in which a curmudgeon rants about romance

[glorious_spoon]

I've been thinking lately about romance, and fic, and why I tend to bounce so hard off of a lot of shippy fic even when I at least theoretically enjoy the pairing. And I think it comes down, at least in part, to the broader way we conceive of romance as a culture. My issue with a lot of romantic fanfic (and profic, for that matter) is that it is very concerned about Romantic Gestures but it doesn't make any effort to suss out what those gestures mean to these particular people--as if romance and romantic gestures are an objective set of behaviors and items that should be applied to any relationship regardless of the people involved.

This isn't exactly the main thrust of Jess Zimmerman's excellent essay, Hunger Makes Me, but it's something that she touches on:

I believe that there are people who truly dislike romantic gestures, in the same way that there are people who truly dislike sweets. And it’s certainly true that a lot of what passes for “romance” in our broad cultural definition—the Jumbotron proposal, the bed covered in rose petals—has been neatly split from genuine emotion, like a painted eggshell blown clear of its guts.

It will probably shock no one to learn that I am a terribly unromantic person in real life; my favorite Valentines Day gift ever is a Ka-Bar knife from my spouse, who knows me entirely too well. But this idea of pageantry and insincerity stuck with me, and I think it's what bugs me about a lot of romance in fanfic, above and beyond the fact that I'm kind of an unromantic curmudgeon: there's this tendency to act out the stagecraft of Romantic Gestures without ever considering what they might mean to those particular people. There is a Grand Proposal, or the Presentation of the Ring, or Flowers and Chocolates... it's not that no one likes these things, or that no one should ever do them, but the way they turn up in fiction often feels like characters reeling off a script with no regard for who they are, what they want, how they might respond to such a gesture.

All this probably sounds really grouchy, but I have read some truly great romantic fic, both long glorious epics and short sweet one-shots; the difference is, really good romance considers its characters as people, and therefore considers who they are and what they might want, how and when they might trip over their toes, how they love people and are loved in return. I'd like to see more of it.

Comments

[snickfic]

Honestly, that kind of stuff is why I always thought I hated romance as a narrative element, and then got my mind changed by fandom, because I feel like fandom is at least way better at romance plots than the mainstream is. Not that there isn't tons of that kind of impersonal pageantry in fanfic, too, but there's also enough good authors that actually write about the characters and write romantic fic that says something about those characters and how they relate to each other to help balance things out, for me.

But this is coming from someone who used to always make a point of never having characters say "I love you," which should tell you where I'm coming from. (The first time I broke this rule, I was 60k into an 80k fic, and the characters broke up immediately afterwards. I really enjoyed writing that, lol.)

[glorious_spoon]

It's something I see a lot more in a particular type of fandom and fic; there are some fandoms where I never run into it at all (and I totally agree that fanfic generally does this kind of thing better than profic romance, it's just that I read a lot more romantic fanfic than profic romance), and some fandoms where it's endemic.

I partially suspect that it shows up a lot more when the primary fandom is for the ship, rather than the show/movie/book itself. Like, certain elements of Sterek fandom are pretty separate from Teen Wolf fandom as a whole, and there are a lot of people there who didn't particularly like (or even necessarily watch) the show itself, so it creates this critical mass of fic that references other fic and characters that don't have much in common with their canon selves.

(Not that there isn't a ton of really great fic for this pairing! But it's definitely a trend I've seen)

[muccamukk]

This is why I like Beatrice and Benedick so much "Truly, I was not burn under a rhyming planet."

[cadenzamuse]

A+

I don't "truly dislike romantic gestures," and I wish someone would send me red roses some day because a: I happen to love the way they look and b: a roommate in college used to bring home leftovers from her business fraternity's Friday rose-selling fundraiser, and c: I happen to know that Spouse hates cut flowers, so he would be thinking solely about providing me with something useless and whimsical and beautiful.

But also, we got pseudo-engaged while talking in the back of a car, and then engaged-with-ring at the top of a slide on a park playground, and we celebrate the-day-after-Valentines-Day so that we can buy cheap chocolate and go to less crowded restaurants (and the appropriate romantic Day-After-Valentine's Day gift is a book, or nothing) so, you know.

