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Most English language Het Romance reads as horror fiction to me, and not by the author’s intent...
There is a piece of discourse going around with some really long, really interesting reblog chains about why the genre of Het Romance (generally in the form of the Harlequin novel) is about powerful women who win in the end after using their diverse inner resources (Intelligence, courage, “womanly gentleness”) to turn an “alphahole” powerful man into someone who respects the heroine as an equal partner. And there in lies both the formula and the powerful fantasy (much like, I would say, a james bond or jason borne novel is a fantasy for some men).
The various reblog chains include some deep discourse on the pros and cons of this fantasy. I don’t even know where to begin to select one as a reblog so I am selecting none.
ANYHOW. THE INTIAL OPs DISCUSSION made me finally see why a segment of women (important: not all women) find this form of Genre Het Romance so powerful because even though I have been told for years it is a powerful escapist fantasy that is also feminist, I never got it and never understood how other people saw it as feminist UNTIL I read this aforementioned post and various reblogs that started talking about some of the issues (as in, feminist for whom?). The OP explained it so simply in so few words, and so well.
One of the things I have seen lit/book bloggers talk about --- particularly lit/book bloggers who are women who blog in english who are ethnically othered in their society (such as WOC in America, but that’s just one slice of the world’s ethnic/cultural/religious Other pie) --- is how important it is for them to have everyone be WHITE in these romance fantasies, especially THE FEMALE LEAD, because as soon as intersectional issues enter the game, the whole house of cards in this fantasy collapses.
I’d go one step further and say that the woman has to be a cis-gendered feminine woman else ... there goes the house of cards in this particular form of HIGHLY GENDERED HET ROMANCE.
And, yes, I can see it as a form of feminism but it is not mine and doesn’t address my needs, never has and never will without A LOT OF TROPE REVISION and/or REPLACEMENT. Which means I can be totally behind this kind of romance as empowering while also saying that it reads like unintended horror fiction when anything hits too close to home. It’s an intersectional problem. It is so many problems. Basically, one size does not fit all, but I cheer for whomever it does fit while trying to figure out how to make it work for me (because then it will also work for more people too).
Somewhere this all gets back to many discussions I’ve had in fandom about why certain het ships work for me but most popular het ships fail and fail hard. I’m also thankful to decades of fandom pushing boundaries on romance fiction (mostly fanfic but, as I have heard, in actual original fiction too) such that it has spaces that are addressing intersectional relationships, queer relationships, etc., in manners that keep the notion of escapism and empowering fantasy but make it work so folks like myself don’t backclick or put the book down 300 words in because we’ve had to NOPE the fuck out.
I cannot begin to describe how hard I’ve had to NOPE out of so much Het fanfic written from the female character’s POV because someone else’s escapist empowerment reads to me as the HORROR, the horrrorrrr. I have spent a decade talking to people similar-in-various-ways to myself in fandom about our experiences with this, coming up with alternate definitions for female-focused escapism in romance, about why we often prefer M/M or F/F fic, and even coming up with an entire theory-in-the-making about shipping as affordances.
And while I hesitate on posting this on tumblr ... some of my upcoming Dirge meta (which gets post on a side blog but is reposted to my main blog) talks about two M/F ships that actually work for me and they “work” for Very Different Reasons. (note that “work” is in quotes for Reasons).
I sort of suspect that if I listed all the het ships across all the fandoms where the ship works (it is not a long list, tbh), I could almost certainly cluster them all into two, maybe three categories. .... thinking I might want to do this...
As for “work” in quotes. Work means “I have an intriguing emotional relationship with the ship.” Work does not mean that I think the ship is healthy for the characters (it might be, it might not). Work does not mean that I think the ship will work or should work or will ever have an HEA (it might, it might not). Work merely means “This is Relevant to my Interests, please tell me more.”
