And who did Mrs Wright date, again, exactly?
Posted on 16 February 2012
Dating the Monsters
The beautiful and talented Mrs Wright, whose maiden name is also her nom de plume of L Jagi Lamplighter, authoress of PROSPERO LOST, PROSPERO IN HELL and PROSPERO REGAINED now has her essay for an Anita Blake anthology (in my opinion her best essay) entitled “Dating the Monsters,” up this morning on smartpopbooks.com. It will remain available until Wednesday at 12:00 AM
Time was when the Romance section of the bookstore was a safe and cozy retreat from all things unfrivolous. Sure, there might be an occasional gothic or mystery romance with a terrifying moment or two, but one could basically rely on the fact that any book you took off the shelves would be like eating spun sugar. Going to buy a romance novel was like visiting the confectionary section of a bakery.
Not anymore! Where once dwelt only roses and Almack’s, now live vampires, demons, werewolves, Greek gods, and yes, even robots. Though, most of all, it is vampires. And not all these books are sugar sweet, either. It’s like heading down to the confectionary and finding yourself in hot spicy foods instead!
By now, you are probably asking yourself: How did this happen …
It started on television with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but it was Laurell K. Hamilton and Anita Blake who brought stories of girls and monsters to the world of popular books. Though paranormal romance is now a booming business, Anita Blake still leads the way, a giant striding amongst her younger sisters. Anita both kills the monsters and dates them. It’s like having your cake and shooting it, too.
The question naturally arises: Why monsters? What is it about vampires and werewolves—once only the stuff of horror stories—that makes them the ideal modern romantic hero? To find the answer, we must first examine the age old war between culture and drama.
Throughout history, a tug of war has existed between the desire to use stories to teach and the desire for them to entertain. [....]
The desire to use stories to teach, I shall call for the purpose of this essay “the needs of culture.” Proponents of this idea hope to use the medium of entertainment to lead people to make the choices necessary for a moral, law abiding society. [...]
The problem is that, most of the time, the more pleasant a culture is to live in, the less interesting it is to read about. A really fine writer can make anything interesting, but few writers achieve this pinnacle of brilliance. It takes a superb writer to make the process of painting a landscape interesting to an outsider. It only takes a writer of ordinary skill to bring excitement to a chase scene with a thief and a Company assassin on ski mobiles in the midst of the Winter Olympics.
In our entertainment today, the needs of drama often outweigh the needs of culture. We would like to teach our children to be peaceful and chaste, but violence and sex sell.
Read the whole thing at http://www.smartpopbooks.com/dating-the-monsters/.
And if you really like it, you might consider buying the book in which it appears: ARDEUR — 14 Writers on the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter (sic) Series. Laurel K Hamilton herself was the editrix.
Makes a great gift! Saint Valentine’s Day is just past, therefore it is too late to get any gifts for your true love, but today is the feast day of Saint Onesimus the Slave, so get this as a gift for anyone you’ve manumitted recently.
ARDEUR
So why is Anita Blake a “Hunter” rather than a “Huntress”? Betrays a startling lack of sensitivity for Miss Blake to call her a boy’s name, if you ask me.
And we all know that to promote true equality and mutual respect between the sexes is to use certain terminology in a certain correct way. So the word “Huntress” will automatically make readers grant a dignity to women which would NEVER regard them as mere pout-lipped zeppelin-breasted cheesecake models displaying their shapely fannies, right?
Indeed! Anita Blake, icon of femalist empowerment, would never be depicted as some dewy-eyed twentysomething babe in a tight outfight, merely pretending to be feminist-compliant by showing her armed to the teeth, right?
Sex and Violence? Show a Showgirl with a Smokewagon
I mean, vampire-hunting dames, what we in the biz called Van Helsingettes, would never be depicted as mere luscious eye-candy for fanboys, right?
Non-exploitive School Girl Vampire Huntress Image ... In Fishnets
Hmmm. Strike that last. Maybe the needs of the culture are different from the needs of drama after all.
An excellent essay. (To quote Henry VIII from A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS: “Your taste in music is excellent; it exactly coincides with my own!”)
Alas, I fear I cannot contribute to burgeoning the coffers of the Wright household by purchasing this book, since I am much too aggrieved over what Ms. Hamilton did to Anita’s character.