[umadoshi]

we celebrate the-day-after-Valentines-Day so that we can buy cheap chocolate and go to less crowded restaurants (and the appropriate romantic Day-After-Valentine's Day gift is a book, or nothing)

This seems like exactly the right way to approach things. ^_^

[out_there]

I found this interesting, because I definitely consider myself a ... well, not a shipper, I'm old enough to consider myself a slasher instead (because I almost never read het, and only occasionally read gen) but still, the 95% of my fic-reading is romance stories. But you summed up the things that I love most about well written fic (and the reasons I haven't honestly tried reading profic romance, because I have a lack of faith that they'll do it right).

My issue with a lot of romantic fanfic (and profic, for that matter) is that it is very concerned about Romantic Gestures but it doesn't make any effort to suss out what those gestures mean to these particular people--as if romance and romantic gestures are an objective set of behaviors and items that should be applied to any relationship regardless of the people involved.

Oh, I agree with that completely. Sometimes, the most romantic stories are the ones where "I love you" is never said, but it's shown with little practical gestures and compromises. Show me Casey offering to cover the soccer report, or Rodney sharing his secret coffee rations, or Mycroft arranging a car and driver when there's delays on the Tube. Considerate gestures get me every time.

really good romance considers its characters as people, and therefore considers who they are and what they might want, how and when they might trip over their toes, how they love people and are loved in return.

That's exactly it! There's nothing more romantic than understanding your partner and giving them something that they truly value -- which usually isn't the cookie-cutter romantic gestures.

[glorious_spoon]

Yes, exactly! I mean, as I said, I'm a curmudgeon and I very rarely do 'I love you''s with the person that I have been married to for ten years and had two children with, but those thoughtful little gestures always just make me melt.

[lazaefair]

it's not that no one likes these things, or that no one should ever do them, but the way they turn up in fiction often feels like characters reeling off a script with no regard for who they are, what they want, how they might respond to such a gesture.

Honestly, I chalk that up entirely to bad or mediocre writing, and not inherently to romance. I know exactly the type of story you're talking about, and most of the time, I will have determined that the fic is below my usual standards long before I even get to the parts featuring romantic gestures, so it's been a long time since I came across stuff like that - and I read almost exclusively ship fic. It's just that I read good ship fic.

Hearty agreement on the general cultural nonsense around Romantic Gestures, though. Especially public gestures. They're clearly all about the performance and not about the partner you're supposedly being romantic towards, and it's just...cringey.

[glorious_spoon]

I think to some degree that's true, but I have definitely seen it (especially on the profic level, but also in fanfic) where the writing is otherwise solid.

Oh, God, though, public romantic gestures. I mean, I guess some people really love them, but they always make my shoulders go up around my ears.

[buttonsbeadslace]

I completely agree, it's honestly kind of bizarre to see different characters in different fics by different authors all play out basically the same plotline of Romance Tropes. One that particularly weirds me out, that seems to show up in fics that aren't otherwise too romance-trope-focused, is the idea that saying "I love you" for the first time is a huge dramatic moment. Maybe it's just that my relationships personally haven't been like that, but that trope is particularly jarring for me.

[glorious_spoon]

I think 'I love you' can be a great moment, but it has to be... IDK, earned? I mean, I think my favorite Dramatic 'I love you' in canon is when Han Solo says it to Leia when she pulls out a blaster and prepares for their glorious last stand, and a lot of what sells it for me is the way he says it.

But I think it gets used as shorthand for an emotional moment a lot, and that usually leaves me cold.

[cimorene]

That was also driving me crazy for a while, but the funniest thing about it to me is that it is subject to trends. Having the characters say "I love you" for the first time and making an occasion of it was really trendy for a time and has waned a bit now in my experience (though obviously it's not going to go away).

And going back in time reading old zinefic (and into the beginning of internet slash), it used to be de rigeur for that to occur at or around the first kiss or first sexual encounter - sometimes directly before or after - while in the more recent trend it was almost overwhelmingly later than that... (I hope due to concerns of realism.)

[minoanmiss]

there's this tendency to act out the stagecraft of Romantic Gestures without ever considering what they might mean to those particular people

Truth. But, then, people so often mistake the symbol for the concept symbolized.

