debate.
That's isn't true. And maybe in the US that's different, but mandatory reading in my country mostly contains books with male protagonist (still have to read at least one of: I am a legend, Fahrenheit 451, Brave new world or 1984 at 17).
That is not true, if you go to the bookstore, they are advertised. In fact the 2:1 boy girl ratio author blames is among all the published books - the top lists have smaller assymetry.
And that is not even talking about the fact that 2:1 male female male character does not make male main characters hard to find.
Addressed in the article (which I recognize is behind a paywall so you may not have seen it):
“But even if the backlist contains a wealth of fiction starring boys, that’s not always a help to today’s young readers. Laura Gardner, a veteran middle-school librarian in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, told me that although some of the classics still stand up—kids love Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet and its sequels, along with the I Survived series—many students have a hard time getting into literature from past decades. Thanks to the disruptions of the pandemic, middle schoolers are coming into Gardner’s library with lower reading levels than they were when she started her career 17 years ago. But even the high-achieving students, she’s noticed, can’t be coaxed into picking up a book for fun unless it’s action-packed. “If the pacing isn’t pretty quick, then you’re going to lose the kid,” Gardner said. Older titles tend to feature more descriptive language and longer chapters; they start with more exposition, and have plots that unspool more slowly than today’s attention spans are used to.”
Oodles of graphic novels these days, plus all the formulaic initial books like Magic Treehouse and Box Car Children, and then you blow their minds by slipping them The Great Brain, The Mad Scientists’ Club, Tom Sawyer, The Dark is Rising…
Maybe the publishers could start a campaign to recruit more male writers, and put greater effort around promoting and publishing their books. Then we could take those books and market them to boys and say look, you can be a writer too.
> The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde, even to the boys themselves. Kids rarely state such preferences outright, Melissa LaSalle, the children’s-book buyer at Old Town Books, in Alexandria, Virginia, told me. Their parents sometimes will, albeit “in a slightly embarrassed way.” Of course, individuals might not connect to a book for any number of reasons: sense of humor, narrative stakes, cover art. “But the unifying theme that I hear resoundingly from parents of boy readers,” LaSalle said, “is, at the end of the day, there are not enough boy protagonists.”
Meanwhile, it used to be a standard talking point that girls need more female protagonists to identify with, same with other protected classes.
It would be nice if the arguments were applied consistently.
It is more or less inevitable that successful representation pushes will overcorrect and you get a situation like this. It doesn’t have to be badly intentioned, and it’ll work itself out as the market corrects itself. But my boys have plenty of books to read with male protagonists if they want them. Percy Jackson alone has carried one of my kids through a long stretch of recreational reading. There is, you know, centuries of literature for children available during which male protagonists were over represented.
There are plenty of other cultural pressures for boys to read less than girls, though. For example, the prominence of male-dominated sports could be drawing their attention.
I’m wondering if the causal arrow goes the other way: fewer male readers leading to fewer male protagonists.
If that’s the case, we are already looking at the market correction, we just don’t like it.
Now lets see the atlantic write endless articles advocating for greater representation of women, racial minorities, lgbt people, and disabled people in media where they are underrepresented.
The article is much more balanced than comments here make it out to be. Sure, the title got it on the front page, but the article considers different possibilities. For example, it addresses the issue of older books having plenty of male characters by arguing that kids have a harder time getting into older books due to the pacing / lack of lots of action. Watching today’s popular anime, I believe it. Whether you believe it or not, there’s more depth to this article than it sounds like from the comments.
Based on article, the male to female characters ratio is 2:1 in all published books and male main characters are easily available in top charts (they are not burried).
2:1 is assymetric ... but hardly a "lack of male characters" situation.
Anything not 50/50 is asymmetric; your choice of word is downplaying the issue. 51/49 is not the same as 33/66.
33/66 is the female/male ratio int he police force where I live and it’s tough for women.
Based on context, I assume you meant 1:2?
My kids read Harry Potter and Percy Jackson growing up in the US (both with male protagonists), and they were huge fans of the LOTR movie series (with its nine members of the fellowship of the ring, all male).
It's really hard for me to believe American kids suddenly can't get enough books with male protagonists. If that's the case, the fault must lie with whoever's choosing books for those kids.