Then again, I have to acknowledge that she is the writer and creator and has every right to turn her heroine into a flibbertigibbet Mary-Sue that has the superpower of smiting every werecreature she meets with uncontrollable slavering lust for her, bedding said weres at the drop of a hat, and becoming massively more overpowered with every volume whilst also dropping anything that smacked of character development, such as Anita’s realisation that the danger of being a monster hunter (or huntress) was in coming to have more in common with monsters than with the mundanes, in favour of soft porn.
Not that I’m bitter about it or anything
A minor demurral with your lady wife: I preferred Ashley to Rhett. Yes, Ashley is gentle and even milk-and-water by comparison with Rhett, but he has a steely core of honour and gallantry underneath that mild exterior. I see the appeal of Rhett, but as a husband? No, not at all (though I have to admit, he and Scarlett are probably well-suited).
Enthusiastic agreement with your lady wife: plastering the interior of the romance cupboard with photos of Adrian Paul rather than Fabio, particularly from that “Highlander” Season Five episode, “Dramatic License”, where a writer of bodice-rippers bases her series hero on Duncan MacLeod and her villain on her husband. Great fun to see the difference between the ‘romance novel’ version of events and ‘what really happened’
(This is a response to #2. Not sure why it got puthere as if it were a response to John’s post.)
It might amuse you to know that Ms. Hammilton did not like my essay (as can be seen in her forward to it.) I entirely agree with you about Anita…notice I only talked about the first seven books.
Your note about Ashley and Rhett seems to me to be right on the mark for the difference between drama and real life. I like reading about Rhett…but Ashley would probably be much more pleasant to live with! (But yes, Rhett would probably be better for Scarlett.
Thanks!
I’m glad to know we agree on that
I’ll spare you my opinion on the Merry Gentry books; suffice it to say I just barely managed to slog about three-quarters through the first one, and if I had a cat, it would have made me kick it.
(A.E. Housman must be turning in his grave at having his Queen of Air and Darkness from his poem used so freely by Ms. Hamilton; I know that the appropriation of the Sidhe and various other terms of art from the seal people (rón) onwards – well, I wasn’t a happy bunny).
The Sex With Elves books? I could not even finish the first one.
Elves, humans, selkies, goblins, I lost count of what, who, which species, and how many.
But it’s the tin-eared prose that was really painful. So she shows good taste by
ripping offpaying homage to Housman with “Queen of Air and Darkness”, then spoils it all by developing soubriquets of her own later on, like “Queen of Flesh and Blood” – er, sorry, Laurell, but that’s not mysterious and subtle, rather it sounds like the kind of B-movie you settle down to watch at 12 at night when cable-surfing because either you’re just back from the pub or you’re in your jammies and de-stressing after the week, and you’re in the mood to tolerate some mindless rubbish with bad special effects and lots of fake blood (and the prospect of bare boobs, for the gentlemen in the audience).You and I are soooo on the same page with this!
“What is it about vampires and werewolves—once only the stuff of horror stories—that makes them the ideal modern romantic hero?”
I’ll take a stab at this by quoting from my latest blog entry:
The vampire is an antidote to all that afflicts this wretched age – a being who personifies the essential elements of Black Sun ideology:
* Aristocratic, Nietzschean sensibility
* Manifested power of the Dark Side/shadow self
* Separation from mundane, Light Side society
* Preference for magic over science, aesthetics over utility
* Predatory spirituality
* Luciferian illumination, energy and creativity (the Black Flame)
You can read the entirety of this already infamous post at http://www.orderoftheblacksun.com/2012/02/11/interview-with-a-psychic-vampire/
I’m rather proud of this one, and feel that I have created a personal manifesto of Vampiric spirituality which nicely complements and expands my previous ideas Re: Sith mastery, sorcery and Satanism.
Forever in blood and darkness,
Sean the Vampire
Oh, Sean. You’re the best troll ever!
He really is, isn’t he? And he is now a vampire as well!
Can we give Sean some kind of place of honor? How many blogs are blessed with such troll? He sort of reminds me of the function the two grumpy old guys in The Muppets used to serve.
The problem is, I think he is serious. We are listening to the voice of the damned. It’s like hearing a voice come out of a coffin, or from behind the barred window of Bedlam.
If I thought he really meant it, I’d be worried, but I think Sean the Vampire Sorcerer Sith (if I’ve missed out on anything, apologies) is just being provocative and yanking our chains the slightest bit
I think he’s probably serious about his transhumanism, but since that won’t come about in any conceiveable way, shape or form for another couple of centuries (if ever), that is not so pressing a concern either.
