Last week we talked about how old and new friendships are structured differently — how you build a bond from zero, and how you fake twenty years of history with a McDonald’s pickle.
This week we’re drilling down and talking about men’s friendships, which come in three flavors.
The buddy action movie is about a mission. Two guys, one problem, and a friendship that grows in the cracks while they solve it.
The bromance is about the friendship. The relationship is the plot, and it follows romantic comedy beats.
The male friendship drama is about what they mean to one another.
Three very different ways of portraying a male best friendship. All emotional, all powerful, and audience pleasing.
The Buddy Action Movie
The buddy action movie focuses on an external mission. Catch the criminals. Transport the witness. Survive the day. Lethal Weapon is the classic template. Riggs and Murtaugh are opposites, a suicidal loose cannon and family man on the verge of retirement. They become brothers, but the plot is about drug dealers and murder.
The mission is doing double duty. It’s your plot, and it’s also your excuse to keep two people in a car together who would never otherwise share a meal. Different missions generate different flavors of that forced proximity.
Riggs and Murtaugh in Lethal Weapon
Police, Feds, and Other Badges
This is the biggest bucket by a mile, and there’s a structural reason for that. A badge is free glue. Partners get assigned to each other and they can’t quit. You don’t have to invent a reason these two are stuck together. The precinct does it for you.
Unlike a law enforcement officer, a PI doesn’t have an assigned partner. To solve this problem, these stories usually pair a professional with an amateur who desperately needs him, because the need is the only thing holding them together.
The Nice Guys are a clumsy private detective and a tough enforcer who team up to find a missing girl when their cases converge
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? chains a toon-hating detective to an actual toon.
Sherlock Holmes (2009) takes the famous consulting detective and partner and reboots them as an action movie with their friendship at the center.
Criminals Partnered with Professionals
These are mismatched-authority pairs. One of them has institutional backing and the other doesn’t. One can arrest. The other can only run. That asymmetry is a gift. Every scene has a built-in power imbalance feeding the conflict.
48 Hrs. puts a convict into a cop’s custody for two days.
Midnight Run sends a bounty hunter across the country with an embezzling accountant.
The Hitman’s Bodyguard assigns a bodyguard to a hitman.
Zootopia pairs a rabbit cop out to prove herself with a fox con artist.
Treasure and Adventure
Swap the crime for a quest and the dynamic shifts. Nobody’s chasing these guys because of who they are. Instead, they are the bad guys' targets for what they are doing. Which means the glue has to be enthusiasm rather than obligation.
Sahara gives us Dirk and Al, who’ve been friends since kindergarten and share an operational shorthand the audience never gets translated.
Shanghai Noon crosses a Chinese Imperial Guard with an outlaw.
National Treasure pairs a historian who believes every legend with a hacker who believes none of them.
Civilians in Over Their Heads
No badge, no training, no license. Just two ordinary guys and a situation that has gotten dramatically out of hand.
Playdate (2025) turns a laid-off dad and another dad from the park into mercenary bait.
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) hands time travel to two people who should not have it.
In Shaun of the Dead (2004) the zombies aren’t really the problem, the friendship is.
What About Women?
The buddy action movie has been overwhelmingly male for most of its history. The genre grew out of cop movies and war movies, and the casting followed. Recently, that’s changed.
The Heat (2013) puts an uptight FBI agent and a Boston cop through every beat of the Lethal Weapon structure, losing nothing in translation.
The Spy Who Dumped Me (2018) sends two best friends into an international conspiracy.
Ride or Die (2026) has an assassin and a civilian fleeing across Europe.
Notice that none of these had to redesign the genre. If you’ve been assuming your buddy action premise needs two men in it, it doesn’t. It needs two people who solve problems differently and can’t get away from each other.
The Bromance
The bromance applies the beats of a romantic comedy to a platonic male friendship, complete with meet-cute, the montage, the third-act falling out, and the run-through-the-airport. Same skeleton, no kissing.
I Love You, Man is the purest example— a man with no male friends goes on a series of increasingly excruciating man-dates to find a best man for his wedding.
