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Romance in not romance-focused stories

Discussion in 'Fanfic Discussion' started by Frundan, May 3, 2016.

  1. Frundan

    Frundan Squib

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    English is not my first language, so I apologize in advance for any mistakes in my grammar.


    I've recently started writing fanfiction again after a rather long hiatus, this time with the intention of actually putting up the finished story on FFnet. It's a crossover of two somewhat obscure anime, and I'm planning on comparing and contrasting their respective world views through their main leads.

    As you can probably guess it won't be focusing on romance. However, there is a small subplot, that actually highlights the relationship of two characters, who are in love with each other. I'm not planning it to be fluff, or their reletionship to one another even that obvious for that matter, but it will factor in during a crucial part of the plot.

    As I was writing out the plan for the fic, I started wandering: why do I want this episode as part the plot? I like the pairing to begin with, and it also makes sense storywise to include it; yet making note of it even during the planning stage still made me uneasy.

    I tend to dislike any romantic subplots, be it in original or fanfiction, regardless if I like the pairing or not. Then as I was thinking about the reasons, I realized why.

    More often than not, when a story introduces a pairing, I tend to feel like the author thinks it needs to be there, even if it doesn't mesh well with the plot or the characters. This is also true for movies, and it has a tendency to annoy me just as much. In fanfiction, when I see a pairing mentioned in the description of a story that is not romance based, my first thought usually is
    "Oh, so this is the author's favorite ship, if he needed to mention it in the description. He probably just put it there for the sake of having a romance, and went with his favorite.."

    With that said, it's not like I don't like romance in general. One of the best fics I've read lately is A Chance Encounter by R-dude. It's a great crossover between Frozen and How to Train Your Dragon, and is mainly about politics, but the romance between Elsa and Hiccup is also a major driving force of the plot. The reason I like it so much, is that while the relationship is in the forefront, it doesn't feel like it's just there for no reason. It's actually used as a means of exploring two very interesting characters, bringing out traits we've not seen in their respective movies, yet still make sense and don't seem out of character.

    While I'm sure all of you have read more fics than I have, I find that romance usually doesn't serve the purpose of character exploration, but is just there to flaunt the author's favorite ship. I have to admit it's a rather biased view, but it pulls me out of the story immediately when the plot proceeds to a screeching hault and all established characterisation gets thrown out the window for what is basically fanservice.

    So my question to you all, who are far more experienced writers than I am: when you write a non-romantic story and put a romantic subplot in it what is the thought process that goes behind it? How do you decide on the pairing? Is it decided right at the start, and the story is naturally built around it, or does it come up later during the planning stage?

    I'm actually really curious, how DLP views romance from a writer's perspective. I'm not really sure if there were any threads on this subject before, but if there were, I apologize for making another one.

    I think some parts of this post came off like an attack, but I blame the fact I'm not a native speaker of English ._.
     
  2. Zeelthor

    Zeelthor Scissor Me Timbers

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    We grow and change as we interact with other people. Romance is one form of interaction. It tells quite a lot about a person or a character.

    Sometimes the chemistry between to characters is just fun and that in of itself can be a reason to write them together, as a pair or not.
     
  3. Sesc

    Sesc Slytherin at Heart Moderator

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    You are conflating two ways of writing. "mesh well with the plot", just like anything that argues about "organic" writing presupposes a way of non-structured, mostly unplanned writing where the "characters are alive" and "the plot lead the author". On the other hand, if you're arguing about deciding and reasons for having certain things in the story, then you're arguing about an underlying structure that presupposes a plan. (From an author's standpoint, for the reader it's all one, of course.)

    If you plan what you write before you do it, then the former isn't a category that can be applied: by definition you throw together bits and pieces that don't inherently fit and only belong together because you want them to. Everything is contrived, because you are actively contriving.

    Or to put it in a different way, where is the difference between deciding that X visits place A on date B, and deciding that X and Y should hook up? From a structural standpoint, there isn't one. One is as legitimate a plot point as the other.

    What there is, though, is A) badly reasoned plot points and B) badly veiled contrivances. Because of course, it is the author's task to hide the contrived nature of the plot and make it appear organic. Both, however, are functions of the author's talent and skill, so what I finally want to argue is that whenever you feel a romance is tagged onto a story, all you are saying is that the author isn't good -- because a good author would have done it differently.


    For your last questions in particular: I happen to plan out my stories completely, so a question about "deciding" makes sense to me. And how and when I decide a paring is -- arbitrary. Because everything is a legitimate start point. I've started with wanting write a pairing, I've started with wanting to write a character, and I've started with wanting to write a certain kind of plot. It really doesn't matter, because I have to fit together the pieces either way, see above.
     
  4. DropWatch

    DropWatch Squib

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    It's like you said, romance that adds to the plot is important. It feels more real this way, on the plus side of also advancing and creating more depth for the plot.

    But beyond that, this is fanfiction. Most people write their pairings purely for satisfaction, it's their OTP, and that's fine. It can create a popular drive for their fanfiction due the popular nature of the pairing, and if stories of that pair are rare enough, it'll get reviews/hits purely off its pairing, even if the fiction itself is substandard.

    As a subplot, romance does its job. It can provide conflict and resolution, and that's all that is needed. It becomes a problem in cases where it is more than a subplot, or it gets more 'screen time' than needed. Then it's more of a wish fulfillment, which for myself isn't very gratifying to read.

