Your Views on Romance · 4:55am Dec 9th, 2014
Okay, so, good news and bad news and a Monday blog post!
Good news is that there is now a blog search feature, so the need for me to come up with an index is lessened, but I’ll still do it eventually. This also means I owe you guys a blog post for last week, which I hope I will get to this week.
The bad news is that my husband hurt his back on Thursday night and had to go to the ER. He pinched his sciatic nerve, which is a very painful thing, so for most of the weekend he’s been on his back on the floor, and I’ve been taking care of Trixie. Among other things this has thrown off my Christmas decorating and made me miss the writeoff (though I had a great idea, which I might try to get done tonight or tomorrow.)
This also means that I forgot to announce my Let’s Read fics this weekend. So! I’m going to announce some Let’s Read picks now, and post the blog I was working on last week tonight, then do the Let’s Read on Thursday or Friday asa bonus post.
Lets Read pick to be reviewed on Thursday, Dec 11th (or Friday, Dec 12th) are:
Epitaphs by baal bunny
Author Insert by Warren Hutch
One More Round by longpantsandimplosions.
I haven’t read any of them, so I can’t offer any insight, but if you want to read them in advance and jump right into the Let’s Read, now’s your chance!
Okay, now on to this blog post, which BTW contains spoilers for Yours Truly, by Thanqol.:
I’m often surprised, when I talk to people about romance stories or ships, by how differently people see things. Over time, I’ve realized the romance has a unique place in storytelling, in that everyone who reads it is bringing their own expectations. There’s a vague set of standards that we all agree on in western culture, but we all have different ideas about the details of what makes a strong couple, what makes a healthy relationship, which challenges are serious and which ones are trivial, what partners can and should expect from each other. And this makes sense, it’s a subject that we’re surrounded by, and one that all of us consider, usually voluntarily, happily, and seriously.
People like to imagine themselves on adventures, but usually not that seriously. There’s no personal investment in how you would react to challenges, or how someone should act when facing down a bad guy. This is something unlikely to ever really come up for you. On the other hand, people don’t like to imagine themselves reacting in a sad situation to the death of a loved one, and while that comes up for all of us at some point, usually we take it on instinct as an individual situation. In both of these cases, we give writers a lot of leeway to let the characters decide how to react; we might feel actions are out of character, but we rarely think they’re morally wrong or expect people to explore how unhealthy they are except for in extreme cases.
Romance is something we all think about. We think about relationships we’re in, or wish we were in. We try to help our friends and family sort out their troubles. We look to relationships we’ve been in, or that we’ve witnessed, or that we’ve seen or read about in media as models for how to navigate the subject. And based on what we’ve seen or experienced, we can have very different views of what people in love should feel and how they should act, what they should expect and get angry about, and when they should find someone who would give them something different. So, in a way, we’ve all learned to internalize depictions of romance, and to project our opinions onto other couples, real or imaginary.
And it shows. An awful lot of romance fics out there have comments or reviews along the lines of “I don’t think she should have taken her back” or “I don’t understand what she’s mad about” that have nothing to do with the characters involved, but are based on the situation and what the commenter or reviewer thinks is right or wrong in romance. And even more discussions of romance aspects, whether fics or the ships themselves, tend to start from our personal ideas of what a happy couple acts like.
As an example, a while ago Jake R and I convinced bats that if he was gonna ship Twijack, he had to read Yours Truly. So he went ahead and read it. I asked him to record his thoughts for this blog, because they illustrated this point so well:
I want to like Yours Truly more than I do. So much of it is done right; the story it tells, the method of telling it through letters, the pacing and buildup, the voice of the letters themselves, all of it is handled with a masterful touch, and the emotional core of the story is deep and affecting. I could take or leave a lot of the content that make up the subplots, but they serve their pacing purposes without detracting from the primary plotline, and that primary plotline between Twilight and Applejack is so...almost perfect.
It kills me that it isn’t perfect for me, it really does, because the emotion given through the characters is so captivating that I just want it to be perfect. The ending is such a powerful thing that it makes me want to forgive the rest, but I just can’t, because the story presents a thesis about relationships that completely wrecks my immersion. Twilight and Applejack decide to stay apart. They get married and forge a long-distance relationship while living their dreams separately. And they both decide that this is better than if they had moved in together, that this is somehow a more pure and distilled form of romance; they don’t have a chance to learn about the little things they find annoying about the other, or fall into the routine of a daily life together that’ll rub the sheen off the relationship, and in doing so they’ve made their relationship ‘perfect.’ Their marriage can be NRFB, and that’s a better thing than scuffing up the chrome and breaking in the leather.
