The male love interests seem to have one thing in common: they're hot. I won't bother to speculate about what "hot" means to individual readers, but let's all agree that he's nice on the eyes. Okay. What else?
No, seriously: what else?
I'm having a heck of a time pining down exactly what else is part of the makeup of the "great guy" in books without him merely reflecting something about the girl. For example, he's great because he saves the girl, protects the girl, watches the girl from afar, lets the girl call the shots, lets the girl be herself, listens with a kind ear or challenges her as an equal; he's funny or a friend first or they have a lot in common, but it's all dependent on her. This is not wholly surprising as most stories are written in the girl's POV so, naturally, her tastes are paramount, but I don't know if it's over-glossy to admit that the males are getting kinda "whitewashed"; not racially (although we can dive down that rabbit hole someday), but emotionally/individually. Guys don't sound like individuals with opinions and characteristics of their own. This reminds me of the whole Prince Charming problem: that if a guy *really* loves you, he'll just know everything that we want/what to do/what to say without you needing to tell him because that would be cheating. If it's just fantasy-wish-fulfilment, fine, I can get down with that. Or if it's the pendulum swinging back from the traditional power dynamic, that's fine too. And while I can name a bunch of great guy characters who are, outside their hotness, people who seem real in their own right with flaws and opinions that have nothing to do with their love's fascination of them, it's not easy (and a lot tougher when there's not something paranormalish about them to begin with). Maybe it's the fact that I *can* name these characters -- like Melissa Marr's Seth or Maggie Stiefvater's James, for example -- that sets them apart because they read like individuals who I can believe for their own sakes: their voices are strong enough on their own without being part of a chorus or in harmony with their love-interest counterpart.
What makes our lead guys great? I'm not talking about their Tragic Past or their Immortal Longing, the more-than-a-friend question or their promise to support their girl no matter what; but something of their own that sets them up to be a good, solid "Guy" independent of the pretty, rose-colored, heart-shaped glasses.
Bueller?
Maybe it's just me, but I want my man to be more than just a mirror. Comments welcome.
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Comments
I always think romances are the most convincing when two very distinct characters fall in love. Isn't that the best? Yet sometimes romances in YA can read as a one way street: one character doesn't seem to exist outside the other. S/he doesn't seem to have a life outside the other. Why? Where is the delight in that, when love is already taken for granted and the only obstacles are one's insecurity and/or external plot devices?
My favourite male characters are the ones I feel I can pluck off the page. Except they aren't often the Love Interest. Simon from THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS and Jacob from TWILIGHT, for example. Why? Is it because they're not "hot?" (They're both described as good-looking.) Or is it because they're not tortured enough?
I often feel that secondary characters can be more interesting in unexpected ways than the primary, but I always thought it was because there was more leeway for our minds to play, with less said, we can speculate more and make them more interesting in our own opinion.
-@BlanchardAuthor from Twitter
And even the characters that you point out, Seth and James, are still presented to the reader as suitable matches because of how they affect the MC. While fully fleshed out characters, their suitability and dreaminess stems directly from their willingness and ability to protect/help the MC. Like the reliable best friend, they exist to bolster and support the heroine, and maybe sneak in some super hot kissing on the side.
But isn't that reality? Don't we choose the people we want to be with because of how they make us *feel*? The excitement of the "bad boy", the stability of the "nice guy", we choose our partners in real life because of how their character reflects back onto us (I chose my husband because he made me laugh). Why should we expect any different from our main characters?
It's certainly not always necessary, but it was recently striking me how often we're calling out female protags but allowing guys to be the "everyman" hottie. ;-)
One book I love for showing these differences is Wendelin van Draanen's FLIPPED. Two cool, growing characters who often misinterpret each other's actions through a more (or less) glorified filter than is the truth.
i.e. What you said! :-)
I studied hermeneutics which is basically like saying "interpretational reality" -- that there is no "truth" because everything is shaped by perspective. Knowing that, it's amazing how ANY communication happens and that 99.9% of interaction is based on misinterpretation so keep THAT in mind the next time you get into an argument! HAHAHA!
Hurts the head, doesn't it? ;-)
Basically, if I don't have a good idea of what the blank-slate love interest is like when not talking to the protagonist, it doesn't work for me. What are they like with other people? What do they do for fun? Dreams, aspirations? Even a hormonal teenager hopelessly, head-over-heels in love has parts of their day that don't revolve around the object of their affection.
And as for me, I find characters who have a life and talents of their own a million times more attractive than when they just exist to fawn over the protagonist. I mean, that's just creepy. Give me someone who's doing their own thing and offers the protag a brief smile before moving on, and I'm sold. Give me someone who buys the protag coffee and interrogates her about her life all afternoon long, or who saves her from some unspeakable danger and is smolderingly hot and then whisks off into the night again, and I just go "bleh".