Step Brothers starts with a hostile meet-cute, has a rapid falling-in-love montage, and the third-act split, and a grand-gesture reunion at the Catalina Wine Mixer. If you swapped one of them for a woman, you’d have a Nancy Meyers film.
Superbad is a friendship movie wearing a party movie’s clothes. The entire plot exists because Seth and Evan are about to be separated by college. It pays off with a drunken confession in adjacent sleeping bags, a mortified morning after, and a final scene where the two of them part ways on escalators moving in opposite directions.
Male Friendship Drama
Just two guys and what they meant to each other.
Male friendship as main plot doesn’t require comedy. This is male friendship drama, where the friendship is the whole story and nobody’s joking.
Brian’s Song (1971) set the standard for the genre. Two competing running backs get assigned as roommates, become inseparable, and then one of them gets sick. There is no villain to punch and no misunderstanding to clear up. The complication is terminal.
In The Shawshank Redemption (1994) the escape is the plot, but the thing the movie is actually about is Andy and Red’s friendship.
Stand by Me (1986) centers on an adult remembering the friends he had at twelve and admitting he never had friends like that again.
Notice what these have in common with the bromance and what they don’t. Same central question — what do these two mean to each other? Completely different tone, and, crucially, no reconciliation beat. You can’t run the third-act reunion when the separation is death, or prison, or just the passage of time. The drama version has to find its catharsis somewhere else.
Three buckets. Same two guys
The difference between a buddy action movie, a bromance, and a friendship drama isn't the men. It isn't even the plot. Lethal Weapon and Brian's Song are both about two men who become essential to each other. One has a drug cartel and one has a hospital room.
What changes is where you focus the story.
Have a mission, and the friendship grows while the bullets fly.
Focus on the relationship and play it for laughs, and you've got a bromance.
Point at the relationship and play it straight, and you've got the hardest and most durable version of all. No villain. No punchline. Just what these two meant to each other.
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In a follow-up to March’s anti-AI attacks on the novel Shy Girl, the Mob goes after an animation creator. This time with death threats.
What happened to director Jorge R. Gutierrez in the last week of May 2026 is too important to ignore. It's the Shy Girl controversy on steroids, complete with death threats and racist attacks.
And here's the part everyone is glossing over: the mob that mobilized to "protect" animation artists destroyed a Prime Video animated series that would have employed animation artists and production staff. They killed real jobs. Real opportunities. Real paychecks. In an industry that is hemorrhaging both.
Who Is Jorge R. Gutierrez?
Jorge R. Gutierrez is an Emmy Award-winning animation writer and director. Among his credits he created the series Maya and the Three (2021, Netflix), wrote and directed the film The Book of Life (2014), and is the co-creator of the series El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera (2008, Nickelodeon).
This is a career artist who has spent decades writing and directing, who found a faster door to make projects — and the mob burned it down.
The AI on the Lot Conference
To understand what happened, you need to understand where it happened.
Founded in 2023, AI on the Lot is an annual conference tracking generative AI's role in film and television. By 2026, it had grown to more than 2,400 attendees.
The conference drew established filmmakers including Gutierrez, David Slade (30 Days of Night), and Gareth Edwards (Jurassic World: Rebirth). Its keynote was delivered by Paul Schrader, the 79-year-old screenwriter of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. He faced his own wave of backlash simply for agreeing to speak.
"There was very much of a backlash. A lot of negative comments. Some of them were in fact insulting. It was as if I shot the family dog."
The concept: give filmmakers, digital creators, and startups access to funding and professional-grade AI tools to produce "high-quality cinematic entertainment." Albert Cheng, head of AI Studios at Amazon MGM, described the platform as "human-centered," designed so that "AI tools will enhance human creativity and make it possible to create TV shows and movies that were previously impossible."
Three animated series were greenlit as the fund's inaugural projects: Cupcake & Friends, Love, Diana Music Hunters, and Punky Duck from Jorge R. Gutierrez.
