Your Life's A Joke So Tell Me Ain't It?

Very old finding in my old sketchbook, love nurses

Movie Howl is a soulful and quiet. Book Howl is a drama queen and Causing Problems and has a long string of jilted exes and couldn't shut up if you paid him.

Sophie and Howl drive each other up the wall at the beginning and it's really funny. Sophie and Howl are (despite themselves) very much in love by the end and they still drive each other up the wall and it's even funnier.

In the movie, Howl has been ordered by the king to participate in The War, and Howl is avoiding it because he is a brave conscientious objector. In the book, Howl has been ordered by the king to rescue his lost brother from the Witch of the Wastes, and Howl is avoiding it by any means necessary because he is a cowardly weasel who wants to stay as far from the Witch as possible.

In the movie, the Witch cursed Sophie because she was jealous about Howl speaking to Sophie for five minutes. In the book, the Witch cursed Sophie because Sophie had been doing surprisingly powerful magic for years without knowing it and it was actually starting to cut into the Witch's plans. (Sophie does not discover any of this until nearly the end of the book, but the reader can start to pick it up much earlier and the way Sophie's magic works is pretty darn cool.)

In the movie, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens, but this is implied to be nothing but nasty fearmongering. In the book, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens because Howl started the rumor so people would stop asking him to do wizard junk all the time.

The book lightly parodies a couple of tropes from Western fairy tales. In particular Sophie has internalized that, as the eldest of three sisters, her "destiny" is to fail so that her younger sisters will look cooler when they succeed, which is why she's so resigned to the hat shop at the beginning. (Sidebar: Sophie's sisters come up much more in the book and they're great.) There's also a really funny bit where Sophie attempts to operate a pair of seven-league boots.

i mean, as i understand it, het romance writers are largely women. it is very common for women to find the idea of getting knocked up hot, as well, and i understood op to be talking more about people's reactions to fictional characters they find it ("get him pregnant" being a common way people express attraction to a fiction male character)

there are things to criticize wrt pregnancy and fiction and how people discuss it in a horny / romantic sense etc etc. but "get him pregnant" as a trend, is literally just people taking the weird sexually objectifying way people see pregnancy in cis women, projecting it onto cis male characters and being even weirder about it, all in ways that have a profoundly negative impact on the actual real life men who can get pregnant and are treated like shit for it. none of this actually unpacks any underlying misogyny in how people treat pregnancy in fiction, and at worst it results in people refusing to unpack underlying anti-transmasculine misogyny around the idea of a pregnant man & why people are so obsessed with the idea of sexually degrading and dominating a man by putting him in an extremely feminine position while also making the whole thing a "cursed i need eyebleach" kind of joke.