Beyond Heaving Bosoms

by Sarah Wendell

  PS: As a medical student I’d just like to complain about the heroine’s whining about her knee. Jesus, Allah and Buddha, woman, you only had some arthroscopy done. That’s an outpatient procedure and not six weeks of lying around because you’re too inept to manage crutches.

  Unquestionably awesome spontaneous review aside, we don’t think Dr. Strangelove’s account missed a stereotype of contemporary romance. The big ones are all there:

  Heroine experiences life-changing makeover and develops instant self-confidence as a result, like the reverse of instant pudding. It’s that fast. Quickly thin = effortlessly self-confident.

  Hero has deep personal injury only the heroine can (a) know and (b) heal. It’s a health crisis, a bum leg, some random muscle cramp, or a snaggle tooth, but it’s manful, whatever it is. And it’s among the easiest ways to lend humanity and vulnerability to the hero, hands down: a secret flaw that, on the whole, isn’t really a big deal, but to the hero it is everything and then some. And only the heroine can soothe away his shame and anguish.

  And of course there’s the flip side to this bizarre healing: if the heroine is for some reason infertile (endometriosis, or a completely absent uterus, for example) there’s always the miracle of the hero, and his Mighty Wang. Infertility? No problem for the forces of true love. Yeah. Spend five minutes singing that nonsense in the waiting room of your nearest reproductive endocrinologist and see how long before someone knocks you unconscious.

  Health problems are always monstrously debilitating, even when in real life it would be no big deal. Yes, a cold could kill you Back in the Day, but a heroine with the sniffles does not necessarily mean she’s gonna diiiie. And why is it always a cold? One supercontagious congestion could kill thousands Back in the Days of a historical romance, but regardless of time period, one sneeze from the heroine and it’s time to summon the doctor and the mortician, because fever and chills are life-threatening. It’s almost the flip side to a man cold. You know, when men get a cold and it’s the end of the known world because it is so serious? For heroines in romance novels, sickness is always dire. It’s a straight shot to drama and a dark moment of doom: illness! Their future happiness hinged on the risk of pneumococcal virus strains! Oh, noes!

  Then there’s the Secret That Could Destroy Them Both but probably isn’t that big of a deal. It could be a secret identity, a secret baby, a horrible crime that’s being covered up. But the secret, it haunts and burns like when you really have to pee and there’s only lonesome miles of highway ahead of and behind you, just you and that secret riding shotgun.

  Time travel: It’s kind of like a metaphor for sex: forward, backward, into and out of parallel dimensions. Someone gets culture shock, but everyone gets nookie.

  Another plot that appears in every subgenre: My Reputation Is Ruined! Ruination plots deal with the destruction and potential restoration of the heroine and her reputation. Sometimes it’s the hero, but since the hero is a dude, he usually suffers little over his reputation. The heroine, particularly in a historical, can be crushed under rumors of her skanky ways. Interestingly, the ruination plot can be found in contemporary novels as well: losing business reputation, enduring humiliation by corporate takeover, or being dumped in public in front of her worst frenemy.

  As we mentioned in our examination of the Mighty Wang, and what a lovely exam it was, the strength and frequency of the ruination plot assures romance readers that, unless “ruination” is specified in the plot summary, any and all nookifying is cleared for takeoff. If you’re not reading a ruination book, once the hero and heroine start riding the booty train, they will never get caught. The whole world disappears. That in and of itself is another one of our favorite plot clichés—invisible nookie!

  And to whom does that fantasy play? Anyone who has ever had to sneak in a sexual interlude, anytime, any place. The assurance that the toddler will not wake up, that the nosy neighbor will not hear, that the parents upstairs will be none the wiser to the bumpus going down in the rumpus room? That’s heady stuff indeed.

  Combine those with some other masterful clichés, and anyone can create the Most Ultimate Romance Plot Tangle Ever! Looking for ideas? Read on, and see if you can guess in which book (or books) these plot clichés appeared.

  The hero was boinking heroine only because heroine’s father inadvertently caused his wife’s death. Revenge is sweetest when visited upon innocent, nubile offspring, oh yesss.

  He then blackmails her into fucking him. Because blackmail sex = hottt.

  Heroine hit her head shortly after fucking hero and loses all memory, including the fact that she loathes the hero.

