Vaginal Fantasy Book Club discussion
Book Discussion & Recommendation
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What Do You Want From a Hero?
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I agree absolutely, Corrina! The attraction can't be just physical. I'm working on my RITA books, too. Afraid I'm going to be late because of illness. Any other time I would have been done the week I received the books.:-)
I tend to avoid the romance genre for this very reason. Yes, hotness is, well, appreciated, but I want to care for and root for the characters to get together because I want them to be together in all sense of the word, not just for hot smutty sex.
I want him to be three-dimensional. PLEASE. Pleasepleasepleaseplease give me interesting and complicated men!As a writer, sketching the hero out with the minimum of lines is often a winning strategy because of the number of readers who want to put themselves into the role of the heroine. It avoids offending anyone.
I sometimes wish I could do that. It would probably be great for my career. But it makes me want to cut my wrists.
If I want to look at a hot guy, I'll look. For a romance I need more--and I personally like a slow build up with a lot of UST before they get to the smex.
I hear you guys! And I've been known to fall in love with supposedly "ugly" heroes--like Aral Vorkosigan in Bujold's Cordelia's Honor. (Which isn't strictly romance.) But I also remember really like Zebrowski (one of the cops) in the early Anita Blake books. The shifters and vampires were one of a kind but Zebrowski, hey, he made jokes and he was a good family man. I liked him. :)
Whether for a love interest or hero, female or male, I want the characters in any book I read to have a purpose. I don't just want to read about some male model wannabes get boners all the time, though I am not opposed to sex scenes in books as long as they to have a purpose and are tastefully done.
In one VF episode, Kiala said that when a guy is super-perfect-looking-hot, it actually shuts off her interest ("I've got nothing for him"), and I feel the same way.
Lena Dunham, meanwhile, recently mentioned that she casts love interests on "Girls" who feel like the audience's secret discovery, the type of guy you feel like you see the beauty in where others might not. That was really interesting.
Lena Dunham, meanwhile, recently mentioned that she casts love interests on "Girls" who feel like the audience's secret discovery, the type of guy you feel like you see the beauty in where others might not. That was really interesting.
"Competence porn". I love it when the characters are written as being knowledgeable and competent in their particular field and it always makes for a more believable story if the characters believe it too. A hero who respects that the heroine knows more about x because it’s what she does and therefore heeds her advice instead of dismissing her and macho-ing his way through it. A hero who conveys his abilities through competent action - not brute force - so the heroine feels no need to sneak off and do the opposite of what he's asked because she doesn't believe in him. Sigh, I wish. I'm so sick of heroes who are supposed to be highly intelligent, who negotiate or discuss or theorise or act stealthy for a living, but who go all alpha-douche at the drop of a hat instead of using their words.
Also, my standard for a viable romance is:If you remove them from the story and sent them to an ordinary restaurant for an ordinary date, would they still end up together? Since they'd be dressed and seated, and have to talk rather than dodge bullets, has the author given them enough personality (and I don't believe a traumatic past counts as a personality) to attact the other without showing off boobs or abs or bank statements over dessert?
@PointyEars42I believe taking the characters out of the story might've been too drastic for some non-contemporary folks.
And I'm scratching my head a bit as much of the romance in these books relies on how absolutely drop dead sexy the heroes are in these books. I love me some six pack abs as much as the next lady and I have a thing for soldiers and cops but I've been left more than a little cold by some of the romances because all they seem to rely on is how hot the hero is.
I like physical attraction but I keep looking for that moment when the two characters emotionally connect somehow--a shared love of something, or thinking the same way, or even some gesture that shows how much they understand each other and I'm not getting any of that in these.
Without that, some really well written sex is just leaving me, well, unimpressed.
Am I weird? Do you all just want hot hunks to lust over (nothing wrong with that!) or do you need something else as a reader to bond to them?