I’ve been thinking. Dangerous, I know, but it sometimes happens when I least expect it and then what am I to do? Really, though, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this fixation romance readers have with their romantic HEA, i.e. couple meets and couple ends up together riding into the sunset.
PERIOD.
Absolutely no exceptions.
Okay, almost no exceptions.
Nah, no exceptions.
Like I said, it’s a fixation. A serious fixation that brings out the snarling beast in those sweet creatures we all know as romance readers. (And if you believe that last description have I got a bridge for you.)
Anyway, while thinking this one over, my brain started playing with the not-so-new idea that it’s played with many times in recent years. Namely, that there seems to be a misconception that romance is HER story and solely her story.
And it ain’t. At least, not the majority of the time nowadays.
And it certainly isn’t HIS story, never mind all those dark brooding heroes who need a sunshine and family fix to make their lives complete. Besides, that would be like going backwards and giving up conquered ground. Never.
This is where a major problem raises its head because for some odd reason most stories have to have a protagonist. Sort of holds the plot together if you see what I mean.
So, if it isn’t his story and it isn’t her story, then whose story is it?
Well, theirs, of course.
As in the story of their relationship, start to finish. Okay, sometimes, we jump into things in the middle and hop around backwards and forwards, but you get the idea.
Now, to be fair, I’ve seen this “relationship as protagonist” idea argued both ways and agree with points on all sides. Some people accept it as part of the dual perspective nature of modern romance novels and some adamantly oppose the idea that something other than an individual “being” could be a protagonist in any story. (Excluding all that weird experimental stuff, you know.) I’ll even go so far as to admit that some romances really are more her story than his – that dratted first person perspective makes it kind of difficult not to yield that point – but over the years I’ve also come to believe more and more strongly that the “their story” philosophy regarding how romances have evolved to their present form is a truth rather than simply a theory and, more importantly, it’s a truth that resonates on an almost primal level with readers.
Hence the snarling if it’s messed with.
The proof is simple. Ask any romance reader why they don’t like even an individual happy ending to a romance and listen, really listen, to the responses you get. Ten to one, what comes through loud and clear is that they don’t like having spent all that time invested in reading about a relationship only to have IT killed in the end. Not the hero or the heroine, even if one of them happens to die, but IT.
Er, for something to be killed it has to have been alive in the first place and therefore really does have a story of its own, right?
Kill IT if you dare.