One of the reasons I write shipfic is to answer, if only for myself, the question "what would meaningful *personalized* romantic gestures be?"

[glorious_spoon]

Exactly! I guess for me, writing romance is just another way of exploring how characters relate (or, I guess, fail to relate) to each other. That's what's interesting about it to me in the first place.

[sholio]

This is something I've thought about too, and I agree. In fact I've thought about it quite a bit, as the length of this comment will attest.

* I think you typically see this more in het than in slash - not that slash doesn't have plenty of it, but het seems to turn really strongly on couples doing typical couple things (romantic dinners, OTT wedding proposals, actual weddings, having adorable children, etc). And I think this might be why I find so much shippy het fic profoundly unsatisfying when it's about characters who have sort of a prickly or atypical relationship in canon - e.g. Peggy and Daniel, Gamora and Peter, Danny and Colleen. Of course I'm all for people in fandom enjoying whatever kind of fic they enjoy, and clearly there is quite an audience for this - but I'm not the audience for it.

Which is a little bit odd because I do actually LOVE domestic fluff of a certain kind, namely, domestic fluff that involves very non-domestic people being kind of uncomfortable and weird about it. I think this is why I typically tend to go more for fluffy fic in a found-family or friendship kind of context than a romantic context, because the "we're just all muddling through and we're not very good at it" aspect is really important to me (which relates, also, to what you were saying about romantic gestures that fit the characters, because so many of the characters I go for and the ones I ship are basically human disasters, or else their lives are disasters, and having a perfectly unproblematic and fluffy date is just not really what I want out of that. Like, say, Peter and Gamora having a series of goddawful, aborted first dates, or attempting to have a date that is crashed by their entire family to the point where they're just like "I guess we're having a family dinner and you're all invited" is totally my kind of fluffy shipfic.


* One weird thing about writing genre het romance is that you have to put it in -- at least, in the mainstream commercial version of it; not that there aren't unusual, quirky romances that go for something more offbeat, but people who read romance-qua-romance really want it, and tend to react badly if it's not there. Part of the fantasy they're after is that of a guy who does all the typical romance things - gives her flowers, says "I love you", always remembers her birthday and gets her some kind of extravagant gift. And if the gestures aren't there, readers react like the love isn't there.

One example of this was a book in which I had the hero so caught up a different part of the plot that he forgot to get the heroine a Christmas present. It turned out that she hadn't been able to think of anything to get him either and had been feeling massively guilty about it, so they had a cute little bonding moment over it. Readers HATED it. I got so many comments along the lines of "I felt so bad for her!" and "All I could think was how awful I felt when my husband forgot my birthday! She deserves better!" that I ended up revising it into a gift-exchanging scene instead.

This is fundamentally alien to me because I truly DON'T care and in fact told my husband when we first got together that I don't expect him to remember and don't care if he gets me anything. (I later found out that he told his mother this and her reaction was a horrified, "And you BELIEVED her?!") It's incredibly sweet to me when he does, because he's not an inherently gift-giving kind of person, so when he does come up with presents, they're incredibly thoughtful and tailored exactly to what I want. It's just that he only does it about one year out of every three or four; also, the even rarer occasions when he does get me flowers or chocolates or do something typically couply are really sweet and also usually hilarious and weird in our own special way. (Like the year he got me the cheapest box of mediocre chocolates in the Valentine's section and then waited for my disgusted reaction so he could bring out the box of much better chocolates he'd hidden in the garage, only for me to get all delighted and gooey over him having gotten me chocolates in the first place. He's like: "This isn't how you were supposed to react to this!")

I'm completely fine with all of this, and it genuinely boggles me that some people aren't. Like I told him (semi-facetiously-but-not-really), I don't expect you to be decent to me for just one day out of the year; I expect you to be decent to me for all 365! (I mean, within human capabilities. But you get what I mean. The idea of setting aside one day a year when we're supposed to be all extra couple-y with each other is so fucking weird to me!)


