I asked this question over the weekend on Twitter but I wanted to have more than 140 characters to ask it, so I’m going to re-post, or co-tweet-post or whatever the hell it is.
I’ve been thinking about conflict and the things that stop or imperil a relationship, and I’ve realized that I am very attracted to stories that have a forbidden element to them, when some powerful no-no prevents the protagonist pair from being together. As I said on Twitter, What conflict preventing the HEAin a romance novel is your favorite? I.e. “We can’t be together because….” What’s your favorite reason?
I’m picky, though, about that reason. It can’t be something so powerful that, despite their decision to be together, it will likely ruin their lives anyway. She’s a courtesan, he’s a lord, and what do you mean their children won’t be welcomed in society anywhere they go?! It’s difficult for me to “suspend my disbelief,” to quote Jennifer Crusie, in those circumstances because the reality is harsh.
Yet, I was a total sucker for Dallas, even though I was too young to really understand the nuances of the plots, and way, WAY too impressionable to be shown that many shoulderpads in contemporary fashion. The Barnes/Ewing family feud, the two characters from each family drawn to each other, and the conflict that results? Rwor.
The more I ponder the forbidden attraction, the more I think that my personal favorite is when the forbidding factor is something morally-based. Whoever is in conflict between duty and attraction has to balance out their moral compass such that they can attain the person they desire and still live with themselves (and be worthy in the eyes of the reader) afterward.
So what’s your favorite reason in a romance novel that prevents the hero and heroine from being together? Which “We can’t be together because…” is the story you gravitate toward and adore? And which ones totally don’t work for you?
Brand new release from [notable romancewriter]:
[center]To Tempt A Slothman
and
Slothman’s Bride[/center]
I sense a whole new genre here…
It occurs to me that conflict in a contemporary setting is more difficult to handle (for the writer) and relate to (for the reader), simply because it is contemporary, thus forcing the reader to ask herself “How would I deal with this?”.
And sometimes the conflict will be a situation that doesn’t mean a whole lot to the reader, provoking a “Meh” or a “Get over it already” response, whereas other stuff matter so much that the writer must have a very deft hand indeed to avoid the subject/conflict coming across as a superficial contrivance, or what the reader feels is assholish, emotional, chain-jerkage from the author.
Historicals, fantasy, SF etc. allow us to pretend that whatever the problem standing in the way of True Love (yeah, I’ve been watching The Princess Bride recently, why d’ya ask *g*) is, it could be A Major Deal in that setting. Within reason, of course.
Ok, so the center tag thing didn’t totally work out. Hmf.
I adore when the hero can’t act on his feelings for the heroine because his duty to her comes first. Oooo bodyguard stories. For some reason I also love when either h/h is totally clueless – one is in love but the other originally only sees them as a friend/coworker/whatever, and their feelings slowly grow throughout the story.
Also, while I don’t like when the h/h do something to ruin their lives, I do like stories that have permanent consequences. One of my favorites has both the h/h committing treason out of love for the other, forcing them to flee the country. Neither of them can ever return to the homes they loved so much and it’s truly tragic, but they’ll be okay, even happy, because they have each other.
I enjoy damaged characters, but only if they are a) not damaged so much that I can’t believe they could ever truly recover and b) damaged enough so their hangups don’t seem ridiculous. I liked Crusie’s Welcome to Temptation but the heroine drove me crazy. As far as I could tell, her major hangup – besides a “wrong side of the tracks” childhood – was that she calculatingly gave her virginity to a popular boy and then he humiliated her about it the next day at school. Fifteen years later, this is still considered by every single character in the book a horrifically traumatic, emotionally crippling event that of course explains why she can’t commit to the hero. What clinched it for me was when the hero himself gasped in all seriousness “God, I’d hate me too!” upon learning the story, despite being very little like the jerky high school kid. Seriously??? The rest of the book was great and I loved the h/h relationship; I just did not understand the focus on this one high school event.
When I’m fighting the urge to yell GET OVER IT ALREADY to a character, that’s not a good sign.
I love them, as the Bitches would say, like whoa and damn, but I always felt that Scorpius was more a a multiplier of their issues and the actual cause. Either way they’re one of my all time favorite couples.
I’m with you. The fact that they didn’t get to do another season still bugs me to no end.
