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Romantasy is a minor hobby of mine so I have a lot of thoughts about this. Romantasy is, essentially, the live literary genre in America today. Outwardly you get these viral romances every few years or so (Fifty Shades of Grey, Heated Rivalry, Fault in Our Stars, The Notebook, Twilight, etc.) More esoterically however these romances shape the literary world in invisible and hidden ways. (Everything is edited and audited by women now and I have good reason to suspect that a lot of female authors are male writers on a penname.)
I highly recommend everyone finding a romantasy they can stomach and giving it a go. They're fun because they're so simple and cliched that you can read what is nominally a several-hundred page book in a couple of hours. Get an airport book or pick up some schlock from a local free library on your next neighborhood walk. The more they make you groan and cringe the better. The point is that the genre is supposed to be extremely cliched, it's not supposed to be good, and that's what makes it work. The cliches reveal something deeper about how story and archetype work, like Jung. The more they try to be "good" the less they say because the writer is chafing out of embarrassment out of what is a natural form. I like McDonalds, I think a lot of fancier burgers are worse burgers, the burger is supposed to be casual, it's not supposed to take itself seriously.
This is a common complaint about Harry Potter and I think it misunderstands what makes Harry Potter good.
Generally a "story and world that hang together" are bad things. The desire for a world where everything makes sense is fundamentally a nerd's preoccupation. The real world itself usually doesn't have a story and rules that hang together. It's extremely realistic for a story to work this way, the apparent inconsistency means it's generally tapping into something deeper. Tying the lore together with more- and more-consistent rules actually makes everything worse because they were never needed, it's like plastering a beautiful country highway in billboards. All the extra signs that communicate more (more is better right?) detract from what was actually good in the first place (Harry Potter is whimsical and magical).
Take Time-Turners. A consistent feature of Harry Potter discussion for twenty years has been that Time-Turners don't make sense. Time travel introduces all sorts of what-if scenarios (why didn't they use Time-Turners to prevent Voldemort's rise?). Time travel works inconsistently with the already-established magical lore of the series. It especially "doesn't make sense" to give time travel to a thirteen-year-old girl merely so that she can study more in school. It really doesn't make sense if you think about it for two minutes.
But really, it's all fine, it doesn't matter. Everything that "doesn't make sense" happens "off-screen". Within the story, nobody treats the existence of Time-Turners as invalidating the setting. Harry doesn't meditate on how he wishes they had Time-Turners to solve their problems, Dumbledore doesn't give a wink-and-a-nod remark to the reader about how you'd be foolish to consider using Time-Turners to solve all your problems. Those things would actually make Harry Potter worse, they would self-ironically acknowledge the problem. When, actually, Time-Turners only have these problems in your head, not in the actual world of the story. So you can just as easily invent other explanations in your head. Make up whatever you want. They're extremely dangerous and regulated technologies and nobody uses them because the consequences are unpredictable. They gave one to a teenager because they're basically safe in extremely limited applications like studying more classes. Maybe they've done it before, maybe they have a list somewhere of safe applications and they do this all the time. Maybe most people don't even know about them. Whatever. It doesn't happen on-screen so it doesn't matter, you can fill in the gaps however you want. Having a real explanation in the story itself would make it worse.
It's like The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Famously, the characters don't see anything until the audience sees it, which is how you have scenes where they're visually stunned by the sudden emergence of a graveyard out of the landscape that realistically they would have seen on the horizon half an hour ago. That's the logic of how a story works. When Time-Turners are on-screen, they don't cause any of the problems that people imagine they must cause. So there must be some explanation, it happens off-screen, who cares. It's fun to watch Harry and Hermione go back in time.
It's all goonbait. Malfoid is inherently goonbait. The trend might not revolve around tentacles and bugged-out ahegao eyes or dirty sexual fantasies, but it is essentially all slop.
A common theme I keep hearing is that Malfoid "fixes" problems with the original Harry Potter. But who said that Harry Potter needs fixing?
For example, I've heard many say that the Malfoid romance fixes the original series' lack of dramatic romance. Who said the original series needs that? I've heard that Malfoid and Harry could unite in the finale and stop Voldemort together, or that Malfoid could be Harry's "reward," or that Malfoid allows the ending to have a dramatic climax of romantic love. Why does the finale need any of those things? Harry Potter is already about love, he dies in the embrace of his dead family, he sacrifices himself for his friends. If you add a romantic interest in, it completely changes the emotional valence, and therefore the symbolic logic, of the ending and thus the entire series. It's a matter of taste if you like it better that way I suppose. But it's not deeper or richer, it's actually simpler. It sacrifices the deeper kinds of love depicted for the cheap dopamine of Big Hero Romance. It's the big neon lights of plotting and style, supersize me, let's add explosions and Michael Bay. There's a deeper reason Malfoid fans draw from the well of anime -- anime is an explosive medium of emotions made simpler and larger. That's inherent to cartoons as compared to live human beings. Everything is flattened into the 2nd Dimension and made more expressive at the same time.
