Greetings GustyTraveler,
I find that this is more an issue of feedback systems in kink environments than anything else. As for the pattern.
1.) Lets start with the primary protagonist is some guy with a closeted belch fetish notices a hot girl burping. You noted that more guys participate in the fetish on this site. Humans have a characteristic of more easily relating to people similar to themselves. So if your protagonist shares traits with your target audience, or how your target audience wants to perceive themselves, it will decrease the energy of activation needed to participate and thus increase the chances of you getting positive feedback as a creator. People on average will create more content that they get positive feedback for.
2.) Narrative arc of some variant of “I don’t mind”, confessing, etc. Is an example of a more targeted format of power fantasy. People on average are closeted about their experience, especially in kinky areas. The juxtaposed energies of people wanting more positive stimulus in their life in this case expressed through fulfillment of the kink paired with a feeling of inability to make that the case on average generates fertile ground for positive response to protagonist inserts that somehow take that step again creating more positive feedback for the creation making it more likely that similar content will be replicated.
3.) I actually don’t have clarity around the friend dynamics bit that comes from anything other than intuition, as such I’ll leave this section of your question to someone more educated in that field.
As for the specific smaller questions:
4.) People default to school settings in many forms of media whether it be wizards, magical creatures, dystopian societies, or just about anything else. Since school is a mandatory part of the majority of people who can access the internet’s lives, it makes it highly likely that a randomly selected reader has some experience with school. This decreases the energy of activation necessary for the suspension of disbelief because more people can relate to having witnessed people learning and forming bonds during development than the percent of the population that can relate to people sculpting marble, or promoting polymerase chain reaction to increase samples of DNA, or giving therapeutic support to someone at the loss of the elephant they bonded with after losing their eyesight. All of these narratives require additional work out of the reader who is unlikely to have experienced these things. More work from the reader means a lower percent of readers will engage as deeply with the story as people’s lives are too much work already.
5.) Tomboys and people who are ridiculously attractive in traditional heteronormative dynamics as primary romantic agents pops up for a few reasons. I think the Tomboy perspective is largely a result of dominant western industrial society stigmatizing women belching as a detractor from womanhood. The majority of humans respond pretty strongly to stigma as a form of social conditioning, and as a result most authors who are men will have their primary exposure to women actually belching in real life be in situations with Tomboys. People generally write from enhanced versions of their own experience, so if this is the most likely vector for witnessing eruptions in real life, they’re likely to repeat these memes in the media they create. As for ridiculously attractive, people’s sexualities often tie into what they find attractive. People creating kink content will often integrate their views of beauty in senses beyond just the kink into their creations. Since there are societal norms around what beauty is, characters that conform to those norms are accessible to a higher percent of the population and thus create that positive feedback loop for content creators.
6.) I still really have no idea with the friends thing.
7.) People having lives outside of school increases the potential variance from standardly accessible experience. This element of media particularly infuriates me. Even in situations where people are given an access point like school to appeal to the majority of the population, additional elements are often interpreted as diluting their experience. For much of the population it would be frustrating to read an article about how to grow oyster mushrooms as food only to find that 70% of the article is covering the philosophy of fungal evolution in relation to mycorrhizal structures and decomposers. They do not care about the philosophy, they care about getting to eat the mushroom with as little effort as possible. The same principle applies in kink content. Anything that isn’t the base level accessible kink content decreases the amount of people who will be interested in consuming the media. I noticed this substantially with my own work. Early in my process I replicated a lot of the archetypes and memes that I witnessed in my kink communities including some of these trends. Additionally pulling on the time honored archetype emulation work of fanart/fiction. These got substantial engagement and interaction that generates the warm fuzzy feelings of someone giving positive feedback. Over time I felt like I wanted to minimize how I contributed to oppressive systems including objectification and the normalization of oppressive control dynamics in content I created. As I engaged in this process of changing my output I had a substantial drop in feedback of all kinds (Going from roughly 30 comments of interaction per piece to 1-2) Adding additional content to make a character less one dimensional actively sabotages one’s ability to connect with a broad audience. The clear archetypical one dimensionality is viewed as a value add, not a value detractor by a large enough audience that it’s generally counterproductive if you want to interact with the community.
Those are some thoughts on your notes about the cliches in the community, why they’re common, and the specific structures in place that make them likely to remain common in the current attention economy. Then again this comes from my biased perspective where my most recent written piece that integrates sensual belching as an element also contains conflict resolution structures in group decision making, high density object physics, and analysis of fictional social hierarchies as ways to highlight different relationships with individual and communal status seeking behaviors.
–Isicera
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