Love interest question from a friend

[mrissa]

A friend of mine was talking about a work-in-progress yesterday and asked what I/we look for in love interests in urban fantasy, and I'm afraid conversation turned and I didn't really answer. So I'm putting it here because I feel contrite and hope that someone else will answer too and help her out.

I don't think my answer is different for urban fantasy than for anything else. If there's a clear main character who has one or more love interests in a book, first and foremost I want them to be people with their own agendas and problems and interests. And second I want it to be clear why at some point they might have wanted to hang out together. They don't have to still be good to hang out together, because all sorts of things shift and change in people's lives, and all sorts of people who once loved each other or even still love each other are not really good at spending time in the same room any more. But I like to be able to see how at some point they were.

I feel like if something is going to not work for me in the "love interest" department of a book, it's quite often having characters who supposedly have "chemistry" in a physical/sexual sense but don't actually like each other. I can almost never pick that up off the page. I mean, I expect there are lots of people who could hypothetically have reasonable sex if they wanted to but don't like each other enough to find out. This does not interest me, and having a character I'm otherwise supposed to want to spend an entire book worth of time with going, "Yes, we have nothing in common and I feel like punching him every time he opens his mouth, but he is Such A Hottie," makes me far less sympathetic towards that character. The world is full of quite reasonably attractive people who don't make one feel like punching them; go find one. (I will very very occasionally make an exception for this if the characters have a long history that does not consist entirely of wanting to punch each other. Complicated relationships are okay. Antagonism and sex: no thanks, not for me.)

Beyond that, there's a mishmash of things I'm a sucker for in any character and the sorts of things I look for when my friends start dating someone new. It depends on the book whether my answer is "good with a soldering iron" or "good with an axe," but "good to random old people" is probably on the list. May be less likely to show up in a novel than axes or soldering irons, though....

Comments

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Hm. I would say I agree, but then... I'm fond of the Kate Daniels books, and yet she does spend the first couple of books wanting to punch the love interest. On the other hand, he actually *is* good to random old people, or at least to all the many people who depend on him, and it's fairly clear that at least some of her antagonism is just because she has good reasons of her own to avoid any real relationship. (He is also a Hottie.)

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I think that might be what makes 'urban fantasy romantic lead' different from 'all other books romantic lead'. Urban fantasy is a genre where it is pretty much expected that the romance will take several books. Ilona Andrews is my favorite example-- the Kate Daniels books are urban fantasy and the Edge books are paranormal romance.

I'd say that for an urban fantasy in specific, the romantic lead has to change over the course of the story. He (usually he) can start out adversarial and condescending, and he'll just about always start out stronger on at least one axis, but he has to change in a meaningful way by the time the romance gets going.

[howl-at-the-sun.livejournal.com]

My first thought was, "I don't really care much about the love interests" in books, which isn't true, exactly. It is often true in urban fantasy, though, even urban fantasy I like.

I was very fond of the romance in Anansi Boys, and from what I remember, it was because I really liked Daisy, and that happened in this paragraph:

Take Daisy, for example. Her song, which has been somewhere in the back of her head for most of her life, had a reassuring, marching sort of beat, and words that were about protecting the weak, and it had a chorus that began “Evildoers beware!” and was thus much too silly ever to be sung out loud. She would hum it to herself sometimes though, in the shower, during the soapy bits. [p. 189]

But, I do not look for 'justice-oriented strong woman character with song in her head' for love interest. I think I particularly like characters who do not just see each other and have love at first sight (yawn!) but characters who have to work together and get to know each other gradually and who thus develop respect for each other, which leads to romance. This, of course, is predicated on the characters being people who Do Stuff.

On an entirely different note, I like people who are thorny and guarded and picky (not jerks. just people who are not always good with people) finding someone who they get along with (especially with difficulties and misunderstandings - those are fun).

[vcmw]

In the particular instance where there are mutiple potential guy partners courting one girl and they're heading toward a one-guy one-girl end set up, I am fond of the writers who reliably signal which love interest is the winning one because he supports her career goals (Nora Roberts always does this. If there are two possible boys, the one who wholeheartedly supports her career as police detective / arson investigator / florist / cake baker / architect etc. is always the one who ends up with her.)

I do read a lot of paranormal romance, and there's often a narrative convention that "oh, I can't stand him but he's so hot" is actually code for "I am currently uncomfortable with my sexuality and/or my body and will not be able to allow the emotional aspects of this relationship to move forward [or even be acknowledged] until I face that discomfort." This actually works fine for me, though it has a highly-frequent failure mode of "urk, conflict through sexual chemistry and denial" that I suspect I am probably much more tolerant of than is really reasonable.

