![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhysianaA few days ago, I read melannen's take on canon het relationships (via umadoshi), which was fascinating and got me thinking, but I didn't respond directly there because I realized all my thoughts on the subject were veering toward written canon rather than TV, which had been the original topic. In particular, it made me think about series mysteries, which are probably the books structured most like TV shows anyway, but with a little more space for character depth due to the medium.
From melannen's post, point 5:
This is a big problem in a lot of mystery series, particularly on the lighter/cozy side, probably because they're more likely to have female leads. The Stephanie Plum books offer the most egregious example I can think of: It was pretty clear the author intended Stephanie and Joe to be endgame, or at least that's what's telegraphed from very early on, but in the interest of drawing it out for as long as humanly possible, she's put in a will-they-won't-they triangle with the mysterious Ranger, too, he of the intense sex appeal and almost zero backstory. I made it through at least fifteen books (they get swapped around the family at the beach cottage every summer), and still nothing had been resolved, at which point everything felt entirely formulaic and I gave up. I was only in it for the characters, not the actual mysteries, and if the characters weren't going to ever progress, what was the point in continuing?
(Romance series, by contrast, just handle this by having each book focus on a different pairing in a linked chain of friends/acquaintances, which solves the problem of only wanting to tell How They Got Together stories, but are there really no readers who are interested in other aspects of romance beyond that point? For longer than 5 minutes in the background of New Couple's get-together book? Like, I like the getting together storyline as much as anyone, but this has always struck me as an odd quirk of the romance genre.)
Point 6:
This particularly bothers me in mysteries, because the main characters are usually throwing themselves in stressful situations all the time, and could really use the support of a partner! (Is it any wonder cop show partners so often get shipped? It's the only emotionally stable relationship most of these people are allowed.) The exception to this rule that I immediate thought of was Kerry Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series, in which the heroine (a plus-sized baker, no less!) wins the affections of a handsome private detective in the first book, and then they proceed to have a supportive relationship for the next 5 (oooh, Wikipedia says there's a new one out!) books, in which they help one another solve cases as needed, or just talk things over with one another, for both personal and case-related reasons. Shocking! (Her Phryne Fisher books feature Phryne in a whole web of important interpersonal relationships, some romantic and many not, but that's less canon het-related and more just "how to write relationships for detectives as if they were actual human beings.")
Point 8 was particularly interesting to me, though:
The thing this one made me think of the most was one of the longest-running series my dad got the whole family hooked on: the Spenser series, which he and my mother started reading before I was even born, and continued through 40 books. (Not counting the ones they handed off to another author after Robert Parker's death.) At first glance, this series is entirely typical of the hardbitten-ex-cop-turned-PI modern noir genre, except Spenser has a steady relationship with his girlfriend Susan Silverman the whole time, and their time together is always shown to be extremely important to Spenser, both in his ability to solve cases and also keep general life perspective. At one point in the series, they break up, but end up getting back together after a discussion of what they really want from the relationship, explicitly rejecting the idea of marriage. They were mutually unhappy apart, but likewise were equally unhappy contemplating a life where their lives were expected to blend (more than they already do) and revolve around one another. (Parker himself shared a house with his wife where they each lived on a separate floor and only shared the middle one, an arrangement he said had saved them from divorce.) Spenser also gives due, arguably equal, weight to his relationship with Hawk, the friend who often assists him with investigations, and attends regular therapy sessions. I wish more mystery writers who say Parker was an influence on them would pick up more of his ability to deal with actual adult character relationships as well as his way with dialogue.
Then the next day via Twitter I found this article on the subgenre of lady detective stories in the Victorian era, which fit nicely with my earlier thoughts about women in detective novels, but also with the fact I'd just started a rewatch of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. The article has some really interesting things to say about the way lady detectives were portrayed next to their Holmes-ian counterparts, highlighting especially how their reliance on "intuition" was seen as negative (because it was "female intuition," of course), and also how being "meddlesome" was a requirement (which obviously Holmes was as well; there are a number of occasions where he's able to make a connection due to his obsessive reading of London personal ads.) While those attitudes are perhaps expected for the time (and the predominantly male writers of the stories), I'm annoyed to find things largely unchanged in the cozy genre, despite many of the female protagonists being quirky successful business owners, etc. The "meddlesome woman" trope seems unkillable. At least Phryne Fisher sets herself up immediately as a professional "lady detective" and owns it.