This shift is the emotional and stylistic analogue of goonbait. It doesn't matter if artistically everyone is wholesome and chaste. Emotionally, Malfoid is porn. It's cartoonified. It serves exactly the same function as a Romantasy novel to actual romance. You simplify real human complexities to romanticized archetypes to satisfy a human fantasy. It's porn.
As another example, I've heard many say that Malfoy lacks a redemption arc and so Malfoid adds something necessary. Well... Malfoy already has a redemption arc. Three times (by my count) he refuses to participate in the evil that's asked of him. (He refuses to kill Dumbledore; he abstains from identifying Harry in Malfoy Manor; he flees when Crabbe and Goyle confront the trio in the Room of Requirement over the Horcrux.) Additionally, his family also backs down from the ledge, at the final climactic moment, after Voldemort has "killed" Harry, in the scene with Draco's mother Narcissus. She examines Harry's "corpse," asks him if Draco is alive, and covers up that Harry is alive. The symbolic logic here is that the Malfoys have collectively long been over their head and regret, in some capacity, their evil deeds. For all this they are rewarded in the finale by happily reuniting, all alive, allowed to participate in the final festivities. This is in fact a kind of redemption, and it's very realistic to how someone who has done a lot of bad things might finally back away at the brink from true evil.
This is all extremely important thematically and symbolically. Harry beats Voldemort in the end because the Elder Wand recognizes Harry as its master, because Harry beat Draco and Draco "beat" Dumbledore. The ending only happens because Draco backed away from true evil. Some people complain that this is a simple plot contrivance just so that Harry can win somehow in the end. But thematically it's very consistent with one of Rowling's big themes, which is that sympathy for evil doers is a path for their own redemption. It happens over and over again in Book 7. Harry acquires the locket by sympathizing with the neglected Kreacher. Harry's life is saved by Wormtail's moment of hesitation, which is symbolic repayment from when Harry once saved Wormtail. Harry resolves the final mysteries through finally sympathizing with Snape when he descends into Snape's memory. Dumbledore practically beats the reader over the head with this idea over and over again throughout the books, and it comes through in the finale which is only possible because of Harry's sympathy for Draco.
But the Malfoid fans want something more than this. They want a pornified heel-face turn where Malfoid gets to have a Big Damn Moment where she explicitly becomes good. They want Malfoid to stand up and renounce evil, or help Harry somehow in the finale, or declare her love and turn against Voldemort. And on paper that sounds better because it's more explicit and direct. But it basically changes the meaning of the entire story, it changes the symbolic logic of everything that preceded it, it emphasizes "Romantic Love" in the formula "Love Conquers All," which is essentially the same story every other story in the world is already telling.
Is it better, is it worse? That's a matter of taste. But Malfoid doesn't merely add, it changes the entire story, because it's goonbait, because it's porn. The whole thing is goonbait.
Which is to say: it's a fantasy! Malfoid is a male fantasy. It's a fantasy exactly because it reifies an idea of love that is very unrealistic and very attractive to men today. They want to believe that there is a woman out there who will transform herself into the man's mirror image. She loves you so much that she's willing to leave her family, her house, her friends, her ideology all for you. She loves you that much. She's a perfect vessel and receptacle for your personality, she's submissive and breedable. (Yes, I'm identifying a narcissistic element here.) This is an extremely old male fantasy.
But Rowling already gave Harry Potter a romantic interest that is (in classic feminine terms) much more realistic. Harry falls in love with Ginny. Ginny, who was there in the background all along, who comes from a family that gave Harry a lot of succor and support, who was always a natural fit for Harry even when he didn't see it that way. Ginny is, in fact, a recurrence to Harry's mother in the same way that Harry himself is a recurrence to his own father. Ginny is not a male power fantasy, so maybe that even makes it a bad romance -- many including apparently Rowling herself wish she had set Harry up with Hermione instead. But Harry's romantic interest in Ginny is at least realistic, and is not emotional pornschlock. This wasn't something people wanted twenty years ago, but it seems like a very common desire today, for reasons that are probably understood by anyone here who has tried and failed to date in the interim.
Besides that, I think Malfoid is cute enough and I'm enjoying some of the Potter resurgence. But I'll allow myself to be labeled a fanboy and declare that actually nobody is doing it better than JK Rowling did in the first place. Because she actually had an extremely dialed-in idea of what how to tell a story and what people want.
Ironically, I actually think the strength of Harry Potter as a series is, fundamentally, its worldbuilding. The actual story of Harry Potter is not particularly impressive - the relationships between the core cast are messy and unsatisfying, and Rowling mostly fails to tell a compelling seven book narrative. The first few books are pretty good, but those books are mostly mystery stories, presenting the reader with a series of clues buried in amid exposition and worldbuilding.
Harry Potter has very good worldbuilding, but it's not the kind of worldbuilding that, pardon my language, autistic nerds like. The magic system in the series clearly has no rules, for instance, and things that any RPG player would immediately notice as game-breaking, like the Time Turner, enter and exit the narrative without explanation.