But I agree with Noah and Robert – not just a troll, but our very own Troll, lurking under the bridge to nibble at our ankles
Aw…that’s cute.
Alas, Sean, as a countrywoman of Bram Stoker (who popularised the Count), I have to disagree with you about the appeal of vampires. I am firmly aligned with the Professor Abraham van Helsing, M.D., D.Ph., D.Litt. (etc.) School of Vampire-Mortal Diplomacy: stake through the heart, cut off the head, stuff the mouth with garlic and all the better if time permits to burn the revenant corpse to ashes and scatter them into a fast-flowing stream
God rest Peter Cushing, the original and best van Helsing. And as a side note, his portrayal of Baron Frankenstein in “Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell” gave me actual chills down my spine in the very last scenes, as after all the chaos, destruction, murder and misery his failed experiments have once again caused, he rallies his assistant, grabs a broom and cheerfully begins sweeping up his laboratory; precise, resigned, controlled, and on the surface seemingly reasonable – until you realise that he is completely, utterly, barking-mad and any shred of scientific justification for his work is long since departed. Cushing’s portrayal of Frankenstein makes you realise this in a way that no scenery-chewing, frothing at the mouth portrayal of madness would do.
Hey now, Eddy Van Sloan was no slouch either! (Yes I am am a thousand years old, thanks for asking!)
I know enough about women only to know I know nothing about women. I suppose I can kind of understand Blake and Buffy, but as for the greater blasphemy of this age (known around my place as Tw*l*ght, the “saga” that shall not be named) I must admit the appeal completely alludes me.
The most coherent criticism I’ve ever heard of those stories came from the Spoony One, who halfway through the second film came to the realization that Bella was the most manipulative soulless villain to ever be featured in fiction.
> am firmly aligned with the Professor Abraham van Helsing, M.D., D.Ph., D.Litt. (etc.) School of Vampire-Mortal Diplomacy: stake through the heart, cut off the head, stuff the mouth with garlic and all the better if time permits to burn the revenant corpse to ashes and scatter them into a fast-flowing stream
I am Sooooo with you!
I should add that just because I wrote about the appeal of vamps and werewolves does not mean that they appeal to me. They do not. Sigh.
Highlanders, though. I do like Highlanders.
The immortals from HIGHLANDER are monogamous therefore romantic. If you ask them why they don’t cheat on their one true loves, or have multiple wives like a Sultan, the immortals will tell you, “THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE!”
Well, only one at a time, anyway.
But I can still make myself tear up by remembering the last moments between Connor MacLeod and his first wife Heather:
“I’ve never really known . . . Why ye stayed?”
“Because I love you as much now as the day we first met.”
You don’t have to be a woman to find that a little gushworthy, I think.
*rolls eyes at that one*
Ladies and gentlemen: behold the power of true love, wherein Mrs. John C. Wright remains in the vicinity of a person who perpetrates such jeux d’esprit in the aftermath of St. Valentine’s Day (I speak as a crabbéd spinster).
As if the romantic vampires aren’t cuddley!
Sean, I feel sorry for you. That healer you went to, whatever the source of her credentials, was expressing something that any semi-well adjusted person that has had even marginal contact with you (like over the internet through comments on blogs) would agree with (at least the sentiment if not the exact ideas). Saying that you are a physic vampire is not meant as a compliment but as saying you need help so as to not end up hurting yourself or others. As I and others have tried to point out, the power of demons leaves one worse off then when one started with nothing real to show for it while the power of God leaves one better off and happier. There is really no comparison between the two, I hope and pray that sometime (soon) you will realize that darkness is the absence of light and it does not persist when light is present and that happiness is better then unending misery.
Dear Vampire Sean,
Sadly, the monsters that best represent our moment are neither the werewolves, linked to the natural world, nor the vampires, alienated from mundane society. No, our special monster is the zombie. We watch, dimly illuminated by the flickering and eerie bluish light of mandated poisoned light bulbs as zombie governments in Europe stagger from bailout to bailout, zombie auto companies manufacture cars no one wants, zombie banks, rotting from within, stagger on, zombie entertainment conglomerates influence zombie legislators to protect their decaying distribution systems, by stamping out newer and more effective information systems. It is a landscape of failed institutions relentlessly choking off any signs of life. The public spaces of our great cities fill with a dispirited and stinking rabble of zombie “occupiers” who communicate only by hand gestures and moronic slogans.
I hope you don’t find this depressing. I believe I have met psychic vampires: people who seem to suck all the life and joy out of any room they enter. It usually turns out that they are clinically depressed.
