On Romance Novel Heroes and Heroines

Romancing the Blog has a column today by Larissa Ione, who reads romance novels solely for the hero. In fact, more often than not she hates the heroine.

This is fascinating to me. It’s a very, very weird viewpoint for me to process. I know people have argued that romance novel readers tend to identify more with the hero than the heroine, or at least be more forgiving of the hero than the heroine, and I can see that. Personally, I tend to be a bit more forgiving of the hero’s foibles and weaknesses, but honestly, the hero doesn’t have all that much more leeway than the heroine. In fact, I tend to get much angrier with asshole heroes than I do bitchy heroines, but then there are very, very few romance novels in which the heroine puts the hero through the same kind of wringer an alpha asshole is capable of. (Hmmmm, a heroine assuming a hero’s a slut and proceeding to rape him with a strap-on might make for a very interesting scenario, though. Heh.) The reverse is much more likely to be the problem in romance novels: heroines tend to be either too perfect, or have martyr complexes so you big you can see them from outer space.

Larissa discusses a few possibilities as to why she feels the way she does, and she says:

I’m not sure why I tend to not like heroines in romance novels. It may be that I expect a lot from women, so heroines sometimes disappoint. It may be that I want to relate to them, but I often can’t.

I think there’s another possibility that wasn’t brought up: it might be because of an odd species of competitiveness/possessiveness. Not that these readers are looney tunes and think the heroes are real and therefore are jealous of the heroine because she gets him and they don’t, but remember back in school when you had that massive crush on Simon LeBon or Jordan Knight or whoever, and they were YOURS and you got pissed off if your best friend developed a crush on him too? I’m thinking that maybe the extreme identification with the hero may originate from similar roots.

Now keep in mind this is just a theory and pure speculation on my part. I’ve been known to engage in colorectal linguistics, and this may very well be one of those times.

Something else I want to talk about is the issue of character identification, and what I find appealing (and not appealing) about romance novel protagonists. I don’t need to identify with the hero or heroine in order for me to like the book. To tell you the truth, the average romance novel hero is way too high-maintenance and has far too much emotional baggage for me to handle in real life, but I still love reading books featuring really tormented heroes. Ditto the heroine. It’s nice when the author is able to create characters who are so damn likeable you wished they lived next door so you could invite them over on weekends to watch bad movies with you and snark at them together (Christy and Anne from To Love and to Cherish did actually inspire that kind of wistfulness in me), but it’s certainly not a necessity. What I do need is for the hero and heroine to be convincing, sympathetic entities to whom I can relate on a very basic level, and who behave in consistent, non-annoying ways.

These are my very general guidelines for what I consider to be a good romance novel hero:

• He needs to be HOT. I don’t mean he has to be muscle-bound, and I don’t mean he has to have chiseled features. There just needs to be something about him that’s overwhelmingly attractive, and mostly that’s personality-driven, though I do have certain physical trait “dealbreakers” that are due to my own tastes in real life. I’m not physically attracted to overweight men, for example. I’m chubby enough for the both of us, thanks. But yeah, the hero has to be hot. He has to talk hot, act hot and to a certain degree, look hot. Jennifer Crusie’s Harlequins like Getting Rid of Bradley and What The Lady Wants had heroes who weren’t particularly good-looking in the traditional sense, but something about them was just, you know. HOT.
• At the end of the day, he needs to treat the heroine like a queen, and if he’s engaged in any rat bastardry, he has to beat himself up appropriately over it and be really really really really really sorry he assumed, said or did any of the asstarded things he has to the beyond-patient heroine.

These are my very general guidelines for what I consider to be a good romance novel heroine:

• She needs to be not-stupid. I don’t mean smart, though I do enjoy reading books about intellectually gifted women. But she can’t be Too Stupid To Live, and should she engage in TSTL behavior, she needs to be appropriately remorseful and not repeat the behavior again. All I ask from my heroines is that at no point do I feel compelled to yell out loud or think very, very emphatically “THAT IS REALLY FUCKING STUPID. PLEASE DIE SO WE CAN REMOVE YOU FROM THE GENE POOL, K THX.”
• She can’t be too perfect. I hate perfect heroines. Oh look, she’s a healer, and a sharpshooter, and a super horsewoman, and she’s beautiful, and she has magnificent ta-tas, and her hey-nanner-nanner is always lavishly well-lubricated yet pleasingly tight, and she’s possessed of more compassion than the Goddess of Mercy and the Virgin Mary combined, and she’s super-smart, and emotionally vulnerable yet grounded at the same time…. FEH. I don’t want a paragon. I want a real woman, not Nancy fucking Drew.

Yeah, notice how I didn’t list “hot” anywhere in my requirements for the heroine. Double-standards? Oh you betcha. I guess I do want the heroine to be attractive and practice appropriate personal hygiene and all that jazz, but mostly it’s because I want the hero’s attraction to her to be believable. To phrase it another way: the hero has to be hot to me and to the heroine, but the heroine just has to be hot to the hero. For example, Seize the Fire has a heroine who’s downright plain, but it doesn’t matter because Sheridan (talk about a HOT hero who manages to tread the very, very fine line dividing good guys from bad) finds her supremely attractive. Yeah, I know, personal fantasy fulfillment much?

And of course I don’t want a TSTL hero, and I don’t want a heroine who abuses the hero non-stop either, but generally these aren’t major problems in romance novels; the problems with characterization that I see over and over again seem to be pretty clearly demarcated along gender lines. Even with my very simple criteria, it’s amazing how many authors fuck it up, and the multitude of ways this fuckage can happen are also legion. A bad heroine will spoil my reading experience just as surely as a bad hero will. I do find that writers generally fuck up both of them at the same time. If the hero is annoying, chances are the heroine will be just as annoying too. I can’t think of any time my experience has mirrored Larissa’s, in which I hate (and I mean HATE, not just “feel mildly and occasionally annoyed with”) the heroine but still end up loving the hero and, consequently, the book.

It’s not all about the man for me. Not even close. I’m all about the equal opportunity hateration, baby. And the equal-opportunity love.