In the most current episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour during a discussion of Suicide Squad, Glen Weldon starts talking about heroism (something he’s devoted a considerable amount of time writing about) and says the following, which pretty much set my hair and my brain on fire:
We’re embracing the antihero. We have been for decades – especially in tv but also in books and movies. We tell ourselves we embrace the antihero because we think it’s more sophisticated. We recognize that the world isn’t black and white, and that moral ambiguity and ambivalence is more real. We tell ourselves that, and we’re awfully smug about it, but the real reason we’re doing that, we embrace the antihero, is because we just don’t have the guts to embrace the hero. We’re too cowardly. We’re too cynical to believe in heroes. We distrust ideals because they’re too hopeful and sincere. If we believed in the heroes that embody them, that means we’d actually have to risk something, put ourselves out there, be hopeful and sincere, and look hokey and uncool….
At RT, and RWA, and in the weeks since, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to different people, sometimes via email, sometimes on the podcast, but as always talking about the romance genre, what it does, what we love about it, and how it can do better. How it can better represent the miraculous individuality of the women who read it, so that the people we see in the worlds of the romances we read more accurately reflect who we are as individuals, as women, as human beings. How it has changed the way it represents sexuality, and how it could change further, for the better. How romance gets some things so amazingly, brilliantly right, and also gets things teeth-grindingly wrong. How evolution is necessary and painful. There is a lot to be said, and it all hasn’t been explicated in full.
But I remain optimistic about the genre. I am determinedly hopeful when there’s yet another hand-wavy pearl-clutching warning about unrealistic expectations or when yet again there are numbers and lists that don’t fit the reality and experience of everyone in this business. I’m determined that romance can be better and do better, even when yet another paper cut is inflicted on someone in the margins of our text. I get discouraged, and I know that it can seem very hopeless, futile and useless when the work of so many is ignored or disregarded, when the effort to move the arbitrary markers of progress is monumental, but prior advancements were made so long ago, a year or five or ten or thirty, that it doesn’t seem to matter to anyone right now.
After a number of conversations this week about how there are so many wrongs that can’t possibly be righted in one lifetime, both within the smaller context of our genre and in the larger, farthest-reaching boundaries of our world, I wondered when or if we within the genre community would hit the, “Oh, well, nothing I can do” point. After 10+ years writing about the genre, and more than twice that reading it, I’ve only experienced a tiny amount of the romance community. And even in that minuscule amount of time, there have been so many small and many more enormous changes, and just as many small and enormous things that remain frustratingly the same. But I don’t think we can or do give up.
And I think it’s because, as Weldon mentioned, that we embrace the heroic ideals. We seek out stories which base their foundations in optimism, and build their structure with possibility and confidence and assurance that it will all be ok in the end. In romance, we traffic in empathy, and we are all about heroic ideals.
What’s more, heroic ideas themselves vary within culture and origin. Is heroism courage? Piety? Confidence and outward bravery? Quiet determination and self-actualization? Humor? Cleverness? Strategy? Trickery? Intelligence and analytic prowess? Emotional fluency and tireless care taking? Or is it all of the above and more? Because the base, the elemental origin of heroism is that there is an ideal, that there is hope, that there is good. There is happiness. And the heroic, they go find it.
So I’m pretty used to being greeted with the assumption that romance is in some way uncool or unworthy because we so eagerly embrace and explore ideals and the possibility of “better” every time we read, every time we write, every time we pick up another book right after we finish the last one.
We embrace heroism, and we take risks by embracing that heroism. That’s scary and weird to some, I think, because we engage with literature which unabashedly targets and elicits our emotions – lots of them, shamelessly, and all the really difficult ones, too! Reading romance is a pretty fearless act because it is risky. It’s pushing against the expected roles for women, rejecting and upending damaging messages about sexuality, and subverting suppressive and toxic lessons about femininity and masculinity. Even at its most familiar, romance centers the characters, their emotions and experiences, wraps them in idealism and hope, and sends them out to readers with the repeated message that in the end, there will be, and there is happiness.
So we’re pretty freaking brave. As Tracey Livesay said during our podcast recording (twice), “This genre is ours. It belongs to us.” There is happiness and there will be happiness because the essential belief of heroism is that better is possible, hope might be reality, and we can do the things that need to be done. We can do better and we can find better, because that’s what we do in romance. We are the heroic ideal who eagerly seeks stories about the heroic ideal, and the emotional victory of finding ourselves.
I hope you’re reading something that rocks your world. Thank you for being brave and fearless readers with me.
This. So much this.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU SARAH
I love this post!!! It made me tear up a bit. Thank you!!
There are always rewards for coming here every day. I’ve been having a pretty cynical, no hope for the world kind of day. I come here and you give me this. Now I’m diving back into The To Do List while the Olympic ceremony goes on. The Olympics are always a font of optimism. And men in shorts.
love love love
This is just lovely, and it reminds me so much of something Jennifer Crusie said – someone help me out here – about how hard it was not using humor to distance the story from the fairytale ending, but to actually commit to the romance. Anyone know what I’m talking about?