What it does do, however, is brilliantly create a sense of place. The main character of the series is Hogwarts, and Hogwarts is a very evocative setting - the magical castle with its interior constantly shifting, the quirky and colourful professors, the four thematically-aligned houses, and so on. I think readers really engaged with and fell in love with the setting. That's why it provoked so much fan fiction - the setting is a great place to tell stories, and the main characters are thin and archetypal enough that they can easily be shuffled around that setting to tell whatever story you like. The events of the story can be changed, and even the genre can be changed (obviously there's a ton of romance fanfic), but the setting, the world, is what makes it feel like Harry Potter.
Compare also the vast popularity of prequel fanfic - James, Lily, the Marauders, young-Snape, and so on. You can remove the actual story of Harry Potter and swap out all the characters and it's still magic, and people still want to read about it and write about it. Look at relationship tags on AO3 and notice the popularity of Sirius/Lupin, James/Lily, Regulus/James, or even Marlene/Dorcas, the latter being two names casually mentioned as coming from Harry's parents' generation but otherwise never described. The setting is doing all the work.
Or consider Hogwarts Legacy - popular game, used Harry Potter really well, but set in the 19th century. Avalanche Software correctly realised that the important thing about Harry Potter is the school, not any particular students or any particular events in the story.
In this light, the defense I'd make of Malfoid would be - okay, obviously it's boys and young men indulging in a romantic fantasy. There's ultimately nothing wrong with that. The last I checked girls and young women thirsted for Malfoy for decades and no one batted an eyelid. Maybe Malfoid is an Edward Cullen figure, but that's okay. For that matter nerdy guys have been writing fanfic about attractive girls in Potter for just as long.
Anyway, once you accept that this is male romantasy, I think it makes good use of the IP. Hogwarts Castle is a romantic setting, and the premise here - everyman hero plus well-bred, snobby perfectionist - is a perfectly solid one for a romance. I think it works fine.
It doesn't 'fix' anything with Rowling's series, and I think that's a silly way to think about it, but who says it has to? It's just a story idea that some boys like. Good for them.
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I love the books and I agree with you that there's nothing wrong with Harry Potter's worldbuilding being vibes-based — it works well for the story Rowling is telling. Since the plots are functionally mystery novels, the spells and mechanics introduced in each book are mostly there as devices to further the book's plot and add whimsy and wonder. That said, it makes Harry Potter as a franchise rather poor ground for extended media like Fantastic Beasts, since the barebones worldbuilding comes back to bite it when trying to tell a different type of story. The world is built around Harry and his journey through school and can't support much else built on that edifice (besides fanfic writers reimagining rules to make more sense).
Kind of. There is some real criticism in that, romantically, Harry is essentially written as a woman. Things that JK Rowling would find desirable in a man are things he likes, and things that give her the ick give Harry the ick. When Cho Chang cries in the tea shop, Harry is disgusted in the same way a woman would be to see a man she likes bawling in front of her. With Ginny, Harry doesn't notice her as a romantic prospect until she starts dating around and demonstrates her romantic viability, which then makes him interested. He is overall extremely passive when it comes to romance, and shows zero interest in using his status as Quidditch star and Chosen One to get attention from women. At risk of generalizing the sexes, these are all extremely female-coded characteristics. Everyone on the internet now having (to put it lightly) a greater awareness of how men and women differ romantically meant it was only a matter of time before this part of Harry Potter got some serious examination under a new cultural lens.
I don't disagree that Rowling gave him something but it never sat right with me how he and the Slytherins were written throughout the series in general. For a series that makes so much importance of love and understanding, having 1/4 of the student body be cartoonishly evil cartoon bullies feels incongruous. Hell, most Slytherins aren't even allowed to be good-looking — the majority are described as ugly chuds with the appearance of gorillas, even the girls. The artistocrats among them are invariably shown to be sniveling bullies who hide behind their wealth and have no shred of character. There was so much room to do more with these characters. Slughorn is a much-needed counterexample (I always liked Phineas Nigellus too) but he feels like the only good one in a sea of evil cartoon racists. So yes, while Draco does get to show he isn't irredeemably evil, that's pretty much all he gets, and that is very disappointing to me. He and the Slytherins are one of the aspects of the story most ripe for reimagining.
Bringing it back to Malfoid, these elements combine to have a lot of people feeling that yeah, maybe it would have been really cool if Malfoy was a tsundere with an anime enemies to lovers plot (Malfoy is also very female coded to begin with!). Is it a male fantasy to convert the evil girl to your side by being that virtuous and irresistible? Yes, definitely! I'd say there's nothing wrong with that, let's push to see even more of it in our media. Rowling has said herself that Ron-Hermione was done as her own wish fulfillment, so there's already precedent here.
Women get to have their most insane fever dream billionaire vampire hockey player fantasies available for $15 dollars on a shelf in every airport general store, in the featured display in every Barnes and Noble, and in a dedicated aisle in every Target. There is a genuine demand for the male side that is unserved by media that doesn't come from East Asia (because many women find it to be gross and, as you said, everything is edited and audited by women now). Malfoid is a fun trend, but has some real merit to it, and I hope it shifts the media landscape at least a tiny bit.