* But getting back to the point - I think romantic gestures or gifts that are tailor-made for the characters, often with a muddling-through aspect to them, do come across sweeter and hit harder in the feels than when it's just "and then he got her a dozen roses." Not that you can't do this in genre romance, either; you just have to be careful not to misfire for a readership that likes classic romantic gestures, as noted above. But I think it works particularly well in fanfic.

I also have occasionally wondered if this is one reason why viewers sometimes come away reading a stronger romantic relationship between two platonic best friends on a show than between the intended couple, because most shows tend to go for the classic romantic shorthand (candlelight dinner! ring! flowers!) so the relationship cannot be mistaken for anything other than Definitely A Romance ... and then it's the friends who do the weird, cool things for each other that actually read romantic to a lot of people who are geared towards appreciating quirkier and more individualized expressions of love.

[sheron]

I'm gonna respond to this comment in addition to the OP.

I'm a romantic at heart. I looove the rose petals on the bed imagery and whatever all that stuff? I'd eat it up. BUT it has to fit the characters. There has to be a reason why character A would want to use rose petals. Do they like roses? Does their romantic interest like roses? What about the experience is profoundly satisfying to them?

So much of het fic (and so much of couply domestic slash fic) just seems to go through the paces and mostly annoys me. I will run across fic which on the surface has all the big capital letter Romance, but it feels like the characters are generic A and B with nothing of the characters I recognize from canon left. (A good example of this is Tony Stark in MCU suddenly being able to do appropriate romantic gestures. No.)

So what I want to say is, as someone who is a romantic, I have the exact same feeling about this as both of you. Part of the reason I tend to prefer gen over romance most of the time is that you can't lean on the relationship tropes as much in gen and thus you tend to get to the "meat" of what makes the relationship work. That's also why I tend to fall for the subtler M/M relationships in my canons, because they do tend to be built up better than a lot of the canon romances (with notable exceptions), just as you say Sholio.

As for in my personal life, which I feel is quite separate from what I get out of fanfic, I think I would be upset about someone forgetting a birthday or something IF (!) I made it explicit that I cared about it. I think the key here is the communication/expectations aspect. I expect to be listened to and understood. If I say I don't care about Valentine's day (I don't) then I don't expect the person to make a production out of it (ignoring me). But if I say I appreciate flowers (for example) then I'd want the person to remember and to treat me. (I think this comes down to that Leo personality that I definitely have (the zodiac). I don't like being treated "just like everyone else". XD)

And I think in fanfic (or pro fic) that also applies. If an author can make me see why this character cares about the rose petals or rings I will eat it up. But if the rose petals are there to put a stamp of Romance on things, I'm bored, I've scrolled past it and I'm wondering why this is so popular.

[umadoshi]

I'm trying to think if I've ever read much fic that draws on the big Romantic standards, but IIRC, I really haven't--which I suspect is due to the fact that I almost never wind up reading any fic that hasn't either been written by or recced by people I know. (And even at that, I only end up reading a fraction of what I file away to get to later. I'm very luck to know a lot of good writers and people whose taste I trust, and less lucky in terms of my few intense OTPs rarely having much fic written about them at all other than what I write myself. >.>)

(The characters I actively ship also tend to either be deeply unromantic [Newsflesh ship] people or people in a situation where trying to do anything especially romantic would be risky or impossible [Fruits Basket ship], so that's a contributing factor too.)

At any rate, while I like romance fine when it's something that makes sense to me and a writer has done the work of making it feel right for the specific characters, I very much agree with this post. I wish romance were handled better in general, both in fiction and socially.

[kalira]

I am a romantic, weirdly, in a way that mostly writing has made me realise . . . but I am also a romantic in a way that tends to not be recognised a whole lot, because I get bored or am unmoved by the . . . Standard Romantic Trope Box I guess.

One of my favourite things about writing characters being fluffily devoted and in love is writing the things that are sweet and meaningful gestures to them. For one of my couples that's things like 'I found you a store that sells Quirky Things to wander through', for some it's 'my 'romantic occasion' gift for you is time spent together building a new (hover)bike', one of my couples there was a gift of rings and it had a tracking device paired in them, as a much-appreciated gesture. One where a most appreciated gesture was finding a kink that hit their masochistic happy point from their very much not sadistic partner while still being enjoyable for them both. (And I have a few where 'I killed this person/threat for you' is a sweet gesture. . .)