I started reading romances (that were marketed as such) very late into my reading life because of this here website. And I thank you for it. Yes, the optimism! I’m a “read the end of the book first” person, and I don’t have to with romances. I’ve also learned a lot. (Thanks Beverly Jenkins and Courtney Milan!)
@kkw, I think I know what you’re referring to. Now I want to go find it.
In my reading, movie and tv watching, and (hopefully) my outlook on life, I look for the good. No horror movies, no depressing novels, no gloom and doom news cycles. I know the world is a scary, harsh place. But there are good, beautiful parts in it. Those are the places I focus on, and that’s why I like rom-com movies, funny tv, and HEA romances.
Thank you so much for this Sarah. Michelle, I agree with you completely – we have to look for the good. I also can no longer watch soaps like EastEnders (I’m in the UK) because of their unrelenting gloom and doom which affect me and emotional state for the rest of the day. I want to invest my time in HEA not misery.
The places I look for the good are all around, like right now my 17 year old cat is asleep on the seat next to me snoring his head off – bliss! Sorry if I sound like Pollyanna because I’m really not, but I believe we have to consciously choose to look for the good, the heroic. It’s all too easy to fall into the negativity trap, because it’s the quickest (and laziest?) thing to do. In the UK we have this default setting of sighing and saying “Oh, not too bad” when someone asks how an event (weekend/holiday/etc) went – and then listing everything that was wrong with it. It drives me crazy, and most of all when I catch myself doing it!! And some peoples’ attitudes to romance are the same I think – there’s an absolute shame-fest out there about embracing it, the positivity… the heroic.
So glad I’ve found this website, you’ve become a real source of validation and inspiration for me (not to mention the laughs).
Love this post.
Love that we still have hope, and courageously choose to have hope.
@kkw – Crusie says this in the foreword to my copy of The Cinderella Deal: “…writing comedy may be hard, but writing honest emotion is ten times more difficult. Every time I got near an over-the-top moment, I had to fight my knee-jerk tendency to step back into irony or even worse, to make a joke. After a while it got easier…”
@Michelle in Texas, I’m with you! I’m very particular about what I ingest and take into my mind and life
I don’t think anyone, when faced with the option, would ever choose fear and unhappiness over joy and satisfaction if they felt they could have them. Cynicism, jadedness, and their attendant emotions come from looking at what is or was rather than what could be. There is always the possibility of good and growth to arise from even very painful situations; at the very least they help us clarify who we are and what we *do* want.
It takes work to have faith in goodness if you’ve been trained (by whatever) into fear and disgruntlement. I think that’s something people develop because children are naturally eager, imaginative, expressive, joyful. I’m all for anything that speaks to that true, eternal part of me.
Thank you for this great post.
So much of our day-to-day lives are marked with struggles just to get up in the morning and make it through the day. Whether the reason is a job that is unfulfilling or dealing with an illness or a relationship in crisis or a myriad of other life issues that drag us down. The world is too often filled with angst and anger. But I want to believe that being hopeful and happy aren’t completely lost in this world – and a reading a good romance helps give me that hopefulness. It changes my thinking about the world around me and makes me want to find a way to make it a happier place.
@Helen R-S Thank you! Yes, that is exactly what I was remembering, or not exactly *remembering* but you know what I mean.
@kkw You’re welcome!
And this is exactly how I feel too about the current spate of DC superhero movies where everything is awful. My thing is, I’ve come through family bereavements and serious illness. I’m older and I’ve experienced more. Yes, I took refuge in cynicism when I was younger because it was easier but now, I’m actively searching happiness and positivity every day for myself and for other, however I can manage it because the world is a crappy place. We all know that from the news even if everything is great in our daily lives. We need stories that lift us up and inspire us.
I was nodding vigorously reading this entire article. Thank you for this. Where would be we without romance and hope? I dread to think.
Thank you! My spouse refers to me as a “ruthless optimist” because I will do whatever it takes to make things turn out well 🙂
Romance novels feed the part of my soul that needs earnestness and sincere emotion and the possibility that people can change and evolve – and/or excavate their best selves from all sorts of crappy rubble. These days, I need hopeful and sincere more than ever. Lovely post, thank you!
I echo all the ideas – esp Michelle. People laugh (and even sneer)at my choice of reading materials and till quite recent, I was ashamed to mention that I love to read romances (especially historical) Not anymore.
But this is my choice because while real life has beaten me up, kicked me around, smothered me with misery and walloped me with wickedness, reading romance keeps me optimistic and hopeful and prevents me from becoming bitter and hard like the rest of the world
So here’s to all us lovers of romance – who are usually laughing and smiling while reading on the bus or train while the rest of them just look miserable!! We are awesome!!
All of the stories, all of this, all of you. Thank you from the bottom of my beat-up heart.