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Notes -
Romance
I recently watched the newest Marvel movie, Thunderbolts. Personally, I have seen almost all of them in a movie theatre and a few of the TV shows. The company's slate of movies in the last few years has been pretty bad, which can be seen in the (lack of) discourse and the box office. As some tweet put it, Marvel movies went from ubiquitous and massively talked about to ubiquitous and ignored.
However, I want to talk about the absence of romance, specifically in Thunderbolts but also in the larger MCU.
Thunderbolts is basically a supposedly anti-hero (but really villains, I won't go into the villain-to-antihero pipeline that is currently happening eg Harley Quinn) team in the vein of Avengers, but unconcerned with letting their targets/enemies live. All but one of the characters has been previously introduced in another movie or TV show.
Thunderbolts follows Yelena (White Widow, from the movie Black Widow) as she is dissatisfied with her clandestine spy work for Valentina (an evil mastermind of sorts who heads the CIA and funny enough looks similar to Tulsi Gabbard) who takes one last job to clear her name and start a new life. Before this mission, she seeks some advice from her loser father, Red Guardian (Soviet Captain America), who despite formerly being Soviet star is now just a boomer washout reminiscing his good old days, living in filth, ordering DoorDash and driving limousine as his job. This meeting is unsatisfactory, so she decided to take the job. That would've been a good setup for a Hallmark-style unfulfilling work focus to romance, but no.
There, she meets the rest of the villains, proceed to fight (Valentina wants to get rid of them since they're no-longer-useful loose ends) and sort of team up when they figure out the plan. John Walker (2nd Captain America, government issued, controlled and discarded from Falcon and Winter Soldier), Ghost ( another female villain, basically a life long lab rat from Ant-Man 2) and the mysterious, seemingly normal Bob.
This Bob guy is a depressive successful experiment of Valentina unbeknownst to the main cast until the 3rd act. We get hints of this when the cast interacts with him throughout the movie and they have visions of their worst moments. Yelena remembers her brutal and traumatic training as a child in the Soviet Black Widow programme but John remembers... his divorce. Specifically, the scene is him doomscrolling on his phone in one hand with his baby in the other while his wife shouts at him asking him if he's watching the baby. Almost all the characters disrespect him ("dime store Cap", "Junior Varsity Captain America"). This guy was a 3 medal soldier, media darling, selected as the new Captain America by the US government and got cancelled afterkilling a Flag Smasher member in broad daylight in a city centre with his shield. Mind you, this happened after the leader of the Flag Smashers killed his sidekick like a minute before.
I hoped during the movie that John and Yelena would end up together. They both are sort of former villains trying to change, unhappy with how they are perceived compared what they feel they could/should be. The fallen hero and the ascending villain. Both seeking redemption. But no, that didn't happen. And John having an ex-wife and a child isn't the reason, since Ant-Man is in a similar place in his first movie and still has a romantic relationship with the Wasp. Everytime there could be some flirting between the two, Yelena or some other character either makes fun of him disrespects him in some other way, and he kind of lacks any response or has some really cringe ones. Think "You're a real bad boy, John" said in a flirty manner by Yelena, to which John would respond with "A-Actually I'm a man". Although not an actual line in the movie, it wouldn't seem out of place. Every line or quip he is facing against, he comes off as obtuse and mismatched. Imagine a 27 year old model talking to a college freshman, who also gets clowned and dismissed by almost everyone.
Yelena does have some mommy-dom scenes with Bob (whose alter ego Void, is the villain of the movie), but no romance there either. Bob is depressive and lonely, and John gives him a hard time for a bit, but even there he seems outclassed. When he tells Bob he's Captain America, he laughs and when pressed about his reaction, he says "Cause you're an asshole". Yelena is sort of protective of Bob, in a big sister way, which towards the end I thought might turn romantic (you know, the Femme Fatale and soft guy type of relationship, that is, I guess, not unheard of in fiction) but no. She looks after him and is instrumental in helping him take back control over his body from the Void, but it's more like a found family type of thing.
It's feels weird, not just because it breaks the previous established formula of the hero gets the girl, but these characters are pretty much at their physical peak with extraordinary skills. In the real world, when top athletes are put together during the Olympics, well you can guess what happens.
The characters form a team at the end of the movie, but I don't think romance is going to be explored based off the recent trend.
