Romance plot conventions

[oyceter]

Because I am having a very interesting conversation with Justine right now...

What are the romance tropes and conventions that drive you nuts? Why?

And which ones almost always work for you? Why?

And which ones are the ones in-between? I.e. if done well, they totally work, and if done poorly, they prompt chucking the book at a wall.

Bonus question: does Doomed Love work for you? What counts as Doomed (or, should I say, DOOMED)? What about love triangles/quadrangles/geometric shapes?

(Note: these aren't limited to romance novels, but to any narrative that involves romance-with-a-small-r.)

Also, please put spoilers in spoiler text! <span style="color:#333333;background:#333333">Spoilers go here</span>

Comments

[the_rck]

I seem to recall someone telling me, once upon a time, that ElfQuest had something like that. It was called 'Recognition' and had nothing to do with love and everything to do with reproduction. My impression, from what I was told, was that it could lead to some interesting polygons because the society recognized love matches but every chosen relationship had to accommodate Recognition because not being with the person you were tied to that way could kill you even if you despised each other.

I may be remembering this wrong (or the person who explained it to me may have been wrong), and I never read the graphic novels or the stories in the ElfQuest universe, so this must be taken with a few tablespoons of salt.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

No, no, you're remembering it right. Recognition is basically deeply linked to procreation and presumably genetic compatibility. Some of the elf societies, like the Go-Backs and the Sun Folk, seem to manage to get along perfectly fine without it, but among the Wolfriders non-Recognized couples who have children are pretty rare. They also tend to assume that Recognition means a lifetime bond, not just a mating imperative, which leads to interesting cultural conflicts when some of the Wolfriders find themselves Recognizing folks from the other societies. In those cases we see it sometimes leading to love and a lifetime bond (Cutter and Leetah), in others they just end up boinking until pregnancy gets the urge out of their systems (Dewshine and Tyldak). There's probably more examples than that but I never really followed the series closely past the four original books. (And yes, they do have cases of non-recognized mates, like Dewshine and Scouter, having to cope with one partner Recognizing someone outside of the relationship. Also canon threesomes and same-sex pairs and poly-ish arrangements!)

[the_rck]

Interesting.

I think the main reason it stuck in my head is that I played in an AD&D campaign that used Recognition as a mechanism for the GM to dictate a few pc/npc relationships. The person who explained it to me was one of the other players, and she wanted to emphasize some of the differences between what the GM was doing and how it worked in ElfQuest.