Not a prompt, but if you're looking for distraction... Most of the relationships in your fic and L&L series are friendships, which I love, please don't misunderstand... but I was curious about if you do it on purpose (platonic relationships being often undervalued), are following in a sort of fantasy tradition (Tolkien-ish, with romance understated, sex swept under the carpet), or if you'd ever consider writing something centered around a couple/have any ideas for stories about people in love.
Is it a fantasy tradition? I felt like Tolkien had multiple romances, he was just bad at writing women so all the really compelling believable relationships were the platonic male-male friendships and so those are the ones we recall.
Hm… I purposefully didn’t give the protagonists of the Beanstalk books any end-game romances– though I do think several of them have romantic connections, or could grow to have them. But I did want to play with that YA tendency to make the start of a romance the chronological end of the adventure– part of the triumph, you know? A perfectly timed part of the triumph, specifically. And one of the ways to play with that would have been to have no romances, but I think what I mostly did was include romances that didn’t fit the ‘traditional’ timing.
For instance, Sez and Sally-Anne are basically old-marrieds by the time we come around, warm and casual and invested in their lives’ works.
George and Jack are a romantic love that never happened– they both toyed with it, in their own private wonderings, but tragedy and turmoil got in the way (if CERTAIN PEOPLE had just STAYED ALIVE, their story might have gone different). We meet up with them after the end, and watch them build a friendship out of the pieces of the people they’ve become apart from each other.
Rupert and Laney are building something, and whether or not it’s romantic is certainly up to the reader (I consider my “headcanons” to only be headcanons unless I write them down in the books). But they’ve got good groundwork, trust and respect, and they are growing slowly but surely into each other’s lives. Laney would have burned down so much to find him, and Rupert never doubted that.
George and Jill are an eleventh hour romance– sort of. They’ve barely begun to know each other, and Jill’s a latecomer to the story in Remember the Dust. But one of the things that made them nontraditional and interesting to me was… they’re both grown, moreso than the other major characters. They’ve both seen shit, lost their battles, and survived their wars– and it’s different stories that they lived through. George is a grizzled old action hero at twenty-seven, with notches on her spear and aching old wounds. Jill’s the veteran of an espionage novel, healing from years of tearing out bits of her heart and life to save other people’s, smiling all the while. Their scars are different but unarguably present. They’re also, peculiarly among this cast of young people finding their way, so entirely certain of who they are, the choices they’ve made, their own worth, and what costs they are willing to pay.
Red and Leaf are definitely the closest to your classic YA romance– three books of pining, and a kiss after the last battle. They’re good kids and they’re gonna be alright.
So, I feel like I don’t lack romance– it just doesn’t ebb and flow with the plot currents the way it’s sort of supposed to. I also put a lot of weight and worth into platonic and familial and other intimate relationships in my writing (Rupert also knew his mother was coming for him, no matter what had to burn in the process), and I think that makes the romances stick out less, which is rather how I like it.
Side note– my Alliance books have much more traditional YA romance and structure (though the uncritical observer of the narrator, the unanswered morality questions, and protagonists’ poor skills at self assessment make them nontraditional and arguably unsatisfying in their own ways). The romances, however, rise and fall with the plot, slowly growing til the closure of Traitor, the final book– there’s even a love triangle, of sorts, in Liar! So if you’re looking for that, go read about my well-meant, naive, certain kids falling in love with each other.
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