That’s exactly it. If I suggest your children read LotR or Harry Potter or Narnia, I’ve done nothing special, nothing interesting, nothing worthy of accolades from my peers.
But if I convince them to read New Shit and the Current Thing then everything is golden.
Imagine how the teachers felt who suggested Potter before it went big. That’s a high many will chase.
My problem with books recommended by schools and parents are that they are the insipid kind of books. Yes I'm a fan of Jane Austen's works but I needed to read some action fantasy books. Boys love super hero oriented themes who are standing between the innocent ppl and the villain. And also video game mechanics in their stories. We need to introduce the kids to those books. Royal Road, webnovel have lots of such stories. Maybe parents and the school authorities are not looking there. I just read Phil Tucker's "Dawn of the Void vol 1" and it is so nice for any boy to read.
What the English faculty in colleges and schools need is to work with the authors of the "Levelling genre" or "Isekai genre" and modify those books with the reading abilities of those boys according to their grades while keeping the credits with the original authors.
You can't seriously be arguing for Isekai's and levelling.
You could fix it. Drop the levelling, keep the portal story-- portal stories can be fun, C.S. Lewis and Astrid Lindgren have done portal or portal-adjacent stories.
I don't think a fixed portal story is necessarily attractive to idiot-readers though. I think popularity of Isekai or levelling stories might have more to do with impatience and inability to tolerate uncertainty.
Isekai says what: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_A...
The last thing we want people to get hooked on is the isekai genre. It's just insipid low-effort wish-fulfillment.
It's not the genre, it's the writing. Just because sausages are usually sold at a hotdog stand doesn't mean it's only a street-food level ingredient; there is always a place for some Michelin star gourmet bangers and mash or whatever.
There is an obvious retort about Narnia being an isekai, but I feel a more appropriate comparison would be Ascendence of a Bookworm, which is an actually well written Japanese isekai literature (written by a female author and featuring a female protagonist, ironic given the main topic) that explores the clash of Earth based norms and customs in a society where gods actually exist, and nobles are literally superior beings, since only their god gifted mana can turn a blank land into fertile soil. In such a world, what value does a mana-less peasant have?
But it does so in a narrative that's engaging rather than scolding; the MC realises that norms arise out of local conditions, and instead of going on some weird emancipation spree, mostly acknowledges local the situations, but still tries her darndest to change things given her constraints (with literal gods intervening, there is little she can do).
The story is titled Ascendence of a 'Bookworm' because her main tool of rebellion is democratising books and knowledge; by inventing the paper and printing press, she will (slowly) help peasants improve their lives over the next coming generations; they will never become equal to nobles who are literally god-gifted, but it's still an important ripple that will change the trajectory of the world.
It's an Japanese isekai, but it resists the urge to dabble in the other other tropes. Yes, Sturgeon's law still applies, 90% of isekai will still be trash and slop, but if you promote good isekai books, then there is still chance for future good literature, even in such a maligned genre.
Id rather people read anything over reading nothing
it's isekai or tiktok, no in-betweens, take it or leave it
I replaced doom-scrolling and brain rot with reading Royal Road, and I feel much better.
Even if most of what's on RR is is slop, reading is always the better vice.
hey you! yes you! listen, come here.
Interested in some good ol' reading slop? maybe with a side-dish of a nice community? you like comments, right? you like discussions about a fast hard hitting chapter?
boy do i have a forum for you: https://forums.spacebattles.com/forums/creative-writing.18/
more and better fiction than two RRs combined!*
*terms and conditions apply, knowledge of Worm and Worm-related media required
I've heard of spacebattles forum, haven't delved into it because of the forum structure makes reading awkward, i prefer RR's presentation, not the best but atleast it's a damn website and not a forum lol.
as for worm... i read it a bit but dropped it because i arrived too late (iirc author had already moved to the third series when i heard of it) and the backlog was too daunting. That said, apparently there ia graphic novel coming up so might look into it.
spacebattles has a reading mode: https://forums.spacebattles.com/library/stories/
It's never too late for Worm. There is no backlog, it's a self-contained story. I'd recommend reading it before the comics (not graphic novel).
The same is true for teen books for girls, where like half of the bestsellers are romantasy, with many of them going into the softcore territory.
