Love Stories vs. the Romance Genre in America and Asia
I was brought up by women who went through romance novels like candy, and I read several people's share of them growing up. I love a good love story, but I find most romance stories not merely bad but downright disturbing. Let me explain by telling you my favorite love story:
"Once upon a time there was a very smart young man with good prospects. Everywhere he went, people said, "That is a young man with a future!" There were many neat, graceful, lovely girls at his college who wanted to be part of that future. They would come up to him and promise to be his ideal helpmate, allowing him to make all the decisions in their lives and do whatever he wanted without ever thinking about talking back to him.
"He couldn't run away fast enough. The idea of spending his entire life with someone who would never talk back to him was terrifying!
"On the edge of the campus social set was a smart, messy, cranky girl. She didn't always talk, but when she did she would either toss off something disturbingly insightful about the most uncomfortable subjects, or on rare occasions talk for hours on end about some obscure and not widely accepted topic. She was frank about her personal problems in the hope that this would drive people away, for she was deeply troubled by things that she did not know how to speak of and the culture she was a part of did not want to hear about.
"He found her fascinating.
"She was very resistant to the idea of being courted and put up all kinds of barriers, but he was patient. She had every reason to fear people, especially men; but she was also desperately lonely, especially for someone who could hold up their end of a conversation.
"They would talk all night.
"People became alarmed when they realized the pair were getting serious. Such a damaged young woman was the worst possible choice for such a promising young man! All sorts of people put up all sorts of arguments to dissuade him, to no avail. Finally they threw their hands up in the air, convinced the marriage wouldn't last six months.
"That young man and young woman were my husband and I, and we have been married for 35 years."
Now I'm prejudiced, but that's still a pretty good love story. But it would never fly in the romance genre. Far too many of those stories are written for, and ostensibly about, the neat, graceful young ladies in the first paragraph. They sincerely believed they could get through a marriage by not thinking and by being like their favorite stereotypical romance heroines, passive and conventional.
But real life isn't like a romance novel. It doesn't stop throwing problems at you once the wedding bells ring. I saw every one of those girls marry out of college, and every one of them divorced within five years. Once they hit the first problem that couldn't be solved by being passive, unthinking, and conventional, that was it.
A sobering number of them went through three or four marriages without questioning their basic life choices.
Consequently I find stereotypical genre romances alarming on many levels. They're not just boring. They encourage impressionable young people to BE boring, to hide all their interesting quirks, under the impression that being boring will get them married. Even worse, given the associations I've seen, I can't help but wonder if they promote an unrealistic view of married life that contributes to divorce.
So while I love in good love story, I want it to be about non-stereotypical people actively figuring out how to deal with the problems they've been handed together instead of trying to stuff themselves and their problems into some conventional formula. This combination isn't always easy to find in American fiction, especially in romance stories. But one unexpected place turned out to be a treasure trove of such stories, and that was gay romance, especially slash fiction. Not all, but the very best of those stories ask, "Since we're not heteronormal, why should our romance be heteronormative?"
(Also being full of amorous hot guys is a bonus.)
Then I got into Japanese pop fiction. While they can tell many wonderful stories, unfortunately unconventional love stories isn't something they're good at. All too often at the end of the day every effort is made to force the relationship into a conventional path. That's a turn off.
But if I was turned off by what I found in Japanese straight romance stories, I was repulsed by what I found in Japanese gay romance stories. When I first encountered those stories in the late 90s and early 00s, they seemed to exert an enormous amount of pressure to violently force the characters into a grotesque parody of heterosexual relationships. Why does everyone have to be "seme" or "uke"? Why can't they just be people?
Cut to the present day. I'm the Villainess, So I'm Taming the Final Boss showed that there have been small but significant changes in the Japanese pop culture romance area. These changes are coming out of the web novel/light novel corner, where more women writers work under less supervision than previously. This less restrictive medium has also had an effect stories from other Asian cultures, and on gay romance stories.
I took a dive into romantic web/light novels recently, and I'll be posting about some especially interesting ones shortly.
