#but low stakes and character focused seems rare in histfic unless it's romance

[trans-cuchulainn]

it is fascinating going from queer historical romances written by people like kj charles who have been thoroughly steeped in classic romance novels and mills & boon (if i remember correctly, kjc used to be an m&b editor), but who are deeply concerned with things like consent and nuance and negotiated power dynamics in their books, to actual original flavour heterosexual mills & boon historicals, where it has never occurred to any of the characters to interrogate a power dynamic and consent is... dicey

(don't get me wrong i don't mean to imply that kjc only writes Healthy, Sensible relationships. she writes unhinged disasters where you're like "okay you're terrible and perfect for each other, never involve anyone else in this, thanks". but it's done in a way that doesn't fall into simplistic and unexamined class/status/gender dynamics, and instead feels like a choice those characters are knowingly making bc they are, as mentioned, unhinged disasters)

i can see in these books the roots of the books i've been reading for the last few years but these haven't yet grown beyond the roots. and what's really fascinating to me is that these are like, 2020 releases. i'm not talking 1980s romance here. this is from three years ago and it's all Big Strong Man with his Big Strong Man Hands forcibly kisses Delicate Noble Lady but it's okay because she liked it. Oh No We Must Marry Because The King Said So and he's so strong and tall and manly and she's so slender and delicate. she is swooning off her horse but he's caught her. he's inflamed with passion and he's sexily overpowering her. she doesn't know how beautiful she is and he's tormented by his dead family because he think it's his fault and he needs to avenge them. etc

it's also funny because the romance is very much centre stage and the plot is usually some absurd contrivance designed purely to engineer whatever arranged or pretend marriage is needed, but i find myself entirely uninvested in the romance and much more concerned with a random secondary character's absurd thirteenth century castle inheritance tangle. but the author is never actually interested in the inheritance tangle unless someone can get married about it. kind of tragic to be honest

#the thing is i am interested in character-led small-scale historical fiction #stories about someone living their life and experiencing some character development in the fourteenth centuey #i'm not that interested in the big battle-focuses cornwell-style historical novels #but low stakes and character focused seems rare in histfic unless it's romance #néide has opinions about books