I am no pearl clutching moralist, but having the mainstream publishing industry push softcore smut onto young girls and even virtue-signaling about how girls read a lot of books, is not something I'm comfortable with.
It's like selling cigarettes to kids, and bragging about how they seem to like them.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is not the height of literature, but I wouldn't say it's harmful.
That said, I don't have a daughter of reading age, so actual parents might have better takes on this.
> Boys love super hero oriented themes
Where does this nonsense come from? I didn't nor did anyone I know. I snorted any kind of adventure books but superpowers? Nuh uh, boring and cheapest of plot devices, and yes, I thought so at 7.
My parents brought me to the library every two weeks and let me read whatever I wanted, I think that's most important. Also, show you read yourself, and if you don't, wonder why.
Drop the “super” and you have something more correct / hero-based books are popular with boys and men.
Are you calling any protagonist a hero now?
well you sure turned out antagonistically for someone who read so many adventure books with protagonists presumably embodying the hero archetype
There's not exactly a shortage of action fantasy books aimed at children with female protagonists.
Second of all, claiming that boys only like action heroes is frankly offensive and stupid. Boys are not intrinsically less capable than girls.
Edit: i said what i said. I am not just replying to the above text but decades around parents who think less of boys.
Somehow you've shoehorned the word "only" in there when the parent said nothing of the sort. Ironic in a thread about reading.
Curious how an equals sign got drawn in your thinking between "likes action heroes" and "less capable."
It was "ONLY like action heroes". And yes, if you by default assume they like ONLY that, you are assuming they are dumber then girls. Because girls get more nuanced and smarter literature mixed with junk.
What you will also achieve is alienation of boys who are indeed smarter and get bored with reading same hero action book again.
I remain firm in replying to precisely that sentiment. I don't believe many will admit it, but this is how many view boys: stupider and less-capable girls.
Ye gods; no, absolutely not. The isekai, levelling, etc. genre is almost entirely fanfic grade writing with a vanishingly thin coat of editorial polish on the few that get formally published. Characterization is trash, plotting is trash, and the background is the most generic of Tolkein/CRPG/JRPG rip-offs. Even the best of the webnovels are barely the literary equivalent of CMOT Dibbler's dubious sausages and the majority are far worse.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is marvelous, though. Threshold is also really good. Most of its terrible, but it's within error bounds for a lot of book quality.
"Harder to get boys into books" means "scholastic sales are down" - it's hard for me to believe that with 50,000 + novels that we can't find any that are appealing - but they're not scholastic "new" and they don't move the money the way they need.
A boy (or girl! They're allowed to read, too now, like Belle) buying a copy of The Hobbit doesn't help much, they need consumption of the new mass-produced stuff to keep the machine running.
I can't imagine how hard it is to try to make it as an author in 2026. Between the sheer number of people writing, the suspicions of AI use, trying to be discovered, it must be completely demoralizing.
My friend wrote a book during the pandemic before AI got too good, and gave up/deleted his work after no publishers called him. I guess a publisher found his manuscript about a year later and he got a call, but turned it down because he deleted his work.
I was recently lamenting to him that he probably lost the last chance he had before the flood of slop books really hit.
I would recommend Magician: Apprentice and the sequel. It's basically a group of 12-year-old boys growing up in a fantasy world - one becomes a magician, one a fighter, and there are others...
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/13812.Magician
I think this is pandering to quietly misogynist people; books don't disappear after they're written. All of the hundreds of books with a male protagonist that I read as a kid are still around, so if the industry has over-corrected it doesn't meaningfully affect anyone.
Let's not forget that girls had no problem getting into books with male protagonists. If boys refuse to read books with female protagonists, maybe we should address that directly?
But they did. Didn't they? Isn't that the whole ass problem? That we live in a patriarchal society defeating women while they're still girls? If that's not the case then sure, boys will be fine. If it is the case then boys deserve the same consideration girls are getting and you can't just sit their intimating that 6 year old boys' malignant misogyny is the problem
kid humans are a perfect miniaturization of adult humans, lacking the corruption of society. are you saying that the perfect representation of humanity is incorrect in some way ? if so, that would imply our society has drifted from the intended purpose of its constituents.
> lacking the corruption of society.
