I was reading this fantasy book series recommended by lots of people on Amazon. It was billed as a Romance, which I normally don’t read, but it was also billed as an Epic Political Fantasy a la Game of Thrones. (It totally, totally wasn’t anything even vaguely like GoT, and I say that as an observation, not a judgment.) It was actually an impossible women’s empowerment fantasy romance, and I think maybe I am too cranky right now to enjoy this kind of book.
It’s not that I despise a good Romance, either. I recently read some fantastic ones by Georgette Heyer that were delightful and witty and left me feeling buoyant and giddy, and I can point you to some fine Fantasy/Romances, so it’s not Romance, per se, that makes me crotchety.
Exploring my testiness about the Romance/Fantasy I just read, first of all, there was a lot of “Gratuitous Plot Advancement” that set a completely unrealistic bar for sexual relationships. I mean, frankly, if people read these and set their expectations according to them, there is NO WAY they could ever have a relationship in reality live up to this standard. Ridiculous, ludicrous, and eye-rollingly impossible outside of a fantasy world, the frequency, consistency, and physical improbability of their sex life is at best silly and at worst harmful for people who compare their real-world relationships to these fantasy ones.
On an emotional level, the relationship seems like the sort of thing that comes from a textbook about how healthy, perfect relationships should go. About how to have total equality in the relationship (as a woman, it definitely helps to have supernatural, god-gifted powers that allow for this), about how consent should look like (pretty sure no one is that perfect, also god-gifted dude), about as far from how things work in reality as possible. Even the oh-so-scripted, perfectly verbalized/realized lessons they learn from their mistakes seem taken out of a cringe-y relationship advice book about how people should deal with past imperfections and poor decisions.
Maybe it’s that this book series makes it seem like relationships only work if you have main characters (especially females) gifted with god-like strength, magical abilities, power, and wisdom far beyond their years. It’s not like female empowerment can’t be done well in fantasy; I’ve enjoyed examples (Scott Lynch) of fantasy worlds where the male:female power balance is a little more equitable than it ever has been in the real history of mankind. The Fantasy worlds that I like better are the ones that have a bit more reality in them: real stakes, people who do wrong thing (a lot), consequences, people who won’t do the right thing, sometimes not even knowing what the right thing to do is, doing the right thing and still not getting the result you hoped for because: people.
Maybe all that reality is incompatible with the basic premise of a Romance (as we currently define the term) being the meeting and falling in lust/love resulting in a happy ending and hinting at a happily ever after.
Maybe it’s also the length. If you have a trilogy and everything is neatly tied up in the end and everyone lives more or less happily ever after, I get crabby. (Maybe I’m just crabby if they have sex in the first book and then a lot after that, in minute and, frankly, repetitive detail, wasting my time while not actually doing anything to really advance the plot or the relationship.) I’ve read without surliness some longer fantasy series that are pretty far over on the romance continuum, and lots of people are really miserable for significant amounts of time and some don’t get a happy ending (romantic or otherwise) and there’s a decent amount of real conflict and the kind of slow, staggering growth that feels genuine and possible. I know some people don’t like slow-moving stuff in their Fantasy books, but I certainly feel I have more direct experience with messiness and time healing wounds and changing us.
I think maybe my ultimate problem with these books is that I like Fantasy that asks questions better than I like Fantasy that gives answers. One of the things that I find compelling about Fantasy is that it can ask sideways questions that are relevant to me here and now while being set in a world that is not the one I live in. I can think about issues in a Fantasy context that help me get to the heart of what I really think about my real world. I bristle at teachy, preachy heavy-handed moral lessons wrapped up neatly and tied with a bow maybe because I don’t work that way and neither does the world I live in.
I don’t think I have a problem with flat-out escapist Fantasy, either. I guess maybe I figure if your Fantasy is going to have relationships, I’d rather see something that resembles a real relationship. I’m not usually enjoying reading Fantasy for the kind of detached-from-reality Romantic fantasy present in this trilogy. I’d rather read something more complicated that gives me hope that change in my world full of real people is possible.
Then again, maybe it’s good for there to be Fantasy stories out there that don’t have questionable consent, rape, and sexual power (im)balances that (negatively) resemble real life. Maybe it’s worth missing out on some of the other stuff that makes Fantasy enjoyable to me for the sake of having ideal examples and positive representation out there for people to imagine and immerse themselves in. It’s fine for there to be stories out there that don’t resonate with me; maybe they bring hope to other people in a way that the darker, grittier stuff doesn’t.
To everyone their own. Enjoy what you enjoy. Just don’t compare something that isn’t at all like Game of Thrones to GoT just to market your book. It makes some of us pretty darn peevish. But thanks for giving my eyeballs a workout from all that rolling and my abs a workout from the laughing. Take joy where you find it; there’s nothing wrong with that. : )
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