In Shang-Chi, the namesake character has a girl best friend with whom he gets drunk and has friend activities (working low end jobs, getting drunk, karaoke). At the end, after he saves the world together with his best friend, his grandma hints at a possible relationship/marriage between the 2 which is shut down immediately by both of them.
Falcon and the Winter Soldier also lacks romance, with the discourse around that time being the shipping of the two (male) protagonists, which got shut down fast by Anthony Mackie (Falcon). Speaking of him, I don't think he had any romantic relationships in the few projects he appeared; most recently he starred in Captain America: Brave New World, where he fights the Thunderbolt Ross (as the Red Hulk. See, Ross is the Hulk's antagonist in the Hulk movie. He also hates Bruce Banner (the, um, Hulk) as he doesn't approve of him dating his daughter, Betty. Again, the relationship isn't really explored past the first installment, and the Black Widow sort of takes the role of "woman who calms the Hulk down" from Betty Ross but I don't think they ever really dated or kissed on-screen. There were certainly some more emotional scenes between them, but if I remember correctly, any actual dating, if it happened, is just referred to in dialogue. But Betty comes back to talk to her (previously estranged) father. Anthony Mackie's character has no romantic subplot, nor does it seem he is interested in any.
Usually, these big action blockbusters have a romantic subplot so the wives/girlfriends have something to care about during all the fights and explosions happening all around. Even their big hit in the last few years, Deadpool and Wolverine, lacked any romantic subplot. Ant-Man and Wasp marry, but there is barely any romance. Even their most successful relationship, Ironman and Pepper Potts, is an afterthought. To say nothing of how the Thor franchise handled the main relationship. Diminishing screen time and maybe throwaway lines during the big team-ups.
Keep in mind that in the comics characters, especially protagonists, have a bunch of love interests that they jump between. Here is how Spider-Man was portrayed (accurately) in Marvel Ultimate Alliance at 10:38 (spoilers for a 20 year old game)The team gets sent to Mephisto's Realm (Hell) and Spider-Man quips "Why can't we be sent to an alternate dimension filled with lonely supermodels?" which is entirely on-par with what a young guy would wish.
The current Spider-Man has a relationship with MJ which is basically best friends who occasionally kiss. Here is a list of Spider-Man's love interests (spoilers for the comics).
I know there are counterexamples both in and out of the superhero genre. But given how prominent the genre is to movies, especially action/adventure movies, this to me seems way more than just an accidental occurrence.
I guess my questions are if you think that the romantic interest is the new "parents problem" that young protagonists have (which is why they are disproportionately orphans or estranged or never mentioned) and if so, is this a recent development due to less interest by younger generations in romance/dating/sex?
It's worth understanding that werewolf romance isn't about the werewolf-- it's about the girl. The werewolf is just backdrop for a fantasy about becoming materially wealthy and high-status through the interest of a suitor despite the attempts of rivals to interfere. It's the story older women have told younger women for the past hundred thousand years, with only modest embellishments for cultural fit. The distaff counterpart is the story of a young man getting mentored into performing a visible and socially valuable task and being rewarded with wealth and high status as a result.
As pertains to movies, and specifically thunderbolts, tentpole blockbusters typically attempt to have a variety of characters such that everyone in the audience has someone to identify with and follow the movie for. And in eras where characters (and audiences) fit into more traditional gender roles, having a romance was a space-efficient way to simultaneously satisfy the fantasy of the viewers who identified with the male and female characters. But in a movie like thunderbolts, the wealth and status fantasies of women are already intrinsically satisfied by the progression of the plot, and the wealth and status fantasies of men are satisfied by bucky barnes, buff asskicking congressman. A romance wouldn't necessarily detract from that, but the movie would need additional runtime to set one up, and a snappy action movie is very limited by runtime. That extends to a lot of marvel movies-- given that the plot of the movie itself already satisfied most status, wealth, and power fantasies, additionally having a romantic fantasy ends up just not being particularly necessary.
My point is that it doesn't need much additional runtime, just the dialogue in the existing scenes between the two being changed and I guess one short scene of them kissing or whatever.
I always thought the monster was about how dangerous a man can seem/be to women, and how in a marriage he mellows out due to getting to know him better in a romantic context.