Hm…
Seriously I really did enjoy this essay. As I am constitutionally required to nitpick, being the boss of both of you by your own admission, I would say that some bits seem slightly forced or artificial here. When your wife goes into the depths of feminine glee it just doesn’t sound natural, based on her blog (I follow both of your blogs) she seems to usually have a somewhat more practical writing style. I am curious if she was intentionally doing this, either for audience or for an editorial mandate.
Now that my required amount of criticism is out of the way, onto the praise! Yes, she is absolutely right on everything she says. I cannot find a single point to disagree with her. Her arguments are reasonable and match my own experiences with the romance genre (by which I mean many, many disturbing fanfics). Her exploration of romance is an interesting side of the coin from other, often very different, perspectives on relationships I have been reading recently.
Anyway, some thoughts.
1. Your wife suggests that power disparities are one of the main issues in the romance genre. I wonder if that is because we are inside our own culture, and cannot see logical and reasonable power disparities for stories. Our current trend is “associative mating” or some such story, where similar people end up together. Perhaps in the future we will tell stories about romances between illegal immigrants and police officers, or teachers and students? It might be the distance from the actual historical situations and more complicated issues that makes it appealing.
2. On the subject of the Anita Blake series itself, I have not read it on my father’s advice. He says it started out his favorite series, but eventually really disliked what it became. As I trust both assessments I have decided not to pursue it. Is this a reasonable assessment? If so, is there a point that would be satisfying to end at?
So, all in all a very interesting essay I was happy to read.
I can attest that this is indeed her real feminine glee, whose depths I have, as her husband, become familiar with. The unnatural sound you hear is perhaps due to the fact that this is quite blunt. It takes a high degree of art to make natural things sound natural. Real life sounds stiff and awkward.
I have not read Anita Blake. Everyone says it crashes and burns at about book seven.
Myself I would have said at book 10. Book 9, OBSIDIAN BUTTERFLY, is actually a genuinely powerful work of literature — though that may have a lot to do with the fact that its primary emotional battleground is not Anita’s character so much, but Edward’s, her fellow hunter.
Obsidian Butterfly is good. It goes 1-7 and Obsidian Butterfly. Don’t read any others.
I really enjoyed those, though. Anita was a Catholic vigin for the first six and a half books. I liked her much better that way.
“Is this a reasonable assessment? If so, is there a point that would be satisfying to end at?”
(1) Not just yes, but hell, yes!
(2) The first book? The first few books are good, but from about number seven onwards, they just get more and more silly. Even the first six or so have some implausibilities – there is a character in the third book named Mr. Oliver, who is the oldest living vampire, is strongly hinted to be a member of the species Homo erectus, and is estimated by Anita to be around a million years old. He shares a title with Poseidon – the Earthmover (or Earthshaker) because he can cause earthquakes, and he is massively powerful. Anita is nowhere near as strong as she becomes in later books, yet she manages to kill him (the only way I could swallow this implausibility is that this was Mr. Oliver’s version of ‘suicide by cop’ and he allowed her to take him out).
She went from creating characters like Mr. Oliver (whom she just threw away – I would have loved to see him in more than just that one book) to inventing yet more werepacks for Anita to become the boss of (at the point I stopped reading because my eyes were rolling so hard they were in danger of falling out of the sockets, and sheer exasperation might have brought me to an early grave), Anita was a leader of a werewolf pack, a leopard pack, something to do with werejaguars(?) and was getting on good terms with the wererats, not to mention her vampire boyfriend(s).
Seriously, I could have cried: the original Anita and her original world was interesting and unusual, and there was a definite moral line being crossed, and the dangers of getting more involved in the preternatural world were being pointed out. Then sex happened, the human characters were sidelined or dropped (what about Larry?, I always wanted to ask) and Anita turned into a Mary-Sue (genuinely the only way I can describe her character: the ‘flaws’ that are no flaws – oh noes, she takes after her Mexican mother and so is short, dark and gorgeous, unlike her father and step-mother’s tall, blonde WASPiness!; the unique powers – necromancy; the over-powering – see the killing off of Mr. Oliver; the way every dangerous, deadly, lethal predator just falls for her – Edward. Blinkin’ Edward, in just the second book or so, gets turned into a domestic fluffy bunny – he’s supposed to be a cold-blooded assassin with ice-water in his veins, only interested in Anita as a possible equal in the killing business, with all human feeling burned out of him, and he is revealed to have a missus and step-family that he loves, instead of planning to have them all neatly dismembered and wrapped in plastic in the boot of his car); the sex. Ai Eru melme, the sex!