My rambling point being it's . . . fun to find what is actually romance for vastly different people (and often in vastly different situations, depending on the fandom), and what is the kind of thing different people will remember and do for their partners beyond that as well. And what they might try and then fuck up.

Far more interesting, at least, than the Standard Chocolate Box of Romantic Gestures. I'm not sure I have read that entire essay before, but I know I've read the bit you quote before and possibly further parts? I think it's kind of sad but also bizarre how the specific gestures are clear of feeling a lot in western culture.

[glorious_spoon]

Yes! People being considerate of their specific person and not the cardboard cutout of The Girlfriend or The Boyfriend is always what makes me melt.

consent issues cw

[greywash]

All of this. Interestingly, Georgette Heyer, who is, you know, sort of a star of the pantheon of romance novel writing, fairly consistently wrote romance novels that I don't bounce off of—and I always want to sort of... hold up her stuff as an example of, "Look, you don't have to do it quite by the script to create that same feeling." Though of course my favorite Heyer (A Civil Contract) is the subject of an oft-acrimonious argument about whether it even is a romance novel, so—

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In my case, when it comes to my ability to, like, take romance as a genre on board, it's complicated by me also being almost totally aromantic—like, actually aromantic, not just not into romantic gestures—which definitely makes things harder. I find it interesting which carefully constructed combinations of, you know, "affectionate love" and "passionate friendship" and "crippling codependency" readers respond to as though they're romantic love—and which ones I as an author actually viscerally respond to, because I've 100% written romantic relationships I found gross and alienating but have gotten a great reader response... but it's usually a little more complicated than that. Because usually what I'm writing, I do recognize. I just wouldn't call it romantic love.

Like—for me all the sort of strictures we put on what we call "romantic love" just kind of don't work, like "oh, well it's sexual"—but I've had a lot of sex with people I couldn't stand; "oh, well, you feel it for one person"—but polyamory's definitely a thing?; "oh, well you have a person you just love more than everyone else"—more than... my beloved dog? my best friend? my mom?; "oh, well it's the person you choose to be with"—well, yes, but then you're talking about action, not feeling, and for me the person I, personally, choose to be with is my complicated queerplatonic best friend slash writing partner, who I don't love more than I love my mom but who I sure as hell like spending time with a hell of a lot better. And for me, the sort of qualitative boundaries between the emotions I feel for her and my dog and my mom and my best friend and my sex friends and my sister are not... very... clear, even though in some cases the quantitative ones may be, and obviously not all of those relationships are sexually inflected (some of them, though, may be more sexually inflected than my relationship with my partner). I still pick my partner. That's why she's my partner. So that choice sort of has to be where I focus, if I'm writing about quote-unquote Romance™, because that's the only bit I really have access to.

When I'm talking to people outside of fandom, I usually describe what I tend to write as un-romance-novels, like—I'm interested specifically in where the fissures appear in the genre when you try to be true to characters who may feel tremendously deeply, but don't—engage with Romance™, or want to engage with Romance™, usually because it feels unnatural or alienating; or who—e.g. Sherlock in BYW, who's kind of my narrative exception on a lot of fronts—both want and don't want it in this really intense, ashamed way. It's sort of like my entire engagement with "romance" in fiction kind of boils down to how to, like, mediate this experience that either a lot of other people experience, and I don't; or that a lot of other people experience in a vocabulary that is so alien and revolting to me that I am literally incapable of learning it—but that I still find incredibly interesting, in part because it is really sort of fundamentally inaccessible to me.

Which is a pretty good segue into the specific thing that I absolutely cannot deal with in romance as a genre, also not coincidentally exactly the thing that's waxing my cat in The Magicians: this idea that partnership or love or marriage is a choice you make once, instead of a choice you make over and over and over and over until you die or stop being married, and a choice that you have to make not only when it's hard to make in the moment, but because it's hard to make in the moment. I feel like romance is like, oh, well, getting married! It means you're committing to love each other forever so once you do that, great! Done and dusted! And I'm just sitting there clawing at my face going: even if you want to pretend that divorce isn't a thing, I have bad news for you, buddy. That's just not how it works. Because the times when you most need to be with your spouse are a lot of times the moments when you least want to do it: when your family is financially melting down, or your parent is dying of Alzheimer's, or your spouse has a psychotic break. The point of marriage is—or, well, should be, at least—to say, "hey, if our family is financially melting down, or your parent is dying of Alzheimer's, or you have a psychotic break, I plan to stick around." I'm no great fan of traditional Western/Christian marriage, but that's exactly what the "for better or for worse" in the vows means, and that's there for a reason. But promising that is easy. The hard part is actually doing it.