It makes some sense that Slytherin is structurally chuddish (though most of them just don't seem to give much of a shit beyond general teenage tribalism up until they're put to a choice by Voldemort's takeover of Hogwarts).
If you want character, there are already two houses dedicated to that, and one catch-all house in Hufflepuff for people who are mostly just chill about things.
There's a constant influx of Muggleborns yearly (and we have no evidence they perform worse than wizards), and it's quite clear that there are a lot of talented aristos and purebloods who simply don't care to hate on them and are just fine climbing the shared status hierarchy. We see two generations of purebloods - James and Sirius have the bluest of blood - weeding themselves out of the Slytherin gene pool because they simply don't have a problem benefiting from Muggleborns.
Slytherins are the equivalent of Roman patricians who never made their peace with plebians becoming Senators, and so lost out on a bunch of talent and marginalized themselves.
Somewhat fucked up given JKR's other points on stereotyping, but makes some sense.
I agree, from a Watsonian perspective, it does make sense. Slytherin is written as rotten to the core with no redeeming qualities. Blood purity is shown to have no impact on a wizard's power since it's a heavy-handed metaphor for class in Britain, so their focus on it makes them look stupid. It's not even the case that they fell from grace or lost their way over time, as their founder was demonstrably just as evil if not more. They would attract only dumb brutes and the few elite sociopaths who use them for power.
Out of universe... making Slytherin all of those things was a deliberate choice. The story would have really benefited from the gang making a Slytherin friend down the line, possibly in Dumbledore's Army. Even in the later books, when Rowling seems to have misgivings about casting an entire fourth of the people in her world as irredeemably evil, none of the Slytherin students choose to stand with Hogwarts when push comes to shove.
Interesting to think about the counterfactual, but at the end of the day these started out as children's books, and struggling single mother Rowling probably didn't have much room for empathy for British aristocrats when she wrote them.
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Despite in-story protestations otherwise, the Houses are basically Good, Evil, Nerds, and Plodders. With a few exceptions.
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I just read this scene last week to my 8 year old, and you are wrong. In this scene Harry feels confused, not disgusted. He is confused the same way that countless men have been confused when their woman starts crying for reasons they can't understand. And Rowling is not subtle about this confusion. There is a full 5 page dialogue between Harry and Hermione where Rowling clearly spells out how Harry and Cho are misunderstanding each other and this leads to confusion. Ron at the end even says: "Hermione, you should write a book" because women are confusing.
He is confused in this scene, yes, but there are plenty of other lines that support Harry feeling disdainful about Cho crying, or explicitly thinking of Ginny favorably because she does not cry, which brings to mind the obvious comparison.
From Order of the Phoenix:
And in Deathly Hallows:
To be fair to Harry and to Rowling, the scene in the tea shop was a complete minefield and I'm not saying it's unrealistic for him to have had no idea what to do.
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Isn’t the Harry Potter worldbuilding issue something that’s pretty easy to retcon with ‘the viewpoint character is a teenager’?
"Pokémon descriptions make no sense." -> "Yes, pokedex entries are made by a 10 or 11 year old child. This is how they perceive the world."
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For the most part yes, but it falls apart when the heroes start fighting for their lives against death eaters. Once it is life-and death with the fate of the world on the line, and with the protagonists having finished their education and being native to the wizarding world, they should be expected to use any tool at their disposal. As should their opponents. The tension and the stakes invite people to think about what opportunities are available. But the worldbuilding can't handle this. There is simply no good reason for why the trio, and Hermione especially considering her genius, continue to use the same tiny selection of spells.
Overall the deadly hallows still works though. Where the world really starts falling apart is in the cursed child.
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Not especially. The narration is third-person limited, sometimes omniscient, which lends more objectivity to the events in question. Oftentimes the world is explained to us by an adult, usually a teacher, or is something we just see as a direct part of the narrative. The latter is impossible to dismiss as being from an unreliable narrator without dismissing the actual events of the story as being unreliable, which most people would prefer to not do. Plus, there there is a whole slew of infamous Rowling tweets from the mid-late 2010s where she gives baffling explanations that 'resolve' worldbuilding snags, which makes it harder to dismiss the book depictions as a teenager's inaccurate understanding.
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Comedies end in marriages because a marriage is a synthesis between two opposing forces. Harry marrying his friend's younger sister might be realistic but it's not plot-dramatic. It's ok, Harry Potter didn't go with a synthesis between the villian-side and the hero to create catharsis. The catharsis ultimately happened by a synthesis of the younger generation with the older. But a synthesis between the two opposing sides is more cathartic in general, so the Malfoid thing is understandable to me.
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Ooh that’s interesting. Would you say there’s anything noticeably different about the content of the works of the suspected imposters? Do they write for an explicitly female audience and follow all the expected tropes and story beats, or is there something in their works that makes them seem more gender neutral / more from a male perspective?
When you read enough of them you start to notice clear patterns and differences between how men and women write stories. Broadly speaking: Men tend to subordinate emotional states to the plot; women tend to subordinate the plot to emotional states. Male plots have a beginning, middle, and end. Female plots are episodic.
