Steamed Enmity

One of the biggest defenses I hear about the game changers novels in general is that they are the way they are due to the genre which is—absolutely bonkers wild to me, like, I’ve been doing literary analysis and criticism for a long time and I have never in my life seen people analyze books as if the genre itself held a gun to the author’s head while they were writing before this fandom.

A genre is just a broad system of categorization. It is a way that we group and describe stories that share similar characteristics. But that does not mean that every single book within a given genre must have all the same characteristics. Art would completely stagnate if that were the case.

What actually is the romance genre?

The definition is flexible. Art is an inherently philosophical pursuit. There have been people over the years who have tried to set out defining characteristics of certain genres, but this is always going to just be someone making conjecture based on their own observations. For example, Aristotle tried to define tragedy in his Poetics, and his musings remain a foundational text in the genre to this day. I personally was hugely influenced by Aristotle and how he approached tragedy in developing my own style.

I still break Aristotle’s rules from the Poetics all the time.

Because I don’t have to fucking listen to that guy.

He’s fucking dead.

Even if he wasn’t he’s not the boss of me to begin with.

There is no King of Storytelling out there who set the binding limits of what can be achieved within a certain genre. There is no central artistic authority setting rules that all artists have to abide by. We have just been fucking eyeballing this shit since the advent of literature. We have a bunch of stories that seem similar to one another so we group them into the same category and once in a while some philosopher will try and theorize about what characteristics exactly makes us say these stories similar. That’s all that genre fucking is.

And the thing about art is that it should always be challenging its own limits. It should change. It should evolve. Acting like genre is this confining force that we must bow to inherently misunderstands the nature of art. If we let set rules dictating how art develops, then it will never advance.

So, again, we do not have a single binding definition of what exactly makes a romance novel a romance novel. We just have academics who have theorized and offered their own definitions for what makes a story romantic. You can pick a definition you like, or you can come up with your own, because there are no real binding rules in art. That’s what makes it art.

One popular definition of the romance genre is the one posited by the Romance Writers of America. RWA is a nonprofit that was formed in the 80s that was meant to encourage the growth of the romance genre. It used to be one of the most successful writing associations in America and it recently declined after its board was sued for racial discrimination. And I think it’s important to keep that in mind because I think it’s important to always question where our ideals come from. I don’t offer their definition to say you have to accept it, just to say that this is the definition that I have seen cited time and time again in academic articles on the genre. Nicholas Sparks has stated that he writes love stories, not romance because his stories don’t meet RWA’s named characteristics. If we are just looking for the most popular definition of the romance genre, I’d say it’s this one.

The Romance Writers of America argue that the romance genre is defined by two characteristics:

1. A Central Love Story: The main plot centers around individuals falling in love and struggling to make the relationship work. A writer can include as many subplots as they want as long as the love story is the main focus of the novel.

2. An Emotionally Satisfying and Optimistic Ending: In a romance, the lovers who risk and struggle for each other and their relationship are rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love.

Which is hilarious to me.

Because the long game breaks these genre conventions.

Shane is not rewarded with emotional justice at the end of the long game. He is turned on by all of his friends. He is humiliated. He isn’t rewarded; he is punished. His ending is inextricably intertwined with loss, and there is no emotional justice for it because we don’t deal with it at all. His very last scene shows him still troubled by the loss of his captaincy he just suffered. Shane’s ending is an unhappy one.

“But it’s happy because he gets to be with Ilya and that’s all he really needs” you cannot reasonably make this argument even under the internal rules of the books themselves. You want to know how I know that? Because Ilya doesn’t lose half as much as Shane loses when he moves to Ottawa and the books themselves act like he suffered more than fucking Jesus.

Ilya keeps his captaincy. He keeps his high pay. He keeps his first line position. No one questions his integrity. He doesn’t get to keep the team that drafted him but he 1) canonically did not like them that much and 2) gets to choose to leave them. The worst injury his career suffers is having to be on a struggling team.

The book and the author emphasizes the misery in his fate nevertheless. This is a sacrifice Ilya made for Shane and Shane was selfish to ask it of him. But the idea that Ilya sacrificed shit for Shane is a fundamentally false premise.

We know exactly why Ilya moved to Ottawa because the entire conversation is written down in heated rivalry. Ilya comes up with the idea of leaving Boston and joining a Canadian team before he ever talks to Shane. He says he wants a non-Russian passport and says that America is not so good for Russians at the moment. They discuss him signing with Montreal and he refuses explicitly so that he won’t have to take a paycut. Ilya fantasizes about getting to be on the same team as Shane and to be with him all the time but he decides it would never work because Montreal could not afford them both. But when Shane is faced with the same issue with Ottawa, it is quite literally laughed off as a joke.

Shane proposes Ottawa because it needs a star center and it was nowhere near their cap space. At no point does he bring up the fact that it’s his hometown or that his parents live there. And Ilya never raises any concerns about Ottawa being a shitty team because it is not described as a shitty team in a single place in the entire goddamn book.

Writers get the luxury of setting their own rules and stakes in the worlds they create. They can take creative liberties. They are bound by very little. But the one thing that binds them? Is their own fucking writing.

