In Western fanfiction, sad men are so popular that we’ve developed a rich vocabulary for describing particular flavors of sadness, such as whump and hurt/comfort. Fan favorites are often incredibly sad. Supernatural maintained its fanbase through steadily providing crying men, men too repressed to cry, men extracting bullets from their own bodies while shirtless, etc. An intense amount of erotic interest was directed toward Jonathan Sims, an unpleasant middle-aged man with almost no coolness or devotion who happens to spend all his time getting kidnapped, stabbed, burned, threatened with murder, enslaved by a cosmic horror, devoured by worms, lost in two different pocket dimensions, and almost transformed into clothing.