I think it's helpful to think of symbolic logic like a vanishing or focal point point. In artistic imagery, many parts of the image converge on one point over the horizon, the vanishing point. This focal point might be occupied by an object or view being emphasized. A vanishing point might also be empty space. But, fundamentally, there is a "center" that allows us to understand the center, the periphery, convergences and divergences. Literature works the same way. In literature, the meaning of a work converges on some idea or ideas. The symbolic logic of a story might even point toward some conclusion that is unstated in the text itself.
Look at Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam". Everything converges on one point, the image of God reaching his outstretched hand to Adam's slackened hand. We could write forever about every possible interpretation of every element in the composition: God is clothed and Adam is naked; Adam and God are both reclining in the same direction, down to Adam toes mirroring God's; God's celestial chariot is in the shape of the human brain; etc. etc. etc. But obviously the center is about the connection between God and Adam, the hand outstretched and the hand slack, everything is oriented toward one point. If you want to "understand" The Creation of Adam, you have to interpret everything in reference to that one point.
(Well, you don't have to, you can do whatever you want. But my contention is that this is essential to cognition, it's what "meaning" means at all. The Creation of Adam is understandable as more than a collection of random colors and atoms in space, it has a shape, it has a form. These are not just culturally arbitrary constructs, they can be as objective as 2 + 2 = 4. Maybe a future culture won't understand long flowing gray hair to be an obvious sign that this is God. But the symbolic logic is inherent in the painting independent of the culture that observes it.)
Look at Rothko. Rothko's painting tends to be extremely abstract, I won't pretend to draw deeply specific forms out of it. Rothko unlike Michelangelo could be described as "random colors and atoms in space". But they aren't random, at least, that's not how cognition works. There's still a sense that putting everything together draws out a form that has some kind of meaning. I'll use "Multiform No. 9," since it's on Wikipedia and I can quote directly:
You can stand in front of Rothko and feel something, abstract colors and shapes converge on something. Maybe you feel boredom, maybe your interpretation of feeling and sense is vastly different from mine. But the process of how to interpret something are still a one-to-one match for cognition itself. It would be coherent to argue, for instance, that Multiform No. 9 is a portrait, because the lone black shape in the center is starkly different from every other shape, and that this individuation is essentially personhood as such. Whatever else we want to say about Multiform No. 9 can be put aside as flimsy and therefore unimportant here, but this is basically how interpretation works, which is how thinking works.
(A similar idea is that any piece with a sharp horizontal division between upper and lower halves is essentially showing the horizon or the sky. Consider Rothko's "Orange and Yellow". That's the basic shape the sky make when you try to reduce it to a kind of essence, the contrast between the ground and the sky. It's such a strong pattern that anything shaped in two pieces starts to become "the sky," even if there's no literal reason why this should be so, even if you make the colors so unlike the actual sky. Similarly I seem to remember a photo going around after the war in Ukraine broke out that deliberately saturated a field of wheat against the sky until it was yellow and blue like the flag -- because that's what those shapes mean, it's as inherent as Bouba and Kiki.)
Look at Catcher in the Rye. This is even more complicated and it becomes hard to say anything serious about a few hundred pages in just a few sentences. But Catcher in the Rye is a pretty easy case for exposing some of the machinery of how symbolic logic works. The central image of the book, so central that it becomes the title, is the "Catcher in the Rye". Holden Caulfield imagines himself catching children running through a field of rye before they fall off a cliff. It's hard not to interpret this as concerning innocence and protecting the innocence of children. And so it forms part of the evidence for the interpretation that Holden Caulfield might have been sexually abused -- even though there's nothing in the text that explicitly says any of this. It's a kind of vanishing point that converges out of frame.
I have detoured far away, forgive me, but now I can get back to stereotyping men and women.
Male logic tends to converge on one symbolic point. Female logic tends to converge on several different points (which is the same as saying it might not converge at all).
The structure of all romance plots is fundamentally the same: Will they or won't they? Two people meet, they encounter obstacles and fall in love, then they get together.* That's the story. Once they are happily together the story is over, there's nothing left to tell. A lot of romances might add some B plot so there can be a bit more to flesh out (Romeo and Juliet therapy-talk confront their parents ). But fundamentally the story is the shape of the relationship, because it has to be.
Look at The Notebook. Boy meets girl, they fall in love. Then they overcome some obstacles (they break up, they lose touch during the War, girl becomes a woman and is engaged to someone else, they reconnect, she runs away, etc.). But fundamentally the story ends when they have overcome all obstacles to truly consummating their relationship. In fact, the story is really contained within a framing device where they're both old and she has dementia and he is trying to remind her who he is. But symbolically it's the same thing: their love in the past resolves symbolically at the same time their love in the present resolves.
Look at "Red, White, and Royal Blue". This was gay romantasy schlock that got a big-budget Netflix adaptation (Umma Thurman was in it). Essentially, the son of the President of the United States and a prince of England fall in love after being forced into diplomatic work together. Enemies-to-lovers, classic schlock. Naturally it has to be kept secret. They break up, they get back together, they overcome obstacles, etc. etc. Emotionally, the romantic arc ends when they are discovered by the public, they confront the prince's homophobic Queen Mother (grandmother), and they truly, finally, come together. Happily Ever After!
