There’s just something about them. Maybe it’s the way they make jokes at just the right time, or maybe it’s the way they lift up your chin with the tip of a sword. They can’t just be a normal character after doing stuff like that – they have to be a love interest! That’s our topic for today: what makes a love interest tick, how to make them desirable without being exploitative, and, obviously, who the best love interests are.
Show Notes
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Mbali Mathebula. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle.
[intro music]Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: And we have a special guest, Bunny, here.
Bunny: Hello!
Chris: So, we’ve recently encountered another podcast. The tone is a little on the dark and broody side, but the voices sound really smooth. And of course, this podcast showed up last minute to dashingly fight off a bunch of regressive fan rangers. We’ll see where it goes. We’re only exchanging a few links now. It’s much too early to invite any of the hosts over as guests. We don’t wanna scare them off. We have to play it cool. This is what happens when joking about our hosts would be inappropriate.
Oren: We have to personify the entire podcast, because that’s a little less weird.
Chris: A little. Slightly.
Oren: Moderately less weird. That’s a good tagline for us. Moderately less weird.
Bunny: I’m trying to think of a podcast-related pickup line.
Oren: Hey baby, you record here often?
Bunny: Man, you have the audacity, don’t you?
Oren: Ah! Oh, that’s good. That’s a good one. Put that down in the book.
Bunny: I’m gonna take that to the bars.
Chris: So, this time we are talking about love interests. So first of all, what is a love interest?
Oren: Who is love interest? Do they have sandwich discourse?
Chris: No, Oren. No love interest sandwiches.
Bunny: Only tacos.
Chris: Or is a taco a sandwich?
Bunny: No. Not go there, probably.
Chris: Okay, I’ll just say any character, the main character in particular, is on some kind of romance arc with. Or even just a potential slight hint. That there could be a romance arc, even if it doesn’t really go anywhere. Usually, they are counted as love interests.
Bunny: I have a question. Somebody they’re already dating at the beginning of the story—does that count as a love interest?
Chris: Not unless there’s an arc, I would say.
Bunny: Okay.
Oren: If someone is already in a committed relationship of some kind and that relationship is not a part of the dramatic conflict of the story in some way.
Chris: If they’re just stable and happily together.
Oren: Probably wouldn’t describe that as a love interest.
Chris: But if they get in a fight in the beginning and they have issues to resolve.
Bunny: Then they become a love interest?
Chris: Yeah, then you would probably be more likely to call them a love interest at that point. And of course, you can give secondary characters love interests, it’s just when we say, “the love interest,” it’s almost always the love interest for the main character. And often there’s exactly one, but you can have as many as you want to.
Oren: Maybe not as many as you want. Some of my clients want a lot.
Bunny: And then I dated the whole kingdom.
Chris: Too many characters.
Oren: Yeah, but this is a question of too many characters. All the characters can be love interests if you’re devoted enough. It’s just a matter of how many your story has room for.
Chris: So first, do you need a love interest in your story? No. Some writers definitely feel pressure to include romance.
Bunny: Louder for those in the back.
Chris: And feel like they have to have one. But only write one if you actually want to. Do not write romance unless you’re actually interested in romance. People will still love your story without it. And I have yet to hear anybody tell of a situation in which they didn’t put romance in their story, and then they submitted it to a publisher and an agent, and that person insisted they had to put it in. I have never heard that happening. So, obviously, there can be a lot of pressure since romance is popular and it can get worked shared online, and definitely feel like everybody else is doing it. So, we have to, but I would definitely say don’t sweat it. If unless this is something that you feel like doing.
Oren: If nothing else, if you hate writing this romance, other people are probably not going to enjoy reading it. I suppose there are exceptions out there. There might be writers out there who can write really good storylines that they absolutely hated writing. But I don’t think that applies to most of us.
Chris: I think the lack of energy in a romance the writer doesn’t actually want to write really shows. And readers can still get invested in it, but ultimately, they’ll probably be disappointed.
