I’m with You Till the End of the Line: The Romanticization of Male Bonds

Abstract

The popularity of the bromance genre in television and film has attracted the attention of the general public as well as those interested in popular culture. Originally aimed at a male audience and with roots in ancestral male bonding, it has also attracted the attention of a female audience interested in the romanticization of the bond between two men. The resulting new genre is typically referred to as slash fiction (romantic stories involving expropriated male media characters) and has a mainly female audience. These fan-produced stories contain plots, tropes, and character features that reflect female evolutionary priorities and strategies. In many ways, it highlights the essential features of romance, those it shares with traditional romances, such as the focus on the development of long-term love relationships. In this chapter, we discuss the history and appeal of the bromance for men as well as its more recent manifestation in slash stories for a female audience once published in zines and now in online forums such as Archive of Our Own.