Eirin: I would totally read about Slothman and his bride. But I’m weird like that. I also think you’re right that when reading contemporaries we tend to cut characters less slack for behaving in ways that don’t make sense to us, where in historicals we right a lot off to “it was a different time”.
On one hand, I think that can be unfortunate and/or unfair because there’s a lot of variation in the world. On the other, there are some things that just don’t work for me, whether actual people do them or not.
Tying back to an earlier part of the conversation—I couldn’t read the Men of August books because they hit my incest squick. My thinking is that generally if you’ve seen a person’s O face up close you have a sexual relationship him. If he’s related to you a sexual relationship = incest, which I do not want to read about. I know that this isn’t where the line is drawn for everyone. When I asked my significant other about it he thought it was gross and weird, but definitely not incest. Obviously lots of people find it neither gross nor incest. YMMV and I think in general it’s good to remember that.
@Karen: I took it that the issue was the wrong side of the tracks problem and having been treated badly by lots and lots of people who “belonged” and never missed a chance to make the family feel less than for being outsiders. The think the virginity thing was just the capper. And Finn was the ultimate insider in Temptation. Was her issue exaggerated? Almost certainly, but hurts inflicted in childhood tend to be blown out of proportion like that.
I like the friends to lovers plot a lot, as well as enemies to lovers. It’s nice to see an existing relationship of some form evolve into love. I guess I’m much more focused on the internal dynamics than action-packed plot. If I do go for a very action-driven story, I prefer it to be funny and adventurous, rather than dark and dramatic. For me, romance novels are all about the good vibes I get from reading it, and the pleasure from seeing the lovers get a happy ending. I guess they have to work a little to get it and deserve it, but honestly the really serious tales end in a feeling of something more akin to relief than joy for me. That’s why I go for simple stories.
@Lori: Yeah, I could see the whole insiders/outsiders thing, and how returning to a small judgmental town could bring all those issues to the fore. I guess I just felt that after fifteen years she could have worked on those issues more, and that everyone’s reactions to the virginity story were just too over-the-top to be believable.
I like the enemies to lovers as well, provided there’s something reasonable at the bottom of the antagonism. It really bugs me when he hates her on sight because…ehr…she wears a red scarf like his lyin’ cheatin’ first girlfriend and drives a blue Miata; and she hates him ‘cause he’s a rockstar and probably a scumbag and…also, stupid hair.
When it’s done well though…yummi hot, angry sex and reluctant getting to know each other and did I mention the hot sex?
ou know, I could do with some recs in that vein right now:)
Woah, Crusie gets credit for copping Coleridge.
Say that ten times fast. 😀
Any copies of Slothman’s Bride available or do I need to read To Tempt a Slothman first? I’ll pay money.
@ShandaLear: I was quoting Crusie from an interview with me. I had no idea she was quoting Coleridge. Ignorance, I has it. my bad.
LOL no worries, everyone cribs the line. I just read it and laughed out loud.
Weirdly… that essay on the willing suspension of disbelief is one of the things actually caused the AHA! bubble for me in school.
Aliens. Aliens just make me laugh hysterically and wonder if there is going to be tentacles involved.
Or egg sacks.
Either way it’s a cop out if they turn out to be compatible and humanoid.
Hmmm. Reading this, I’m not sure if I “prefer” any in particular. I actually rather like the Temptation example because they get over their own issues and seeing each other as “jerky frat boy” and “bad girl.” And Farscape. It’s difficult, but possible.
The best ones are usually the ones that prevent the h/h from ever getting together…which is the problem. Buffy/Angel being a classic. Or any coupling where someone has AIDS (hello, Robin Scorpio). So inherently, you have to find a very good excuse, but one that can be gotten over with work.
The one I hate is “one is childfree, the other isn’t, get the childfree one to cave in, they end with a baby.” Haaaaaaaaaaaate. That is in my “please don’t go there” category. Or “I can’t have your baby because I’m infertile” and then she gets pregnant anyway. I also loathe the Spider-Man “I can’t be with you because it makes you a target, except obviously she’s ALREADY a target” example.