This conceit of the story is so patently ridiculous that I can’t see past it. I understand why they opted to stay long-distance, and I understand why neither one would let the other cut their dream short for the sake of a relationship, because that’s a natural crossroads for any sort of relationship to enter and it fits with both of their personalities. It’s the mature and healthy thing for them to have done. But knocking a relationship around, finding the annoyances, and falling into the monotony of a day-to-day life together is what relationships are all about. They aren’t gaining something special from never doing that, they’re losing something vital and integral. It hinges on this idea that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it doesn’t. Absence makes the heart hurt.
There’s a reason so many long-distance relationships fail, and that’s because they hurt to be in, and the highs of the times two distant lovers are together when things can feel shiny, new, and perfect, just don’t cover up the lows. It’s a fairytale relationship in an otherwise grounded and real love story. Yours Truly is beautiful and heartbreaking as it is without the added pain of showing the truth of their relationship, but when I stare the soul of the story in its face, all I see is a lie. It holds it back and makes the piece weaker than the sum of its parts, and all that’s left for me is a desire for it to be better than it is.
Now, Yours Truly is a fic that a lot of people, including me, love. (Bad Horse does not, it has been noted.) But for bats, based on his view of romance, there’s a major sticking point in an otherwise well written, in character fic, based solely on his philosophy of romance.
This is a handicap that every writer of romance is starting from. Unless you’re depicting the most cliched, bland romance based solely on things that everyone in the western world thinks of as healthy and romantic, you’re going to write something that some people aren’t going to understand, or aren’t going to want to root for, or people will see flaws in your story that you don’t see as flaws at all, but as non-issues.
And, of course, this is the basis for most disagreements over ships as well. When it comes down to it, those of us who prefer certain ships on a general basis (as opposed to people who like any ship, or people who like the ship for a specific reason like “because they make the best writing device”) prefer them because they match what we think a happy couple looks like. This is “chemistry,” that spark we’re seeing: our own views of romance reflected back at us. Some people have views of romance that are on more solid ground than others, but they’re still based on our own set of experiences and things we’ve seen.
The thing is… I don’t think there’s a solution for this. Sure, some points of view are based on more experience, or a better eye for not just how people around them acts but the reasons for it: this is the same reason some people get a reputation for giving good romantic advice and some people get it wrong more often than not. But that’s not likely to change the mind of someone who’s only understanding comes from media fantasies and half understood views of other relationships, and it’s even less effective when dealing with someone who’s had or witnessed a kind of relationship that’s an anomaly and taken lessons from that.
I suspect this is one more reason romance in general is so divisive. Like the “team” aspect of shipping, the best we can do is admit that quality of fics is actually unrelated to this, in general, and try not to judge fics based on what we think a good or bad relationship looks like, but on whether the characters are in character, the events of the plot make sense for them, and the writing is good enough to convince you that these character care about each other.
Thanks to my December subscribers: Ultiville, Jake R, Kiro Talon, Singularity Dream, bats, Merc the Jerk, nemopemba, diremane, First_Down, sopchoppy, jlm123hi, Bradel,
stormgnome, JetstreamGW and Everhopeful. If you want to see your name in links, or get other fabulous prizes, check out this post for information on how to subscribe: Subscription Info.
I read Yours Truly a long, long time ago, and it is the one story I've sworn never to re-read.
It deserves to be perfect, and memories can be perfect.
Okay, I just reread it, a rare thing, and well. I still teared up at the last bit.
I read YT back in the day, when I was reading anything shippy. I remember loving it, but on a re-read it lost much of its luster. The ship didn't hit home for me the second time around (same problem bats had) and the plot device struck me as improbable enough to break my immersion. I suppose lots of stories I read 2-3 years ago would fall into that category.
You're right - for me, the shippery is about the story matching my ideals of what a relationship should feel like in all its stages. I've been married almost 20 years so my perceptions of romance and love are decidedly personal and now thoroughly ingrained. When a story doesn't convey what I know love to feel like, then I have to divorce myself (pun intended) from the characters and their story to judge it based on technical and other merits. Honestly these days it's extremely rare that I read anything without a Romance tag, and even then, the shipping goggles are on.
I have to admit, I wrote Traveling Tutor to counter so many of the "Hi, I love you, let's bang" stories that seemed to pop up everywhere I looked. Comedy can be instant, but romance takes *time* to develop, and it took a lot of misconceptions over a lot of time to get my lovebirds to nest. (so to speak) In short, a good romance takes: Time, Common Interests, Compatable Personalities, and a little bit of Magic. (fountains optional)
Romances in which the relationship is successful, probably suffer from the Anna Karenina principle ("All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"). There are so many more ways for lovers to fall apart than to come together, so it is much easier to write sad romance with a novel or unusual plot than a happy romance.
