If the main character believes in destiny, are we still romancing the sub-plot? There’s a core problem with the main character in my fantasy series; she believes completely that the man in her second sight is ‘the one.’ But all romance plots revolve around the ‘will-they-won’t-they’ conflict…
Here’s the issue; the visions in Jovanka’s second sight show her ‘with’ a man years before she meets him. It looks like ‘insta-love,’ which is big reader turn-off in the current fiction market. It pretty much kills the romance stone dead at the outset. Unearned love can never be true. The lovers have to fight for it to earn the payoff of the Happy Ever After.
So why do I handcuff myself to a bad premise? Spoiler alert: Jovanka’s misbelief is that fate is fixed and unchangeable. The key to the relationship with Varla? Subverting the romance trope.
According to Miranda Darrow‘s checklist of the core elements for any romance plot/sub, we need:
- The Meet-Cute
- Friction/conflict
- Forced proximity/Adhesion
- Hints and Maybes
- The Dark Night/All is Lost story beat
- A Grand Gesture
- The Happy Ever After or Happy for Now
Follow that straight down the line, you get Pride and Prejudice (yes, collect a sticker). But I don’t do that. I go for subversion.
Meet cute.
Jo and Varla meet in the middle of a bloody battle. It’s hardly cute; in fact it’s bloody murder.
Friction/conflict
Despite Jovanka’s visions, Varla isn’t Mr Right. He’s withdrawn, grumpy, even a bit of a jackass. He doesn’t want to go where she leads. They have very different internal and external goals. So far, so not Romance. Or is it? Grumpy and Sunshine? Opposites attract?
Forced proximity/Adhesion
Forced proximity for these two means a fight for survival in the Outlands; wolves, bandits, marauding Horse Clans and the Emperor’s tracker. It’s a little more extreme than that Last Hotel Room With Only One Bed.
Hints and Maybes
There comes a mutual admiration of each other’s fighting skills and spirit of resistance. The barriers come down; there’s a recognition of shared trauma.
Later, Varla mounts a bravura rescue against the odds, an all-or-nothing grand gesture; a commitment of the kind you don’t make for just anyone. This is why he’s a keeper; not because some vision shows them together.
Dark Night/All is Lost
Jo’s vision shifts and Varla dies in the near future. This is new. If Varla can die, then nothing in her future is fixed. It breaks everything, including all her sacrifices to this point. And there’s no guarantee the two of them wind up together.
The Grand Gesture
In an attempt to defy this new future, Jo elects to take Varla’s place on the Stupid Suicide Mission. She throws all the cards up in the air; there’s no telling where they’ll land.
Happy for Now?
Jo seizes the day, seals the relationship and Varla comes around to the idea; she believes in him and that lifts him out of his despair. Then everyone almost dies in the action climax. Now we’ve earned the payoff.
Awkward!
I could have picked a better couple than a pair of PTSD survivors lacking any people skills. Jo teases him relentlessly almost from the start and she keeps massive secrets from him. Jo’s seduction itself is pretty ham-fisted; the morning-after scene is equally awkward and looks like an epic fail. Misunderstandings abound.
With or Without You?
Is this twisted romance sub-plot essential? I could cut the romance and make it a friendship story without fundamentally changing a thing. But the romance escalates the stakes and raises the rooting interest. The brutality of the surrounding events pretty much wipes off any sentimental sugar coating. And in the course of the story, that element of Will-They-Wont-They adds an extra dimension.
And that appears to be it in Book One. But there are undisclosed secrets. In Book Two, we discover there’s another reason she needs Varla’s help. Will it bring them closer together or tear them apart?