Bittercon: Are We Not Men - Human Women and Beast-Men in Paranormal Romance

[attackfish]

Paranormal romance is a world in which human women and girls are entranced and overcome by the charms of supernatural, inhuman men. Vampires, werewolves, faeries, demons, and others populate the romantic field for the women of these novels, and seldom does it flow the other way with a human man and a supernatural woman.

The story of a supernatural woman romancing mortal men, as told by male writers portraying women as the other is a venerable and often retold one. But the idea that a woman is othered by men, that she is some sort of strange and unknowable creature tells women that men must be so very different from them, and therefore as hard for them to understand. Therefore, since the beginning of women's writings, women have portrayed men as the strange unknowable.

But is this the only reason the female protagonist of a paranormal romance rarely begins as a supernatural creature? Romance writers presumably expect women and girl readers to identify with the female protagonist, so it must be her male love interest (m/m and f/f romance having different dynamics all together) who is inhuman and serves to introduce her into the magical world he inhabits, a world the reader gets to visit until the story is over, so it's very useful to have an othered male.

One of the largest subsets of paranormal romance is Young Adult or Teen paranormal romance, where entering a supernatural world serves as an obvious metaphor for the first steps into the dating world. Dating is so confusing, so overwhelming, that most of us on some level wish we had a guide. Along with introducing her to the supernatural world, the supernatural boyfriend in a paranormal romance serves as that guide, taking away insecurity, potential pain, and the fear of making a mistake. The fact that if he is a vampire, faerie, demon, angel, etc. he is likely to be much much much older than the heroine (though still appealingly young and sexy) makes for a fairly dubious cultural narrative of an older man who guides and protects a young girl.

It has been discussed elsewhere that fathers and father figures in paranormal romances and urban fantasies tend to be very very good fathers, and mothers are in some way either neglectful or monstrous. The only woman a heroine can rely on is herself. How does this play into the idea of the othered male? Is the genre also othering women from it's female readers, proclaiming them each exceptional women, far above other women, and therefore worthy of their own magical boyfriend?

Written for bittercon the online convention for those of us who can't make it to any other kind, on a topic stolen from a panel at the 2011 Readercon.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Good questions! Linking.

[avocado-love.livejournal.com]

This is some tasty meta!

I agree with you on most parts, but wanted to add to this:

Romance writers presumably expect women and girl readers to identify with the female protagonist, so it must be her male love interest (m/m and f/f romance having different dynamics all together) who is inhuman and serves to introduce her into the magical world he inhabits, a world the reader gets to visit until the story is over, so it's very useful to have an othered male.

While I feel this is true, and as you said in the next paragraph, serves as a metaphor for entering the dating world, I feel that starting with the female protagonist as human and he male as supernatural is a good way to kill two birds with one stone.

One of the easiest ways to introduce a reader to a new world is through the eyes of a character who is being introduced to it themselves. Either they're young and growing up and learning the different society's rules, or they're being thrown from the normal (mundane) world into the supernatural, where the changes are immediate.

From what I've seen, urban fantasy usually trends to the second scenario. The boyfriend/love interest also shares a role as teacher/mentor figure, as they are the one introducing our main character to the world. This usually sets up the plot for many moral dilemmas, including whether or not it's right for them to be showing the MC the world at all.

Is this all inherently problematic? Eh, I think it could be, expectantly if put into hands that aren't deft in writing moral dilemmas. There's also the unspoken metaphor of a young girl being led down a path into womanhood by her ~~man, which is... not good. But! I think done in the right hands, it the inherent moral dilemmas could be delt with in an interesting, sexy, (and educational?) way.

There's no getting around the fact that it's an overused plot device because it works in introducing a character to the new world, AND the secondary character/love interest/mentor figure at the same time. It's damn economical.

Anyway, those are my thoughts, gleaned from reading waaaaay too much urban fantasy. :P

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I've tended to avoid writing these sort of pairings. Sure, the naive protagonist gives plenty of chances to explain what's going on, but they're too much of a tabula rasa.