I will forgive much in a book where the romantic partners are drawn together by an admiration for each others' competence. Especially if the competence they admire in each other is something that their relationship supports and makes clearer to other friends/ involved parties.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My main concern with "I am currently uncomfortable with my sexuality and/or my body and blah blah onwards" plots is that I read enough YA that I am really uncomfortable with relationships in which one person Fixes the other.

I haven't seen a lot where Our Young Heroine Fixes her boyfriend, but that would make me equally uncomfortable. (My dad will hold forth at some length about how People Are Not Fixer-Uppers and how you will indeed change after marriage but not necessarily in ways a partner has planned out, so do not marry someone with the intention of changing them! Etc.! He hasn't been doing this as much now that it isn't a risk for me. But it's still a thing he sees people doing and goes, "Nooooooo!", and also I suspect the I Met A Broken Boy And Fixed Him Go Me thing would give me hives from the condescending even without that.)

What I am seeing an unfortunate lot of, though, is that you are broken and your boyfriend knows how to change you so that you will be Totes All Bettar so you should listen to him and do what he says. And I really believe that healthy relationships should help you grow as a person. It's just that there's a line between that and "you are broken and the other person is not, so listen to them and change yourself to be what they say, whereas your insights are not of equal value to them."

And the "I can't stand him but he's so hot" code often verges uncomfortably close to Fixer Upper territory for me.

[vcmw]

I have somehow missed the YA "you are broken and your boyfriend knows how to change you so that you will be Totes All Bettar" plot: it sounds horrible.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sarah. Dessen.

Sigh.

[vcmw]

I think I read a book by Sarah Dessen in my YA lit class in grad school. It was Not My Thing, and I don't remember much about it beyond thinking it wasn't my thing. I think Sarah Dessen writes more problem novels than relationship novels, despite the covers with flowers.

[dancing-crow.livejournal.com]

My recent guilty pleasure is Burn Notice, not least because Our Hero is very deft with a soldering iron, so it is nice to see that in someone else's criteria.

What I like is people who talk and listen and do not assume. Any time there are assumptions on the part of anyone, I get tight and itchy because the ground rules in our house are all about communication, and I generally want people to Do It Bettar.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

I think I am less likely to be interested in books that are sufficiently formulaic to have an obvious "love interest". I prefer relationships that seem to grow out of the characters rather than relationships that seem to be there because that's what one does. So I guess I would be looking for a character for whom it is clear why the main character likes him/her/it and vice versa, rather than looking for any particular character traits. I mean, it's not my love interest, so the characters' preferences are way more relevant than mine.

I also like characters who appear to have their own lives going on better than characters who are clearly just there to play a supporting role (like "love interest"). If that's their role in this particular story, fine, but I like to have the sense that there's a whole person there, who could be the protagonist of some other story. So not dropping everything to follow the main character around is a plus.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So not dropping everything to follow the main character around is a plus.

Yyyyes. I watched a Katharine Hepburn movie today in which she dropped everything to follow Cary Grant around, and...he was better than what she had, but still. But still.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

"I'll be yar now, I promise to be yar."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Not that one. Different one.

[marydell.livejournal.com]

I didn't think so, it just brought that awful YAR thing to mind. "Be less like yourself and it will all work out between us!"

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

I just finished an upcoming urban fantasy, third in a series, where the heroine has this fated chemistry thing with another character and it's handled SO WELL, mainly because it annoys the crap out of both of them that they don't seem to have a choice in the matter, although of course they do and the text makes it clear that they do. A lot of urban fantasies seem to do the fated romance thing without examining how gross that sort of thing actually is.

Also, the heroine is bisexual and obviously so and I suspect she's not monogamous, either. But not because she's bi, but because she's not monogamous. Thank you author, for making it clear that non-monogamy does not necessarily follow from bisexuality! Two separate things!

[marydell.livejournal.com]

In urban fantasy, I am intrigued if a person falls in love with someone from their own side of the mundane/magical divide, instead of always falling for the person who guides them through the new environment. Also it would be refreshing to see a story where the person is like "wow, this new world you are guiding me through is delightful and exhilerating, but you're kind of a jerk and I won't be hanging out with you again" because too often the guide character becomes an avatar of the new wonderfulness, and therefore Must Be Loved despite lacking loveable qualities.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Really looking for the same things in UF/PR love interests as in other genres - I would like both characters to be grownups, damnit. Ideally, they should also fit well together and be willing and able to communicate (and negotiate! bonus if they do it 'on-screen'). Extra-special bonus if there are narratively-acknowleged relationship possibilites other than het and monogamous.

-Nameseeker