To give The Magicians source creators their due: they're clearly pretty fucking aware of what a gross and coercive idea magically-enforced marital fidelity is, but man, the fandom reaction, in a lot of quarters has just been so, so alienating to me. I mean—speaking from some pretty awful personal experience, actually, for a lot of people, sex is a fundamental need. And if sex is a fundamental need for my partner... if they can't choose to be with someone else, how can they possibly be actually choosing to be with me? I am literally the only place they can get it. That's not romantic. That's rape. And it really, really bothers me that here in 2019, that seems to be so fucking hard for a lot of people to see.

</your thursday dead horse floggery>

Re: consent issues cw

[glorious_spoon]

Like—for me all the sort of strictures we put on what we call "romantic love" just kind of don't work, like "oh, well it's sexual"—but I've had a lot of sex with people I couldn't stand; "oh, well, you feel it for one person"—but polyamory's definitely a thing?; "oh, well you have a person you just love more than everyone else"—more than... my beloved dog? my best friend? my mom?; "oh, well it's the person you choose to be with"—well, yes, but then you're talking about action, not feeling, and for me the person I, personally, choose to be with is my complicated queerplatonic best friend slash writing partner, who I don't love more than I love my mom but who I sure as hell like spending time with a hell of a lot better. And for me, the sort of qualitative boundaries between the emotions I feel for her and my dog and my mom and my best friend and my sex friends and my sister are not... very... clear, even though in some cases the quantitative ones may be, and obviously not all of those relationships are sexually inflected (some of them, though, may be more sexually inflected than my relationship with my partner). I still pick my partner. That's why she's my partner.

Ohhh man, so much this. I ranted about this a bit on Tumblr a while ago, but the way love and romance and friendship and companionship are discussed in our culture is just so incredibly alienating to me a lot of the time. This idea that affection and sexual attraction and emotional intimacy and sexual intimacy must--or even can--always be rolled into a single thing; the idea that intimacy and love are the same thing, or that sex is somehow inherently tangled up in them--like, I'm demisexual, I'm not attracted to people unless I like them and am comfortable with them, and I've still slept with a lot of good friends that I have no interest in pair-bonding with. And at the same time, I like my spouse more than most people, but I don't like him in a markedly different way than I do most people. We're compatible both sexually and emotionally, we get along, we can share space and hobbies, we have similar goals, we enjoy each other's company, we chose to build a life together... where does that become romance? Or does it at all? I don't know. My marriage suits me perfectly, but a lot of the people I've described it to seem to find it profoundly depressing.

In fiction, particularly, I'm really interested in pulling those things apart. I can enjoy shippy romantic fic, but I'm intrinsically a lot more interested in nonsexual intimacy, or sexual intimacy and emotional intimacy without romance, or platonic romance, or the points where all of those things kind of collide and interact with each other. While I've written plenty of straight-up romance, a lot of the fic I do tends in that direction, and I've had some really weird reactions to some of it from readers who clearly expected to see a neat romantic ending that (at least I felt) really wouldn't have suited the fic at all.

Idk. APPARENTLY I HAD A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THIS. /rant

[virtual_particle]

👍🏾 (since there's no "like" button)

[cimorene]

Because empty sentimentality is a pet peeve of mine and this is a minority position in romance fanfiction, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this issue.

It reminds me of this Nabokov quote, although I always misremeber it as sentiment vs sentimentality:

“We must distinguish between ‘sentimental’ and ‘sensitive’. A sentimentalist may be a perfect brute in his free time. A sensitive person is never a cruel person. Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them. A sentimental old maid may pamper her parrot and poison her niece. The sentimental politician may remember Mother’s Day and ruthlessly destroy a rival. Stalin loved babies. Lenin sobbed at the opera, especially at the Traviata.”