Well, no, the story continues. The movie adaptation leaves off there but the book does not. The book is full of a continuing B-plot concerning the upcoming 2016 Presidential election. The president, the protagonist son's mother, is the first female President, a Democrat, and she runs against this brash political Republican outsider who is not even pretending to not be an expy of Donald Trump. Throughout the book the protagonist works on his mother's re-election campaign and is convinced, against all odds, despite what everyone else tells him, that Texas could finally flip blue. So the end of the novel comes not at the end of the Will-They-Or-Won't-They, it comes at the end of the election when the protagonist's mother wins re-election after Texas flips blue. This codicil has virtually nothing to do with the core romantic plot of the novel, which is ostensibly the whole purpose of the story being told. But I'm sure it's very emotionally satisfying and cathartic to the probable readers of "Red, White, and Royal Blue," who probably near-unanimously want their American politics-themed romance to include an emotional victory for not-Hillary Clinton.
If it wasn't obvious from my characterization, The Notebook was written by a man, and Red, White, and Royal Blue was written by a woman.
I find this pattern to be fairly consistent: Male stories converge on one symbolic point. Female stories converge on multiple symbolic points, which is the same as saying they only converge emotionally.
As a final example, consider The Lord of the Rings. Famously, it is a story full of many twists and turns, stories-within-stories, poetry, odd-ends, etc. etc. The ending of The Lord of the Rings isn't even when the Ring itself is destroyed, as the plot continues for a good while longer up until the Scouring of the Shire: The four hobbits return home and find home overrun with evil, which they then purge. It might be said, isn't this a separate story, isn't this just like the end of Red, White, and Royal Blue? But I would argue that it's not, the arc of The Scouring of the Shite recapitulates the arc of the rest of The Lord of the Rings as a whole: men saving a fallen world. The symbolic logic of The Lord of the Rings, in fact, is consumed with the world more than the characters within it. Because the world is a vehicle for God, the world is vast in service to emphasizing the will of God. It's the story's vanishing point: God is basically never discussed at all, and yet the story doesn't make sense without Him. All the sub-stories and tangents, which otherwise don't have a purpose, in fact reflect exactly what Tolkein wanted to say -- the world is mysterious and vast because there's a higher order in it.
So I'm not just saying that women are more emotional or that their stories have tangents or that girls are yucky and gross and they have cooties. I'm saying that their stories converge as emotional experiences, not as logical stories.
For some other examples of this: Saltburn, Tales of Genji, Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie, Anne Carson's poetry, Willa Cather, Triumph of the Will, To Kill a Mockingbird, Twilight. Even Harry Potter, which is a very well-plotted story with a great deal of symbolic coherence, has that damned epilogue so we all know how to feel after all.
Somebody else could probably adduce examples of very male plots that don't appeal to women at all because they don't cohere emotionally in a way women find satisfying. Master and Commander?
I've written a lot here now (far more than I intended to), but hopefully this answers the question. I find this difference between men and women to be very consistent, even when it's hard to put into words, even when specific examples can be found going both ways. But men and women write very different stories, I think it's been very easy for me to train this sense by reading romance novels. And when you have a strong-enough sense of it you can look at airport romance novels written under pseudonymous pennames and you can say, if it walks like a man, and quacks like a man...
*(The small percentage of romance stories that don't end happily are usually born of the author's need to feel that they are writing something "serious," that romance is somehow beneath them.)
This was amusingly illustrated by a pasta that’s decades old now. It even features alpha widowhood and political cuckholdry from quokka’d do-gooders:
Below is the result of a writing assignment given by an English professor from the University of Colorado. A “tandem story” was to be written by two students, one male, one female.
The story was to be compiled in alternating paragraphs via email, with CC’s to the professor. There was to be no communication between the writers aside from each successive email. The story would end when both participants agreed a successful conclusion had been achieved.
Rebecca (PINK) Gerry (BLUE).
THE STORY:
(first paragraph by Rebecca) At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The chamomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked chamomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So chamomile was out of the question.
(second paragraph by Gerry) Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic, tea-drenched bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to GeoStation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.
(Rebecca) He died almost immediately. But not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who ever had feelings for him. Soon afterward, Earth stopped pointless hostilities toward the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel," Laurie read online one morning. The news simultaneously excited and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth, when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no cell phones, no Internet to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at the beauty around her. "Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully.
(Gerry) Little did she know she had less than 10 seconds to live. The wimpy peaceniks who’d pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left Earth a defenseless target for hostile empires determined to destroy the human race. Just hours after the passage of the treaty, alien ships were on course for Earth with enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. Their lithium fusion missiles entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, was rocked by the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized poor, stupid Laurie.
(Rebecca) This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent geek.
(Gerry) Yeah? Well, my writing partner is a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium. "Oh, shall I have chamomile tea? Or shall I have some other FUKING TEA??? Oh no, what am I to do? I'm an air headed bimbo who reads too many romance novels!"
(Rebecca) Asshole.
(Gerry) Bitch!