Okay, I like romance stories on here. I generally don't have huge glaring issues with how two characters can be together or have any particular favorite ships, but there's a couple of stories here and there that really bugged me even if I liked them. A good example is Twilight's List. Now, a lot of people love Twilight's List. A LOT of people. It's a good story. But when I was reading it I was practically yelling at the screen because Twilight is continuously going on about how their romantic outing inevitably has to end. It literally never occurs to her to ask Rainbow to make it a regular thing. That bugs me. When two characters are obviously into each other and obviously on a date, you'd think at least one of them would say "hey, I had a great time tonight and would like to do this again" BEFORE one of them breaks into tears because they aren't dating therefore their love can never be. It's little things like that that get to me. And like I said I still liked Twilight's List. I can't think of any stories I've read for romance that had such glaring issues with the relationship that I couldn't take it. But I can think of a TON of stories that I lose a little enjoyment in them when I start thinking about them. I don't have a lot of romantic experience, and the relationships I have had were weird and dysfunctional (not toxic, just weird) to the point where I know I shouldn't expect a romance story to really resemble it all that much.
As for Yours Truly. Oh man, that was one of the first fics I ever read. It also holds a unique honor in that it is the only fic that has ever made me straight up cry. Not just get a little misty eyed. No, bawling like a child over these cartoon horses. A couple others came close, but I always took a short break to calm down so I wouldn't. With Yours Truly, I was so wrapped up in the story that I couldn't bring myself to stop, so I couldn't keep it in. And I don't really plan on rereading it since there's a very real chance that might happen again and as a general rule I don't knowingly walk into situations that are going to make me cry. I'll just let the happy memories of embarrassing sobbing be the only ones I have of Yours Truly.
In the FiMFiction IRC, this happens a surprising amount:
A noob will come in -- out of an orange-coloured, purple striped, bright-green-polka-dot sky -- and ask:
It's always that story.
But I always forget how much that long-distance ending annoyed me, because in its place, I'll only ever remember how much sense sky-pirate Pinkie Pie made. Or, really, just how fantastic the Rarity subplots were.
I know that seems utterly irrelevant to what makes it a good or a bad love story, but it really isn't. It shows that a love story doesn't have to exist in a vacuum, and it feels more poignant when the world around them is alive rather than static, built purely to support or create trials for these two characters.
Your points about romance are good to chew on. I'm gonna bookmark this and come back to it in a week or two and try to let it really sink in (especially since my RCL reading is exposing me to a wider variety of great stories than I'd usually be interested in from surface impressions).
Best wishes on the home front. Spousal health issues are in some ways worse than having problems of your own. You leap in gladly, because that's what love is about, but there's two people's worth of work to do and you spend your time triaging it.
Ah, pinching the sciatic nerve is dreadful. I don't know from first-hand experience, but my mom's had to deal with it, and its not pleasant. I wish your husband a speedy recovery!
I actually remember reading Yours Truly really early on in my pony career. Perhaps too early. I kinda skim/read it, and thus didn't give it a proper chance (yeah, I'm a terrible person). Plus I'm still kinda meh about Twijack, so that could be it. The bats excerpt is something I definitely find myself agreeing with - I mean, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that two people could make a pretty much permanent long distance relationship work, but personally, it feels like it would be missing too much to ever be all it could be, you know?
I also agree with you on the preconceived notions of romance colouring our reading lens thing. Everyone's got their own thing going on, experience and personality-wise, so no one romance story is going to get everyone on the bandwagon, whether the actions/reactions of the characters are spectacularly IC or not.
Also, what do you mean people don't think about their reactions to adventure situations seriously? That's not a thing? Nobody else has randomly pondered what they would do to save the day if a bear or the mafia spontaneously burst into their lecture? No? Kay...
I'm just hopelessly addicted to romance in every way, shape, and form. But looking back at my top favorites, I've noticed something of a pattern - there's a lot of just day-to-day sweet stuff in between the conflicts that make up good stories, with only two out of seven being more dramatic. (Yours Truly being one of them.) That probably says something.
also I hope your husband gets better. Best wishes to you both.
Eh, anytime you're judging a story based on how you think it should work rather than on how the author wanted to make it work, you're doing it wrong. It's totally fine to not enjoy a story because it doesn't match up with how you believe the world should work, but it's just dumb to call a story bad for the same reason.
One of the reasons I tend to read fantasy over any kind of hard si-fi [1] this days is I can't help but see the technical inaccuracies and impossibilities because I know to much about physics. Basically, hard si-fi writers had a hard time with me. What you're saying is that for the same reason romance writers have it hard time with everyone because everyone knows (or thinks they know) about romance?
[1] Stuff based where the spaceships all have FTL drives get of free because the existence of FTL drives basically mean a wizard did it.
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Exactly. Except that in the case of romance, there're no facts to settle the matter, just different lifetimes of experiences.