OPINION: Reality Fracture Proves Straight Men Can’t Write Fanfiction

In Friday’s announcement regarding the upcoming Reality Fracture standard set, Wizards of the Coast has presumably unintentionally proven the well-known adage that straight men can’t write fanfiction.

My name is Red, and I’ve been writing fanfiction for almost a decade. Straight men can’t and shouldn’t do it for one simple, simple reason: you motherfuckers already control every other creative field. When you write fanfic, you’re not doing it to tell the story in a way that appeals more to under-represented demographics. You’re writing it to appeal to yourselves, and everything is already made for you. The inherent appeal of fanfiction over commercially published fiction is that it allows you to peer deeply into a usually-queer person’s unique and personal mental illness, while also usually seeing better use of metaphor and imagery than the last published hetslop romance novel you’ve read. For example, Rebecca Yarros, author of Fourth Wing, was certainly able to write a bestselling series that every straight woman I’ve ever met wouldn’t stop recommending to me. And the fact that her edgy, borderline abusive bad-boy protagonist is explicitly based on her real-life military husband is a matter between her and God, and certainly well beyond the scope of this article. Despite that huge red flag, however, there isn’t anything interestingly wrong with Rebecca, and that’s why her worldbuilding sucks shit.

Sidenote: July, Rebecca? Your series explicitly takes place in a world different from Earth with its own language, continents, and more, and you tell me there’s a month called July? The month formerly named Quintilius that was then renamed after real-world living human Julius Caesar? That July? Just say “summer,” Rebecca! Jesus! And don’t even get me STARTED on the actual dragons!

Given that Reality Fracture is evidently a deep dive into Jace Beleren’s Ao3 account, one would think that he is certainly mentally ill enough to write good fanfiction–after all, the man’s been through the wringer and had his entire memory wiped, what, four times by now? He’s gotta have at least a few disorders going on at this point.

But you see, dear reader, Jace is a heterosexual cis man, and it’s clear that not even mental illness can make his fanfiction interesting. He’s thus far given us incredible takes like “what if the five Strixhaven colleges were the other five color pairs, had stupid concepts, and belonged to a different, less well-named university?” and “what if Chandra Nalaar was a fucking cop?”

Sidenote 2: Wizards of the Coast (I am speaking directly to you now), if you try to earnestly tell me that gay man Ral Zarek and/or pansexual woman with a canon girlfriend Chandra Nalaar is/are heterosexual in this dumb new universe, I will appear in your nightmares repeatedly smacking Chris Cocks over the head with a rainbow cartoon mallet. This is not a threat, it’s a promise.

Also, it’s clear from the art of one card so far that Jace has also made an alternate and “perfect” version of Vraska, his fucking girlfriend, and the implications of that–that he tried to “make her perfect” after she was just compleated by the Phyrexians, who had the exact same intent–is genuinely fucking vile. I don’t even have a joke here. If the writers don’t address how deeply fucked-up it is that he tries to fundamentally alter the personality and being of the woman he loves so that she’s “perfect,” they have made an extremely irresponsible writing choice that deserves your genuine scorn.

For the record, I understand that the point of these flawed character mirrors is to prove that Jace is flawed, and that his understanding of his fellow planeswalkers is flawed. It was openly and quickly admitted that the world was “supposed” to be perfect, and isn’t. I get that this is not an actual earnest rewrite but the demonstration of a flawed, in-universe attempt at doing so. I can use the incredible power of literary analysis to determine that most likely the ultimate moral and point of Reality Fracture will be that trying to undo the past is a flawed idea from the beginning, and that Jace will only ultimately heal by accepting what has happened to him and the universe, and trying to earnestly move on from it.

However, that is a Thermian Argument (Google it), and here is my counterpoint:

You could have made a set about anything, and you instead gave me an entire fucking standard set whose premise is “Jace’s Shitty Fanfiction” instead of another Time Spiral or Planar Chaos. This whole standard set is apparently an entire fucking reality created by one fucking guy attempting to rewrite the actual true reality–functionally murdering trillions of living people by the way–and when he presumably fails to actually do that, you know that motherfucker’s gonna just get a hug and a therapy arc instead of a “what the fuck is wrong with you” moment. We are hyperfocusing on this one guy’s specific neuroses. The faceless enforcers at Hexhaven just so happen to resemble the kids who used to bully him on Wrin? I have seen M/F harem fanfic with more fucking restraint about sucking one male character off over and over again. We are peering way too fucking deep into one loser’s specific neuroses.

I am so serious. They could have come upon a “what-if” set in many, many different ways. They chose to give us a “what-if” set by making it a reality explicitly designed by one fucking sad white boy in his extremely flawed attempt to create a world that’s perfect.

I already live in America in 2026. I do not need to see more of what powerful white men consider “perfect.”