Lectures on Tap - "From Achilles to Fanfiction: The Rise of Broken Heroes"

📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email

🧠 Lecture: From Achilles to Fanfiction: The Rise of Broken Heroes

🎤 Speaker: Dr. Lydia Griffiths

Millions of people—many of them women, most of them online—are writing and reading stories where powerful male heroes finally break down, cry, and let someone take care of them. Steve Rogers processes his trauma. Draco Malfoy has a panic attack and someone stays. The most feared villain in the galaxy just needs a hug.

This is hurt/comfort fanfiction, and it is one of the most widespread myth-making practices on the planet right now.

In this talk, mythologist and fandom scholar Dr. Lydia Griffiths argues that hurt/comfort isn’t a guilty pleasure—it’s a collective ritual. When a culture struggles to hold vulnerability, tenderness, and the idea that even the strongest among us need care, it writes those needs into the stories it loves most. It always has. Achilles wept. Gilgamesh fell apart. The hero’s wound is as old as storytelling itself.

Part mythology lecture, part cultural criticism, part love letter to everyone who ever stayed up until 2am reading a 200,000-word fic, this talk asks: what does it mean that we are desperately rewriting our heroes—especially men—as people who are allowed to be human?

Get a drink, connect, and learn at Lectures on Tap! 🙌

Agenda

6:30 PM – Doors open: find a seat (open seating!), order food & drinks, and expect a bar line—arriving early is key.

6:55 PM – Host introduction

7:00 PM – Lecture begins

7:45 PM – Audience Q&A

8:00 PM – Have 1:1 time with the speaker, mingle with fellow guests, and order another round

8:30 PM – Wrap up.