m/f romance and the skeptical audience

[kindkit]

I just watched I Know Where I'm Going, another lovely Powell and Pressburger film with another m/f romance that I found completely unconvincing. The IMDB forums, on the other hand, are full of praise for the love story.

Now, I know I'm a tough audience for m/f romance. But there have occasionally been some that I've believed in and liked! Really! So when I find them unconvincing or unmoving, it makes me wonder whether many viewers find heterosexual romantic stories convincing merely because they're heterosexual (the stories, that is, not the viewers, although I suppose straight people are the target audience for straight-focused stories), and because the convention is that the female and male leads will get together. Whereas because I am not straight and not invested in this assumption that men and women should pair off together, I tend to want evidence that these people really love each other and will be happy together; I don't just assume that they "naturally" do and will.

I may be a tough sell, in other words, but the storytellers assume they're making their pitch to people who are 90% sold already.

And it tells you a lot about how much I like Powell and Pressburger's work that I'm willing to sit through the romance parts.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

I know that's the case for me with TV shows where that m/f pairing of the leads "naturally" happens. I'm still a diehard Noromo for X-Files. I think that a lot of it for me is that they never show why it would be good for the female character - *obviously* it's her goal in life to be the caretaker for a male character who rarely respects or listens to her! One of the things I'm really enjoying about Elementary is that they're absolutely not doing that.

[kindkit]

they never show why it would be good for the female character

Yeah, that's also the case with my most loathed subgenre of romantic comedy, the one where the intelligent and sensible woman falls in love with the hopelessly childish man-boy, and she teaches him to grow up and he teaches her to make fart noises or something.

I'm not watching Elementary for reasons I've bored/irritated people with sufficiently elsewhere, but I'm glad they're not taking the romance route with it.

[magnetic_pole]

Nothing insightful to add, just "Yes." Part of the reason I never enjoyed rom coms was that they often showed a woman (or a man) separating from a best friend (the relationship I wanted to work) and getting together with someone else.

I think it's part of the reason I'm drawn to same-sex-close-friends-getting-together stories; the author really needs to show how two people fit together in order for the story to work for me. M.

[kindkit]

Yes, and usually in stories where there's a best-friend relationship, it's possible to see why the friends care for each other. The writers put some work into it, which is not often the case with the romantic relationship.

One of the great things about Hot Fuzz, where the central male-male friendship is structured like a romance but is nominally a story about friendship, is that the audience sees Nicholas and Danny growing closer. Their relationship is built, not taken for granted.