This says it better than anything I ever could. Brava!
I agree with you on all counts -- in fact, I like the character to grow having met the person in question. Expanding our boundaries, learning something new from one another, changing Who We Are is the BEST part of growing up, growing old and growing closer with our fellow human beings. (And if we love one another, bonus!)
I think it's a combination of the pendulum swing and catering to the desires of the self-entitled generation. (You know...the unfortunate who were raised on "I'm special for no apparent reason" and "My dreams will come true if I just SAY I believe in them and I don't ever have to actually do anything about them. Wait, what were my dreams supposed to be?")
The most appalling part of the pendulum swing is that it swung from a rather stupid place to begin with: the place where female characters were plot devices rather than people. Literature swung away from that because it made for crappy characters, and also because Western society-in-general figured out that females were human. And, given an educated choice, humans generally DON'T LIKE being objectified. (Unless you're talking about consensual bedroom stuff, but that's a different topic.) More than objectified, even: conceptualized, where you turn a person into an idea rather than a living creature with hopes and fears and ideals and flaws. The fact that we've swung back to that place with our YA male characters says something about human relationships in our modern society: that people have difficulty connecting to one another, and there's an expectation of perfection appearing without having to work for it. (Unless by "work" you mean battling vampires or something. But that's easier than sitting down and having an honest conversation about wants and needs and what's bothering you and doing something productive about it.) By creating these "perfect men" for YA female characters, the need to learn and work and grow into healthy human relationships is neutralized, allowing them to focus on smaller, less baffling, less stressful problems. Like nuclear disaster.
(Hey, when the world is coming to an end and you've got nothing left to lose, it really simplifies decision-making. I think that's why every generation has its pro-apocalypse crowd.)
But the point of creating worlds and characters is not to make them simple. I think that doing so plays down the complexity of Existence and is something of a cheat.
where you turn a person into an idea rather than a living creature with hopes and fears and ideals and flaws.
YES! This is exactly it. You hit the nail on the head with what I was trying to say: I want to have fleshed-out *people* not just pretty ideas walking around in tight jeans and nice shoes. You're certainly right that it's not easy -- no relationship is -- and certainly the ones on paper aren't either.
I am intrigued what you've said about folks having difficulty connecting with each other in our modern society...I just spoke on it at NESCBWI talking about all the technology for communication and everyone STILL feels all alone and ignored, wanting to be part of something, acknowledged and loved.
Hm.
I think there may be a future post on this...
Hm.
Thanks!
Great post!!!!
I was able to think about what they each brought out in the other. You know that old saying "they bring out the best of each other"? I think that's what we need to think about, and show what those things ARE.
You know that old saying "they bring out the best of each other"? I think that's what we need to think about, and show what those things ARE.
And I think *THAT* is something dearly missing from lots of YA: that the love need not be tragic from the outset, but there's this blissful "honeymoon" time of gleefully, joyfully, daringly doing no wrong. All is right with the world and this person is PERFECT! Happiness is outre, I guess, in the face of good ol' fashioned angst, but I kinda miss it. It's something I really appreciated in Ann Brashares' THE LAST SUMMER (OF YOU AND ME).
I watched a wonderful movie last weekend, an anime called "Whisper of the Heart." It's about a girl of 14 or so who's filled with a great sense of longing and loneliness that she doesn't know what to do with... she notices a boy whose name is in the checkout card of every book she checks out from the library, and she dreams that he could be her prince charming. Well, they meet, and they get off to such a rocky start that she's HORRIFIED he's the "Amasawa Seiji" she's been dreaming about meeting, but eventually he lets her see the violins he's been learning how to make, and he tells her about his dream to become a violin maker. After much persuasion, his father lets him take a violin making apprenticeship in Italy for two months. The girl is devastated, heartbroken. But it's her loneliness, and her love, and her longing for Seiji's sense of purpose, that pushes her to grab hold of her own dreams and write a novel.
Antoine de St. Exupery said that real love isn't staring into each other's eyes, it's facing the same direction together. That's what I really want to see in YA that has a romance plot - characters who don't spend the whole novel just staring into each others eyes, but who are busy using each other and their relationship to discover who they are, who they want to be, what they want to do.
BTW, "one glommed-together starry-eyed amoeba of romance" = LOL!
I've posted my own thoughts in reply.
http://perspectives.rea-hedrick.com/2010/0
For the YA, I've made sure that the boy in question has lots of his own stuff going on--passions, interests, friends, a job. All things that he is deeply and (I'll use the word again) passionately engrossed in before Megan ever enters his life. She sees him in the context of these things, as well as in the context of her life (and so do the readers) and that's why she falls in love with him.
Strange how my main character is a skeleton... <:-)