That is a very interesting essay, thank you! I could potentially get behind the Book is a Spoof theory and the related Subversion of Expected Protagonist Morality. I can appreciate that in theory even if it's not my thing.
I don't know if genre-romance is more rule-bound than other genres or if there is just a strong community of readers, writers and publishers who define the genre narrowly.
I don't know, either! I think I'm part of the problem when it comes to policing the borders of romance, despite not even being a self-identified "romance reader." If I had a different set of expectations for TLoM I might have enjoyed its cynicism, but since I'd already automatically mapped it onto TBC and was expecting an ending I could read as unambiguously "happy," I came away from it feeling almost as indignant as Eileen Robinson in my reactionary heart of hearts. But why was I so attached to that expectation, and why did the author's indifference to it it annoy me so much? I'm not sure.
That POV-switching convention was one of the things I found the hardest to like about the genre romances I tried. Not that the POV switched at all, but the specific convention of seesawing back and forth between two POVs with the ruthless regularity of a metronome. I'm sure it's possible to do it well, but I don't think I've ever been happy with it in practice.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2017-06-11 05:00 pm (UTC)I don't know if genre-romance is more rule-bound than other genres or if there is just a strong community of readers, writers and publishers who define the genre narrowly.
I don't know, either! I think I'm part of the problem when it comes to policing the borders of romance, despite not even being a self-identified "romance reader." If I had a different set of expectations for TLoM I might have enjoyed its cynicism, but since I'd already automatically mapped it onto TBC and was expecting an ending I could read as unambiguously "happy," I came away from it feeling almost as indignant as Eileen Robinson in my reactionary heart of hearts. But why was I so attached to that expectation, and why did the author's indifference to it it annoy me so much? I'm not sure.
That POV-switching convention was one of the things I found the hardest to like about the genre romances I tried. Not that the POV switched at all, but the specific convention of seesawing back and forth between two POVs with the ruthless regularity of a metronome. I'm sure it's possible to do it well, but I don't think I've ever been happy with it in practice.