Wattpad Cliches

character cliches: male protagonist

ik i said this is discontinued but I recently decided to give finding stories on wattpad a chance and i am so done already

let me just say the YA/teen fiction sections are utter nightmares when it comes to finding books with original characters... it's always the same character with different names slapped on there. However the worst offenders of these have to be the male protagonists.

idk if you notice this but on wattpad, male characters tend to be a lot less fleshed out than female characters. I'm actually guilty of this myself, so I can understand why this is. As a woman it's hard to write from a male perspective I guess? like ig one could say just write it the same as a female character but replace the pronouns but is that an accurate portrayal ?? idk so yeah my male characters tend to be a bit one dimensional but at the very least I can be sure that all of my male characters are not the same person? like you guys haven't really seen any full on stories from me cuz i don't publish them but i do a lot of story building and characterization for every story idea that i have and all my characters are pretty different from each other.

see, YA and teen fic books can't relate. scrolling through wattpad, all you see is "she was a quiet nerd, he was a popular womanizer" or "she was a tomboy while he was the star quarterback notorious for sleeping around" or "she was a quirky, virginal girl and he had sex with anything that walked".

why does he always have to be a hoe???

and we all know how this goes: he's a hoe, he makes fun of her for being a prude, she's the only girl in the school who doesn't want to fuck him(y'all know lesbians exist right) cuz she has so much SeLf ReSpEcT (as if being a girl who has sex means you don't respect your self, but that's another topic for another day), he makes it his goal/a bet to make her want him, falls in love in the process, stops being a hoe and becomes faithful to her. and if this sounds like a story you've written, listen to me.  i'm begging you to please use a better character development device than this. it's lazy and overdone tbh

anyways why is this so prevalent? i don't get it. are promiscuous athletes the only male characters y'all know how to write?? are men who sleep around attractive to you?? do you think so lowly of men that all ur male characters are objectifying assholes who only think w their dick?? please help me understand.

all that being said, if you guys know of some good stories that diverge from this trend please lmk.

some that i can think of are:

tggbb series by RubixCube89201 (excellent characterization of the male characters. really turns the 'bad boy' trope on its head and i loved it)

the one without words by destacia (to this day i have never read another het teen fiction with a male protagonist written in this way. very unique and interesting character, very good writing in general. loved it)

this chap is really messy and i'm like half asleep but i had to get it off my chest