On stage, Gutierrez was visibly excited — and candid about the journey. He acknowledged that he and his team had initially been "terrified" of the technology, but that the speed of production had changed his thinking. He compared the experience to "having sex and then they hand you the baby" — skipping the metaphorical pregnancy and getting straight to the show. "I'm used to two years for a pilot," he said, "and something like this… it feels like the most rebellious, punk rock thing you can do right now is to make something this fast." He was quick to add: "The secret sauce is humans. The more it comes from a human being, the more human it is."
Enter Cartoon Brew
Cartoon Brew, founded in 2004, is an influential trade publication in the animation industry. its readership is the animation community's professional core. Jamie Lang is owner, publisher, and editor-in-chief. Lang personally wrote all three of Cartoon Brew's articles on the Gutierrez story.
His framing in the announcement piece is worth noting. While he reported the news factually, Lang highlighted that "Gutierrez's involvement is more unexpected given his longstanding association with highly personal storytelling and design and outspoken support for artists and animation craftsmanship." That is a loaded sentence aimed at exactly the readership most likely to read it as a betrayal.
The story hit the most combustible possible audience, with framing that emphasized hypocrisy. The wildfire spread from there.
The Backlash
The backlash was immediate and ferocious.
One day after the announcement animation communities erupted online. Gutierrez's Wikipedia page was vandalized; someone edited his bio to call him a "sellout."
Then the death threats started. The racist attacks came next. Then someone targeted his child. Gutierrez later posted: "The racist stuff and the attack on my kid were too much."
The response from some online critics? Accusations that he was "playing the racism card." Claims he was "making this up to deflect from your piss poor choices." Let that register. A man reports racist attacks and threats against his family — and people call him a liar.
And then there was Gutierrez's own history working against him. Between 2023 and 2025, he posted cheeky memes expressing distaste for AI. So yes, there was irony in Gutierrez's pivot. But since when does changing your mind earn you death threats?
He Kowtowed to the Mob
Forty-eight hours after the announcement Gutierrez posted his full withdrawal on X:
"I have decided to drop out of the AI program at Amazon and will not be making a Punky Duck series. Actions speak louder than words. My intent was to showcase artists, both new and seasoned, both inside and outside the studios, driving this new tech. My sincerest apology to those I upset. I promise to do better moving forward. Thank you for your patience with me. I will try harder."
I understand why. When someone threatens your child, protecting your family comes first, and I will never second-guess any parent who makes that call.
But the mob won. A creator with decades of experience, a proven track record, and a genuine artistic vision was run off a project by a pile-on that included death threats, racist attacks, and threats against his child.
The Jobs Nobody Is Talking About
Let's talk about what actually got destroyed here. Because the narrative that the mob "protected animation jobs" is contradictory.
Punky Duck was a series greenlit by one of the biggest streaming platforms on the planet, Prime Video. It would have employed people. Storyboard artists. Character designers. Voice actors.
So what was the plan? Destroy a new show, chill a new funding program, and threaten the career of one of the industry's most distinctive voices. And somehow, through this destruction, protect animation jobs? That math doesn't work. You cannot protect jobs by eliminating killing projects.
The most effective thing the animation community could do right now is make more projects. More shows. More movies. More original stories reaching more audiences on more platforms. That builds the industry, demand, and careers.
It Is Nobody's Business How You Tell Your Story
This is a hill I am willing to die on: How you tell your story is your business, nobody else’s.
The anti-AI pattern is identical every time. The internet explodes; the creator folds and apologizes publicly; the mob feels justified; and then uses attacks again next time.
Every time someone posts "I promise to do better moving forward" under duress, the mob gets stronger. It learns that threats work. And somewhere, a show doesn't get made, a team doesn't get hired, and an audience never gets the story they would have loved.
Gutierrez said making a show this fast "feels like the most rebellious, punk rock thing you can do right now."
He was right. The most revolutionary thing you can do in Hollywood is refuse to wait for permission. The people who ran him off the project think they're the rebels. They're not. They are the gatekeepers, with torches instead of suits.
