All I Want Is One Good Showdown Fight
15 Nov 2010 Leave a Comment
in Books, Romance Tags: forgiveness, groveling, relationships, trust
and a chapter or two of groveling.
This discussion has come up more than once: The too-quick to forgive heroine who borders on a doormat. Linda Howard has a few of those- the heroines in “Angel Creek, “A Game of Chance” and “Lady of the West”.
Kleypas has are recent one with Poppy in “Tempted at Twilight.”
There are others and I’ll add them as I remember them.
Now the hero’s crimes vary from cutting off the water supply to the heroine’s farm, to deceitfully manipulating scandal that forces a break-up with her beau and her to marry him instead, to lying about his identity, getting her shot and almost killed to outright hitting her.
In each of these cases, the issue was never discussed or brought to light adequately for the reader. OK, maybe a sentence or two of internal remorse from the hero, maybe a bit of the same from the heroine, but never the nasty, no holds barred, screaming banshee, beat the issue to a bloody pulp catharsis that the reader needs. The kind of fight we know we’d have with our SO’s if something like that happened to us.
At least we’d like to think we’d do it. Demand an apology, explain the loss of trust, express in words the hurt and anger; or best of all, put forth the aspect that it would be better to walk away from him and the relationship than to stay.
Make it clear that the heroine demands his respect and that he must re-earn her trust —and both deserve a higher value than he has given.
Instead, in all the above…the couple either ignore the issue and move on, discuss it with a ‘well, that happened- won’t happen again’ or the heroine decides to ‘love him anyhow’.
Okey dokey. I don’t think so Louise.
Authors who do get it right or at least learn from past mistakes are—
Linda Howard in “Loving Evangeline” (the book, not the gosh-awful, WTF was that, Made for TV movie that bore zero resemblance to the book). Here, the heroine tells the hero to take a hike at the end of the book because he was a cold bastard. YAY!
OK so they do get back together, but only after said cold bastard has gone off and marinated in his misery a bit. Realized what a screw up he was and how he threw away the best thing he ever had.
Works for me.
Another favorite of mine is Christina Dodd’s “That Scandalous Evening” which has probably my absolutely favorite grovel scene ever because… he actually is on his knees groveling! On the docks! While she ponders getting on a ship to sail to Italy, leaving him and his perfidy behind!
Double YAY! For his kneeling and her leaving.
The scene goes on for several pages, she gets to vent and is seriously about to leave him. Granted, it’s not chapters long because it’s at the end of the book, but it’s enough. You really do believe he’s sorry and remorseful and won’t do it again.
Which I think is the issue with the above mentioned books without said scenes. You never totally believe he won’t do it again because he hasn’t been scared enough at the prospect of loosing her— she came back too easy (Game of Chance, Tempted at Twilight) or never even acted angry (Angel Creek) or was angry/hurt enough in the first place (Lady of the West had her hurt, but she was also busy trying to get him to understand her side of things).
The books leaving you feeling unbalanced, like there was an injustice that was never dealt with, that a wrong was never righted. That the heroine never placed a high enough price on her self worth, selling herself too cheaping for love. It is because major deceit/mistreatment/crime was given a pass, meaning an even worse incident is almost certain to happen in the future. Call it experience, or human nature, or simply we know what can and will happen when woman is a doormat.
She’ll get walked on again, just worse the next time.
It’s hard to believe in a HEA the issues of remorse, forgiveness and trust have never fully been worked out.
So give me more scenes like the one in “That Scandalous Evening” and I’ll believe the HEA no matter what the hero does (almost).