My girlfriend read a lot of werewolf romance when she was younger and in describing it I'm always struck by how she focuses on the fact that the main girl is always chosen by destiny, or outcast for being a runt and later discovered to be extra special, or fated to be the alpha's mate, or whatever. She spends virtually no time describing the werewolf himself. Probably she likes werewolves-qua-werewolves too, but the literary genre serves as more of a promise about what kind of main character you're getting and what story they go through than as a promise to feature long descriptions of buff, hairy men. (Even if they also include those.)
As pertains to marvel movies, marvel movies make a specific promise about what kind of plucky heroes will be on-screen for the audience to identify with. If those heroes then get into romances the audience doesn't care about they actually become less identifiable. So unless a romance is well justified by the characters and plot, it's more of a risk to include them then to not include them.
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There wasn't much romance in the new Top Gun movie either, Cruise spent much of the non-jet parts being dressed down by former lovers which I found a bit irritating and unnecessary. Quite different to the old one.
In either of the Mission Impossible 'Dead Reckoning' movies there wasn't much romance.
Not sure how you can have romance in the modern era where there seems to be so much emphasis on men being denigrated. Traditional James Bond style romance is too rapey, Roger Moore's Bond is right out. Even soft wooing can still give the ick to some extent. The male can't pursue the female without being humiliated it seems,. And if the female is pursuing the man it seems like male wish fulfillment fantasy, the Japanese trope where a very passive guy ends up with a harem of 10/10s because he's 'nice'.
So how do you have a romance then if neither party can pursue? Ironically, lots of women want Roger Moore x10, they want a billionaire werewolf lumberjack cowboy with a massive cock. The 50 shades of grey movie made 570 million on a budget of 40 million, it's a clear success. As in my previous post, many many women want the alpha male version of Malfoy: https://www.themotte.org/post/877/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/187490?context=8#context
But directors and high society/PMC feminists absolutely refuses to permit the alpha male version of Malfoy, Rowling wrote him to be a wimp and a loser. I saw a funny thread on /gif/ the other day where the premise was 'feminists/liberals fucked hard' and so naturally all these commenters joined in a pointless political debate on 4chan's third most degen pornography board: 'you guys are incels posting this garbage', 'its so cringe, trump supporters don't have sex' and nobody realized that the clips were all from the reddit forum, fuckingfascists. It was leftwing and liberal women who were into this stuff, getting fucked by trump supporters, getting turned into tradwives. Femgooners were to blame. You can tell this instantly because none of it or the stuff from fuckingfascists was anime. Clearly it wasn't authentic right-wing content. There's a huge gap between the roles and expectations that society tries to project and what's actually happening, at least in terms of masturbation fantasies.
I'd like a movie where some gigachad Sean Connery secret agent from the 1950s comes forward in time and has to deal with modern norms and lame gadgets, shows all the paper-pushers and pencilnecks what real racism and sexism looks like. The femgooners can have their dangerous alpha male. I can have an antiwoke, fun, action movie. Everybody wins except the directorial class who've been pumping out all these terrible marvel movies.
Something really amusing regarding Malfoy given your mention of 50 Shades, which was Twilight fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off (meaning the author changed the names to be allowed to publish it as original fiction). There's a Draco/Hermione story that is also being published.
The upshot here is that female romance fandom commonly takes franchise characters and smushes them together in transformative works. This is VERY true of Avengers fandom, but a lot of it is slash, because Marvel/Disney are never going to let Cap and Bucky bang onscreen.
Personally, I'm not particularly interested in romance in superhero movies. It feels shoehorned-in.
See also The Mortal Instruments, which was adapted from the author's earlier Draco Trilogy.
In a sane world, writers could just publish their fanfic commercially and send a royalty check to the copyright holder. But we do not live in a sane world.
Cassandra Cla(i)re was well-known in the fandom space. https://fanlore.org/wiki/Cassandra_Claire
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I missed my chance to finish reading Manacled then, probably a good thing. The work is basically an infohazard as discussed downthread in my link, totally alien to the male sensibility. And it holds such power over them too, such incredible desire. Who the hell translated it into WELSH?
Needs industrial-grade shaming. Whatever invective and scorn was poured on the 'I got sent to another world and have sexy adventures with Biccus Tittus and her sisters: now with more hot dark elves' genre should be returned against these people. Hermione is not supposed to be a useless, passive, shrinking violet failing to kill herself. And she's certainly not supposed to be with Draco in a Handmaid's Tale scenario where there's barely any sex, just suffering.
