Guest Post: AnimeJune’s Top Ten Awful Romantic Cliches

AnimeJune from Gossamer Obsessions closes out this week long event as KB will be back tomorrow from her cruise...

Hey folks, AnimeJune here, filling in for Katiebabs. I think I can already assume that if you’re a regular reader of Katiebabs’ blog, you love romance. So do I. Romance is almost an entirely character-driven genre – so the originality of the storyline isn’t the highest priority because it’s the individual characters within the story that matter. As a result, clichés tend to proliferate. For the most part, I can tolerate and even enjoy these provided the writing is clever and the characters sympathetic. However, sometimes clichés can be used for evil – awful, piss-poor, wallbanging evil. While in very special cases these clichés can be redeemed (and by all means, provide examples for discussion in the comments!), for the most part they ignore rhyme and reason in favour of all-out insanity. Because romance centres around the characters, I’ve divided my top ten list into two – five for heroes, and five for heroines.

The Top Five Awful Hero Cliches
1. “I Hurt You Because I Secretly Love You”
The Set-Up: A man is painfully, helplessly in love with the heroine, but for some contrived reason is unable or unwilling to express it. Because he feels unworthy of the heroine he tries to scare her away by being a giant asshole – insulting her, ignoring her, humiliating her, romantically sabotaging her, making out with slutty ex-mistresses in front of her, that sort of thing.

You’d think the heroine would rather eat her own hair than consider this prince, but she discovers he’s hiding romantic butter-sculptures of her in his freezer. Oh, well, all is forgiven!

Why This Cliche Sucks: Because it essentially turns love into a Free Pass for Douchebaggery. The hero can hurt the heroine, so long as his personal road to hell is smoothly paved with all of his lovey-dovey intentions. It posits that love is defined by thought, and not by action or expression – therefore, the way one treats or behaves around one’s beloved is inconsequential compared to how one feels on the inside. It also promotes the idea that the mistreated heroine can’t judge the hero by his actions or behaviour towards her, but must rely upon how he tells her he feels at the end of the book, which makes absolutely no sense.

2. “All women are naturally whores – except for you. You’re different.”
The Word: A man wasn’t hugged enough by his mummy, so he believes all women are grasping, calculating, manipulative sluts. Therefore, he grows up to cut a swath through the female population with his penis without any guilt or remorse. However, he discovers by chance a woman who is like no woman he has ever met. She is dewy-eyed, kind to babies and animals, bakes cupcakes for hobos, and only wants to touch one penis in her lifetime – his! Wow! Totally unlike all those other women. Sluts.

Why This Cliche Sucks: Because the hero is a misogynist, and even by the last page, is still a misogynist. He doesn’t learn to understand and appreciate women because he finally falls in love with the heroine. He falls in love with the heroine because she is different from other women. She is everything that every other woman in the world (apparently) isn’t – caring, compassionate, pure (see Cliche #3 below). Essentially, she becomes the exception that proves the rule. Now what does that say about the rest of us grasping, calculating, manipulative sluts?

3. “I’m in love your innocence.”
The Set-Up: The jaded hero, exhausted by the frivolities of the ton, meets a woman untouched by the corrupting influence of society. Sure, she doesn’t know much about literature, politics, or art, and will gladly take candy from disreputable strangers driving unmarked white vans, but that’s just part of her innocent, uncorrupted charm!

Why This Cliche Sucks: To be more specific, I don’t hate the theory of this cliché. In this case, I mean social innocence rather than physical virgin innocence, and I can understand how the social outsider and the social butterfly can find common ground. No, I just hate how this cliché ends up being perpetrated in practice: in nine out of every ten cases, “innocent” ends up being just another word for “ignorant” and “unable to protect herself,” which means the reason the hero loves her is because she’s not smart enough for backtalk and makes him feel all manly when he saves her from running out in front of an ice cream van.

4. “I can’t love her – my excruciatingly powerful masculinity is just too dangerous for her delicate ladyflower.”
The Set-Up: This is your vagina. *holds up an egg* This is your vagina during sex with an Alpha Male. *smashes egg with a frying pan* Any questions?

Why This Cliche Sucks: Because, whether the novel interprets masculinity metaphorically (hero believes he’s too rough, big, dirty, uncouth, muscular, manly for heroine) or physically (petite heroine + standard-issue 10-inch Alpha Male horsepenis = human shish kebab?), it’s a ludicrously silly, nonsensical and arrogant fear. Oh, you’re too manly for the heroine? Oh no. Whatever shall we do? Manly heroes? The very idea! Can’t have that! It’s like that episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where the vampire therapist diagnoses Buffy as having an inferiority complex about her superiority complex. I’ve yet to encounter an example of this cliché that provides an effective and understandable motivation for a hero’s terror that his manly manfulness is too dangerous for porcelain female innocence, so whenever it’s used as a romantic obstacle it comes across as contrived at best and over-the-top stupid at worst.

5. “I love you, and you love me, but why don’t you go away for a while anyway?”
The Set-Up: The hero loves the heroine, and the heroine loves the hero, but the looming threat of the hero’s tawdry past as a juggling clown-gigolo threatens their love. Convinced he’s too scarred by years of grease-paint and sensual balloon animals to be the right man for her, he sends her away for her own good so he can make something better of himself.