    As for myself, I have pairings that'd I would add to fanfiction purely for the sake of having them there. I like them and fanfiction doesn't have to make perfect sense in order to work. It's about making it plausible and taking it where it goes. I know that whenever I see a HP/DG fic, I'll give it a go if it isn't completely horrible. That, I think is the point of pairings, in fanfiction in any case.
     
  5. Joe's Nemesis

    Joe's Nemesis High Score: 2,058 ~ Prestige ~

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    Damn it, Sesc. Just when I think I'm maturing as a writer you go and dump this kind of brilliant crap in a thread that makes me realize just how immature of a writer I still am.*

    And what pissed me off more . . . it's so simple.

    /overreaction

    *Honestly, I think this is probably the third or fourth time I've opened a thread and had a basic concept of writing changed by your post.
     
  6. Sesc

    Sesc Slytherin at Heart Moderator

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    Lol, you're welcome ;) It's not entirely mine, though -- the two ways of writing theory I encountered in a blog once; it used the examples of a gardener and a carpenter to describe the two types. I just applied it, since it made sense to me.
     
  7. Damask

    Damask Seventh Year

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    I don't see it as a dichotomy at all. If there's one iron rule of literature in my view, it's this: every element that gets to make it into the story has to have both an in-universe reason and an out-of-universe (literary) reason for being there. If it lacks the latter, the story tends to be rambling, unfocused, uninteresting. If it lacks the former, it smacks of contrivance and gratuity. Any kind of proper writing arises out of the marriage of these two rationales of the presence of various elements within the story. Any part of the story that fails this litmus test lowers the quality of the story. If the reader gets the feeling that the author is operating strictly within one framework or the other, then the author has already failed.

    Obviously the author has the reins, and gets to decide what to write into the story regardless of the process of judgment by which he/she filters plot points. The difficult task of the writer is to braid story ideas and settings with literary rationales so well that the chosen setting is such that intrinsically appealing plot points would not be hard to fit logically into the world, and that the literary appeal of your story, the message to be read between the lines, is one that can be told organically through the story you're writing.

    --

    As for the OP: I've hardly ever seen pairings in fanfiction that weren't, so to speak, written with one hand. It's mostly a fault of the medium (of inexperienced writers) and of the kinds of things that appeal to fans that romance in fanfiction is gratuitous and masturbatory. Yes, this includes these forums. (If you're wondering why, given that the DLP favoured pairings at least limit Harry's chosen partners to people of the same age cohort, of the appropriate gender given his sexual orientation, and usually but not always of the same faction, it's because these pairings almost unmistakeably follow the pattern of young-male-to-identify-with/trophy-girlfriend, and therefore lend themselves more easily to vicarious experience of romance than to accurate depiction of romance.) Avowed shippers have a tendency to write a romance subplot into the story in the form of a sort of Romance Expansion Pack to the story, in the happy case when it's not a full-on lemon with no other plot to speak of -- or when the whole world bends to the love between two characters. In these cases, this subplot tends to be isolated from the main story, with at most a token effort to relate it to the main story events. If they were to cut it off entirely from the story, paragraph by paragraph, scene by scene, it wouldn't be missed by the rest of the plot points -- the whole story would make sense without it.

    On the other hand, a story entirely devoid of romance, when it spans a multitude of characters over a long period of time and in different stances, is at the very least suspect from a literary standpoint, because in these kinds of stories you kind of have a duty to represent reality accurately, with all that it tends to contain. In these cases elements such as romance become conspicuous by their absence. (This is kind of the same sort of critique that SJWy people are getting at when they blame a book or movie for having suspiciously few e.g. women or ethnic minorities, in a way that's not justified by subject matter or statistics.)

    I can't say I blame you for your perspective on this. The second iron rule of writing I stand by is that gratuity is the mother of all vices. Indeed, a lot of the romance is there for the sake of there being romance (almost always between very attractive people, usually in a cocoon somewhere away from the main plot, where there are no fights, no drama, no cheating, and no breakups.)

    While all I've managed so far is the beginning of an outline of a behemoth of a fic, here's how things look like from my view: I tend to put pairings there for the sake of complicating the plot and the lives of characters. The first major pairing that I've got planned so far is primarily instrumental in precipitating the events of the main (political) plot; its value as vicarious romantic fulfillment is small to nil. Future romantic developments are, so far, meant to influence the fate of the characters in a tragic way, to expose their weaknesses, to hack their volition into doing things they wouldn't have been inclined to do for other (rational) reasons. A lot of it is unrequited love. I incline towards believing that I'm handling this aspect of the fic in the right way, by integrating romantic subplots into the larger stories and sending a few messages about the role of love in a person's life, but at the end of the day this remains to be seen, once the story is out.

    P.S. Stop fussing so much about speaking English as a second language. You're getting your message across just fine.
     
  8. Sesc

    Sesc Slytherin at Heart Moderator

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    Naturally it has to have an in-universe reason. But if you plan a story, what is an "in-universe reason"? It's another plot point you come up with to hide precisely the fact that you want it to exist and that it, from the outset, has no other reason to exist beside that. This was what I meant by it being the job of the author to make it appear organic, if you are contriving the story.

    I can't offer too much insight in how it works if you don't know what you're writing before you do (examples would be King, also Funke (Inkheart)), since I don't do that. But for the other case, think of it like this: The ideas originates in my head, and I am writing them down. The direction is exclusively me --> story. As such, I control every aspect of it, and "in-universe" is meaningless for me.

    It's a distinction you apply to the story afterwards, as a reader. But if you come to me, the author, and say oh, it makes totally sense for X to do Y there in circumstances C, I can totally relate to that, my only answer is well, that's why I put C there -- since I wanted X to do Y.
     
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