Bunny: I think that the sort of publisher mandated romance element, I feel like that wouldn’t happen so much in publishing as it would in cinema and Hollywood because, man, do a lot of those romances feel unnecessary. I’m not in the writer’s room. I don’t know if this is the case, but it does often feel like someone was in there and they were like, but what if the woman character had a boyfriend?
Oren: Or these two characters are on screen a lot together, and they are of different genders, so they should probably kiss. That certainly, at least, is the impression one gets from watching some of these movies.
Chris: Yeah, that’s a too many cooks in the kitchen issue. Probably were. We’re not necessarily on board. Their lack of coordination about this, and somebody could easily mandate that if we’re talking about a big-budget production with a lot of people involved in it.
Oren: Yeah, and I’ve encountered an occasional novel that has something like that where suddenly it’s, oh yeah, I guess those two are dating now. But I generally think that is more of an execution issue. At least from when I see the writers talk about those romances, in cases where I can find examples. It’s more of a execution problem than a, the writer put this in when they didn’t want to. Just because by the time you get to that level, you’re not really making that kind of mistake. You’re not putting in a romance just because you think you have to if you’re actually getting your story published.
Chris: I’ve definitely read published works that really felt like that, but certainly it’s going to be more likely in a manuscript.
Oren: The one that comes to my mind that both it felt like a contractually mandated romance but also, I think the author was into it, is The Wheel of Time. Where Elayne and Rand have almost their entire romance off screen. But that wasn’t because Robert Jordan didn’t want to put a romance in. It was just because he’s not good at romance, and he just wanted Rand to have another hot lady. All of the dating takes place off-screen.
Chris: Yeah, I feel like he probably was less interested in the romance itself and more interested in the wish fulfillment of having lots of hot ladies. And the logistics of the story and the sprawling, bloated series with people in different places meant that they weren’t in one place very much.
Oren: That romance is very funny because they have one meeting in book one, and then two and a half books later, they meet again, and I’m supposed to believe that they’ve just been burning with passion for each other based off of this one meeting. And then they date off-screen and are basically together when the story starts. It’s amazing.
Bunny: So compelling.
Chris: How do you make love interests attractive to audiences? Anyone want to take a crack at this first?
Oren: Alright, you just describe how they’re conventionally hot according to very traditional conventional hotness narratives.
Bunny: They done have the boobage!
Chris: Fruit boobs. Gotta be melons or cantaloupes.
Bunny: Oh yeah, they have balloons!
Oren: Maybe some kind of cheese metaphor; I’ve seen that, like a nice brie. I guess I would say that there is something to physical appearance, but I think you can be more creative than, yeah, than they were traditionally attractive. Cause A: that’s boring; people have seen that a lot, and it also can just feel exploitative if you’re focusing on things like cleavage, or other aspects of the body. So, you generally want to go with something that’s a little more interesting. That they like something about the romance interest’s face. Or something about the way their hair looks in the sunlight. That’s just more interesting, then. And then there were breasts.
Chris: Or mannerisms. We can have distinctive mannerisms too.
Bunny: Certainly, that’ll make them stand out as a love interest more. In terms of there being a lot of love interests that are just described vaguely as yeah, they’re hot. Then having one where it’s, sure, maybe they’re hot, but the thing that the main character notices is the way they gesture when they speak or something like that.
Chris: Yeah, I don’t think physical attractiveness, conventional physical attractiveness hurts usually, but I’ve seen too many depictions where that’s really all there is. And especially in narratives where, all the ladies in the story are super-hot. At that point, a love interest who is also hot, she just seems like all the other hot ladies. Honestly, this happens a lot in visual works too, where you have all the actresses are super-hot, and then there’s supposed to be a plot point that this actress is magically hot, and she looks like all the other actresses.
Bunny: Alternatively, she has her hair up in a bun. She’s ugly till that point.
Oren: Extremely undateable. Can’t even.