At least people have made an active choice to publish my stuff.^[1] Maybe you could put it on par with a good fan-fic. But I look at what I do with my characters, and how I use them, and they're people with a history. They might be in an unanticipated situation, having to do something they're not prepared for, but they're not going to do anything stupid.

At least, not if they can see an alternative.

There are paranormal romances which do some of that. But there's a heck of a risk of turning into a Mary-Sue.


^[1]A character with history can be so interesting. (http://spontoon.rootoon.com/SPwBeL03.html)

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I feel a bit lame linking to my own essay, but it's quicker than regurgitating all the points in it: "Why Is Faerie Ruled by Queens?"

If it wouldn't have been terribly off-topic for the conference, I might have tried to go into the flip side, which is human women and supernatural men. It seems to me that pattern happens the most often when the supernatural is seen as predatory/bestial (as opposed to mystical/irrational, the faerie pattern, which is so often feminine). Those qualities can be hyper-masculinized, whereas "manly" and "fey" don't play as well together. And, of course, some of it has to do with the sources of these narratives: Dracula, the archetypal vampire, is male, and on the werewolf side you have the whole "alpha wolf" concept. (Which apparently isn't nearly as true as we think. But I digress.)

I really like all of your points, too, about reader identification and othering and the dating metaphor and even the practical, craft-related concern of exposition. I can think of some ways to flip those on their head and write from a supernatural female perspective -- some authors have done that already -- but it doesn't erase the pattern.

[amyraine.livejournal.com]

This is a tangential comment, going off of the bit about mothers/mother figures:

"either neglectful or monstrous"

I offer up another option: if she's neither, then she's dead/missing

Take our mutual fandom, AtLA:

Kya - dead
Ursa - banished, missing, possibly dead
Hama - monstrous
Mai's mom - neglectful
Poppy Bei Fong - arguably both monstrous and neglectful, though it's following her husband's example...and I think that makes it even worse.
All other moms - missing or unnamed and ignored.

In what is otherwise a great series full of strong female characters, the lack of mother figures who are powerful women in their own right was painful. Isn't there anyone I can look up to as a mom and a woman?

Guess I'm probably in the wrong genre. Maybe I should look outside of YA.

[marycatelli]

There's plenty of supernatural men romancing women in age old tales. Fair Janet is wisely afraid of it from Tam Lin, as the ballad The Elfin Knight shows -- the bear in East of the Sun, West of the Moon -- Hans My Hedgehog.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Great post!

[marfisa.livejournal.com]

There's also the less frequently-occurring variant in which the female lead is somewhat paranormal/supernatural to begin with, although the male lead or leads at least initially is far more powerful. Series (they're usually series--Ilona Andrews' "On the Edge" is the only apparent one-off example of this I can think of) that fit this pattern include Andrews' "Magic Bites/Burns/Slays," etc., whose heroine is basically a very adept warrior with somewhat less well-developed magical abilities on the side, and Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse Southern Vampire (a/k/a "True Blood") series, in which the otherwise apparently normal human Sookie is a telepath. (Evidently in the HBO TV version Sookie has now been revealed to be at least part fairy, although this doesn't happen until much farther into the book series, if it ever does--I've only read the first four or five novels so far.) Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson series probably also qualifies, since although Mercy as a skinwalker/were-coyote lacks some of the classic vulnerabilities of more conventional werewolves, she is also less physically powerful than the various male werewolves who are romantically interested in her.
Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake, vampire hunter, also starts out as a somewhat more formidable example of the "human except for one preternatural ability" type that Sookie Stackhouse fits into, with the preternatual ability in question in Anita's case being the ability to raise--and, to some extent, control--the dead. Of course, as the series progresses Anita becomes more and more powerful, going from a mere (re)animator to a fullblown necromancer, then beginning to develop her own unique variations of some of the powers of her various vampire and werewolf/wereleopard/shapeshifter lovers. By the time of "The Harlequin," fifteen books into the series, if not before, she seems to have become as powerful--in some ways perhaps even more powerful--than either of the two supernatural males she has spent much of the series bonded with in a magical triumvirate of power (i.e., the master vampire Jean-Claude and Richard Zeeman, the head of the local werewolf pack).