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In a context where courtship is inherently an unequal and adversarial dynamic, setting up your characters to be in conflict can be extremely simple. A woman who-for any number of reasons-feels disinclined for marriage in general, or for marriage to the other protagonist in particular, may view the courtship itself as a hostile act. In a historic context, the initial conflict sometimes stems from the coercive dynamic of courtship and marriage itself.
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Arousal, in turn, when embraced, forces a reanalysis of the underlying emotional state. Whether the conflict is a generic “war between the sexes” where personal desires are in conflict, or whether there’s an external clash that gets personalized, the underlying theme tends to be that the heightened emotions of conflict is re-interpreted by the body as arousal. In contrast, a mixed-gender “enemies to lovers” trope often tends to lean into seeing romance as conflict. And once a friendship is established as existing, there needs to be an ongoing barrier that initially prevents the characters from recognizing (or at least acknowledging) the romantic potential. (Contemporary settings are more open to the idea, of course.) So for a historic romance, there can be a significant hurdle to arranging for your protagonists to be non-romantic friends in the first place, if you have a male-female couple. That counterforce could be a lack of physical attraction it could be a significant social taboo such as a pseudo-sibiling relationship between two people who have interacted closely since childhood it could be a matter of social classification, where the other person has been tagged as “inappropriate for romance” for any number of reasons.Īs has been noted in previous installments of this series, there have been large swathes of cultural history in which non-sexual friendship between men and women was considered implausible as a concept, or at least only possible within very narrow contexts. Men and women in close social proximity-so the model goes-will invariably find desire entering the picture unless there’s an overwhelming counterforce.
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“Friends to lovers” plots for male-female couples lean heavily on the cultural expectations and stereotypes around the imperatives of sexual desire.
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It helps to begin by dissecting how the “friends to lovers” and “enemies to lovers” tropes work for mixed-gender couples, and how they work differently in historic settings than in contemporary stories. However for this particular set of tropes, I’m going to be discussing general dynamics more that specific historic examples. If you’re writing your story in a significantly different cultural setting, you should research what the differences might be with regard to expectations for friendship and for social conflict between women. Historic romance readers love their tropes, and in this series of podcasts, we look at how some of the more popular tropes function for female couples in historic settings-how they change the dynamics of the plot due to social expectations, prejudices, or assumptions around gender relations that are specific to the setting.Īs usual, my examples tend to be drawn from Western culture. In the context of historic romance novels, popular tropes include ones that describe attributes of the romantic couple, the context in which they meet, the barriers keeping them apart, or the mechanism by which they connect romantically. The trope could be a character type, or a situation, or even a plot-sequence or mini-script. And in the context of romance fiction, it has come to mean any of a variety of fixed structures or scenarios involving the romantic couple that is used regularly enough that it has come to carry a weight of expectation and meaning, and that connects the story in the reader’s mind to other stories that have used the same trope. To review briefly (because you never know who might have just stumbled on this concept for the first time), a trope is simply a recurring, conventional literary device or motif. But it seems to me that both tropes can be explored in a more interesting fashion by contrasting them with each other, while simultaneously contrasting them with how the tropes work in mixed-gender couples. It might seem a bit odd, when doing these shows on tropes in sapphic historic romance, to combine the “friends to lovers” and “enemies to lovers” tropes into a single discussion. Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 252 – Our F/Favorite Tropes Part 6: Friends or Enemies to Lovers - transcript