Chris: They do that thing where they style the hair to look frizzy, just to emphasize how unattractive she clearly is because her hair is frizzy.
Bunny: It reminds me of Halle Berry in Catwoman. They tried to put her in massive sweaters. She’s Halle Berry. She’s hot.
Oren: At this point, it’s so common that it’s almost more funny than annoying, where it’s like, here, this lady, she’s not attractive as, huh. Yeah, you keep telling yourself that. I definitely agree that she’s not attractive yet. Wink. Chris has a whole six archetypes for love interest’s thing. Generally. You just want to make them stand out in some way. You want them to be cool, and that can be, traditionally they can be slick and badass. That’s one way to do it. They can be kind and caring. The kind of qualities that the reader would want in a partner.
Chris: I do think that people generally like competence in a love interest. It’s less likely. With cishet men, just because there’s so much of that traditional rescue the lady stuff going on, but in general, even that is changing, in a lot of female love interests for male characters still are showing a lot of competence. And I don’t think it’s entirely just to cater to a female audience. So that one, I think we see a lot, and the risk there, of course, is having it so the love interest starts to overshadow the main character too much.
Oren: So, I think what you’re telling me is the solution is to have the opening scene where the love interest shows up and is a super badass, so we can be like, ooh, she’s cool. And then she gets captured, and all of her badassness is just not there anymore. That’s what you’re telling me to do, right?
Chris: No. Oh man, yeah. If you have a situation in which a man to rescue the woman, you just also have to find things that she does that make a difference even though he’s rescuing her. It’s not that you can’t have men rescuing women; it’s that you want her to also have agency, not just him.
Oren: Agency is of course, the magic word here.
Chris: So, she’s got her own role to play. She’s the diplomat doing the important negotiations, and he’s her bodyguard, for instance, would be one way to do that, as long as she makes a difference to the story and has a role of central importance. And of course, it matters what kind of conflict your story has. If your story relies entirely on action conflicts to steer the course and he’s the action hero and she’s not, that’s going to be a problem. But if it has a lot of political intrigue and then there’s some action on the side, then you could definitely have a main character who’s a diplomat and then have a love interest who does the fighting parts.
Bunny: And certainly, one way to make your love interest stand out is to give them a skill set that nobody else in the cast has. Maybe it isn’t an action-type shooty-punchy thing, but this character is the one who knows how to build explosives, or something like that.
Oren: Nothing more romantic than C4 on the first date.
Chris: I think chemistry is pretty important. I would say it’s especially important in visual media.
Bunny: Yeah, Chris, that’s what the C4 is.
Chris: I think one of the issues with chemistry is that people want to go from enemies to lovers or hate to love, and their antagonistic chemistry is too antagonistic.
Oren: Yeah, I was trying to think earlier: what is chemistry in this context between two characters? And I think it’s interactions that are interesting. And they can be sweet and wholesome interactions; those can produce chemistry, but often argumentative and adversarial relationships are also chemistry because they’re like, ooh, that’s fun to watch. That makes us interested in these characters, even if they, in theory, don’t like each other. But it’s easy to take that way too far and be like, now it’s just not believable, because they seem to hate each other too much for that to ever go away.
Chris: Yeah, we wanted the more level of teasing or banter. If you want them to be a little more antagonistic, competition works great. Have them compete with each other for something; that usually creates a lot of tension, that makes good chemistry between them. Because if they have to fight for personal reasons, that’s when it’s more likely to just become too much, right? As opposed to them having just opposing goals or interests, that’s much easier to pull off.
Oren: Yeah, and putting the characters in competition also really helps make sure that the romance is part of the story instead of a thing that you occasionally do when you’re taking breaks from the story. Because that’s a big problem, in manuscripts in particular, is the plot will be going, and then suddenly the plot will just grind to a halt, and we’ll go see our romantic interest, who isn’t involved in the plot in any way, and then suddenly the plot will lurch back into motion once we’re done with that scene. And that’s not ideal; you generally don’t want that.