In the late '80s and '90s, there was something of a wave of modern noir professional female PIs, which I enjoyed, but they also tended to fall prey to the apparent requirement that a private detective have an entirely screwed up personal life, an isolation that becomes even more odd and stark when gender-flipping the main character. These books barely even manage to get into the realm of dealing with canon het, because the characters have so few relationships of any kind. I'm not entirely sure where this trend comes from, other than old movies, though possibly it's a misinterpretation of Holmes as a "lone genius"; the reason ACD Sherlock Holmes still has such a strong fic community is because the central focus of all his stories was really his relationship with Watson, but because Watson is the narrator, it's easy to accidentally overlook the fact everything we see Holmes do in those stories is in the context of a relationship (whether one wants to read it as platonic or romantic).
This has gotten long and more rambling than I intended, but basically all my media intake lately has been coming back to the conclusion, over and over again, that if you're not letting the characters and their relationships drive the story, it's not going to be nearly as satisfying for the audience, and will, in fact, come off as flat and less coherent.
melannen's take on canon het relationships (via umadoshi), which was fascinating and got me thinking, but I didn't respond directly there because I realized all my thoughts on the subject were veering toward written canon rather than TV, which had been the original topic. In particular, it made me think about series mysteries, which are probably the books structured most like TV shows anyway, but with a little more space for character depth due to the medium.From melannen's post, point 5:
There’s a large cohort of people who think the only interesting story about romance is How They Got Together. In fanfic this works, because we can write How They Got Together 20 million times and it just gets deeper and richer with repetition, but when you’re trying to do this in a series with continuity, you either end up writing excruciatingly endless will-they-won’t-they, or repeated breakups and get-back-togethers that mostly just present a case for why they shouldn’t, or a bunch of romance-of-the-weeks that aren’t worth getting invested in, or the situation where they get together and the romance does, in fact, stop being interesting, because the writers think the interesting part is over.
This is a big problem in a lot of mystery series, particularly on the lighter/cozy side, probably because they're more likely to have female leads. The Stephanie Plum books offer the most egregious example I can think of: It was pretty clear the author intended Stephanie and Joe to be endgame, or at least that's what's telegraphed from very early on, but in the interest of drawing it out for as long as humanly possible, she's put in a will-they-won't-they triangle with the mysterious Ranger, too, he of the intense sex appeal and almost zero backstory. I made it through at least fifteen books (they get swapped around the family at the beach cottage every summer), and still nothing had been resolved, at which point everything felt entirely formulaic and I gave up. I was only in it for the characters, not the actual mysteries, and if the characters weren't going to ever progress, what was the point in continuing?
(Romance series, by contrast, just handle this by having each book focus on a different pairing in a linked chain of friends/acquaintances, which solves the problem of only wanting to tell How They Got Together stories, but are there really no readers who are interested in other aspects of romance beyond that point? For longer than 5 minutes in the background of New Couple's get-together book? Like, I like the getting together storyline as much as anyone, but this has always struck me as an odd quirk of the romance genre.)
Point 6:
When canon does try to do a centered, established relationship between two main characters, they often seem to think that the only character storyline those characters can have anymore is This Threatens the Relationship. We almost never see them have personal crises where the relationship is nothing but rock-solid support; we never see them have personal life developments that are just about them and they aren’t worrying about how their partner will react because they know their partner will support them; we don’t see plotlines where they think the relationship is fine, because it is, and then are happily surprised when it gets better. In short, the established relationship too often gets written as a weakness, when it should be a strength; written as unstable, when it should be supportive.
This particularly bothers me in mysteries, because the main characters are usually throwing themselves in stressful situations all the time, and could really use the support of a partner! (Is it any wonder cop show partners so often get shipped? It's the only emotionally stable relationship most of these people are allowed.) The exception to this rule that I immediate thought of was Kerry Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series, in which the heroine (a plus-sized baker, no less!) wins the affections of a handsome private detective in the first book, and then they proceed to have a supportive relationship for the next 5 (oooh, Wikipedia says there's a new one out!) books, in which they help one another solve cases as needed, or just talk things over with one another, for both personal and case-related reasons. Shocking! (Her Phryne Fisher books feature Phryne in a whole web of important interpersonal relationships, some romantic and many not, but that's less canon het-related and more just "how to write relationships for detectives as if they were actual human beings.")
Point 8 was particularly interesting to me, though:
Too often centered, established canon het will automatically get put on what Poly Weekly calls the Relationship Escalator, no matter whether that makes sense with the characters’ history or personalities - you step on and automatically get carried one at a time up the steps of dating, I love yous, moving in together, romantic engagement scene, formal wedding, kids, and then if it goes on long enough, kids’ life milestones take over. Sometimes just to mix it up, they change the order of a couple of them! There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it gets awfully predictable, and when a character has previously shown little to no interest in being railroaded into normativity before the endgame ship became canon, it can go OOC pretty quickly. Sometimes it’s well done and manages to stay mostly IC, especially if it’s over the course of many years, even then, but if I was in it for adults having adventures, not episodes about their kids choosing a college, I’m not interested once the show turns into that, even if it pulls it off in theory. Also, there are options other than the Relationship Escalator. I would like to see a show where the two leads start dating and then just… keep dating, because they’re happy where they are! The angst could be about the pressure to get on the relationship ladder, and them deciding over and over that they don’t want to! It could be great.
