Tropes vs Life

Not quite a dark, evil, sexy fae, but…we take what we can get.

When a superhero defeats an enemy, no one says, “They defeated them that way because that is what men secretly want to do.”

When a soldier wins a battle, no one says, “The plot here was constrained by the secret desires of the male audience.”

When Luke makes the shot to destroy the Death Star, no one goes, “He did it without his computer because that is what all men long for.”

So when a woman dates a sexy, evil, fae monster in a romantasy, why does everyone assume that the way these stories work reveals what a woman wants in real-life?

Every review I have listened to of romantasies—and I listened to a number when I discovered the genre—talk as if the kind of men women end up with in these books tells you something about the readers.

Short version: It does not.

Folks, the Needs of Drama are not necessarily the desires of real people.

Elsewhere, you can read my analysis of the Needs of Drama vs. the Needs of Culture. But this issue is not about drama vs. culture. This is about drama vs reality.

If you were to judge from Romantasy and Urban Fantasy, you might ask: Why do all the women want to date monsters?

The answer is: what makes a good story and what is good in real life are not related.

Elsewhere, as well, I talk at length about tropes. You can even see a video version here. But the short version is: Tropes are not arbitrary. They are not just what someone wishes to write about on a whim.

They are sculpted by the landscape of the human heart—the things that bring us joy, make us afraid, etc. These things are not arbitrary. They have a kind of logic to them. Every genre has a condition that its readers read to experience. With horror, it is terror and fear. With a mystery, it is the curiosity sparked by trying to figure out the whodoneit.

I cannot decide by fiat that butterflies or dandelion fluff will scare people. I might be able to make those things scary…but only by manipulating them in non-arbitrary ways. I cannot, without additional manipulation, make a child dying of cancer funny, or make spiders not frightening to people who find them so.

Yes, each of these things might be acheived with effort, but they are not the natural state of these ideas.

Romance, too, is a genre that produces a certain emotion in the reader. Actually, it produces three specific emotions: the oogly-boogly emotion, angsty heartbreak, and zing!.

The first is the dreamy feeling produced by the masculine overwhelming the feminine as the feminine yields.

The second is pretty clear…angst and heartbreak, usually caused by the couple not being able to come together.

The third is the feeling you get when a relationship intensifies. The couples’ eyes meet for the first time? Zing! The couples’ hands brush? Zing! The couple finally kisses after months of heartbreak? Zing!

These are the emotions romance readers read to experience, and, as with horror, or other genres, the authors do not get to decide what produces this effect in the reader. This is decided by human nature…by the landscape of the human soul and how it is laid out. All an author can decide is whether to follow the rises and falls of that landscape—and produce the desired emotion—or not.

What is necessary to acheive the desired result depends on what you have to work with in your story.

So what about romantasy?

A romantasy author, too, is trying to produce the romantic emotion in its readers. But since what achieves this is not something they can decide by fiat, nor can they decide what kind of male makes a good hero—and I use the word lightly—in the sort of story romantasy provides.

Let’s look at the constraints under which romantasy operates:

1. Romantasy heroines are girlbosses.
   They are Buffy wannabes. They are headstrong, clever, tough, and independent, and they kill wolves and stuff. (This is not a hard and fast rule, but it is true often enough for this article.)

2. The “hero” of a romantasy cannot be a nice guy.
   Why? Because nice guys take no for an answer. The tough heroine rebuffs the nice guy…and the romance is over. No oogly-boogly, no heartbreak, no zing!

3. The “hero” must be monstrous*
   (* an inhuman fae, a vampire, a dragon with overwhelming lusts, a werewolf, etc. — this applies to both Urban Fantasy and Romantasy.) Because otherwise, the masculine will not overwhelm the feminine, producing the oogly-boogly sensation. He has to be evil enough—even if he has a good heart underneath—to ignore all her protestations and mistreat her.

These three things are what is necessary to make a romantasy and have it produce the emotional effect the reader desires.

Is this because all female readers secretly long to be mistreated by a sexy, evil man?

No.

It is because in the days of men having to ask for consent, which makes the guy appear weaker, the only guys who don’t ask for consent are portrayed as evil jerks.

So the evil jerks are the ones who end up seeming the most sexy in a story with a headstrong heroine.

Simple as that.