Chocolate and Peanut Butter

Lois McMaster Bujold, on the nature of The Hallowed Hunt and The Sharing Knife:

[Thinking about The Hallowed Hunt] led me to wonder in turn if that's one of the salient differences between men's adventure fiction and women's romance fiction. In an adventure tale, the most important relationship is between the hero/ine and the villain (or antagonist, in the case of villain-less conflicts such as man-against-nature); in a romance, the most important relationship is between the heroine and the hero. Combining the two story types can lead to a sort of hierarchy-of-values problem. If two characters struggling for their very lives stop in the middle to smooch, it risks looking not romantic, but stupid. And villains have their ways of insisting that everyone pay attention to them. src

If we accept the above, which I do with the addendum that "men's adventure" and "women's romance" should be understood as generalized marketing categories and not 'natural' literary categories, then it suggests one of the reasons rival-slash is a) so popular and b) so hard to write. Because, of course, rival-slash is precisely the blending of those two modes, and the tension Lois points out between the styles of character-relation is only partially ameliorated by hero-villain and hero-hero being the same characters. Yet the concept holds out the promise, or at least the hope, of bringing the two story systems together like a textual Reeses Peanut Butter Cup and giving us two favorites in one.

Fanwriters win again.

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