Harder on Heroines
Be warned…today's post might irritate some people. Sorry, not my intention-just need to get this off my chest.
Something that has always amused me in Romanceland about reviews, discussions on heroines & heroes, etc…some people are always harder on the heroine. Please note… I said some. And this isn't about getting negative reviews. It happens even in good reviews. And it's not always in reviews, sometimes it's just discussions.
FYI… I'm going to do very MINOR spoilers-although probably not really, since it's all mentioned in the blurb.
A case in point… some people have mentioned Sarel from my Hunters books…and this is to me, so I feel it's fair to use this as an example. She's the heroine in book 2, HUNTERS ELI & SAREL. They loved Eli. He was awesome. He was wonderful. His heroine? They hated her. She's a bitch. She's spoiled. She didn't deserve him. Why do they feel this way? Well… the blurb reads:
After three long centuries of aching loneliness, Elijah Crawford, Hunter of the Council, has finally found a woman. Maybe she can replace the obsession he has for Torrance Reilly, the wife and lover of his best friend.
Sarel is a lean, red-haired, wild-eyed witch with a soul to match his. She has a thirst for justice, and a yearning for a love to fill the void inside her. Sarel has been searching for Elijah. She is here now, prowling his grounds, waiting to get into his house.
Sarel has come to kill him.
She's there to kill him. Why does she want to kill him? When she was just out of her teens, I think 19 or 20, she returns home after being gone quite a while and finds her sister just gone. The house is a bloody-and I mean literally-wreck. She thinks her sister is dead. And she's a witch, self-trained. She doesn't know entirely about vamps,weres, etc. But she knows Eli had been there, she knows her sister is gone-assumes she's dead. In her mind, she sees Eli as her sister's killer and she wants vengeance. Now once she realizes how wrong she'd been? She's willing to make amends, even willing to die for it, even though she's not happy over it.
Had this been a guy? Sorry, I can't help but think everybody would have been just peachy keen with the scenario, because some people are just harder on the heroines. Now…that heroine could go through hell and back and try to be strong as Job, overcome more hell than I'd ever want to consider…but if that heroine does anything so human as make a mistake? She gets slaughtered.
The hero? Oh, he's fine. There are definitely some who will flay a book over a hero being an ass, and that's perfectly understandable. And don't get me wrong-if a person doesn't like the heroine, that's fine.
It just always amuses me that the hero can screw up, make mistakes and still come out smelling like roses. But the heroines? If they don't do everything perfect? They judged so much harsher. They are bitches, they are petty, they are shallow, they are immature…ironically, that's kind of the way some women are about other women. Some judge so much more harshly. We can't screw up, we can't make mistakes–we aren't allowed to be human.
That's kind of sad, when you think about it. Not sure why it amuses me so much in romanceland, but it does. Maybe it's because I still so often see the arguments where we get pissed off when we don't get treated equal, or when we get pissed that people mock or deride the genre or give it a fair chance. I just see some serious irony going on, I think. And irony very often amuses me.