(Rebecca) FUCK YOU - YOU NEANDERTHAL!!
(Gerry) In your dreams, ‘Ho. Go drink some more fucking tea.
(Rebecca) I hate you. Don’t ever talk to me again.
(TEACHER) A+ I really liked this one."
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The real world 100% has rules that hang together. You just don't run into them as much. And nobody is demanding Harry Potter rules for interpersonal relartionships, where the rules don't hang together. They want rules for the magical equivalent of "if the store is 100 feet away, why are you taking an airplane there?"
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I like your Harry Potter takes much more than I like your Iran takes.
I generally agree with you about the nature of the Potterverse, but one of the reasons people get wrapped up in the illogic, and the "shipping," is that the books made an awkward transition from "children's series where we can accept that magic is whimsical and fairy-tale like and doesn't need to make sense" to "YA series where people are starting to have adult relationships, the story is increasingly metaphorical, and the world is starting to look silly." Thirteen-year-old Hermione being given a Time-Turner so she can take more classes is funny. The Time-Turner is a MacGuffin. Seventeen-year-old Harry fighting wizard Nazis and being threatened with torture and death makes you wonder why he (or Hermione) isn't thinking about Time-Turners.
Rowling is a good author. The sense of wonder, the aliveness of the wizarding world, the investment in characters, is why HP became huge despite neither her world nor her prose being better than many other authors writing in the same playground. But she's very much an author for whom "numbers aren't real" and "worldbuilding isn't a thing," and that means when the audience gets older and starts thinking about the inconsistencies, well, they realize that the Wizarding World only works if you don't think about it too much.
Getting back to Malfoid, I agree that this is gooner slop, even if the visual presentation is chaste. Harry marrying a nice girl next door isn't good enough; gooners don't want a quiet girl next door, they want a hot blonde badass who's pretty and feisty and kind of bitchy but will become submissive and demure (but still sexy) for you... only for you. It's the flip side of the woman who fantasizes about the rough bad boy alpha who reveals his tender squishy heart only for you.
I am kind of surprised to see you praise romantasy, as hereabouts it's often criticized for being basically literary porn for women. Now, I am a literary snob (no, not really, I like Dungeon Crawler Carl and Harry Potter), but I'm also a literary gourmand. I'll try anything. I've tried romantasy. Have yet to find one that didn't bore me or strike me as execrably bad writing. I tried to read Twilight back in the day. I didn't hate it, it didn't give me girl cooties, it just... bored me. You say the bad writing is the point, and maybe that's true (romance has always been a very formulaic, mass-produced product), but I don't know why I'd want to suffer bad writing and boredom if I am not the target audience getting dopamine hits from an enemies-to-lovers alpha story written like a fourteen-year-old's first fanfic.
Basically everybody enjoys fantasies, it's a matter of taste which are yours. You read enemies-to-lovers because the fantasy is that there's a love so powerful out there waiting for you that you could be actively fighting it and you'll still get the girl. You read Twilight because you want to be whisked away by the rich billionaire vampire who's dark and troubled but you can save him, etc. Really the archetypes are all the same, over and over again, there aren't that many unique fantasies. Maybe you're personally romantically satisfied or just not interested in romance plots, but no matter, there are lots of kinds of fantasies. I would loosely, for example, call The Martian a kind of fantasy: your life that has been overlooked becomes important when you are thrust into a dangerous and dramatic situation, which your competence is capable of solving. It's a hero fantasy. There are hero fantasies, love fantasies, persecution fantasies, etc. etc. I advocate the romantasy because they make it really easy to see the machinery at work, and there are so many of them you can probably find something to your taste.
Call me crazy but I think it's the same idea: fantasy is inherent to narrative, narrative is inherent to cognition, and that's how we understand history. News and current events are just stories, and we understand stories in heroic terms. Everything is hero-worship, fantasy is cognition.
I am not sniffing at romances (or romantasies) because I don't understand the allure. I understand the allure. Of course everyone has fantasies, whether they are romantic, power fantasies, competency-porn, or whatever. What I mean is that every romantasy I've ever looked at is just so badly-written, and has so little plot beyond "Which bad boy alpha fighting over me shall I choose?" (I mean, I guess in some of them the chick is also a bad-ass fairy assassin or something, but that just makes it more badly written) that I cannot enjoy them. I feel the same about romance in general, though I've read a couple that were enjoyable enough, despite being very formulaic. Do you recommend any romantasy that would actually stand on its own, with good plot and prose in its own right, beyond serving up female wish fulfillment?
Without getting too serious (and off-topic), I don't quite understand your point here, because you seem to be saying that your Iran takes are fantasy and hero-worship, which I am pretty sure is not what you meant. I mean, I get that you literally worship Trump as a hero, but are you saying that framing all events as a fantastical narrative of good and evil is how you think we should understand the world? Rather than messy conflicting narratives where facts exist but are hard to discern or agree upon?
So I understand what you mean when you say I "worship" Trump, so I can talk in these terms, but I want to be clear that my appreciation of Trump is quite rational, bound up in specific material reasons, and that the only person I worship is Jesus Christ.
