Whoooaaaa-ooooaaa-oooaaa… Caught in a Bad Romance

Ga ga ooh la la…

Okay, so without condemning or praising this development, and acknowledging that I’m judging based only on the first couple episodes of the season, one of my favourite shows has suddenly shifted emphasis from mystery to romance. This seems to have split fans down the middle. You’d expect this to be because some fans approve of these particular characters entering a relationship and others don’t, but there are plenty of non-shippers who seem to be okay with this turn of events and plenty of former proclaimers of OTP who are now crying foul.

The whole fanfiction thing is, of course, in full play: naysayers compare cheesy romantic moments to the cliché absurdities common to fanfiction.net authors who self-identify as young and/or female. (Speaking of which, in some cases, the whole sexism thing is also in play — the identification of “silly” romantic fantasies with women and girls, and the implication that such fantasies are somehow have less value  than similarly unrealistic fantasies associated with men and boys, or assumed to be gender-neutral.*)

I watched the season premiere and found myself thinking, “Euuuurggh… This is a boring story” even though I liked the idea of this couple getting together earlier on. And then, because the show didn’t engage me to the point where I figured staying out of the fandom would benefit me, I checked out some message boards. And was surprised to find forums I’d normally associated with complaints about all things romantic split down the middle as to whether they’d loved or hated the premiere. So I re-watched some of the scenes the ravers were raving about, wondering if it was just me and my own cynicism that first time.

So far, my answer is: sort of. I can better enjoy the scenes I re-watched once I know what to expect, and also the whole skipping-over-the-really-stupid-parts helps because I control the pacing of the episode and can just not watch anything that made my brain freeze in protest. But more than anything, taking a look at people’s wildly divergent responses to certain key moments — and seeing how it could go either way when I compare my first-viewing response to my re-watch response — makes me wonder: what makes a romantic story good?

There are some obvious candidates as to what makes one bad: poor writing that distracts from what’s actually going on (whether it’s giggle-worthy euphemisms being used for the descriptions of sexual acts or plain old bad turns of phrase, like the one from the novel our high school Writer’s Craft teacher gave us as an example of the kind of writing to avoid, wherein the protagonist held a bouquet described as  “a salad of roses”); characters who suddenly act as though they’ve had a personality transplant; or uncomfortable themes used naively (for instance, a straight-up romance about a rapist and his victim who fall in love with each other).

But what do we like about the romances we like? What makes one romance jump out at us as cliché and another move us? It’s not just familiarity: many people are still moved by the poetry of Romeo and Juliet, and when you look at Much Ado About Nothing, it’s clear that the bicker-style romantic couple hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years.

I wonder if, in some ways, readers and viewers give romance a high set of expectations compared to most other “genre” fiction. We expect mysteries to intrigue us and to end satisfactorily; we expect science fiction to present one or two cool new ideas and develop them logically. We’d prefer to fall in love with the protagonists and every aspect of the plot — that’s what makes fiction great instead of just good — but we can acknowledge, say, that a book was a good mystery and then add without contradicting ourselves, “But I hated all the characters.”

On the other hand, we demand that even a moderately successful romance make us feel something. This “something” is so nebulous to define that we have all sorts of material metaphors for it — “chemistry”, “tension” — and many people differ completely on whether the same actors have it or not. Feeling the “chemistry” between two actors or characters seems to be such a visceral and idiosyncratic phenomenon, affected by so many different variables, including one’s own standard of attractiveness, the extent to which one identifies with the character(s) in question, and even one’s knowledge of the characters’ or actors’ pasts.

(For example, if you know a pair of actors are married or dating or divorced in real life, or that they don’t identify with the same sexuality as the characters they play, it’s difficult to keep the fact from altering your perception of the fictional relationship they’re acting out.**)

The thing is, romance by definition deals with highly emotional situations, with plot constraints often coming from how the characters feel rather than or in addition to external forces. So the instant the reader or viewer takes the tiniest step back to gain perspective, suddenly a whole bunch of the characters’ actions seem very silly. Why doesn’t Romeo hold onto his horses and wait for the Friar to explain how Juliet died? Why don’t Benedict and Beatrice swallow their pride, stop acting like spoiled brats, and admit they like each other? (Or, why don’t Claudio and Hero just talk things over?)

Similarly, we judge how “romantic” a scene or action is based on how it makes us feel; if a character’s actions or words prompt us think of something outside the story (like, how cool the lighting is in this scene, or how many times we’ve seen that scenario before in fanfiction, or how unbelievably sexist this plot is), suddenly, we’re not feeling the plot of the story anymore. Which means we’re not feeling the love.

*sigh* I’m not doing a great job at articulating why I think writing good romance is difficult — I mean, all writing is difficult, and it’s always a challenge to get an audience to feel emotions along with a character. And readers’ reactions to fictional people are always going to be as personal and varied as their reactions to real people. I guess what daunts me about romance is how much of the story depends on securing that emotional attachment — how, without it, there’s nothing left of the thing itself to enjoy***.

Because romantic and sexual attraction are so wonderfully varied in real life, and because different people are comfortable with them to different degrees, I think it’s easy for the writer of a romance (or a romantic subplot) to lose his or her audience, and I think it’s particularly easy because many of us are encouraged to avoid mentioning ways in which our standards of attraction might differ from the mainstream. So even if a random writer out there gets it “right”, his or her audience might still be too embarassed to really get into the story.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

* For instance: an overblown love story in which two teenagers meet their twu wuvs and angst over it is somehow mindless drivel; a power fantasy in which you have a ridiculously eccentric detective who’s sexy, funny, brave, and always right or a suave, slick secret agent who beds a hundred desirable women each month whilst everything around him explodes into fireballs is still considered less “smart” than, say, Shakespeare or No Country For Old Men, but somehow nevertheless a notch above Twilight. Even strictly in the realm of sexual fantasy, porn (associated with men) is slightly less embarassing than a Harlequin (associated with women): somehow, many accept that the first is about satisfying physical needs, while the second implies some sort of delusional worldview on the part of the reader.

** Curiously (and I have to admit, to my horror), this operates in reverse:  some viewers who really feel the romantic attraction between two characters will transfer that feeling to the actors who play them as well. When The X Files was popular, there were “DD/GA” shippers who wanted David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson to get together as much as they did Mulder and Scully; contrariwise, I’ve seen at least one anti-House/Cuddy fan j’accuse that the only way the two characters’ relationship could have come about is if the actors who play them had hooked up in real life. Now, unless such fans actually cause harm to the actors and their lives by sharing these fantasies and/or conjectures, I guess I can’t pinpoint what I find so ethically wrong about it, but still…

*** Romances are often mixed up with some other kind of plot, and even if they’re not, the bickering type will at least leave you with a couple good zingers. But you know what I mean?