  Hero throws a shit fit when he finds out she’s pregnant and accuses her of being a slut because she once smiled at his second cousin.

  Don’t forget her virginity shall set her free, due to the Hymen That Proves She’s a Lady.

  The hero is unable to control himself and boinks the heroine in all number of inappropriate places, and maybe they get caught and maybe they don’t, but it’s her fault for her irresistibleness, and thus, she’s a whore.

  Our Favorites from Moviefone.com’s Worst Action-Movie Clichés

  Henchmen Are Lousy Shots

  Best parody of this ever? True Lies when Tom Arnold evades an assassin’s shots by hiding his girth behind…a 4-inch lamppost. Every shot misses, of course!

  The Female Hostage

  There is always a hostage, and she rarely fights back. Usually, she just whimpers. Lame!

  Government Files at Your Fingertips

  There are always government files accessible with two clicks and a Starbucks wifi connection. Hold on to latte, and for God’s sake don’t spill on your adorable, Apple-product-placement-appropriate laptop!

  Check for a Pulse, Dummy

  As we all know, there’s “dead dead” and “mostly dead.” Mostly dead? Slightly alive!

  I Think I Love My Ex-Husband

  He’s been wandering around fighting crime and a bad Scotch habit for months, maybe even years. But one widdle cut on his widdle manly forehead, and, oops, she did it again.

  Villains are not immune from the dreaded plot cliché, either. Just like in an action movie, in a romance, the villain is almost always the one unattractive and not-entirely-saintly person who gets significant screen time. In fact, more than a few movie clichés cross the border into Romancelandia. For example, the wacky sidekick for the heroine is always more slutty, more freewheeling, and more cynical about men than the heroine.

  Then there’s the symbolic clichés: if you’re the hero and you’re trying to take over the heroine’s company, you’re invariably trying to do what’s best for the company and represent the March of Progress. If you’re the heroine and trying to take over the hero’s company, you’re invariably attempting to crush the spirit of independent business and represent that Oppression of the Man on Individuality.

  And let us not forget: bareback realism. Forgoing condoms means it’s true love, baby. Riding the pony sans saddle is another covert nod to virginity, and has been a sex scene cliché since the dawn of the dance as old as time.

  ROMANCE TRENDS WE’VE KNOWN AND LOVED (AND LOVED TO HATE)

  Sometimes, if we romance readers are really lucky, a plot cliché will become a trend, and then, it’s just a short hop to becoming a subgenre. All plot clichés want to grow up to be subgenres, and some of them do. And lo, we loved them, or hated them, or both. And we’ll start with Candy’s favorite.

  Trend 1: Pirates!

  Real-life pirates were filthy, diseased-ridden rapists, murderers, and thieves. Remove the filth and disease, and hey, presto! You had a perfectly viable romance novel hero. Pirate romances saw their heyday in the 1970s and early ’80s, with a minor revival in the late ’90s. Back at the peak of pirate romance fever, you couldn’t swing a saber without smacking some delicious young ingénue who’d been vilely kidnapped by a harsh-faced yet beautiful seafaring rogue who was really the misunderstood son of a filthy-rich nobleman. Th
e potential for High Drama on Even Higher Seas was endless. Besides all the exotic locales, there’s the skullduggery that attends falling in love with a criminal. She hates him! She loves him! They fight! They make love! They fight! They make love! He killed her brother! But then he also rescued her from being raped by that other pirate—you know, the one who’s equally brutal, except he belongs to a different pirate’s union, one with less comprehensive benefits, so his teeth are nastier and he has a hunchback. But as the times changed, so did the pirate heroes.

  The Best Pirate Romance: The Windflower by Laura London. Possibly one of the best romance novels, ever, and yes, this is Candy’s favorite, and a favorite among many romance readers. Charming innocent is kidnapped by mistake by a bored, dissolute aristo-posingas-a-privateer, big secrets galore, and the heroine charms the entire crew of the ship—including the pet pig. Whose name is Dennis.

  Guilty Pleasure Piracy: Suspend your disbelief on a high, high peg, and reach for Gaelen Foley’s 1998 debut novel, The Pirate Prince. Mediterranean islands, warring families, royals and rebels, and a pirate prince? High Camp on the High Seas, and a reading indulgence like Oreo cookies and milk.

