I want to put down my thesis of the "white guy enjoyer" phenomenom, wherein someone engages with a piece of media only to find the most attractive (to them) white guy to write x reader imagines to, ignoring basically everything else about said piece of media. These fanfics tend to simplify characters, themes and relationships to fit into neat little tropes and scenarios, that can be reused and recycled with any character without much changing, despite the fact that people are writing for a variety of fandoms with completely different contexts that the characters are in. But, don't worry, you can read about half a dozen flavours of "yandere x reader", "ceo x reader", "boyfriend scenarios", etc. Because this seems to be such a widespread phenomenom in certain fandoms, you also end up with a side effect of all these x reader fanfics seemingly clogging up tags and hiding other types of content.
Let's look at a few examples:
Knifes Out (2019): An innovative mystery comedy about a latina woman having to navigate a rich family's many problems, that talked about issues of immigration, power, how façades of liberalism and conservatism fall when a rich person's money is at risk, etc... And after the movie released, tumblr was full of x reader fanfics for the asshole villain of the story, just because he was played by Chris Evans.
Weapons (2025): a mix of horror and absurdism, about a town having to deal with a class of children that seemingly got up in the middle of the night and walked out of their homes, dissapearing into the night. It's bloody, it's thrilling, it's a metaphor for child abuse, school shootings, alcholism, disease... and the tumblr tag is just one x reader fanfic about the minor drug addict character, just because he is a white guy.
Bonus points! Besides x reader fanfics, there are a bunch of analysis about how the teacher character, that got blamed and turned into a scapegoat after her students dissapeared, is actually a bad person and deserved what happened to her, because she has a history of alcoholism and innapropriate behaviour (she hugged a child and slept with a consenting coworker); but the drug addict is a funny cinnamon roll and his substance abuse is actually cool and fine because..... ?
Scream (1996): this is actually an interesting case, because a lot of older movies and series and whatnot, have tags filled with a lot of diverse content, since their fans tend to be older and not following the most recent trends of x reader fics, but because Scream is a franchise that is still being continued to this day, new movies get released and people go back and become fans of the older ones as well. So a lot of the Scream tag is Billy Loomis x reader, or Stu Macher x reader, or Billy Loomis x Stu Macher x reader, or...
Jujutsu Kaisen (2020): This is a good example of the extension that "white guy" can take on. Obviously, most characters in this series are japanese, and as such, not white guys, but depending on the fandom culture that springs around the piece of media, basically any light-skinned guy can become a white guy if you strip away all of his nuances. So Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto become white, Miguel O'Hara from Across the Spiderverse becomes white, most recently Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein (2025), becomes white, in the way they are written.
Sinners (2025): This feels expecially outrageous, and while the tag isn't all that clogged with Remmick x reader fics, they still fill a significant portion. In a movie all about black experiences, black fears, filled with excellent black (and attractive) black actors, you decing instead to focus on the singular white villain of the piece feels
Now let's look at a few fandoms where this didn't happen, mainly because there weren't any white or white-passing guys to do this to:
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022): First of all, there are only two white named characters, Becky and Deirdre; and they are both mostly instruments to the themes of especifically asian dispora, culture, generational trauma and healing that is absolutely central to the story. No white guys to make x reader fanfics to.
Glass Onion (2022): After the dissapointment that was the knives out tag in 2019, the glass Onion tag in 2022 healed a little bit of my soul. I can't really explain why Miles Bron or Duke Cody isn't seen as boyfriend material for x reader writers, but I am just glad that his negative rizz has kept the tag much more diverse.
Wicked (Musical, 2024 & 2025): Another instance where there is a white guy (two in fact!) to write fanfics for, but apparently the Gelphie agenda is so strong that they trump out everything else going on (for good and for bad).
Get Out (2017): A movie that feels similat to Sinners in the sense that it's a black story, featuring black actors about a horror that is so specific to black people in the USA that you feel like you can't focus on anything else. And yet, in Sinners, people still found a way to do so.
What motivated me to make this post, after years observing this phenomenom is after i watched the movie "I Came By" with my dad the other day, I was excited to go on tumblr and see what people had said about it. It's the story of a grafitti activist that goes into rich people's homes and tags their walls, and he accidentally discovers that a rich judge is actually a serial killer that targets refugees seeking asylum in the UK.
Spoiler alert! for the sake of my argument: the graffiti activist that initially discovers this is a white guy who gets killed a third into the movie. Now imagine my dissapointment when I go into the tag for the movie on tumblr and I find exactly three posts even pertaining to it, ALL of them are about this white guy and one is a x reader fanfic.
Let's discuss why this bothers me so much: not only does it make finding other stuff so difficult on tumblr, because even with filters, a lot of times things aren't tagged correctly, or stuff slips past; it's also incredly frustrating because a lot of these fanfics sell the fantasy of x reader with these white guys at the expense of all other characters in the story, especially poc, especially women, especailly woc. I'm talking about Marta Cabrera not existing in Hugh Ramson x reader fanfics, because the reality of what he did to her (what his whole family did to her) is too unconfortable for the people wanting "What would Hugh Ramson give you on valentine's day?" fanfics. I'm talking about the way people villify or minimize Sidney Prescott's emotional turmoil, blaming her and her mother for hurting a boy's feelings, nevermind that that boy then decided to become a serial killer.
If you want to write a story about falling in love with a character, fine! Don't let me stop you. But why is Remmick the one you were attracted to, and not Elijah or Elias? What is it about him that makes him the better option, can you tell me? Why are Walking Dead x reader always about Rick or Neagan and never about Glenn, or Tyresse, or Morgan? Why have I seen a million x reader stories about the same dozen light-skinned guys from Honkai Star Rail, and not a single one of Arlan, the ONLY dark-skinned character in the whole game? Why do I see so few of the women? Can you look me in the eyes and tell me that these tendencies across basically the entire tumblr fandom landscape is just "coincidence" (as someone to whom I talked about this back in 2020 told me) and I should just let people do what they want to do?
P.S. There is also a "white girl enjoyer" syndrome, where the same thing happens, except the tag is filled with people writing lesbian versions of the same x reader fics you can find everywhere else. This happened to Wandavision (and, by extension, Agatha All Along) and Scream (2022 & 2023), and I can't really explain why some fandoms have this phenomenom inverted, but the rest of may arguments still stand. The black or darker-skinned characters of these franchises are noticibly not the subjects of these x readers and are often either completelly missing or turned into objects to advance the white character's interests.
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