Kids are influenced by their parents, their teachers, and their peers. It's no coincidence that kids raised in some environments are more likely to segregate themselves into gendered groups than others.
yeah! kids are known for embracing and loving the classics, so what gives?
"come on Timmy, I bought you the Shakespeare box-set, get to reading!"
The children doth protest too much methinks!
I’m only talking about picking up books. Please don’t take this out of context. Or in context?
Shakespeare sucks, but Duma is quite engaging, and the books aren't going anywhere.
Finally someone said it! I understand Shakespeare introduced many pearls into literature but I personally know no one who has said that Shakespeare induced them the love of reading in their formative years. So why are we teaching Shakespare to grade school children
Shakespeare has 2 problems for school age children:
1) The language is middle English and difficult to read 2) Its public domain so publishers can't make money from it
When Shakespeare is made into a movie, even when it doesn't modernize the language, those movies are hits. There was an entire generation whose love of stories came from a movie based on Shakespeare using middle English. So this entire line of thought is complete nonsense. The books being published ATM are ideologically driven and that's why people don't want to read them. People acting ignorant about this are the problem and always will be.
I didn’t want to like this article but it was quite good. And I didn’t want to believe its thesis but then I realized I was subject to the same phenomenon.
I never developed an interest in watching movies or tv and still don’t. I mean it was interesting to see people in different situations, but in the 60s and 70s they never had people who looked like my family, so they weren’t that interesting or engaging for more than a short time.
So there’s at least some evidence that this phenomenon is real.
Seems surprising. The first books my daughter really got into all had male protagonists: Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, The Adventurer's Guild.
Conversely, even as a male, mine was Nancy Drew. I could not enjoy Hardy Boys for some reason
Having read all the Hardy Boys as a child, because I was told I had to read something, I can definitely agree they are not particularly enjoyable.
https://archive.is/AcRwc
How serendipitous! I find just now Scrine which works like doom scrolling but you are scrolling one line per swipe from famous books. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50414155
Maybe it was just because I was a precocious reader at 8-12, but at that age almost none of the "age-appropriate" books in my school library actually interested me. You start to think about difficult "adult" subjects like relationships, mortality, conflict etc, yet no material available to you really addresses these ideas in a way that doesn't feel like they're just completely coddling you from reality. I had to go to the public library to find actual novels I felt were at my maturity level. You had 8 year olds using racial slurs against each other playing call of duty and you're worried they're scarred for life reading "fuck" in a novel? Come on children aren't idiots, expect more from them.
I was at my typical bookstore lately and I walked right out again. All the recommendations by staff and bestsellers all anchored around "I'm a woman and I see the world like so and so". I wanted inspiration on life in general (think The Alchemist or whatever). Not how it is to be a woman. Not hating, but I'm a dude in my mid thirties and an avid reader. The whole bookstore was remade to cater to young women, tiktok viewers (has selfie walls and shit), and table top games. I get that there's market pressure, but it was already hard to buy books already (like english books taking 3 weeks to be ordered and such). I don't want to order on amazon ...
Really a pity. Another big store opened 100m from them. Hope they get their ass whooped.
We can protest and complain all we want at the end of the day stores are built for their customers and men and women shop differently.
We may not like what it says about the world.
Yeah, I know. That was the first moment of my life where I felt obsolete lol.
Frankly, while it might be jarring no longer to be the prioritized demographic, I've realized that the proper response is to be grateful to the romantansy fans for propping up the genre fiction publishing industry. My fellow sci-fi/fantasy fans sure aren't doing their part to buy books, so I gotta appreciate romantasy booktok for subsidizing the books that I like to read with their purchases of books that I don't want to read.
Marvel is still putting out plenty of them.
We just spent the last several years hearing how representation matters, and when the numbers flip sufficiently that a new group is now under represented they get told "that's too bad".
When you look at where money is spent and by whom, keep it in mind as you shift the demographics of who's watching / reading. The money moves with the groups interest, and it doesn't necessarily get filled by the new demographic.
> We just spent the last several years hearing how representation matters
this reminds me of the green piccolo meme (from 4chan, i think?). Piccolo, fyi, is a green alien character from the famous anime/manga series Dragon Ball Z, which is popular with young boys all over the world.
The meme is that boys, regardless of the race and language or other physical conditions, see themselves in a green alien character that looks and sounds nothing like them, and will happy play with a Piccolo figurine.
