fierceawakening:

lookashiny:

fierceawakening:

n-o-ramos:

Toxic Relationships in Fiction

Something I’ve seen a lot lately, which really bothers me, is how romance novels centered around a toxic relationship (with the female typically being the party who is the victim in the situation) are so incredibly popular.

 Like bonkers popular. 

To the point where large publishing companies encourage their authors to write these kinds of relationships.

I’ll be the first to admit, the relationship in my novel is a horrible, toxic, abusive relationship. But I’m writing a horror novel. The relationship is supposed to scare its readers.

I’ve read way too many books where the toxic, abusive relationship is romanticized. “He stalks her out of love. It’s romantic.”.

 Um. No. I was stalked by someone who was “in love” with me. It wasn’t romantic. It was the scariest thing I ever had happen to me.

Bottom line, let’s stop romanticizing shitty relationships. 

What does romanticizing mean in this context, though? Like what exactly is the thing you want people to stop doing?

Because every time I’ve tried to come up with a definition for that it’s ended up splash damaging something that’s actually good.

Not OP, but I have read a fair amount of romance novels (some of which I liked ,even) that have creepy things like stalking openly depicted as romantic. There’s one that I liked 90% of, where the heroine leaves the hero after a fight and decided to take a plane home, so he follows her to the airport and yells at her to go back with him. When she refuses, he picks her up and carries her back to his car and basically forces her back to their hotel room. This was not depicted as a flaw of his, but rather as evidence that she should have just never left. That’s creepy. Stuff like that isn’t is as many romance novels as it used to be, but it’s around enough to annoy me.

Ah, okay. I don’t read a lot of straight romance but I read a fair amount of gay romance and I’m pretty sure what I write is classified as “erotic romance” by my publisher.

Stuff like this worries me because I’ve seen, like, “character a does something like that, character b emphatically tells them off for it and a acknowledges b is right, but they still end up together eventually because $weirdplottwist” get labeled as this.

Which worries me as a writer because… often, the conflict in this genre s interpersonal stuff. Which means that if everyone must be depicted as good at healthy relationships, it becomes very hard to come up with believable conflict.

Which I feel like I actually see in some lesfic. The characters are so obviously not flawed that whatever is keeping them apart feels unrealistic.

Which is why I asked for specifics. I want to make sure the critique is nuanced enough to take that into account.

Yeah, it’s a lot more of a thing in what I’d call mainstream straight romance. Obviously, interpersonal conflict is the main kind of conflict there, but there’s good kinds and bad kinds. I’ve read romance novels where one of them screws up or accidentally says the wrong thing and then they have to work through that, which is fine. Heck, I don’t mind a certain amount of dysfunction, as long as it’s obvious that’s what it is. Unfortunately, either from norms in straight romance novels or writer inexperience or whatever, bad/toxic behavior can be glossed over or just presented as romantic. And by presented as romantic I mean, for example, the heroine complains to her (usually female sometimes male) relatives about the hero being controlling or stalking her, only for them to brush it off or say “he’s just worried about you” or whatever, and they’re presented as right.