I read it due to the buzz and I have deep regrets.
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If you ever change your mind, you can still find it in the archives.
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It isn't a perfect fulfillment of the fantasy, but the Sylvester Stallone series Tulsa King has him playing a traditional Italian mafia underboss who gets out of prison after a 25 year stint, and ends up in Oklahoma, and has to adapt his older-generation mobster style, macho braggadocio and all, to modern times and a smaller town.
The general theme is that his brand of realistic common sense, his willingness to use violence, and his tendency to take what he wants is actually extremely useful for achieving success compared to the beta males that modernity has wrought, and this likewise gives him success with ladies.
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Demolition Man, but different timeframes.
Demolition Man is the most reactionary movie ever made.
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Problem? What problem? From my perspective, the shift in screenwriting priorities is actually nice. There are so many varieties of non-romantic relationships that go underexplored on screen because the writers have to make space for an obligatory romance arc. Maybe the pendulum has swung too far of late, but human desires being what they are, I'm sure it'll swing back.
Also, counterexample: Have you seen the GTA 6 trailer from a few weeks ago? My first thought was: after hundreds of thousands of words spilled about the fertility crisis, dating troubles, incels, etc, the thing that is actually going to move the cultural needle is a video game franchise modelling a healthy adult relationship between its protagonists.
I just now realized I should've included this in the OP, but I was blindsided since it's actually one of the few above-avereage Marvel movies, but in Civil War, the conflict between the 2 sides is over Bucky, Cap's long lost friend, who being brainwashed, killed Tony's (Ironman) parents. The previous movies establish a friend/rival relationship between Ironman and Cap, who are the defacto leaders of the Avengers. There's a line in the trailer where Cap says "Tony, he's my friend" and Ironman responds "So was I" which still gives me goosebumps.
While there still is a ideological undercurrent in the movie (should heroes work unrestrained or should they be state agents and everything that comes with either choice), in the comics that's the main thing.
I guess the jarring thing is that this sort of "drawing battlelines and breaking up the organization/friend group" is usually reserved for romantic conflicts in a love triangle or just 2 guys vying for one woman (think Troy).
I guess this is more common in Japanese media, Naruto has an unhealthy obsession with bringing Sasuke (even weirder friends/rivals relationship) off the wrong/evil path.
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I dont watch much superhero stuff anymore but I am fairly certain this is not happening either. We aren't getting Frodo and Sam 2.0. Instead the often poorly written romances are just replaced with nothing.
Maybe. I also stay away from the Marvel stuff, but from the description, it least sounds like it's not nothing.
that's something!
also something
But I haven't seen the movies, so maybe you're right and it's a wasted opportunity.
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You have my condolences.
I only saw photos of the cast and I was going "Who the hell are these people, I recognise nobody except Sebastian Stan who must be playing Bucky/Winter Soldier" and while they seem to have a Captain America in the movie, I think that is a wasted chance to have Bucky and Fake Cap arguing it out over "who is Captain America, what does he mean to the public?" - I'm presuming this is more along the line of "wacky gang of misfits get together and pull through for the greater cause", is it?
Yes, that's basically what happens, with some underlying "these people are/can be actually heroic if not for their traumas/life circumstances.
The argument over Cap's shield happens in Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
And "Fake Cap" is kind of weird, since John is arguably much more suited to be Captain America than even Steve Rogers. If you'd have to choose a priori, would you pick the scrawny nobody or the multiple times decorated soldier with proven experience and skills?
The only reason Steve got picked by the guy who developed the highly experimental and unproven Super Soldier Serum is because he showed the willingness to sacrifice himself when he threw himself over a grenade during bootcamp.
You might say that you'd test it on a guy like Steve and then roll it out to all of the John Walkers out there. The only reason that doesn't happen is because the facility gets sabotaged and they lose the formula.
I haven't been following the comics but my impression was that Walker was kind of a proto-Homelander (starting out as Super-Patriot, a villain or at least anti-hero). So Bucky/Winter Soldier, who was there at the start with Original Cap, surely has a lot of opinions about pretenders to the title:
I do like how the general aura of Cap means that even the grittier reboot version gradually becomes more heroic to fit the ideal 😀
But yeah, that would have been too deep for this kind of movie.