The next time you want to attack a creator online, remember freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequence. Thanks to the Constitution, you can say anything. However, threatening someone online is against federal law. And employers do not react kindly to their employees intimidating people. Think about it. Would you want to work with someone who had advocated harming someone publicly? Death threats are serious business and making them come with serious consequences.
Just like readers, audiences don't care how you make your movie. They care about a good story. The mob screaming at Jorge Gutierrez on social media is not going to stop AI from becoming a standard part of animation production. It is only going to determine whether American creators lead that process or get left behind by it. And whether American animation artists have jobs, or watch that work go overseas.
Create Make Build
Every creator, whether you're an animator, novelist, screenwriter, filmmaker, or a podcaster, the most powerful thing you can do right now is create. Not attack other creators. Not spend time online. Not worry about what AI is doing to your industry.
Build your audience. One episode, one chapter, one short film at a time. The creators who will still be standing in five years are not the ones who spent those five years attacking each other on social media. They're the ones who stayed at their desks, kept making things, and kept finding their people. The people that will survive are the creators that keep creating and building their audience.
The only people you have to answer to are your audience. Those are the people you serve. Everyone else is noise.
Don't let the mob be the new gatekeepers. And don't be one yourself.
Dive Deeper
For how to deal with negative press and online attacks check out the Dive Deeper section of this article.
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Fan fiction, aka fanfic, is unauthorized fiction written by fans based on an existing work (movies, TV, and books). It is a hobby. Fan fiction authors cannot officially publish and make money off of their work legally, because they do not own the IP (intellectual property). Think of it as a creative gym where you build craft and community—no membership required except love of the source material.
Outsiders often look down on fan fiction because of stereotypes that it is “not real,” fake, unskilled work.
How did Fanfic Start?
Fan storytelling is older than the internet. It began with men writing their own Sherlock Holmes stories (called pastiches) in the 1880s. Even today there are scores of people writing and publishing their own Sherlock stories, which are versions of fan fiction. (Sherlock stories can be published because the character Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain.)
Today’s fan fiction culture started in the 1970s at Star Trek conventions in fan-produced magazines that people would make and pass out for free. Fanfic really took off in the 1990s with the start of internet culture and online forums.
Where do you Post?
There are lots of fan fiction sites. Here are the three most popular:
AO3 (Archive of Our Own) — is nonprofit, ad-free, and volunteer-run. It’s built for discoverability and preservation.
Fan fiction.net — one of the oldest large fanfic sites; many fandoms still live there.
Wattpad– a social storytelling platform where writers share original fiction and fanfic.
What do People Write?
Everything. But here are fan-favorite zones:
Favorite IP: There are vibrant communities in Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Hunger Games.
New stories and adventures: Fans want to spend more time in their favorite worlds with the favorite characters.
New romances: A favorite is getting enemies together like Star Wars’ Reylo (Rey/Kylo Ren) or Harry Potter’s Dramione (Draco/Hermione).
Rewrite history (a.k.a. “fix-it” fiction): Writers change a finale they hated, heal favorite characters, or reroute canon entirely.
Why Write Fan Fiction?
Love of the IP: It’s fan joy in action—celebration, invention, expansion.
Great community: Feedback, kudos, bookmarks, beta readers. It’s social, supportive, and wildly generative.
Skill-building: Writers practice voice, scene work, tropes, pacing, and long-form serialization and then carry those muscles into original fiction.
Training Ground: Authors find their voice and explore trends before they reach traditional publishing.
Publishing Interest: Traditional publishers and agents now increasingly look at popular fan fiction authors who have large followings as potential candidates for publication.
How to Publish
If you want to publish for pay, you’ll need to transform it into an original work. Fan fiction writers call this “filing off the serial numbers.”
This is the industry term for transforming your fiction into a legally distinct novel with new names, new world building, altered dynamics, fresh plots, so it’s no longer tied to the source IP. E.L. James famously did this with Fifty Shades of Grey, which began as Twilight fanfic. Fifty Shades’ breakout status brought new attention to the possibilities of fanfic.
