"Remove the love triangle...".

A question of genre...

I'm a huge fan of George Takei, both as Mr. Sulu (yes, I'll admit it, I'm a not-so-closet Trekkie!) but more recently as a follower of his fan-fed humour feed on his Facebook page.

That being said, I have a teensy bone to pick with one of his recently posted memes:

Okay, so we all like to join in on a little Twilight-bashing from time to time. It's popular, it's riddled with teenage angst and did I mention that it's incredibly popular. I will be among the first to start listing the elements about the series (the books or the films) that irritate me, but in this case, I'm stepping up. I'm standing up for Twilight. Perhaps not as an entry into the great writing of Western culture. Perhaps not as a generation-defining masterpiece. What I want to defend here is the genre.

Let's have a look...

The Hunger Games

This story is set in a futuristic, dystopian society. The central plot focuses on the fight-to-the-death survival story. Genres we could easily assign would be Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Young Adult. Is there a romantic element in the story? Yes. But it's a sub-plot.

Twilight

In my mind, Twilight fits into several genres if you consider the series as a whole. Fantasy, Young Adult, Vampire. Some might say even Urban Fantasy due to the concentration on Forks, Washington and the supernatural elements. But if we're looking at the first book particularly, the most important genre categorisation here has to be Romance.

My evidence? Vampire-boy meets human-girl. They fall in love. The competing character of Jacob gets in the way, along with that tiny issue of Edward being a vampire and Bella a human and how it means they can never be together (perfect plot device!). Love prevails. Yup. That's a romance.

Just to double-check myself I went onto Amazon.co.uk and checked up on the genre categories that each book was listed in, as they're usually pretty accurate:

The Hunger Games:

Twilight:

Oh hey! Look...they pretty much match what I thought. Fancy that.

"So get to the point already!" you say...

Okay, it's simple really, and you've probably already sorted this out. But just to be clear.


A. Remove a romantic sub-plot from The Hunger Games, and yes, you will still have an intact plot.

B. Remove the central plot from Twilight, and of course you have nothing left but setting!

I rest my case. And I shake my pompoms for romance. Because, after all...love is important. And it's still pretty damn popular, even if there isn't always a fight-to-the-death-survival story included. Oh wait...wasn't there one of those in Twilight...?

A different type of heroine...

I've been doing my homework this week, reading up on some of the greatest names in romantic fiction. I found myself on Nora Roberts' site, and from there reading an article of an interview with her by Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer called Nora Roberts: The woman who rewrote the rules of romantic fiction.

Click to read the article

You can't argue with the fact that Nora is incredibly successful at what she does. I remember reading a few of her books when I was still nicking them out of my mother's bedside table, but I've not really been drawn back to them for some reason.

She is incredibly prolific, able to write a novel in 45 days and then just start on another! Can you imagine?

One thing that's been at the back of my mind and bothering me somewhat is what is said in the article about her heroines. They're all very ambitious women with high-powered jobs and somewhere on the spectrum of swash to buckle.

If I'm honest, if the heroine is engaging enough, I don't mind a story like that, but what I really like in a story is possibly someone a little bit more like me. Not a high-powered superwoman, but someone who may need physical rescue. Of course she has to be the emotional rescuer in the story, or she wouldn't be interesting at all.

Ironically, it was the so-called push-over type heroines that Nora was trying to get away from when she wrote her own first novels as she said the heroines just weren't 'feisty' enough.

Considering her popularity, this gives me pause. She wrote what she enjoyed reading, and she's sold millions of books. This means that women love to read about her type of heroine. But is my type of heroine actually of interest to anyone? Will they just think she's weak?

In Bronte sister terms, do I try to write my heroines as Catherine Earnshaw or Jane Eyre? I think I'm just going to have to follow my heart, and my gut.

But thanks to Nora and the others who have forged Romance into a multifaceted genre, perhaps there's room for everyone, even me?