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And also in general because he expressed that he wants to fight the Nazis to protect his people, not to kill the Nazis. It is highlighted that the serum corrupted Red Skull because Red Skull had the wrong morality. Many John Walkers would also fail. To be fair I haven't watched Thunderbolts, so maybe John was just as pure-hearted as Steve.
Cap is the Marvel version of Superman. The idealism is the point. Whether it's starting out as 40s literal "punch a Nazi" or 60s "Vietnam is not what we're about" or 00s Civil War "this is authoritarianism", or whatever they're currently doing with the character, the ideal of Captain America is what is best about America, its foundational myths, its aspirations, the shining city on the hill. The land of opportunity. The nation of immigrants, where you can leave the shackles of the Old World behind and have a fresh start, work hard, succeed on your merits, with nobody holding you down because of out-worn social classes like nobility and peasantry or because your lot in life is predetermined.
If you make the character dark'n'gritty Punisher type, you fundamentally misunderstand what it's about and you wreck it, so you either create a new different character to be the new dark'n'gritty pragmatist, or (as the development seems to have been with the John Walker character) retcon the retcon so it fits the ideals better (maybe our current ideals are feminist anti-racist pro-woke Cap, but the character is still a representation of idealism and not 'shoot 'em all, let God sort 'em out' pragmatism and cynicism).
Ugh, I've always hated the writers for this shit. This is the kind of mindwash you get when you let a particular group of people drive your modern myths for decades. America Chavez and Ms. Marvel are just the latest most hamfisted reincarnations of this.
Eh, Steve Rogers is the son of Irish-Americans (not noted if they're Protestant or Catholic) so he's the exact type the Know Nothings were objecting to (even though he's literally white, blond and blue-eyed):
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I was going to call you out for glossing over the Guardians of the Galaxy series, where Starlord and Gamora have a truly interesting romantic dynamic across the first couple movies, which is SO emphasized that it is the entire reason the heroes 'lose' the Infinity War.
But then I remembered they turned it into a joke for the third film.
So this might just prove the point.
Although James Gunn's NEXT film, this time with a more well known hero looks like it will lean heavily on the Lois Lane romance.
I wanted to mention it as an example for the femme fatale / bumbling idiot pairing example, but I felt it would have taken too long to explain properly, although clearly you demonstrated the opposite.
Starlord is also portrayed as the bumbling idiot of the group, like he gets replaced by Thor as the leader when he just... shows up.
Regarding "losing" the Infinity War,I don't know if that's the case, since Strange foresaw just 1 winning scenario which might as well have necessitated Starlord inadvertently freeing Thanos.
Yeah, hence the scare quotes.
That scene gets maligned for a few reasons. I don't think Quill acting out of character is a good critique, though. This is the same guy, who, in the second film, impulsively started blasting his own father into smithereens because he found out that dad was the cause of his beloved mother's death.
Forgetting the stakes and wailing on Thanos over his lost lover is fully in character.
I think the reason the scene is so maligned, is because it seems contrived to have the heroes lose from a basically unloseable situation, just so they could have thr sequel.
Like,whatever happened to Gamora can be found out or resolved by literally waiting for another <minute since finishing the task gives you literal control over reality. Sure, you can't bring people back sacrificed for the soul stone, but the characters don't know that yet.
Oh yeah.
They had to contrive a VERY particular situation where the heroes are on the cusp of winning and somehow, without some crazy deus ex machina, lose and Thanos achieves his objective.
Hell, they showed that Dr. Strange's portals can be used to sever people's arms earlier in the same film, that should have been the thing they tried first.
So they used Quill as a device for Thanos breaking the hypnosis and reclaiming the gauntlet. While it was in-character for Quill, it required a lot of contrivance to get it to happen.
HOWEVER, I do like that one common theme in the film is that the heroes lose b/c they don't have the "will" to make the hard sacrifices, whereas Thanos puts it all on the line to achieve his goal, and so he does.
There are MULTIPLE scenarios where the heroes could have won if they weren't committed to avoiding any real sacrifice.
Big one: they tried to save Vision's life when removing the stone instead of killing him so they could destroy it faster. Vision himself was okay with dying!
Or earlier, Loki gives up the space stone rather than letting Thanos kill Thor.
The heroes, despite the stakes, couldn't bear to accept losses.