[glorious_spoon]

I hadn't come across that quote before! It is very apropos

[donut_donut]

Interesting post, thank you.

[alchemistdoctor]

I'm not a romantic. Similar to your story, my favourite V-day gifts have been a microscope and Stabitha, the acid-etched dagger.

I like playing with romance, though. Romance IRL squicks me out, it feels fake and dishonest. You put it well: there's this tendency to act out the stagecraft of Romantic Gestures without ever considering what they might mean to those particular people. But writing it, I can go from very gen, to very cliched romance, to romantic-relationship-with-no-tropes-at-all (there needs to be a word for that.)

Because it's fiction, I can play with the ideas that IRL would make me feel very uncomfortable. Meanwhile, my romantic-at-heart friends enjoy my writing. So it works out. I do wish there were more non-traditionally-romantic things for me to read. I like people falling in love but without the tropes. Life is messier than that.

[sholio]

Somewhat apropos of this conversation, check out this cartoon from 1940(!!):

https://yesterdaysprint.tumblr.com/post/182459871324/esquire-magazine-december-1940

[glorious_spoon]

Ahhh that's awesome :D

[isozyme]

Writing the words "I love you" into a story gives me absolute hives in almost all situations. I'm hard pressed to come up with a situation where something more creative isn't better. Honestly, if I see a character getting something as generic as a dozen red roses in a well-written romance I assume the relationship is in a tailspin; if it's six dozen red roses someone's cheating.

Jennifer Crusie's Bite Me does a very self-aware subversion of the Romantic Script that I liked a lot. It's definitely one of my favorite romance novels.

I think one of the most time-consuming parts of writing is coming up with fresh stuff when there's so many worn-out cliches in the world of romance (and elsewhere). It's easy to re-write well trodden ground.

[glorious_spoon]

Honestly, if I see a character getting something as generic as a dozen red roses in a well-written romance I assume the relationship is in a tailspin; if it's six dozen red roses someone's cheating.

Same, tbh. I think there are characters for whom it can work, but it so often seems like a lazy shortcut--either from the writer, or from the character.

[nerdflighter]

This is so interesting to me as an aromantic person, because I write, well, almost exclusively shipfic. And even before I realised I was aromantic, I knew I just wasn't a very romantic person. The gestures don't really...mean anything to me. They don't translate to love, they're just there.
You just articulated 90% of my problem with fluffy shipfic: the thing with fluff in fandom is that they do Romance. They get each other flowers, or cake, or they go to the carnival together.
And for some people that's empowering and all power to them, really, but when I need fluff I need it to be about the way that character interacts with the world.
Fluff needs to be an autistic character's partner giving them a sensory experience they crave but rarely allow themselves. Fluff needs to an anxious character getting a much-needed hug and an evening in the company of friends where they can melt into their partner's shadow but still participate when they feel up to it. Fluff is about what makes somebody feel at ease in their own skin, and it's not always a big romantic gesture.
In fact, looking back at most things I've shipped over the years, it seems to me that I always pick characters for whom Big Romantic Gestures are useless.
I do I write 'I love you'; sometimes it's in the context of either friends or a relationship drifting apart. But I also write it between couples, because it does mean something. I think about couples saying they love each other the same way I tell my cats or my friends that I love them - I say it when they do something extremely silly, or hopelessly cute, or when they make a terrible decision and I am filled with warm fondness for this complete idiot whom I have chosen to love, so I tell them I love them. And it feels more authentic to me like that, anyway, that my characters say 'I love you' when one of them is yelling at the TV screen, or when they manage to write an entire paper in one night and they're sleepy and cranky the next morning - because I know that that's when I would say and that's when I would want to hear it. And most shipfic is just my aro ass delegating romantic love to those who can do it.

[glorious_spoon]

Ironically enough I kind of want to draw hearts all over this comment, because YES. I find so much fluff SO OFF-PUTTING, because it's all about, like, Doing Romantic Things instead of loving a person the way they want to be loved, in a way that's meaningful to them.