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(This post has no central thesis, I'm just rambling)
I read one of Loretta Chase's older romance novels the other day ("Viscount Vagabond") and realised I was really enjoying the fact it didn't have any sex in. Which struck me as odd since I've pretty much gotten used to sex scenes thanks to lots of fanfic and mostly enjoy them well enough, but then I realised what I was actually enjoying the lack of was stuff from the heroes POV about his Uncontrollable Animal Lusts(*).
Thinking about the Shouju manga I've been enjoying as well, I MUCH prefer "The hero is surprised by how much he admires the heroine's competence" scenes to "The hero is surprised by how much he admires the heroine's sexiness" scenes (and I am not talking about "The hero sees the heroine being competent and finds it suprisingly sexy)(**).
I know what people enjoy reading /= what they actually want in life, but I'm wondering if it's partly because afaict unlike a lot of women the "you suck" voice in my head that I wish to escape from in escapist fiction is much more likely to say "You are stupid and unlikeable" than "you're ugly and unattractive". It's less that I have super self esteem about my appearance (though I'm happy enough) and more that my appearance doesn't have much to do with my self esteem one way or another. And the fact that as a woman who spends a lot of time in male dominated spaces I've had more men obviously wanting to have sex with me than I've been entirely comfortable with (and fewer openly admiring my intelligence and talent than I might have liked) means that if I imagine myself in the position of the woman in these stories I often feel skeevy and threatened. Also, I seem to be in the minority of heterosexual women who, if a relationship must have an imbalance in terms of age/knowledge/intelligence/experience etc, prefers it to be weighted in my favour.
Overall I am getting a bit sick of the same-ness of romances and romance heroes.
I get a bit annoyed at the way a lot of Dragon Age fanfic reads like regency romances (People in the medieval-ish times did not waltz! They barely did in the regency era!) but while Alistair and Zevran (the two canon male love interests(***)) between them cover most of the traditional romance hero bases of noble birth, sexually experienced, physically imposing, etc individually they don't and that makes the stories more interesting.
I think part of my problem is that while I do enjoy romances for the, well, romance, I also enjoy them as stories of people growing and changing and finding happiness, and I think a lot them are written more to be the story of two people overcoming various difficulties in order to have really awesome sex (though I like that too).
All this makes me feel like writing (a)femslash and (b)a regency het romance where the guy is a grocer's son posing as an Earl who gets into hijinks with an older woman who is secretly an ex prostitute or something. Maybe one of them would even not be white and straight omg.
(*)The animal metaphors in regency romances get so extreme sometimes it almost reads like furry porn. Which isn't objectively bad, but it squicks me.
(**)Though I like a bit of "The hero is surprised by how much he admires the heroine's sexiness" as well, I just don't like when that seems to be the main thing he notices about her.
(***)The two canon female love interests make for even worse traditional het romance heroines and I'm not sure I've seen anyone try.
I read one of Loretta Chase's older romance novels the other day ("Viscount Vagabond") and realised I was really enjoying the fact it didn't have any sex in. Which struck me as odd since I've pretty much gotten used to sex scenes thanks to lots of fanfic and mostly enjoy them well enough, but then I realised what I was actually enjoying the lack of was stuff from the heroes POV about his Uncontrollable Animal Lusts(*).
Thinking about the Shouju manga I've been enjoying as well, I MUCH prefer "The hero is surprised by how much he admires the heroine's competence" scenes to "The hero is surprised by how much he admires the heroine's sexiness" scenes (and I am not talking about "The hero sees the heroine being competent and finds it suprisingly sexy)(**).
I know what people enjoy reading /= what they actually want in life, but I'm wondering if it's partly because afaict unlike a lot of women the "you suck" voice in my head that I wish to escape from in escapist fiction is much more likely to say "You are stupid and unlikeable" than "you're ugly and unattractive". It's less that I have super self esteem about my appearance (though I'm happy enough) and more that my appearance doesn't have much to do with my self esteem one way or another. And the fact that as a woman who spends a lot of time in male dominated spaces I've had more men obviously wanting to have sex with me than I've been entirely comfortable with (and fewer openly admiring my intelligence and talent than I might have liked) means that if I imagine myself in the position of the woman in these stories I often feel skeevy and threatened. Also, I seem to be in the minority of heterosexual women who, if a relationship must have an imbalance in terms of age/knowledge/intelligence/experience etc, prefers it to be weighted in my favour.
Overall I am getting a bit sick of the same-ness of romances and romance heroes.
I get a bit annoyed at the way a lot of Dragon Age fanfic reads like regency romances (People in the medieval-ish times did not waltz! They barely did in the regency era!) but while Alistair and Zevran (the two canon male love interests(***)) between them cover most of the traditional romance hero bases of noble birth, sexually experienced, physically imposing, etc individually they don't and that makes the stories more interesting.
I think part of my problem is that while I do enjoy romances for the, well, romance, I also enjoy them as stories of people growing and changing and finding happiness, and I think a lot them are written more to be the story of two people overcoming various difficulties in order to have really awesome sex (though I like that too).
All this makes me feel like writing (a)femslash and (b)a regency het romance where the guy is a grocer's son posing as an Earl who gets into hijinks with an older woman who is secretly an ex prostitute or something. Maybe one of them would even not be white and straight omg.
(*)The animal metaphors in regency romances get so extreme sometimes it almost reads like furry porn. Which isn't objectively bad, but it squicks me.
(**)Though I like a bit of "The hero is surprised by how much he admires the heroine's sexiness" as well, I just don't like when that seems to be the main thing he notices about her.
(***)The two canon female love interests make for even worse traditional het romance heroines and I'm not sure I've seen anyone try.