Inspiration for Screenplays
Reworked fan fiction is a wonderful way to generate screenplay ideas. Think of your favorite story universes as another place to mine for templates. High-engagement stories show audience appetite (Tropes! Love! Angst!)—and when reworked into fresh IP, they’re pitch-ready for adaptation.
Takeaways
Play first, publish later. Treat fanfic as a low-pressure lab to test tropes, voices, and story engines.
If you go pro, go original. Change more than names—shift world rules, backstories, plot architecture, and character arcs so the new work stands on its own.
Leverage your community. Reader enthusiasm (comments, shares, BookTok buzz) can translate into momentum when you launch original work.
Mind the ethics. Keep fanfic free and for fun; keep the published work legally distinct.
Books that Started as FanFic
Alchemised by SenLin Yo – Dramione – epic fantasy*
The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood – Star Wars: Kylo & Rey (Reylo) – scientists in love*
Forget Me Not by Julie Soto – Dramione – Flower Shop romance
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Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Ferris Bueller
When it comes to growing your career, reaching your goals, and achieving your dreams, every book, article and thought leader will at some point talk about getting out of your comfort zone. This advice is abstract and unhelpful.
There is a fun way of getting out of your comfort zone – physically going to a new place. When my clients are stuck, the number one thing I recommend is to get up from your desk and walk around the block. My daily walks are some of the most productive and creative parts of my day. I mull over things I'm currently writing and come up with new ideas.
A Change of Scenery
In the first two weeks of May, I went on a road trip with my dad and stepmom throughout the southeast. My family has a long tradition of road trips and they are always full of adventure. We drove over the third longest bridge in the United States in the Atchafalaya Basin, saw beautiful green rolling hills, explored quaint small town downtowns, toured a cypress tree-filled lake by boat, and stayed in the oldest hotel in Texas.
My stepmom wanted to find a giant ball of string or some other equally enormous tourist trap. Instead, we found a mini Stonehenge and a bar straight out of Captain Hook’s pirate ship.
All the crazy things we saw and did, the places we stayed, and food we ate fueled my creativity. I encourage you to go somewhere new or revisit a favorite place. If you can't afford to travel or you don't have time, go exploring in your city. Go to a part of town you've never been to. Find a new cool park or try that weird restaurant you've been meaning to go to.
Seek new experiences to get out of your comfort zone, change your perspective, and get new ideas. And have some fun. We live in stressful times; goofing off is important.
Here are some road trip inspired writing prompts:
What is your favorite place?
Where is the most unusual place you have stayed?
Pick a painting in a museum and write the story behind it.
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Check it Out!
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When you read as many books and articles on habits and productivity as I do, you hear a lot about the wonders of getting up very early in the morning. Getting up early and taking time to pray, meditate, or journal sets you up to have a good productive day so conventional wisdom goes.
But there is a big but about that advice, and it is not everyone is a morning person. Some people say that you can force yourself to become a morning person by getting up 10 minutes earlier every day. But that is not always the case. Everyone is different. Everyone's level of energy, health challenges, and their own physical rhythms are different. Being a morning person is not a one-size-fits-all piece of advice to improve your life.
This rant is coming from somebody who is most definitely not a morning person. I have tried over the years a lot of different techniques like getting up much earlier before work to get a jump on the day. It just doesn't work for me because I feel lousy in the morning.
One time in desperation, I googled how to have more energy in the morning. A lot of the articles mentioned doing three things to help you wake up: getting out in the sun, drinking 16 ounces of water, and exercising. These articles all said that this routine would wake you up better than a cup of coffee. I tried it and found it really helped, but I do it plus two cups of coffee.
Even though I have finally found a morning routine that works for me, I still am not a morning person. I know I cannot be creative in the morning or productive with other people. I'm lucky enough to be able to design my own schedule and my mornings are spent reading, researching, and answering e-mail. Working with clients, teaching, and writing are for the afternoon. Creatively I really am a night owl and sometimes I do my best writing from after dinner till midnight.
When are you at your best?