I’m currently reading the latest in the Cal Leandros series. I’m not sure how I feel about the excuses in that one, which boil down to (a) “There is no way on this earth I will have sex with anyone who can get pregnant, period, I don’t trust birth control” (this is a little paranoid, but given what’s happened to Cal in his life I sorta can’t blame him for paranoia, especially since he can’t go to a doctor for a vasectomy), and (b) “My evil family/enemies have promised to slaughter everyone I love while I watch.” It’s all kind of justified and kind of not at the same time.
I kinda feel scared that you will all throw sloths at me, but I love the whole “Mate” thing. When the hero/heroine is fated to that person and then they have to overcome the fear of a biological only type love into feeling the complete package. Love it.
Also have to chime in on the whole damaged hero, especially an alpha one.
HIV doesn’t actually make it impossible for people to be together. It changes some things obviously, but being HIV positive doesn’t mean a person has to be alone. In fact, from what I understand, Robin Scorpio is now married and has a baby (I gave up on GH many years ago).
As for the Cal Leandros thing, does that world not have a little thing called the vasectomy? I
well, aren’t you the smart one? some of us still haven’t gotten the message that GH is dead as a door nail. It gets worse everyday, but i still watch when i have the time. its kind of like watching a train wreck or a car crash. you just can’t look away.
Smart? Unfortunately not—-I still haven’t been able to totally give up on All My Children. It’s such a train wreck it’s not even fun to snark about it any more.
Any book that can make me wonder half way through ‘how on earth is the author going to make this work?’ works for me. It doesn’t matter as long as the problem/conflict is a real sustainable issue, not a ‘we can solve this in one conversation but then the book would be over’.
I tend to lean toward the wounded heroes myself 🙂
I think I hate it when the thing keeping the hero and heroine apart is something they both know but can’t figure out how to avoid or mitigate. My favourite romances tend to be the ones where for whatever reason the thing that keeps them apart is that they don’t know they are in love (and that this lack of knowledge is understandable, even if it could be cleared up in one conversation if it makes sense not to have the conversation). It could be that one of them hasn’t twigged to the fact that what is going on is Love, or it could be that one knows that s/he Loves but is sure that the other doesn’t. Challenge by Sophie Weston (Harlequin Presents) is one I love—the heroine thinks that the hero isn’t serious and he doesn’t realise right away that a light-hearted flirtation isn’t the right place to start with her. (Maybe that doesn’t sound very brilliant, but I really like the characters.)
Much easier for me to list the conflict issues that make me nuts, as I enjoy a variety of conflict issues as long as they’re well written. The big Too Stupid To Exist Hall of Fame Wing of EWWWW goes to the ever popular “I think you did this bad bad thing but I refuse to actively participate in any meaningful dialogue that would clear this up in about ten seconds so we can drag out the Big Misunderstanding Based On Misinformation conflict for 500 pages before I can say, oh, wait! You were not secretly the lead guitarist for WHAM!” drama. People, people, open your pie holes and communicate. I HATE that crap.
It does, but Cal unfortunately is not quite human (which is the root of his problem) and that would raise doctors’ eyebrows.
I haven’t read the latest one yet but boy, am I looking forward to it.
I read a book a few years back about women dressing as men during the Civil War: They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the Civil War. I had some issues with it, but the authors did a pretty tight job of explaining how so many women could pass themselves off as men: some of it was probably because many soldiers were very young and the women could pass themselves off as younger (boys in their teens), but a lot of it also seemed to be about expectations. There was NO overlap between male and female clothing and fashion at the time, unlike today—so if someone was wearing pants, why would you EVER think they were anything other than a man? People’s brains just weren’t trained to check for gender clues like ours are—it sounds a little fantastical to modern-day readers, but it made sense. A lot of women were only found out when they suffered wounds or were killed (although one woman was discovered because she gave birth in camp!).
@Lizzie: Yes, that’s the gist of the historical “passing as male” argument, and there are some impressive historical examples. Most gender clues are cultural, and if you can mimic them, most people don’t even consider the possibility that you’re faking it.
Cross-gender performance is my scholarly specialty, as it were, and it’s pretty amazing what you can pull off even in today’s culture. Once when I was playing a male character on stage (a fairly small space, with an up-close audience), and one of the critics said that he “had me pegged” by the middle of the second act—he was convinced I was gay (male)! One of the nicest compliments on my acting ever, thanks very much. And while I’m not drop-dead gorgeous, I don’t think I’m the type that “would not pass as a romance heroine.” (If I could figure out how to post a picture here, I would, darnit.)