Why This Cliche Sucks: Because it’s a flagrant page-padding exercise that has no bearing on character development or pacing, and it relies on the isolation of the romantic protagonist who suddenly has to solve his initial problem all over again by himself when the point of the romance is that the hero and heroine solve it together. Plus, it ends up making the end of the book boring as hell.

Top Five Awful Heroine Cliches:

1. “I’m too much of a Strong Independent Woman to Listen to a Stupid Boorish Man!”
The Set-Up: The heroine is a Strong, Capable, Self-Sufficient, and Independent Woman (hear her roar)! She relies on no man! So when the Boorish, Overbearing, Troubled but Secretly Hot FBI Agent orders her not to enter her home because it’s wired to explode, what’s she going to do? She certainly can’t obey a direct order from a Boorish Man! Might as well turn in her Strong Independent Woman card and go back in the kitchen, am I right, ladies? Years and years of explosives training just can’t measure up against Strong, Independent Womanness!

Why This Cliche Sucks: Because while it’s outwardly the fist-pumping “Gurl Power” slogan, deep inside it’s still the “women are silly and need to be rescued” mantra of old, where a woman ignores a man’s reasonable advice and ends up in deep doo-doo for it. It tends to be even worse in historicals, where it’s both annoying and anachronistic. Yes, Miss Spinster Bluestocking, considering a man’s advice may be beneath your Feminine Dignity, but I’m guessing having to be rescued from a burning building with your petticoats on fire because you ignored his warning about leaking casks of gunpowder may rest even lower beneath your Feminine Dignity.

2. “Oh, curse my gigantic breasts and huge lips! I’m so ugly!”
The Set-Up: Pity our poor wallflower heroine! Born in a long-ago, barbaric time when large breasts and bee-stung lips and full hips and long, flowing red hair were unfashionable! Woe is her!

Why This Cliche Sucks: Because it’s the ultimate lame cop-out, where an author wants her heroine to feel or be regarded as unattractive but doesn’t have the stones to actually write an ugly, or even plain, heroine. I’m sure that with the changing of clothing and fashion throughout history, certain body shapes and figures came more into style in regards to presentation and dress, but did it ever really translate into physical attraction? Was there ever a sad point in history when an average, heterosexual man would see a woman with an enormous pair of tits and go, “Ew, gross!” ? On further examination, I’m pretty sure that this is the Heroine equivalent of Awful Hero Cliche #4 – in both, the author makes a paltry attempt to convince her readers that her gorgeous and well-endowed characters still suffer as horribly as the rest of us.

3. “I’ve been in love with you since I was 3 – it must be true love!”
The Set-Up: The heroine has lusted after the hero and has schemed to become his wife – ever since he rescued her Dora the Explorer sippy cup from a sewer grate.

Why This Cliche Sucks: Because how solid is a person’s romantic judgement at three, or eight, or fifteen? Really? Do you know who I had a huge crush on when I was fifteen? David Spade. Yes, that David Spade, from the Tommy Boy and Adam Sandler films. Do I know how to pick ‘em or what? It doesn’t, however, mean that he is destined to be My One and Only. Now hear me out - I’m not saying that kids and teenagers are completely incompetent at understanding and identifying what’s good for them, but in romance the heroine needs a bigger motivation for being in love with the hero now that they are adults than how he gave her Barbie Dream Corvette a free oil change with his Handy Manny playset.

4. “Everything is my fault!”
The Set-Up: The hero loves the heroine, but she refuses his attentions, because she knows she’s an awful person unworthy of love ever since she caused a twenty-car pile-up, resulting in over 40 deaths, when she foolishly (foolishly!) wore white after Labour Day.

Why This Cliche Sucks: This ridiculous cliché, where the guilt-wracked heroine holds herself responsible for something that isn’t her fault in any way, shape or form, is just another example of a literary cop-out: it gives the heroine a dark, mysterious past full of guilt without the inconvenience of a heroine who actually did something worthy of dark, mysterious guilt! Now, you may ask why I made this a heroine cliché and not a hero cliché. Well, while heroes are just as likely to be self-indulgently angsty about past errors as heroines, thanks to Ye Old Double Standards, sexy heroes usually get enough leeway to actually make mistakes worthy of broody guilt. Romance heroines, however, as the characters the readers are most expected to identify with, are held to a much stricter standard.

5. “I can’t marry him, despite being compromised – because he didn’t ask the right way!”
The Set-Up: Lord Biggs loses a contact lens and mistakes innocent Miss Wedge for his mistress and the two indulge in a roll in the hay. However, once he discovers he’s debauched a virgin, he does his duty and asks for her hand in marriage. “No! Don’t be an idiot!” shrills Miss Wedge. “You didn’t ask me because you love me!”

Why This Cliche Sucks: Because it’s a blatant twenty-first century intervention in an historical narrative that makes the heroine look like a moron. You’re a woman in 19th century England where your virginity and purity are literally currency! You could be pregnant! You could be ruined in the eyes of society! And you’re refusing to marry a rich, handsome Earl who could provide you a lifetime of financial and social security because of Your. Fucking. PRIDE?! A man who is (as is usually the case in historicals) your social superior and could have left you high and dry but chose not to because he’s a decent guy? For a woman raised in the nineteenth century who is reasonably aware of the social rules and expectations of her environment, where romantic love in a marriage is a pleasant bonus, saying no to the wealthy peer willing to marry you after taking your virginity would not be an intelligent option. I guess one century’s romantic woman is a past century’s blithely oblivious idiot.

You can also find AnimeJune on Twitter @AnimeJune