Tbh Dr. Strange's powers are a walking deus ex machina, they could have sent thanos to the mirror dimension or to that no time hell hole if they wanted too. Hell, they showed us Dr. Strange could use time travel to be in the same place multiple times, him being a level 99+ wizard of wizarding he could have had like a 100 of him right there and nuked Thanos out of existence with magic bullshit too.
I can't tell if this is supposed to be ironic since he pretty much did all that.
Not the fake clone dudes, I meant literally using the time stone to have actual multiples of himself there
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Yeah, not to mention the Hulk being afraid to um... Hulk out.
Probably because the action scenes / choreography would've been much harder to do with Hulk rampaging around.
Plus, Thanos had the space stone, so he could've just spammed teleport, grab Strange and go to wherever. While Strange also has teleport, his is much more time intensive, so Thanos had the edge.
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Thanos is physically very tough, I can understand not trying the portal cut if Strange was reasonably sure it would just tickle him.
I read Loki giving up the cube as a trick to momentarily distract Thanos while Hulk jumps him. The Vision thing is absolutely stupid, though, yes.
Oh also when Gamora was begging Quill to kill her earlier in the film, and he hesitated too long, even though Thanos complimented him on having the guts to do it.
That also might play into his reaction against Thanos later.
I appreciate that the film made it clear that Thanos 'deserved' his win since he would actually go as far as needed whilst the heroes kept dropping the ball for (comparatively) petty reasons.
That's probably why some fans ironically(?) valorize the guy.
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I doubt anyone at that point was even thinking about using the stones themselves. Quill could barely survive holding the Power Stone by sharing it with all his friends.
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I actually just wrote a post yesterday touching on some similar points.
One of my theories is that modern relationships and friendships have been so hollowed out that writers just don’t have material from their own lives to work with when it comes to deep romances. It’s something you have to actually live in order to recreate in your characters.
Sadly modern connection has been extremely flattened for a variety of reasons, and it reflects in our art.
Hollywood writers come from hyper-liberal blue tribe backgrounds, yes? I don’t know what courtship norms look like in those bubbles, not really, but if they’re assuming apps and hookups turn into a relationship, there’s some obvious reasons that’s less on the screens- both that it’s harder to introduce and possible ratings issues.
Most of publishing is different sub genres of bdsm werewolf erotica, so I don’t think ‘entertainment industry thinks relationships are a dead end’ is the explanation.
As I said in another comment, it's not that they are dead ends. It is that treating romantic partners as disposable leads to a more shallow exploration of emotional depths you can reach via deep connection in relationships.
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And yet Korea, the place with possibly the worst gender relations on earth, accompanied by the lowest TFR by a mile somehow manages to be the world leading producer of romance dramas.
I don't think your theory holds up and this has more to do with what people producing movies and TV shows think people want and whats "in" in their social circles.
There is a massive market for romance out there and a shitton is being produced in America, just not necessarily in film. Romance is the biggest written fiction category by far and accounts for some 25-30% of books sold.
I think American dramas have another big problem, which is that it’s almost impossible to portray a romantic relationship, especially one that develops from a friendship, in a realistic way without tripping over a thousand versions of problematic. Korean and Chinese dramas really don’t have the same culture wars around relationships that Americans do, so they’re free to make a real romantic relationship between the leads where modern western stories cannot. If a Korean story were remade by an American company, it would be seen as extremely sexist.
... what? I think that's the most common trope in the last few decades, friends-to-lovers.
Anecdotally, online and offline, it also seems that at least in the Anglosphere (maybe exclusively?) a lot of women express preference for starting as friends, which may then develop into a romantic relationship.
Stated versus revealed, etc. In real life it's extraordinarily rare for a friendship to 'blossom' into a romantic relationship without at least a long period of separation in-between.
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I think you are right, but also I don't think hollywood wants to portray healthy, heterosexual relationships. That thing is basically culture war poison for them. And they would probably love to sneak homosexual and trans things into everything, but you still have to have a product that sells, and that stuff just does not.
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Korean romance dramas aren't exactly realistic romances. If you watch just a few of them you can start to see the formula: Episode 1 introduces high-status guy and average girl who hates everything he stands for, Episode 2 we meet their friends, Episode 3 she befriends his best friend who has a crush on her, Episode 4 high-status guy has physical contact with main character in a plausibly deniable way, ... Episode 10 they kiss, Episode 11 something happens to estrange them, ... Episode 16 they marry and live happily ever after. I'm sure the writers and producers spend enough time watching dramas that they know the tropes, know the formula, and have an instinct for the progression of a good drama.