Of course it would be harder day to day, face to face, in real life. For an excellent view of how it might be done (one that doesn’t conveniently skip over the details, a la Shakespeare), I recommend Pam Rosenthal’s Almost a Gentleman.
He’s dead. Or she’s dead. So they can’t be together. Even though the dead person has come back as a ghost. But of course we only find this out in the last chapter.
And if he’s from a different historical era, so much the better…
Going back to Deathwish, it’s worth noting that both Cal and Niko have severe trust and intimacy issues (yet aren’t assholes! It can be done!) and Cal has a particular Madonna/whore thing going on with his relationships with Georgina King and Delilah. Those reasons cited above are perfectly valid within the framework of the story, but the best part of Thurman is that there’s a lot of human personal issues going on with her monsters.
Having thought about it more, I think that my problem with the cross dressing romances is tied to the fact that I’m not crazy about love at first sight stories and other plots where people fall for each other when they don’t know each other well. I’ve read a lot of those over the years and they’re just not working for me these days.
I’ve met drag queens & kings and a couple of transvestites socially and at one time had a coworker who was transitioning male to female. My experience is that cross-dressing doesn’t hold up all that well to close proximity where you’re really paying attention to the person. I know it has happened IRL, but the circumstances behind the cases I’ve heard of were generally more sad than romantic.
So, I rarely read stories where the “I thought she was a boy” thing holds up for me and the couple has spent enough time together for me to care about the relationship. Because I have very limited time to read and a TBR that could cause physical damage if it fell on me I just avoid that particular plot device.
I think this is generally how it works for me. There are very, very few conflicts or plot devices that are the automatic kiss of death on their own, but lots of combination that don’t go well together.
No, HIV doesn’t make it impossible, but it’s a pretty big complication to throw into a plot. Depends on how willing the other person is to risk getting the disease, which Robin has had play out from both sides now.
Regarding historical crossdressers, there was a young woman in my hometown who took part in the Napoleonic Wars. The local museum has a portrait of her as well as a sword and uniform jacket that belonged to her. The jacket is tiny, so even given that people were smaller in centuries past she must have been very petite.
The young woman did not manage to pass completely, an officer must have found her out, because he made sure that she was quartered separately from the other soldiers. She survived the war and was celebrated as a heroine and example for all women upon her return.
I need to chime in and agree with all those that love a “damaged” man. Though I am a fan of all of JR ward’s books, Zsadist’s was the most compelling and most powerful to me. I just read the novella and it was like chocolate on a bad day – a great lift.
In terms of contemporary, I have two words: Kathryn Shay. Her firefighter series is among the best I’ve ever written. The first involved a firefighter with two teenagers in an unhappy marriage when he meets the heroine. They are attracted to each other, but do nothing, since hello, he’s married. When they finally get the HEA, you can’t help but reach for the Kleenex. All the books in this series are along those lines and I can’t put them down.
After 111 posts, nobody is going to notice this nitpick, anyway! While I have no doubt that J.Crusie will have referred to suspension of disbelief, it is not her concept, as your wording seems to suggest. It was coined by Samuel Taylor Coleridge around 1815. I’m sure you knew that, really. I imagine that this must be taught in most literature courses, but it is 50 years since I did any Eng.Lit. classes, so I may be wrong.
Suspension of disbelief is central to our reception of fiction, and in these days of supernatural elements occurring regularly in fiction intended for adults, is the chief explanation of the different responses and tolerance of different individuals – we all have different boundaries, points beyond which we are unable to suspend disbelief.
😉
@AgTigress: the ignorance is all mine as I said up here. I didn’t actually know that. I’ve read theories on and explorations of how we interact with fiction, but not the original Coleridge text. Something new to read. Woot!
I also get the sense that Ms. Thurman just doesn’t find Georgina all that interesting a character.
Well, Cal has a human mother, so the species match enough for mating to be made and reproduction to obtain. In any case, I could never understand why Mr Spock lived, and the offspring of T’Pol and Trip did not…
It’s hard to be interesting when you’re on a pedestal. I’m hoping for a future entry in the series where in 1st person narration George reveals she’s constantly jumping out of her skin with desire to get laid, or had a weird tic.
Promise is more boring to me, frankly.