Meanwhile girls (supposedly, according to the meme) require a Barbie doll that looks and feels like them, and hence all the various dolls that are made to represent the diverse young female audience.
I don't know how true it actually is, but this stereotype tends to format a lot of the representation discussion online. Boys grow up to be men who chafe at the 'diversity' and 'representation' topics, because they would happily see them selves represented in anything, even if it were a green alien. To them, looks are less important than actions. Piccolo was a good father figure to Gohan, and they aim to be as good as him.
therefore, books written with the (supposedly) feminine themes (even if the MC is a boy) tend to not click with boys.
>Boys grow up to be men who chafe at the 'diversity' and 'representation' topics, because they would happily see them selves represented in anything, even if it were a green alien.
As long as its not a girl.
Not necessarily.
Frieren is a manga that has a female protagonist and is wildly popular with boys, elsewhere in this thread I talk about Ascendence of a Bookworm, another story with a female protagonist, popular with boys.
Yes, female MCs are less likely to be common in boys literature, but if the story is good, then boys will read it. What makes the story 'good' in the eyes of boys, is about the themes, at least to my understanding.
I believe Japan does it best, they clearly delineate young/mature, male/female categories in terms of themes, and then have stories can still have a female MC but thematically targeted towards the category 'young+male'(Shonen) or 'mature+male' (Seinen)
Examples of each:
https://myanimelist.net/stacks/41465
https://myanimelist.net/stacks/59021
Many of these stories are something I've read/watched but forgot that they were not labelled under the female category stories.
>When you look at where money is spent and by whom, keep it in mind as you shift the demographics of who's watching / reading. The money moves with the groups interest, and it doesn't necessarily get filled by the new demographic.
I'm not clear on what exactly you mean. My best guess is: "media is produced to satisfy an audience's desires" but I'm not even confident that's what you mean.
Media is not produced to satisfy an audience's desires; that's only indirectly and coincidental; more and more.
Media is produced to satisfy an executive's desire, which is often based on what they think the audience wants, but sometimes is based on what they think the audience should want.
I don't think that's the incentive. Executives don't care about such things. It's just that they are risk adverse, they try to avoid drama as that's a risk.
Avoiding drama is the exact opposite of what you want to do in publishing. This sentence is true for both meanings of the word 'drama'.
Media is rarely passive and never just follows where consumers point to, is it. Eveeybody with some power has some agenda to push on others.
I dont even mean cia/military-backed ultra patriotic movies from hollywood of the past, eveeybody simply has their opninion and even journalism is rarely objective.
Representation never mattered, what mattered was to get a different group on top. It's not just men vs women, you see it everywhere. It's like how a poster of black and Asian people is "diverse".
Have you considered that when people use the phrase “increase diversity,” they mean across the entire medium? That a movie or book can have, in a vacuum, a fairly limited cast, but if that cast is otherwise unrepresented across film or literature it does increase diversity?
I'd much rather have a diversity of stories with appropriate casting than artificially-induced representation via race-swapping cast members. By all means, use diverse casting for modern and future-facing stories, but give me fewer black elves and asian dwarves in old, exclusively European stories and more stories from Asian, African, South American, etc. cultures.
As a small example: I'd love to see more about Anansi, the African spider trickster god elevated into mainstream media. I can only recall him appearing in American Gods and an episode or two of Gargoyles in the 90s.
Are people saying "that's too bad?" Or are they frustrated to see endless criticism of this argument when it is applied to other groups over the past five years while this topic continues to get litigated.
I support grants for authors to create a wider variety of literature. Too bad the NEA and NEH have been slashed to ribbons.
> when the numbers flip sufficiently that a new group is now under represented they get told "that's too bad"
according to whom? do you have any examples?
Have decades or centuries of this and you’ll have an argument, as it is, yeah, get over it.
Current generations deserve all the same fairness. It's not a good argument to say that group X deserves less fairness because people trust belonged to group X decades ago had an unfair advantage.
This sounds like a pretty dumb explanation due to the obvious fact that you're not forced to only read books which came out in the current year...
> The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde
Jeez, how far from common sense are some people nowadays.
Did someone steal all the old books? This is absurd on its face.