  Special Buttpirate Mention: In Darlene Marshall’s Pirate’s Price, the heroine is a cross-dresser, and her pirate ship is staffed entirely by gay pirates (plus a gunner with an unhealthy attachment to his pet goose).

  Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together: Nancy Block’s Once Upon a Pirate combines pirates and time-travel. Temporal dislocation + yarrrr = win.

  Delicious, Delicious Wrongness: Lisa Kleypas’s Only with Your Love features a heroine who ends up being involved with a pair of identical twins, and it’s the evil twin who ends up being the hero. One of Candy’s favorite guilty pleasure novels, the only way this could’ve gotten any wronger and hotter was if the heroine, Celine, had enjoyed a threesome with the Vallerand brothers.

  On Our Wish List: A pirate romance featuring a set of twins, both of whom are pirates. And the evil twin is a time-traveling female pirate. And her first mate is a ninja, and they have kinky sex all up and down the foc’s’le. This one hasn’t been written yet, but somebody needs to get on it.

  Trend 2: The Never-Ending Series Featuring Vaguely Homoerotic Spy Rings, Secret Clubs, and Societies Named After Celestial or Diabolical Elements and/or the Copious Progeny of Some Damn Family or Other; Twee Naming Schemes Mandatory

  The 1990s and earlier part of the 2000s saw the rise of the interconnected romances. It’s extremely rare for romance novels to have true sequels; the Happily Ever After definitively marks the end of the story arc for the hero and heroine, since the focus of the romance novel is overwhelmingly the discovery and securing of romantic love. As Kay Mussell pointed out in Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formulas of Women’s Romance Fiction, having that arc fucked with and showing the hero and heroine breaking up and getting together with other people would mean the characters had made a mistake the first time around, and we certainly can’t have that, can we? There are a few other options, such as killing off one of the original protagonists, but that’s the sort of buzzkill no romance author would touch with a ten-foot pole. Or the author can opt for a Series of Unfortunate Misunderstandings (with bonus Long Separation) to milk the conflict for all it’s worth, as Rosemary Rogers did for her Sweet Savage Love trilogy, or as Karen Robards did for her Island series, which is a trickier thing to pull now that Old Skool romances have fallen out of favor.

  Nowadays, if authors and readers want to revisit old characters and watch them age gracefully, they find themselves some books featuring distinct yet interconnected love stories. Hence, huge numbers of spy organizations, Special Forces groups, and families in Romancelandia suddenly saw all their members being set up in grand old style, often at clockwork intervals. Reunions in later books would usually result in a near-nauseating collection of the most gorgeous, titled, powerful, and progressive-for-their-time couples and their adorable, impeccably behaved children.

  Most Humptastic: Stephanie Laurens’s Cynster series. It’s a wonder that none of the Bar Cynster have dropped dead from heat exhaustion. Their fiddly bits must be made from some sort of titanium-Teflon alloy to withstand the copious amounts of friction. Frankly, we think NASA should look into the composition of their genitalia for spacecraft applications, and perhaps investigate possible uses for overcoming the perpetual motion conundrum.

  Most Cracktastic: Probably a tie between Mary Jo Putney’s Fallen Angels series and Jo Beverley’s Mallorens. The Fallen Angels have two different twee naming schemes going for them (almost all the heroes are named after angels, and the book titles of the original members of the Fallen Angels feature elements of weather), while the Malloren siblings are named after notable Anglo-Saxons. Both series feature court intrigue, spy shenanigans, plenty of high adventure, and cross-dressing protagonists. What’s not to love?

  Unquestionably Cracktastic: The Black Dagger Brotherhood by J. R. Ward. Ward took the rhyming scheme and khicked it up a nhotch lihke whoa, coupling giant badass vampires with Valley-girl lexicons and a love of luxury and high-end weaponry. Oh, and a life-and-death battle for supremacy with a cloud of powder-smelling weirdos. And hot, hot vampire sex.

  Most Adorably Functional Family Ever. Julia Quinn’s Bridgertons. Somebody just saint Violet Bridgerton already, eh?