Eh. Once we found out that Anita converted from Catholicism to Episcopalianism (due to the Church’s stance on necromancy), that should have told me all I needed to know about where this was heading
I so agree. Though I would add that you neglected to mention the plot…or lack there of. The first six books or so are mysteries. They have a mystery, there are clues, and it gets solved.
After that, there just stops being a mystery. Either there is none at all, or it comes up in the first chapter and the last and not otherwise.
It is…very, very sad.
> here. When your wife goes into the depths of feminine glee it just doesn’t sound natural, based on her blog (I follow both of your blogs) she seems to usually have a somewhat more practical writing style.
I love romances. I read them. I don’t usually write them. My romantic, feminine jargon may be a bit rusty.
The first books were interesting. Unlike most urban fantasies, there was no Masquerade; it was more like Operation Chaos or “Magic, Incorporated” where the alternate history USA has magic in it.
I liked how you could become a werewolf from a bad batch of anti-lycanthrope vaccine.
But it did go to pot.
Yeah, that’s the shame of it – she started off with a good world-build (the idea that all that folklore and myth stuff? Turns out to be real, and we mundane humans have to find some way to deal with it, and one of the ways we do is to patronise monster-hunting businesses which are the equivalent of preternatural detective agencies; you suspect your wife is having an affair? call a gumshoe; you suspect your wife is having an affair with a vampire who has her in his thrall? call the government-licenced executioners!) and interesting characters – human characters, to boot, like Larry (whom I would love to have seen more of, because initially it was set up that he had the same power as Anita but was a newbie to the business so she would be a mentor and teacher for him); moral dilemmas – Nietzsche’s “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you” being played out in the Real World of the novels;
a range of supernatural characters, not just vampires and weres; a look at how being a vampire wasn’t all it was cracked up to be (like the low-level ex-mobster who may have thought that becoming a vampire put him at the top of the pecking chain when it came to humans, but never considered that he’d be bottom of the pecking chain when it came to vampire society) and taking religion seriously (e.g. not representing all religions except Christianity as being good and true and valid, with Christians being solely frothing fundies and/or ‘let’s all just be nice to each other’ do-gooders).
Then something went wallop and we got sex, sex, and more sex. I don’t know why; maybe she thought that urban fantasy demanded it, with the rise of all the new paranormal romances; maybe she just wanted to explore this element after her first marriage ended and she married a younger husband; maybe it was just a commercial publishing and marketing decision on the basis that “sex sells”. I have no idea. It’s a damn shame, though, because if Anita could have gotten over the chip on her shoulder (re: her mother being Mexican and her father’s marriage, after her mother died, to a very WASPy step-mother, described as tall and blonde and Nordic), she certainly had the potential for being a strong, capable, heroine who didn’t need to take her clothes off every ten minutes.
1) I lovede the scene where prayer drove back a demon.
2) According to her essays in the Ardeur book…the author had been religous and married to the guy Richard was based on. Then she decided she wanted more sex and got divorced. Now sex is at the center of her life.
Very sad.
Very good essay, and I never heard of the darn series before. Reading the comments, Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter sounds like The Dresden Files for the ladies. Is this a fair assessment?
(On the other hand, I’m happy to say that Dresden gets better as the series goes on, contrary to the consensus regarding Mdm. Blake. Michael Carpenter and Fr. Foothill are easily my favorite supporting characters in just about any genre series fiction.)
I haven’t tried “The Dresden Files” yet, but based on the people doing the recommendations I keep seeing for it, I think “The Dresden Files” is “‘The Dresden Files’ for the ladies”
Hah!
Dresden File is excellent…it has a lot of what I liked in the Anita Blake series without what I didn’t like.
Personally, I’m having a hard time believing that the series is still going strong, but The Dresden Files really is. While the first three books were pretty formulaic, it seems to me that from Michael Carpenter right up until Changes, when he really took a chance, Butcher was steadily dropping the gumshoe act for some really rock-solid world building. Characters have really come out into their own, I think.
For that matter, Mr. Wright might appreciate the Knights of the Cross, for two of the three are totally not what you would expect. Sell him on these books if you haven’t already!
Jim Butcher says outright that he was inspired by Buffy and Anita Blake. That being said, The Dresden Files are just, outright better. (Though the first several Anita books are quite good.)