Also, I'm sure that there is a selection bias. We hear about every Marvel and Disney production even when it sucks because there is a large marketing budget targeted at English speakers; we only hear about the Korean dramas when they are actually good. (Counterexample which demonstrates the rule: Squid Game 2 sucked and had a large marketing budget, and I heard about it "organically" before it came out).
But they're still romances. Entertainment exists as wish fulfillment, not as an accurate reflection of reality, that story sounds excruciating but also like something women would lap up.
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Which sounds exactly like the romance novel formula (at least as it was back when I was reading them as a teenager). So that's probably why they work: guys are likely not going to be watching romance movies/shows, women are, this is the successful formula for women's romance novels.
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So? People like formulaic fiction. My point is that lack of romance in western writers personal lives (if that is true in the first place) most likely matters little, given the abundance of evidence the places even worse than the west are producing popular stuff and the west still produces a shitton of written romance that is as popular as it's ever been.
Romance dramas are more often than not not prestige dramas. They are relatively low budget affairs promoted to their intended demographic. Nowadays that is done by streaming companies by recommendation, not by billboards. Whether we hear about them or not doesn't really matter, they're watched in massive amounts just like romance fiction is quietly the most read literature genre and we almost never hear about that either. The Koreans were able to enter the market for live action romance because it was grossly underserved in the west.
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Yes, but how much of that 25-30% is literal smut ("romantasly"?) or a Sci-Fi with added romance to it?
Does 50 Shades belong in the romance category?
A lot of modern RPGs in the last 15-20 years have an optional romance tacked in, but it cannot be said that Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Baldur's Gate or Skyrim are romance games. Yes, romance videogames are rare and hard to make/market.
I guess the underlying principle to follow would be "Does the protagonist save the world and gets a girlfriend after" or "He saves the world either together with her or for her". It's hard to describe broadly, without giving examples. I guess The Witcher (books) is closer to a romance despite not being labelled as one then most "romantasy" books, even though the relationship is not the forefront, it's easily seen to be vital to both characters.
...Yes?
The romance genre is just the female version of pornography. Much like purpose of porn is to stimulate male reproductive instincts, the purpose of romance movies is to stimulate female reproductive instincts.
The difference is that men and women are attracted to different things, so instead of men watching an endless stream of videos depicting naked girls who moan a lot, women consume an endless stream of stories about billionaire athlete demon pirates kings who declare their undying love for the audience surrogate.
A romance novel is is nine hundred pages of the male love interest demonstrating how aloof and alpha he is, a hundred pages where he breaks down, gets weepy, and shows his soft inner core of twu luving betaness, and one page where he tears the lady’s clothes off with his teeth and the couple finally at long last get some action.
No no no, you're forgetting the very vital sub-plot of the Former Love Interest showing back up! The ex-fiancée, the old flame, the childhood sweetheart - the threat who is hot and sexy and successful and a tigress and everything the main female character is not, and the male love interest either diverts his attention to her and it looks like they'll get back together, or the old flame does all she can to break up male love interest and female love interest.
That leads to the satisfying set-up where male love interest shows up, demonstrates his scorn for old flame because she has shown herself to be untrustworthy/only trying to use him for status and wealth/he was only trying to make female love interest jealous, and reaffirms that he has chosen female love interest over hot successful tigress, and then the ripping off clothes with his teeth scene follows 😁
The sub-sub-plot to that one is the distaff version of new/former love interest showing up for the female love interest. A nice guy (and I don't mean that ironically); someone supportive, different to the male love interest in not being dismissive and curt to her, a guy who is handsome and successful and desirable in his own right (but still not quite the equal of the alpha hot guy), someone who genuinely cares about her. Alas, he is destined to be friendzoned because he just doesn't have that spark, but he is understanding and bows out courteously because he realises that she and alpha guy are destined to be together. This is comforting reading for the consumer of such novels, because it demonstrates that the female love interest (who is the vicarious stand-in for the reader) has options, she's not just doomed to be dumped by the hot guy, she don't need him after all she can always get another guy who truly wants her for who she is.
