Reading: Romance Tropes and Narrative

[sartorias]

I want to throw a few thoughts out and see if anyone agrees, or this is just my idiosyncratic tastes. But first, though I want to jot down some ideas about narrative devices, with a riff on why romance novel tropes don't work for me in the following instances, I'm stating up front here that I would so rather avoid sneers and slams at romance.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I haven't read too many straight romances, but I like romance in other stories. I'd like to try some of Bujold, judging from how you describe her books

[sartorias]

The Big Stupid Misunderstanding has become a cliche in romance--something like what you describe that would take ten seconds of rational conversation to clear up, but instead is propelled forcibly through the entire novel, just to keep the h/h apart. Those used to be big in the Harliequin days, but are pretty unpopular now.

[akirlu]

I hadn't explicitly looked at my preferences in terms of your orders of intention, and I can see that as one useful way of describing what doesn't work for me, in romantic fiction and elsewhere. And while I do prefer intent to be less than fully transparent, I can live with transparent intent if intent maps in a sane, plausible way to action.

What makes me totally crazy is when the intents, wishes, and desires of the characters are quite clear, yet their behavior relative to those desires could at best be described indicative of a psychotic break. They act in ways that make no sense whatever, ways that are out of synch with what they think and want. The classic example of this would be when you have a bunch of teens staying the night in a haunted house and people start being killed in the house and now the rest of the teens are terrified but none of them leaveMy theory is that you get a lot of that kind of disconnect when an author is writing a formula story and knows her characters must visit all the stations of the formula,

[sartorias]

Oh, that's a good observation. I tend to ascribe some of these (like the teens) to the requirements of storytype, or rather storyverse. In a horror novel or movie, seldom does anyone act in a rational manner. You get these silent rules: anyone having sex is toast. If there is a danger, everyone splits up. Or goes in pursuit. All actions counter to instinct--which ratchets up the tension, because in real life, yes, we would run like hell, so it makes you exponentially more squirmy that the heroine goes to investigate all alone, with a flashlight we just know she's going to drop.

The comicverse requires the homeric response, as examplified in Iron Man: when you have to redeem yourself, you don't donate your money to green causes, you go and fight bad guys yourself, just like Odysseus. You redeem yourself by spending your money and time building a mega suit. The excellent versions of these storyverses make us believe in these rules, though they don't make sense the moment we step out of the theatre into real sunlight.

[shalanna]

Just a side observation-- I *adore* your phrase when you say, "her characters must visit all the stations of the formula." That nails it perfectly! I can even superimpose a mind's-eye movie of a penitent going through the Stations of the Cross over a mental paradigm of the formula for certain kinds of stories.

I've never been able to read most category romances, because I felt that the two main characters were in some kind of obsessive disassociative state, or that they were stalkers of one another, and they thought of NOTHING else. This isn't realistic, even for teenagers . . . they occasionally think of the next exam or a soccer game or going shopping. *grin* Too often, characters are forced to be Too Stupid to Live. Why does the industry publish those books? Aargghh!

[ecbatan]

When I try contemporary romances my preferences are, I think, similar to yours -- I want humor, and I want strong supporting characters. I can note that I had the exact same experience with Kinsale and Crusie that you report -- both came highly recommended to me, but I tried one Kinsale and bounced off hard, while I like Crusie quite a bit. (My wife likes Crusie too, though she's a bit offended by her habit -- a result, I think, of the state of the contemporary romance market -- of including some pretty frank sex scenes.)

eluki bes shahar's Romance novels (as by Rosemary Edghill) -- Regencies, mind you, not comtemporary -- strike me as to a great extent more interested in the humor, and the secondary characters, than the central romance ... and I like them a lot. (On the other hand, perhaps they didn't sell, because she only wrote a few, that I know of.)

[sartorias]

My theory about Rosemary Edgehill's Regencies is that they were printed when Regencies went through one of the dips in popularity. I bet if they were reissued, they'd do fine: they were far more intelligent than most of the obvious knockoffs of Heyer (which is a legit subgenre, as Heyer will never write another, but there's an enormous audience for her particular type of story).

[mayakda]

I didn't realize Edgehill had regencies -- I enjoyed her fantasies ... (off to hunt for them)

[shalanna]

eluki is great! Anything you can find, grab it and read it. Have you read her fantasy/witch mysteries? The Bast series, I think it was. Ahead of their time, IMHO, so they didn't sell well, unlike the latest flood of fantasy mysteries with witches as detectives (few of them well written--I am a cadenced-prose junkie--and most of them just rehashing tropes from "Bewitched" and "Charmed

[onyxhawke]

For me...
I'll admit that being a big, burly manly man, (ignore the cooking, silk shirts, and love of children of animals those are irrelevant) the covers of romance throw me off at least as bad as the nipple and floss SF/F covers throw a lot of women off.

That said, i dislike romance for similar reasons to disliking first person narrative; they lack tension. I find it hard to step around my disbelief and go "ZOMG they is gonna DIE!!!". On top of that there are the issues of emotional topography. Most romance concentrates on one to three emotions; lust, love, frustration. Good god anyone who has those three as their primary emotional drives is not my type of person. Where the hell are curiosity, anger, fear, and the rest. And we'll not even go into the plot convenient character quirks, which I admit aren't an exclusive fiefdom of romance.

[sartorias]

Yeah...the audience expects, and wants, that intimate space, which is bounded by what you say, and all the shades inbetween: jealousy, fear of losing the beloved, yadda yadda.

[avengangle]

There's one 'straight' romance author, I forget her name, but she writes absolute tearjerkers, and I read a bunch of them, and realized I'd rather go back to Julia Quinn and Eloisa James who, while they may not write the most spectacularly crafted romance novels, are at least good at balancing the humor with the angst.

One of the Ja(y)nes didn't like Spymaster's Woman, either. Here's her review; your reasons for disliking it may overlap hers.

I generally prefer my romance mixed with sf/fantasy, but right now (yes, as I type) I'm getting burned on another paranormal, and it might be the subject of a dissection later.

[sartorias]

Oh yes.

Of course, just about any time someone uses the term "achingly vulnerable" and is serious about it, I'm usually on my way out the door. Jayne's take was very much mine, indeed.