Despite being twentysomething myself, I feel I’ve “outgrown” the typical romance heroine. Part of my ever-deepening attraction to urban fantasy and sf/f has been the fact that these characters could be, well, me. Of course I’m not out every night slaying demons and vampires, tasting food for poison, or shifting into a werewolf when the moon is full, but these women draw me not because of their strengths, but their weaknesses. I personally crave stories featuring women who have their foibles and idiosyncrasies, and the men who love them, but as numbers seem to show, the percentage of readers who read for the hero far outweighs the percentage of readers who read for the heroine.
Not that I have an issue with readers adoring the strong, funny and troublesome male protagonists that have peopled my favorite romance and non-romance novels (Carlos Rivera 
), but I feel the romance genre has grown too hero-centric to suit me. The heroine, instead of standing on her own feet, is increasingly created as a foil for the hero, to showcase his strengths and be “light” to his “darkness.” Instead of being his equal, she begins her journey in one of two forms: “feisty” and “independent” or “nurturing” and “bookish.” These characteristics evolve into two endings; the former, in which the heroine is taken down a peg or two, and the latter, in which the heroine is forced out of her shell by a) healing the hero from his tortured state or b) his rakish seduction of her. In a nutshell, the heroine’s journey is solely that of hitching a ride on the hero’s character arc.
This trend presumes to tell me that the male and female protagonist cannot simultaneously partake equally of a character arc. And what troubles me are the words tossed at the heroine who doesn’t fit within the aforementioned categories. The statement in Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, that heroines are required to be “presented as intelligent without being intimidating, independent without being offensive, attractive without being smug” lest they become “cast-iron bitches who appear petulant and unsympathetic rather than strong” is downright insulting. The fact that a heroine perceived to be recalcitrant would warrant the word “bitch” astounds me.
It is the fearlessness of female protagonists in urban fantasies to be not only “bitchy” but also vulnerable, perhaps throw a tantrum, insult her love interest, etcetera that makes the story stronger, richer. And on that note, the hero/love interest is forced to work for the heroine, to rise to another level to win her, to prove that they are worthy equals for one another. Despite the inherent differences between romance novels and urban fantasies, I feel there is room for complementary character arcs. And can we get rid of the word “bitch” regarding heroines who refuse to acquiesce to the hero’s journey?
Related posts:
Uh ohhh…. starting off the day with a spam comment.
As a writer, I usually start the story with the heroine. In my mind, it is her book. The action and growing and… is all about her.
Most of the time my baddies are women also. Stands to reason with women taking up over half the population and everything. They are never completely bad, they simply made a wrong choice or two.
But as a reader, I do like the big strong hero and his very different POV. I’ve often wondered “what was HE thinking?” and with romance, I get a peak into it.
1) Hero
2) Heroine
3) Both
4) All of the Above
I choose 4) All of the Above! But, then, I always choose ‘All of the Above,’ except Horror and Erotica. I really am sounding redundant these days. Sigh.
I also like buffets and garage sales.
Some writers are good at Hero-focused. The challege here is in appealing to a reader who’s known enough men to know what they’re really like, so the Hero doesn’t come off as a total Fantasy Fake. This makes a long-married woman like me laugh, not swoon.
Some writers are good at Heroine-focused. Again, I think where a reader is at in Real Life plays a big part on how the Heroine appeals.
It seems few are good at both, but I’ve observed as a an author grows she becomes better and better at both.
Ah, you raise an interesting possibility. Perhaps the reason I have become herocentric is because I can’t relate to the sweetness-and-light heroines as well as I do with the heroes, who are allowed to have a dark, ugly side.
And what did I do? Naturally, I wrote a heroine who’s so good and virtuous and nice, she made me want to puke sometimes. *sigh* The story calls for her to be good, but I found a small, dark, ugly spot to work into this revision, and it’s amazing how much that tiny revealing thought of hers broadens her character.
In contrast, I started a project recently in which I was afraid to make the heroine as bad as I wanted her to be, afraid readers wouldn’t find her a sympathetic character. I decided to go ahead and make her murdering, thieving, lying, and backstabbing and resigned myself to keeping my day job a while longer.
Fear undoubtedly inhibits a lot of people who write for a living, as well as agents and editors. If you take a chance on something that deviates from the standard and it’s not well received, it can damage your career. Much as I’d like everyone involved to take more risks, I can understand why they might be hesitant to do so when their livelihood is involved.
Thank you!
I tend to be a heroine-centric reader. If the heroine doesn’t start out as an interesting person with a few weaknesses and oddities, I’m really not going to care how cool the hero is.
Read a book like that recently–not mentioning any names. The hero was fascinating, dark and tortured and screwed-up with good reason to be. The heroine? A complete non-entity. While I could believe a man with his particular set of problems might be attracted to someone sweet and unformed because she was so harmless, and that someone might need to be that naive to fall for someone that PTSD-ridden and crazy, it didn’t make for interesting reading.
I found that as I wrote, my heros took over, although not by much. The romance genre is one where you have two almost-equally weighted character arcs.
My heroines tend to be ‘normal’ people who are thrust into anything but normal situations. And usually with relatively simple problems escalating until they’re dealing with things they had no idea they could handle.
For me, what’s the point of a kick-ass heroine in a book where she’s kicking ass. That’s her job, her nature, her skill set. What about the poor soul who’s just trying to exist, who has to kick ass and has to uncover the skills she need to do so.
The secret is finding a pair of characters who can fill in the empty spots in each other so the end result is more than the sum of their individual parts.