You do not get to write a conversation where the only concerns discussed were about making sure the move didn’t harm Ilya’s career and not mention convenience to Shane once and turn around and say that actually this was a huge career sacrifice that Shane selfishly imposed upon Ilya for his convenience. If you wanted it to be that way, you should have fucking written that to begin with.

But, nevertheless, we all emphasize how Ilya sacrificed and suffered joining Ottawa “”for Shane.””” Which means we do not get to turn around and pretend that Shane’s ending isn’t marked by misery. He loses his captaincy, his pay, his reputation, the team he loved and dreamed of retiring on, almost every friend he’s fucking had for the last ten years—he loses so much more than the sacrifices that were deemed immeasurable for Ilya. His ending is defined by unhappiness and his final scene in the book shows him still upset by his loss. As much as we want to call this a happy ending, half of the relationship isn’t fucking happy at the end. This book does not even fucking conform to the most popular definition of the romance genre and we are all out here acting like the genre itself held a gun to the authors fucking head and made her type.

I usually see the “must conform to the romance genre” argument raised in defense of many points, but the one I want to talk about is how I’ve seen it used in defense of the Ottawa ending itself: it is the idea that they must end the book married and on the same team because it is a romance book. I’ve even seen it used in defense of this idea that Shane should lose everything but Ilya because Ilya’s somehow all he needs.

First off, no.

How many romance books have you read that end with the love interests in the same fucking job? That’s not even a trope within the fucking genre.

But giving up a job for love is very common in the genre. It’s not a requirement of the genre, but it’s common. Having happily ever after be a picket fence in the suburbs with a dog and kids on the way is another common ending of the genre. For a queer romance, Shane and Ilya’s ending is aggressively heteronormative. And Shane is undoubtedly treated as the woman in the relationship, down to being paid sixty cents on the fucking dollar and having his dad help Ilya before the wedding because he’s the groom and his mom helping him the bride. The book places excruciating emphasis on how how small and pretty and delicate Shane is compared to Ilya, like a doll like a woman. Again and again, he is cast as the feminine of the two.

And his fate is that of the strong career woman of a Hallmark movie: he’s giving up his career and moving back to his hometown to be with his man whose fucking Christmas tree farm is for some reason a better career path than a 160k+ salaried position in NYC plus benefits. The woman leaves her career for love and that is all she fucking needs to be happy. Never mind that we never ask him to leave the goddamn Christmas tree farm for the big city. It is one of the most common endings in the genre.

And it didn’t come about in a vacuum.

I said earlier that there’s no king of storytelling who gets to set binding rules for a genre. And that’s true. But we get kind of close. There are people who do not have the authority or the power set rules for what an entire genre is—but they do get to try and bottleneck what stories within a genre reaches the public.

It’s book editors. It’s producers. It’s censorship boards.

People have always, always, always tried to protect patriarchal ideals by limiting what art reaches public consumption. Louisa May Alcott’s editors refused to publish Little Women until she married off her independent female protagonist. She expressed explicit dismay at the demand that the only ending she could have was marriage, “as if that were the only end and aim of a woman’s life.” The happy ending of that story is the woman being married off because some old patriarchal fucks in 1868 decided that it was the only happy ending a woman was allowed to have. These types of endings became common because they were the only endings allowed to be published.

This happens again and again and again in history. Look at the Hays Code. The Hays Code was a conservative censorship guideline in Hollywood that was in place from the 30s to the 60s. And it wasn’t instituted randomly. It happened because before the institution of the Hays Code, there was a huge wave of innovative movies that was challenging traditional family values. The 20s to the early 30s had this wave of racy, feminist, edgy films. We had major motion pictures about openly bisexual cross-dressing queens (the literal, royal kind. Like of Sweden.) in fucking 1933 and movies like that spooked old, traditional assholes into enacting the Hays Code. It was enacted to protect patriarchal, heteronormative values because art was challenging those values.

Women once again had to conform to traditional heteronormative endings. Their happy endings could only be found in motherhood and marriage because the Code required you to promote the “correct” standards of life and that meant traditional, patriarchal standards of life. The happy ending is to be a wife and a mother and go to the goddamn white picket fence suburbs with the dog and the babies en route. And if you have a character that defies those traditional values, the Code demands that they meet an unhappy end or the movie does not get made. You must punish the subversive.

The Hays Code is the reason why bury your gays exists. It is explicitly why that trope started to begin with. Queer characters so often meet tragic ends in media because for decades you were required to narratively punish queer characters or the movie did not get made. And even after the Hays Code was disbanded, so many queer characters still end up in the fucking ground because that’s how the story always goes. That’s the trope. That’s the genre convention. That’s the common thread in art. Ninety fucking years ago some asshole decided the only good queer person was a dead queer person and his thumb is still on the fucking scales today because people act like they are beholden to how other artists did it before.

We decide what a genre and its common themes and tropes are by looking at similar existing stories and identifying the common threads between them. But we cannot forget that sometimes the only stories that are allowed to exist are the ones that conform to traditional values. Maybe we would be able to imagine a happy ending for a romance other than marriage and a house in your hometown with a dog and the promise of kids if any other goddamn ending was allowed to be published. Maybe it wouldn’t be so common in the genre if every other ending wasn’t choked out.