As we start thinking about new ways to design our work and creative life in 2023, I urge you to figure out a routine that works best for you. Are you a morning person, a night owl, or something in between? When are you the most productive? The most creative? How can you design your day to take advantage of your rhythms? I understand that not everyone has control over their schedule. However even if you are a corporate worker, there are a few meetings under your purview and you can pick when to schedule them. Also, try to schedule any difficult work conversations at your most optimal times.
Get Some Sunshine
Unfortunately, working at your most focused times isn't always possible. When I was working in Hollywood, I dreaded having screenings or story meetings at 9:00 AM. Sometimes you do just have to drink a lot of coffee to push through. On days like that when you do have a break, get outside in the sunshine, even if it's just for 5 minutes. I used to take breaks and go sit in the parking lot under a tree for 5 minutes when I needed to recharge at my last corporate gig. It can really help boost your mood and your energy level.
Find Your Evening Routine
Another hack for non-perky morning people is find an evening routine that sets you up for success in the morning. I have to lay out my exercise clothes and my work clothes the night before. I fill my water bottle and make my coffee. Then I review my next day's schedule and write a list of to dos. These evening habits help me run on autopilot before I'm fully awake. And my to do list that I've written the night before helps me jump into work quickly and be focused.
Spend the next few weeks as the year winds down noticing what your internal energetic rhythms are and thinking about ways you can design and revise your current daily routine to sell yourself up for success. If you’ve discovered some hacks that work for you, I would love to hear about them. Comment below and let me know.
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This past weekend I went to a paint your pottery place with my three sisters (sister, sister-in-law, and pseudo sister). As always when we get together, it was an adventure. Of the four of us, I had never been to the pottery place before and I am the least artistic, by a lot. I mean if there is a visual artistic talent continuum, I might be the baseline for no talent.
The top talent of our group were my sister and sister-in-law. My sister is a talented artist. When she was a teenager, she would draw these elaborate animals that looked like numbers for the page numbers of her letters from camp. I vividly remember a beautiful swan she drew to be a number two. We also had a family craft tradition of drawing on these special plastic plates. Her sun and rainbow plates were legendary. During the Lockdown, my sister-in-law got really into decoupage and learned how to make candles. You can check out her stuff here on Instagram. She also got her real estate license. (That last bit has nothing to do with creativity. I just wanted to show what a go-getter she is. I spent my Lockdown, thinking the world was going to end, drinking a lot of wine, eating a lot of Oreos, and binge reading cozy mysteries.) As for my pseudo sister, I wasn’t sure where she was in our sister artistic continuum, but I knew she was above me.
A Fabulous Foursome
My sister picked the biggest coffee cup you have ever seen and started putting letters on it to spell peace and happy and drawing her trademark sun and some clouds. My sister-in-law arrived with a project in mind - a bowl with an elaborate design. She had reference pictures on her phone of the the types of birds she was going to ring the bowl with. Pseudo sister chose a shot glass. A very wise choice in terms of surface area to paint. She took her inspiration from one of the store’s finished pieces that had lime slices on it. The store helpfully provided a stencil and she went to work. I chose to paint a narwhal coffee cup. As you know, I am a coffee cup collector and the thought of a self-painted narwhal cup made me smile. I have a minor neurological problem with small motor control, which means that using my hands for detail work like painting is a bit harder for me than most people. I thought painting the narwhal would be easy because it was mostly one color with a little detail in the face and horn.
I find our range of creative approaches really interesting. We have some creator archetypes here.
The Free Wheeler - Having an idea and discovering more along the way.
The Planner - Coming with a project and reference material.
The Handywoman - adeptly using tools (the stencils).
The Realist - knowing her limits and picking a project to suit.
So what are the take aways?
Everyone approaches creative projects differently. So find the approach that works for you. And if it works for you, don’t compare your process to someone else’s.
If what you are doing isn’t working, try something different.
Every project is different, so what worked last time might not work this time. Be open to shifting your approach, even mid stream.
Play to your strengths or recognize your weaknesses and set expectations accordingly.
And finally things rarely turn out the way you planned.
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