Writing a romance novel, even a formulaic one, is a lot tougher than you think - way back I was part of an online group that tried doing the traditional tropes in an ironic way and we didn't get very far because writing is indeed hard. I'm given to understand there's a lot more sex in modern romance novels because times indeed change, and waiting for the wedding bells ending isn't enough, so the female and male love interests can get it on a lot earlier and indeed more frequently (while still going through the 'will they, won't they/he loves me, he loves me not' travails until the happy ending).
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My point is that there is a separation between "romance" books that are m/f coded, namely harem/vampire type of stuff, and romance like the sitcom/TV show "will they/won't they" stuff that permeated across genres. Think Ross/Rachel or Mulder/Scully. Those stories are not really about the couple, but it becomes a, if not the, driving force the more you go through it. Which mirrors life, since you wouldn't ditch your plans with your friends at the needs of a 2 week relationship at 20, but if you're 30 and in a long-term relationship for some time, it's a different (expected) response.
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In Korea? Not much. In the West? I think mainstream romance (which may include a little bit of steaminess but generally ends in a conventional HEA between a monogamous couple) still outsells smut/romantasy by a significant amount.
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Hollowed writers is definitely part of it. More broadly, I remember a relatively recent Lindyman post about how people/artists used to have much more interesting and varied lifestyles. Going through their wikipedia seems like their lives just upend at random, back and forth from rags to riches across varied types of work.
Today, people focus on a career pretty early, due to increased access to education, credentialism, safetyism and general structural rigidness of life. Yes, I guess a software dev can just quit, move out of Sillicon Valley to Idaho and be a writer while working some odd jobs, but that's unfeasible unless he saved up a lot or just made millions. But more likely he either got burned out, did FIRE or usually fried himself up with psychadelics.
Even so, there's more romantic relationships now than ever. Maybe it's so common audiences lost interest in seeing them on the big screen. Maybe there is such a discrepancy of expectation from growing up with ideas about romance, that when confronted with the reality personally, people are just not interested. Seeing so many divorces, breakups, cheating or other such behaviors while growing up on "Love conquers all" is cognitively dissonant.
Maybe past works were so interesting because most people didn't marry out of love, but ended up loving their partner nonetheless? So a story of pure genuine desire had a different impact.
Maybe over the last few decades, as fiction became more popular and more media genres portrayed, reached a peak of "people believing romance to be possible and desireable" and "people did find romance" and we're slowly coming off that peak?
I think that's what happened to hookups and hookup culture. Popular sitcoms (and other movies) in the 2000s made it super desirable and popular, out of what experiences, personal or witnessed, writers had from being young in the 1980s and 1990s. As hookup culture gained traction, it reached a peak (probably 1-2 years after Tinder was invented) and now we're here, with the (male) loneliness epidemic.
I'd say that since romance that was previously pretty achievable becomes more "impossible", then we should see more impossible romances and relationships in media. I am thinking of monsters, aliens, robots etc but that would be difficult to disentangle from the lifting of (intimate) taboos.
Isn’t paranormal romance the best selling genre out there? Werewolf porn hitting it big is consonant with your predictions.
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Yes there are "more" romantic relationships in that people date serially. My point is that these relationships aren't as deep in terms of depth of emotion and connection than they were in the past.
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They also don't have direct lived experience of giant green mutants, alien invasions, Infinity Stones, and so on and so forth; and yet they're still able to write stories about these things in a manner that people find appealing.
Those are all much easier to imagine and less complex than deep human relationships.
I... have to nitpick on this. A lot of comics (and especially their movies) leave giant plot holes. I mean the medium is built on 80 or so years of publishing tens of titles yearly across hundreds of writers. Which means inconclusive answers to a lot of questions regarding power scaling and such.
But the movies have a bigger problem, namely since their stories usually involve origin stories for their villains, they kind of just pop up one after another. Which begs the question why after the Avengers, they don't just all show up to fight the 1-2 villains each solo hero fights in his own movie. I mean yeah it's always explained that everyone else is busy, but in the comics that's sort of assumed since there's dozens of villains per hero (plus, there aren't any pesky IP rights or contracts to have them show up whenever).
So um, besides having literally thousands of pages of lore to just pluck up for the romantic subplots or have the writer(s) insert their cleaned-up bad/great relationships/fantasies, everything is just... hollowed out. Like there's foundations there as I described them in the OP, since I guess Hollywood blockbuster script-writing is more of a science than art, but it's just hollow.
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