The thing this one made me think of the most was one of the longest-running series my dad got the whole family hooked on: the Spenser series, which he and my mother started reading before I was even born, and continued through 40 books. (Not counting the ones they handed off to another author after Robert Parker's death.) At first glance, this series is entirely typical of the hardbitten-ex-cop-turned-PI modern noir genre, except Spenser has a steady relationship with his girlfriend Susan Silverman the whole time, and their time together is always shown to be extremely important to Spenser, both in his ability to solve cases and also keep general life perspective. At one point in the series, they break up, but end up getting back together after a discussion of what they really want from the relationship, explicitly rejecting the idea of marriage. They were mutually unhappy apart, but likewise were equally unhappy contemplating a life where their lives were expected to blend (more than they already do) and revolve around one another. (Parker himself shared a house with his wife where they each lived on a separate floor and only shared the middle one, an arrangement he said had saved them from divorce.) Spenser also gives due, arguably equal, weight to his relationship with Hawk, the friend who often assists him with investigations, and attends regular therapy sessions. I wish more mystery writers who say Parker was an influence on them would pick up more of his ability to deal with actual adult character relationships as well as his way with dialogue.
Then the next day via Twitter I found this article on the subgenre of lady detective stories in the Victorian era, which fit nicely with my earlier thoughts about women in detective novels, but also with the fact I'd just started a rewatch of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries. The article has some really interesting things to say about the way lady detectives were portrayed next to their Holmes-ian counterparts, highlighting especially how their reliance on "intuition" was seen as negative (because it was "female intuition," of course), and also how being "meddlesome" was a requirement (which obviously Holmes was as well; there are a number of occasions where he's able to make a connection due to his obsessive reading of London personal ads.) While those attitudes are perhaps expected for the time (and the predominantly male writers of the stories), I'm annoyed to find things largely unchanged in the cozy genre, despite many of the female protagonists being quirky successful business owners, etc. The "meddlesome woman" trope seems unkillable. At least Phryne Fisher sets herself up immediately as a professional "lady detective" and owns it.
In the late '80s and '90s, there was something of a wave of modern noir professional female PIs, which I enjoyed, but they also tended to fall prey to the apparent requirement that a private detective have an entirely screwed up personal life, an isolation that becomes even more odd and stark when gender-flipping the main character. These books barely even manage to get into the realm of dealing with canon het, because the characters have so few relationships of any kind. I'm not entirely sure where this trend comes from, other than old movies, though possibly it's a misinterpretation of Holmes as a "lone genius"; the reason ACD Sherlock Holmes still has such a strong fic community is because the central focus of all his stories was really his relationship with Watson, but because Watson is the narrator, it's easy to accidentally overlook the fact everything we see Holmes do in those stories is in the context of a relationship (whether one wants to read it as platonic or romantic).
This has gotten long and more rambling than I intended, but basically all my media intake lately has been coming back to the conclusion, over and over again, that if you're not letting the characters and their relationships drive the story, it's not going to be nearly as satisfying for the audience, and will, in fact, come off as flat and less coherent.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 12:58 am (UTC)I think I assumed Susan would start dating Hawk? My expectations were already primed for the relationship elevator and there wasn't much other genre fiction to contradict it. I can really only think of Tana French, now, for realistically meandering relationships in series.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 04:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 04:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 01:56 am (UTC)You've piqued my interest about Spenser, though, so thanks for that.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 02:17 am (UTC)(But yeah, I hear you about the weird OOC-ness of later Bones. The less said about that, the better.)
Oh! Interesting note about the Spenser books: One scholar has noted that Parker was always better than many of contemporaries about representing realistic diversity in his books, especially noting that his gay characters were gay for more than points, which is likely because both his sons were gay. A lot of his real-life experience made it into his books, clearly. (Spenser's dog is also named after his real dog.)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 01:59 am (UTC)Don't even get me started on Stargate or god help me Castle.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-18 02:20 am (UTC)JAG I have less of a feeling of utter exasperation about because a good chunk of the late middle of it happened when I was living without regular TV access. And also I read your epilogue fix-it, so that's canon to me now. :-)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-19 01:00 pm (UTC)