That’s a fair cop.
I found Mrs. Wright article excellent, as a guy I haven puzzled by the popularity of the “monster-romance” genre. It is great to have such clear-sighted analysis of what women want and like in these stories. I have read most of her entries on livejournal and I agree with you; it is one of the best things she has written.
Switching topics slightly, I am trying to expand my reading horizons by including romantic-comedies or romance stories to my book collection, unfortunately the stories I pick tend to suffer from:
1-smutty sex.
2-they are too feminine or too deeply entrenched in a female point of view for me to handle. (AKA estrogen overload).
3-all of the above.
Mrs. Wright seems knowledgeable enough to answer my question: does she have any recommendations, besides the princess bride, for romance or romantic comedies that a guy might like?
I will ask. Unfortunately, my own knowledge of romantic comedies is limited to THE DIRTY DOZEN and DEATH RACE 2000, which may not be representative of the genre.
Of course, I say there is more than enough romance and comedy in a black and white Fred Astair and Ginger Rogers flick: TOP HAT, the GAY DIVORCEE, FOLLOW THE FLEET.
My knowledge of romantic comedies is on a par with that of Mr. Wright; I can proudly boast I have seen neither “Sleepless in Seattle” nor “When Harry Met Sally”.
Um – “Romancing the Stone”, from the 80s? Or “The Mummy”? (before the series went just sillier than it was from the start). Hey, it has Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz falling in love whilst battling an evil immortal Egyptian high priest and his army of resurrected mummies, what is not to like there? It has Brendan Fraser and Oded Fehr – and Arnold Vosloo, for those who like the bad-boy type. That’s enough romance for any red-blooded woman right there. When the character of Ardath Bey appeared on a white horse, that was plenty romantic as far as I was concerned
Have you read Gone With the Wind? It is the original romance book. But it is also enjoyable to the non-romance audience. I tricked John into reading it and he liked it very much. Other than that, if you could give me a slightly clearer idea of what you are looking for, I might be able to suggest something else. You might try Cold Comfort Farm, too…it it quite funny.
Oh! And thanks!
I’m not sure I want to buy the whole book, but I definitely want this essay, and think paying the lovely Lampwright a $ for it is more than fair.
It’s very fascinating – so much to talk and think about. John, do tell your wife that I can be a bit like a puppy when my brain is teased with new ideas and I intend no offense as I bombard her with quarries and thoughts.
(I’ve been meaning to comment on her article about angels – talking about Supernatural but I lost the page awhile back and haven’t gotten around to finding it again.)
Finished! Thoughts (mostly from my considering writing my own romance, and curious about it’s “rules”):
Does it matter how a male is “superior” to a female? Say… Wonder Woman (agile, strong, head full of hair) was to be in a romance with Professor X (handicapped, bald). We know WW would be able to break ProfX in half, but his way cool mind powers would obviously make him far superior to WW if they ever conflicted. Speaking of superheroes…
Enter the paranormal man. He is dark. He is powerful. He is sexy. And he has taboos galore! He is so powerful, he could kill you with a kiss—if he does not hold himself back. As to taboos . . . well, he is supernatural. This opens the way for the author to invent as many taboos as she pleases: he cannot face the sunlight, cannot come out on the full moon, cannot talk to mortals, cannot this, cannot that, and cannot the other!
Is there room or how does it work with the hero disguised? Say… Clark Kent or Bruce Banner – who at first appear to be very weak, but then later revelations reveal that he was far more powerful than we suspected. Can readers be led along in this “mystery”? Can good romance be made with the girl (and the reader) at first led to believe CK or BB are as weak as they seem before eventually revealing their true power? Or must Superman & the Hulk be revealed at the start (to the reader at least) to make a good romance?
Is there some room for the heroine to also be tamed? (or is that bad romance?) Can say… the wolf run under the moon fall in love with the vampire who thirsts for blood? And together, can they learn to tame their beasts and become more human? Or is that bad romance?
No wait. I know what I want to ask: Is it better romance if the guy (via the girl) learns to tame his passions while the girl (via the guy) learns to embrace hers? I’ve read a lot lately on the arc the general romance plot and many (particular the male target) characters take, but I’m not sure what arc the female character takes. Does she grow or learn at all? How is she different at the end of the story? (or at least, good romances compared to bad ones)
(I actually have a romance book I read once by accident (it wasn’t bad, just not what I hoped it would be) called Thief with no Shadow. Would you like me to mail it to you?)