Romance Novels are thought experiments

I find shoujo manga interesting because they are thought experiments about love relationships. There are a wide, wide range of hypothetical situations, many ‘what-ifs’. What would be the end result of a relationship that had this and this and that set of elements? Every shoujo manga is out to figure it out…

And I think this is partly the reason why most romance novels and shoujo manga are formulaic. Some start out with a simple formula (eg. nice girl meets bad boy) and subsequent authors replicate it (with perhaps a few variations). But the end results tend to be the same since it originated from the same formula. I’m not saying there’s no diversity (often superficial) within one type of formulation but that overall, they create creatures that look and act the same way.

However, over time, everyone gets sick of the same thing and this is a time of fun ;) Conventions within one genre would have stabilized authors now have a viable means of communicating parody/satire. For example, female heroines in the old days tended to be ‘weak’ and needed the male’s help (a lot =_=). But new stories have come out, with heroines that swing the other way, playing the ‘strong’ character instead. This could be done in several ways: by copying the strong, male role (more common) or by turning the ‘weakness’ into strength (less common and requires more cleverness on the author’s part). And oft-times, the male characters take the ‘weak’ role.

However, the ‘strong’ heroine these days have given way to a more neutral/androgynous character. One of the examples I love to give is the Beauty is the Beast manga (title literally translated). (And to some extent, Hana Kimi is alike in this respect.) The heroine’s ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ role is downplayed. She may revert instead to child-like and/or idiosyncratic behaviour (neither of which are gender-specific). She is neither looking for a man to complete her (as a ‘weak’ heroine would) nor to entirely dominate a relationship (as a ‘strong’ heroine would). There is less ‘looking for a relationship’ goal-oriented focus to the stories but tend to present the happenstance of relationships as something rather random and not pre-mediated. There is less ‘how to get the man’ than there is ‘how the heroine relates to him’ ( and when and if he appears, hehh).

***On another side note, I was re-reading my Hana Kimi (my room mate’s been watching the Taiwanese drama on Channel U) and I realized how it challenges homophobic ideas prevalent in most heterosexual shoujo manga. Although the characters give stock reactions to homosexuality, the context of those reactions changes how you would perceive such reactions. One of the most important elements in the manga is its gender-bending. It’s interesting that the ‘sage role’ (one who dispenses wisdom) is taken by the homosexual doctor (rather fitting too, which was really clever of the mangaka. And anyway, Dr. Umeda totally rocks! *Fangirl mode*.) He holds knowledge, both because of his age, compassion and sexuality that the heroine needs in order to make her way. One of the most important statements made in the story was how gender does not matter when you fall in love. Her deep, empathetic treatment of the main characters whispers this throughout the series.

In another way, manga like Nana has lessened the focus on a ‘one and only’ (though it does feature relationships where the protagonists can’t do without the other). It suggests to us that there is no ‘one and only’ soulmate out there to be found but that different people fulfil different kinds of needs in us at different times in life. Nana is probably unique amongst the shoujo genre because the characters never remain static. As in real life, people change. One of the more unique themes featured is that even though two people have great chemistry, they lack the luck of fate to stay together. Circumstances often collide. It counters the ‘love prevails’ idea. The love of your life is not the one you are destined to or even should marry or stay with forever (star-crossed lovers…) (This is yet another reason why I totally loved the Paradise Kiss ending. I would say that it ended happily, yes, but not in the way it conventionally does. Whoooa, she so totally kicks ass with it!)

Interestingly enough, yaoi and shoujo ai (both are targeted at female manga readers) has stalled at the dominance/submission evolution of their themes. It is a rare yaoi manga that does not have a dom/sub featured in its story. But you have to blame the binary-gender system for that. Yaoi manga just can’t imagine a relationship without one character taking the male role and another the female role (even if they’re both male). In some ways, recent heterosexual manga are taking a big step towards moving away from all that. Maybe one day yaoi would move away from gratuitous ass-fucking (only). Sigh… I hope that day would come… I like my ass-fucking boys as much as the next fangirl but the whole genre’s stagnating like those English romance novels!

Actually, I would argue that many stories play on the dominant/submissive theme (‘pursuer and the pursued’, ‘lover and beloved’). It is how relationships are traditionally played out in a binary gender system anyway. This is probably one reason why I find romance novels boring. All the stories have been done to death. If you must read a romance novel, please pick up a nice manga scanlation, please. Most manga may be just as boring and generic but at least the good ones are innovative (and manga tends to be funny, rather than a long and drawn out ‘he says, she says’). I tell you, there are no innovative romance novel. I think Jennifer Crusie comes closer than the others in going beyond the dichotomy but her recent works have not been inspiring. Sigh.

A recent manga I read was about a ‘what if two people lived together as owner and pet?’ scenario. I like it because the dominant/submissive roles are not static, it is fluid because there is that self-awareness within each of the characters, that the role-play is just what it is, roleplay. It’s beautiful in its portrayal of how the characters navigate life in such roles, and its joys and tragedy. It is about dependency and comfort and vulnerability. It thoroughly explores the meaning of what a ‘pet’ is and why we may need them. The story it tells is not moralistic nor judgmental and because it is not, it frees the author to write beyond those limitations. And I like how the subplots are self-referential towards the main plot, allegorical to the characters’ experiences. (I’m more tolerant of the allegorical aspects of the manga since there’s always a point to it.) It spent ten volumes on track, no fillers, which is something I thoroughly applaud (manga in long series often take a detour…) One of the interesting things about it how carefully domestic and public domains are demarcated in the manga. The mangaka is interested in how their roleplay affects these domains. I guess the manga will come to a head once we reach the point where domestic and public domains collide (it hasn’t yet but it’s bound to if the series continues).

My last thoughts on this is that the genre’s strong and weak point is how much strongly it clings to motifs. The reader benefits from the diversity and familiarity a single motif can create while losing out because these conventions figure so strongly in the genre that anything new may take some getting used to (or in a bad case, get rejected).

(On the other hand, Shel Silverstein, genius poet sums it up in his book: The Big O and the Missing Piece.)

Related posts:

1. Bad Romance
2. Comments on the Japanese live action Hana Kimi
3. A Question of Gender
4. Aww me bishies
5. Robert Fulghum