There is an implication of advertising; old books obviously exist but no longer advertised not are the front and center when you enter the book store.
I guess the implication is that without such advertisements, old books are lost media for young kids. Their first brush is with new media that IS advertised to them, and upon finding it not compatible to their tastes (at least acc to the article) young boys tune out of the reading hobby altogether.
Obvious retort is that this where parents should step in... but that's a whole different debate.
That's isn't true. And maybe in the US that's different, but mandatory reading in my country mostly contains books with male protagonist (still have to read at least one of: I am a legend, Fahrenheit 451, Brave new world or 1984 at 17).
That is not true, if you go to the bookstore, they are advertised. In fact the 2:1 boy girl ratio author blames is among all the published books - the top lists have smaller assymetry.
And that is not even talking about the fact that 2:1 male female male character does not make male main characters hard to find.
Addressed in the article (which I recognize is behind a paywall so you may not have seen it):
“But even if the backlist contains a wealth of fiction starring boys, that’s not always a help to today’s young readers. Laura Gardner, a veteran middle-school librarian in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, told me that although some of the classics still stand up—kids love Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet and its sequels, along with the I Survived series—many students have a hard time getting into literature from past decades. Thanks to the disruptions of the pandemic, middle schoolers are coming into Gardner’s library with lower reading levels than they were when she started her career 17 years ago. But even the high-achieving students, she’s noticed, can’t be coaxed into picking up a book for fun unless it’s action-packed. “If the pacing isn’t pretty quick, then you’re going to lose the kid,” Gardner said. Older titles tend to feature more descriptive language and longer chapters; they start with more exposition, and have plots that unspool more slowly than today’s attention spans are used to.”
No one stole the old books, no one is printing or marketing them either.
Somehow, one single year of female protagonist majority is more powerful than 3000 years of male protagonist majority.
I'd be fine if we could have at least acknowledgment that the problem can hit boys too and not have different standards for different genders.
Apart from that, it feels dumb to make this a competition.
I don't understand how the "problem" is affecting boys when the vast majority of books feature male protagonists.
Dad of a 7 year old boy here: no.
Oodles of graphic novels these days, plus all the formulaic initial books like Magic Treehouse and Box Car Children, and then you blow their minds by slipping them The Great Brain, The Mad Scientists’ Club, Tom Sawyer, The Dark is Rising…
Sounds like the Critical Drinkers “modern audiences”.
Maybe the publishers could start a campaign to recruit more male writers, and put greater effort around promoting and publishing their books. Then we could take those books and market them to boys and say look, you can be a writer too.
> The idea that boys might prefer stories about boys sounds awkwardly retrograde, even to the boys themselves. Kids rarely state such preferences outright, Melissa LaSalle, the children’s-book buyer at Old Town Books, in Alexandria, Virginia, told me. Their parents sometimes will, albeit “in a slightly embarrassed way.” Of course, individuals might not connect to a book for any number of reasons: sense of humor, narrative stakes, cover art. “But the unifying theme that I hear resoundingly from parents of boy readers,” LaSalle said, “is, at the end of the day, there are not enough boy protagonists.”
Meanwhile, it used to be a standard talking point that girls need more female protagonists to identify with, same with other protected classes.
It would be nice if the arguments were applied consistently.
It is more or less inevitable that successful representation pushes will overcorrect and you get a situation like this. It doesn’t have to be badly intentioned, and it’ll work itself out as the market corrects itself. But my boys have plenty of books to read with male protagonists if they want them. Percy Jackson alone has carried one of my kids through a long stretch of recreational reading. There is, you know, centuries of literature for children available during which male protagonists were over represented.
> successful representation pushes
Certainly this is one possible hypothesis.
There are plenty of other cultural pressures for boys to read less than girls, though. For example, the prominence of male-dominated sports could be drawing their attention.
I’m wondering if the causal arrow goes the other way: fewer male readers leading to fewer male protagonists.
If that’s the case, we are already looking at the market correction, we just don’t like it.
I think that is plausible also, and also video games.
I think in general the market is going to sell what people are buying.
Now lets see the atlantic write endless articles advocating for greater representation of women, racial minorities, lgbt people, and disabled people in media where they are underrepresented.
Did you miss, like, the last decade??
The atlantic specifically has been beating this "woke has gone too far" drum for years.
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