The Dangers of SFF's Informed Romance Trope

My neurodivergent experience and the downward trend of critical thinking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FaCEBhM35x8

A haunting song about being isolated from reality

Context & Intent

As with many of my articles, this one was born from a chaotic confluence of inspirations. Chief among them, though, has to be my ongoing experience reading James Islington’s The Will of the Many (2023). I was hoping to finish it in time to review today, but it’s a thick tome – even listening to it at 1.6x speed – so that will have to wait for next week.

I’ll hold back most of my feelings about the novel until then, but one element of it did lead me to a realization about much of SFF romance in general. 

Having read such varied and unique books lately, The Will of the Many genuinely surprised me by being so devoted to genre conventions. Perhaps those familiar beats serving as backdrop helped identify the protagonist’s romance subplot as something that was weighing on me.

And it’s not really even the fault of this book, that Vis/Diago passively attracts and eventually enters a relationship with his classmate Emissa. We’re at least told that they’ve spent pleasant time together; many authors don’t even offer that much.

And that’s the realization: that it’s standard genre practice to inform readers about romance rather than showing it. Not problematic in and of itself, of course, until you see it’s almost always male protagonists passively attracting partners simply by virtue of being themselves.

The intent feels very gendered to me; the idea that these SFF stories are for boys and romance stories are for girls. But ultimately, don’t both take the awkward and emotional complications out of actual human interactions in favour of telling a thrilling and enjoyable tale for readers to insert themselves into?

Now, the fact that these are genre conventions is supposed to help alleviate the issue: readers should be cognizant that these stories are eliding realistic romance for entertainment purposes.

But what does it say that I’m only fully putting this together now? As an undiagnosed neurodivergent kid and teen, I learned almost everything from stories. It’s really only in my (late?) twenties that the switch has flipped toward critical thought and analysis. 

And the generations of kids consuming stories like these and worse, with their critical thinking skills at a profound low? The parallel to resurgent conservative ideas around male entitlement and traditional gender roles are hard to ignore.

'Catenan Academy Elites' from The Will of the Many, art by rocinanterising

Harmful Lessons

Another minor inspiration for this article is, and go with me on this, porn. (Someone in one of my book clubs compared it to social media, and it resonates!) In fact, isn't our current world entirely built on selling attractive and uncomplicated lies and half-truths? A related phrase I've recently seen: "sex doesn't sell; voyeurism does." The idea being that frictionless, risqué illusions of authenticity are far more attractive than navigating actual reality.

The informed romance trope in SFF is cut from the same cloth, depicting easy and happy relationships just coming the protagonist's way. It suggests that romance is a guaranteed reward for being a 'nice guy'. In traditional Romance stories, the mirrored perspective is all too familiar: true love is just about being accepting and subservient to Prince Charming.

As I alluded to above, these lessons infected my understanding of the world when I was younger. Stories like The Princess Bride (at least on a surface level), Eragon and Transphobic Wizard Child – as well as the early Disney Princess movies and who knows what else – established romance as just being an uncomplicated and expected part of life. And as with any time our understanding of the world conflicts with reality (triply so for neurodivergent folks), I felt angry, scared and hurt when that was proven untrue.

I moved past it and eventually learned! But you don't have to look far online to see whole bacterial cultures of people who didn't, as well as those who stayed too long in abusive and harmful situations because they believed those stories about true love.

And I'm just left wondering, why? Why is informed romance so often a necessary reward for these heroes? Frodo and Luke did just fine. Something about masculinity, or society's underlying fear of being alone?

A brief aside: there are many things to be said about Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind (2007) and The Wise Man's Fear (2011) at another time, but trying to think about them in terms of this informed romance trope is an absolute headache. We're told Denna is Kvothe's true love but she flits in and out ceaselessly, Fela throws herself at him and is warded off, Ari approaches more cautiously (as he does with her) – then the second book has him thrown into intimate encounters with his teacher Vashet and legendary Fae Felurian. It's almost another level of male fantasy, despite starting out much more complex and interesting.

Fela and Kvothe in The Name of the Wind, art by Julia Maddalina

Queers do it better? (Happy Pride Month!)

You might notice that I keep saying SFF and spelling out science fiction and fantasy rather than calling these stories speculative fiction, and here's where I admit I'm making a fundamentally inane distinction. Because while these stories are by definition speculative, they feel like they belong to another era, where heterosexual romance was as much the goal as slaying the dragon or recalibrating the planar tesseract.

In a certain way, I think queer theory and speculative fiction go hand in hand: both thinking and existing beyond established conventions to find novel perspectives and experiences. Queer authors are rarely going to elide the beginning of a romance because even today, those situations can feel just as speculative as unicorns and FTL – in addition to the importance of representing queer experiences to all audiences.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant and The Locked Tomb and Winter's Orbit (I could go on) depict messy, often tragic queer relationships as part of telling profound speculative fiction stories, and they are all much better for it. Romance isn't a reward or a sub-objective, it's baked into these characters' lives and informs how they navigate the world.

And of course, this isn't an absolute truth: I'm sure there are plenty of queer stories out there sticking to genre conventions; and I can also shout out series like Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings and Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief for portraying deep and complex straight relationships for their male protagonists.

(In researching this, I've also spoiled myself that The Will of the Many doesn't stick to this trope forever. Alas. It's also doing a nice allegory for capitalism, which puts it more in the speculative side of things. But more on that next week.)

Thanks for reading (and enduring what was probably a lot of obvious observations for most of you) and until next time <3