  Trend 3: Navy SEALs and Special Forces

  A governmental institution with a spotty record of admitting women, and a policy toward gay Americans that we’re not supposed to ask or tell about? A job that in current climates guarantees active duty in a military campaign? Training with weapons, strategy, and medicine for athlete’s foot? A career that is demanding and often leads to high rates of self-destructive behavior, divorce, and emotional and spiritual fracture, not to mention post-traumatic stress disorder?

  Oh, yes, now that is romantic.

  The secrecy, the code of honor, the understanding that the moral core of the military protagonist is unshakable and completely dependable—okay, we can see how that can be sexy, especially when housed within a toned, fit, hot, and definitely lethal body. Military romance is a trend that won’t dissipate anytime soon, and there are plenty of examples of which Special Forces romances should be…okay, between “rear admiral,” “saluting soldier,” “heat-seeking missile” and all the other possible jokes, our heads just exploded.

  Modern Major General of Military Romance: That would be any and all Suzanne Brockmann romances, who took the Navy SEAL and the military hero and dipped him in awesome with a sidecar of Hottie McHot-Hot. From explosive (literally) pairings between protagonists on an elite Special Forces team to a multibook secondary story that culminated in a much anticipated resolution of the “Will they or won’t they” Sam and Alyssa plotline, Brockmann is the military author we salute.

  Air Force Colonel: Catherine Mann’s Wingmen Warriors series can’t be left out of any list involving military heroes and heroines, because many Bitchery members have recommended her books as among the best.

  Four Star General: Lindsay McKenna’s name is all over just about every military romance list, and her backlist is a big ’un.

  Trend 4: Romantic Suspense

  Ah, those tough-talking, loose-cannon cops, detectives, private investigators and spies with their big guns and even bigger cocks. Much like the Navy SEALs and Special Forces people, these guys see some of the highest divorce rates of any occupation in real life, with fairly high rates of alcoholism and low life expectancies. No wonder their counterparts in romance novels are so damn angry—you’d be, too, if you no longer had your booze.

  Romantic suspence gathered steam in the late 1980s and by the mid-’90s was selling like damn, with authors like Sandra Brown, Linda Howard, and Anne Stuart upping the dead body and Anti-hero count in Romancelandia. And then with the dawning of the twenty-first century (cue theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey), female agents came into their own and actually got to kick ass every once in a while. Many of them were even halfway
competent at it, and some even got to rescue the hero.

  If you like your heroes shouty, with constant, massive hard-ons every time the heroine walks on the scene: let Linda Howard and Susan Andersen be your guide.

  Best Antiheroes: Anne Stuart, hands down. Look, Moonrise had a hero who was a cult leader. How awesome is that shit? Stuart’s bad-boy heroes come from some truly dark, grimy places, and they show it.

  Still gives Sarah nightmares: Nora Roberts started introducing suspense elements back when she wrote category, and now her single title contemporaries often feature a mystery and a romance intertwined. Without a doubt, Blue Smoke scared the crap out of Sarah, and she still can’t talk about it without making sure the doors and windows are all locked. And the dog is awake.

  Most underrated romantic suspense author, ever: Why wasn’t there more love for Theresa Weir, eh? Why? Whyyyy?

  Trend 5: Paranormal and Fantasy Romances

  Hard though it may be to imagine, vampires at one point were considered hideous, terrifying creatures. Watch Murnau’s Nosferatu. That sort of depiction of vampires was a lot more common for many, many centuries. And then Bram Stoker came along with his suave Count, and a century later, getting your blood sucked out by angst-ridden animated corpses became the hottest thing ever.

  Though to be fair, paranormal romances don’t just cover angst-ridden bloodsuckers. As we mentioned, the varied cast of characters includes angst-ridden werewolves, angst-ridden shapeshifters of other sorts, angst-ridden witches, angst-ridden aliens, angst-ridden time travelers, angst-ridden psychics, and angst-ridden ghosts. The ones that aren’t angst-ridden shoot over to the other side and tend to be flip, lighthearted first-person accounts about what a drag it is to be, say, a demon slayer, or a vampire hunter, or Queen of the Vampires. Paranormals had been on the fringes of Romancelandia almost since its inception but became huge business in the early 2000s. Now, the romance shelves of your nearest bookstore are flush with the undead and hairy.