That out of the way:
What I'm saying is closer to, "we already understand events as fantastical narratives of good and evil". That is, essentially, how cognition works, our sense of good and evil is bound up in every judgment we make, all the time, everywhere. And you can say, ok, but life is messy and facts are hard and everyone is shades of gray. (Which is more or less what I think too.) But you still have a sense of good and evil, you still have the ideas as such. Nobody is ever really a nihilist. (Nihilism is essentially a death-wish, it is a failure of life, of life-spirit. Life, abundant vital life, wants to expand.) And especially in memory the nuances wash out and everything shades toward black and white. Because that's how cognition works.
What I am asserting when I assert that Trump is winning in Iran is not just the object-level claim that Trump is winning in Iran. (Which I also think is true.) I am staking my position that this is how everyone will eventually understand it. Modulo all the shades of gray or whatever caveats you want to add. I don't think I'm saying anything all that complicated. I could reach into more complicated explanations here, but thankfully Trump has already given us an analogue in Venezuela. After the Maduro raid there were a lot of people skeptical that it would work, that it had worked, and given that events are still in progress it could go any number of ways. But also anybody who bought stock in "Trump is right" is way up nine months later.
When I say, "Trump is Naruto," what I mean is, this is essentially how history is going to remember Trump. Everything gets simplified and reified in historical memory and "time makes more converts than reason". It would have sounded equally crazy to anyone in 1864 if you had said similar things about Lincoln. Lincoln was extremely controversial in his day and a lot of people thought he was an idiot. But if you sat in 1864 and believed that the war was going well and was going to be won, it's really easy then to understand that Lincoln would become a hero. Even before his assassination and the myth-making that engendered.
And we don't know yet how Trump's story is going to end. I think that's the most consequential thing of all, because the ending of a story tells you what it means. So nobody actually knows what any of this means really. But, at the same time, when history looks back on 2026, they aren't going to say, "Trump bombed Iran but his CIA report said not to except I don't believe in the CIA report but it still maybe cost him the midterms but we don't know the counter-factual because incumbents always lose their midterms." They're going to say: Donald Trump; Vladimir Putin; Xi Jinping; Elon Musk; Superintelligence; Starship; Golden Dome. They'll say, Trump started preparing the American economy for war, which is something I see evidence of every time I open the papers but I don't see anybody thinking of in those terms. They'll say, 2026 is when Artificial Intelligence became Superintelligence, and they'll understand that the entire world was changing and it happened under Donald Trump. I am of course betting that AI is going to change the world and everything in it. I'm also betting that people will eventually understand how badly Iran was beaten, because that's what I think happened.
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And here I was, having only vaguely heard about this "Malfoid" thing, and assuming it's because Draco Malfoy as bully (as opposed to Draco Malfoy as in-over-his-head Death Eater) almost entirely acts like a queen bitch abusing social connections rather than engaging in more "manly" bullying himself (there was the Remembrall back in book one, and... I can't actually think of much else?).
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Do Pern and/or Mercedes Lackey count as "Romantasy"? Presumably at least the latter's 500 Kingdoms series would.
You could probably call it that nowadays, in the same way that a lot of stuff that wasn't originally "YA" is now called that. I've read very little Mercedes Lackey, but my recollection of the Pern books is that the romance subplots were mostly pretty light, not the primary running theme.
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Damn what a good summary of Harry Potter and some of the things I love about it and it's message.
What Romantasy would you recommend checking out? Might be a good way to get some of my foreign language hours up?
To be clear, I'm using the term "romantasy" even though my personal tastes are for romance with zero fantasy. I much prefer romances with basically zero fictional elements. The logic of the story all hinges on people talking to each other and resolving emotional conflicts. This to me is the whole point of the genre. (Although, again, the logic of the romance is inherently fantastic, it's all a fantasy, and the fictional fantasy plots about werewolf zombie witches all ultimately reinforce the logic of the core emotional fantasy. What you like is a matter of taste.)
I'm not sure there are really any stellar recommendations here. Half of the appeal of the genre is that there is so much slop that you can read whatever tickles your fancy, and I think you can knock most of these books out in a few hours even if they seem much longer. Emily Henry? Kate Spencer? Casey McQuinston? B.K. Borison? Treat it the way you'd treat going to the zoo or the theater, and if you hate the zoo you'd probably go at least once a decade just to see what it's up to, right?
The high-quality romances are all either quite old (Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice) or romcoms. When Harry Met Sally, Crazy Rich Asians, Four Weddings and a Funeral, etc. The key in all cases is the same, which is understanding that the romance is an emotional fantasy. I.e., in When Harry Met Sally, the titular characters actually meet three times at different phases of their life before they even maintain a relationship as friends. What does that matter? Well, in your life you meet so many people, sometimes for a brief moment, maybe you make a bad impression, maybe it's the wrong time. Ah, but true love, if someone is your true love life and the universe will conspire to put you together, you can't screw it up. You're destined to fall in love. Which is essentially the fantasy at the core of all romance novels: each subgenre and type is just an elaboration on a particular kind of obstacle that commonly frustrates your romantic endeavors.
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