I want to read books about interesting relationships between interesting people. If only one participant holds my attention because the other one is bland, I’ll put down the book and find something else.
For me, the “heroine as place-holder for the reader” has out-lived her usefulness. As a reader, I don’t need a bland protagonist so I can paint her with my own personality and imagine myself in the hero’s arms. As an author, writing that same empty vessel over and over again gets old damned fast.
I understand why the bland heroine is still popular, but I’m glad to see more fully-fleshed female protags coming to the fore.
[...] today’s Romancing the Blog, Angela T. discusses the hero-centric romances and heroine-centric urban fantasies. It’s an interesting post and gives one possible reason for the rise in popularity of UF. [...]
What an intelligent argument and an awesome, thought-provoking post! As a writer who’s been told to “be careful” because my heroines can come across as “too bitchy” I really appreciate your point of view!!!
Bland heroines doesn’t make an interesting read. When I read, I like the heroine to be just as complex a character as the hero is. I don’t mind it if she’s a little “bitchy”, one of my favorite heroines of all time is Eve Dallas, from Nora Roberts In Death-series. And the fact is, just as men have problems, women have them too – “darkness” and a history isn’t only a male thing.
I prefer the books I read to have two equally strong characters. I don’t like too hero-centric books with weak heroines, but books with weak heroes are just as bad.
When I was a twentysomething, the word “bitch” offended me, too. Now that I’m a little older and a little more jaded, I translate it as meaning something like “woman-who-refuses-to-perform-appropriately-in-socially-prescribed-roles-like-I-want-her-to-and-that-irritates-me.”
Haven’t you heard?
“Bitch is the new black.”
I love this post. I absolutely hate the books with what start out as great, successful, independent heroines who give up family, friends, and career to become barefoot and pregnant and live HEA. I’d love a hero willing to compromise to compliment the independent heroine. As a writer . . . well, my heroines are not that independent so their HEA is more believable. But I always love heroines more than heroes. And those Alpha heroes, blech.
My heroines are very weird. I was laughing with my crit partner because my heroine chooses to give up controlling power of her entire planet so she can become a farmer, a clumsy one at that.
It’s the life she really always wanted, and she’s happy. Not very skilled, but happy.
I don’t know how people are going to receive a reluctant kick-ass heroine turning in her sword for a plow. We’ll see, I guess. I can say this, it is her book. She’s definitely the one with the stronger character arc, and the one who changes the most.
Remember, DANGEROUS MEN AND ADVENTUROUS WOMEN was published in 1992. That’s more than 15 years ago. The meaning and use of “bitch” has evolved since then.
I don’t run across too many place-holder heroines in my reading, but that’s because I really don’t like those dark, dark, nasty-alpha, tortured heroes. A little torture, a little darkness, okay, but no nasty-alphas. (My definition of Alpha male tends to incorporate Eagle Boy Scouts.)
However, I don’t think strength necessarily means kick-ass. I’d find it interesting to find a strong … Girly… heroine. One who’s more traditionally feminine–and yet quietly kickass. Does that make sense? It just seems to me that strong women do not have to kick literal asses.
It’s not that I’ve got anything against the guys, but when it comes to telling a woman’s side of things, isn’t the best place for that a romance?
Hmmm. . .
Don’t know how my post got posted like the one above, but I was trying to agree with Angela T. I liked her post so much, I kept it going at my place. Great topic!
Thanks for saying all this. When the heroine is so sweet and forgiving and nuturing in a book even when the hero is an arrogant jerk, I sometimes wonder why such a man would fall madly in love with such a doormat? And in real life, sweet shy women really don’t like the badboy type. Lots of good points today.
I simply prefer strong characters, period. I don’t care who does the heavy lifting as long as they jump off the page, as characters should.
I try to write my women characters as strong and independent, even if they’re supporting a male lead. The strength of that support has to be based in reality and, to my mind, real women are a combination of many wonderful qualities, and reflecting that in my work is important to me.
As a man who reads romances — well, mostly romantic suspense — I know that the men in romance novels don’t ast like men. They act the way women wish men would act. (Committing unnatural acts like talking about their feelings or picking up his socks.) By the same token, I’ve often wondered if the heroines in some of the novels I’ve read weren’t made bland deliberately so they wouldn’t interfere with the reader putting herself in the story.
Me, I don’t need to be in th story. I like to read about interesting characters interacting. Sadly, I;m finding most of the time I need to go outside of romance to find that.
Brilliant post. Well said and, personally, I’ve had similar feelings about female characterization. I wish the genre loved women enough to consider us worthy of being portrayed in all of our complex motivations, individual flaws and acts of bravery.
There’s quite a good song by Sara Bariselle over on YouTube called Fairytale that addresses some of the same things you mention in your post, particularly where she sings that the fair maiden “spent her whole life / being graded /on the sanctity of patience /and dumb appreciation /but the story needs some mending / and a better happy ending.”
I love strong characters, especially strong heroines. I like to read them and I like to think I write them.
One or two of my stories, the hero became an equal focus, but in my mind and in my heart, it’s always the woman’s story.
::claps::
This is why I loved Ember by Bettie Sharpe so much. Now that’s one heroine I’d switch teams for.
If the characters are well written, regardless of being bitchy/sipid/bland, I will most likely read the book with great joy! Mainly because, it is easy to believe that these characters exist – we have bland people, bitchy people, etc etc..
On the other hand, it is nice to see this argument made – I can definitely see where writers hold back, but I’ve also read a few where the heroines will kick ass (IMO) and I’m like whoa, you go! =)