Bunny: I feel like in that, it’s useful to take some pages from actual romance novels books, because the plots are the romance in that case, so you can have conflict-filled scenarios that your characters can find themselves in, where the romance and the conflict are one and the same. There are common tropes that people just actually look for books on them, like fake dating, that’s one of them, fake dating turns into real dating.
Oren: I do love that trope; I have to admit, I am a big fan.
Chris: I’m also a big fan of fake dating.
Bunny: It’s a good one. You might like, my roommate just read The Spanish Love Deception, which apparently does that very well. And then there’s Forced Proximity, which is another popular one, which is the, oh no, there’s only one bed and there’s a snowstorm outside. Only one bed. What do we do? But of course, then the challenge is making these feel fresh, which I think you can just do through character specificity, so like, why is it interesting for these particular characters to be in this particular scenario? Even if it is, we’ve seen that there’s only one bad thing a couple times. But now it’s these characters, and that makes it their particular interactions.
Oren: And you’ll find all kinds of discourse about tropes and whatever, but the basic rule is that if a trope is popular, that doesn’t mean you can’t use it, but it does mean it will be under more scrutiny. So, you’re gonna wanna put a little more effort into making it your own. And also making sure it’s credible. Cause the whole, if you say there’s only one bed, and it would be really easy to resolve that by going to the front desk and being like, can we get a room with two beds in it, please? People are going to notice that.
Because that’s a very popular trope, and people are going to be looking at it more critically. One thing that I see authors often neglect, most commonly for a male hero in a heteromance, although it can theoretically happen in other places, is reciprocity. We do a lot of work making sure that the love interest is someone that the hero would want to be with, but that needs to go in reverse. The hero has to be someone that it is believable that the love interest would want to be with. And sometimes I just, I don’t know what it is. I’m not just talking about Name of the Wind, but I am talking about Name of the Wind.
Chris: I see this a lot, and the good news is that it’s actually a opportunity to give your main character a little more candy.
Oren: Everyone loves candy.
Chris: Everyone loves candy! So, that’s usually… In my opinion, the solution is, look, what’s special about your main character? Give them something cool that the love interest can be interested in.
Bunny: Not just biceps with a scar on them.
Chris: But often something where maybe other people don’t understand the love interest. And you wanna establish, in that case, a specific thing they don’t understand and show it in action. That’s a mistake if you just say, oh, nobody understands me, but you do. And you don’t actually show that happening. That’s going to feel pretty contrived. And then you’d wanna set up something about the love interest. That people don’t understand, and then you’d wanna show a few interactions between the love interest and then the person where the love interest has to correct them and or explain themselves a lot, and then show that they just don’t have to do that with your hero for instance.
Oren: Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about.
Chris: Yeah. At the end of the day, people have a lot of different tastes, obviously. But what we find is that if you show how the two people are good for each other, even if somebody’s not into romance, that just helps them get on board with the value of the relationship and make it a little more compelling to them, even if that’s just not their type.
Bunny: You have to be able to understand it.
Oren: Another thing that is important for love interests, especially if this is going to be a love story that you want to draw out for a while, is why are they not together? What is stopping them from getting together? And I see this problem a lot in unpublished manuscripts. And the only one I can think of in real life off the top of my head is actually Crusher and Picard in TNG. Because other than maybe they should be afraid.
Chris: They should be afraid.
Oren: I have no idea why they’re not dating. I don’t get it. None of the arguments that they list make any sense.
Chris: And to just be clear, that is a reference to the end of a romance episode they had. Where they get psychically linked. By some technology, of course, and then they, as a result of their psychic link, it starts to unearth their feelings for each other, and then they start talking about it, and then the episode ends with them basically going on a date. They’re all dressed up in these fancy clothes and getting together in private —in one of their quarters —for a really romantic scene, and Picard tells Crusher, you know, I was thinking we shouldn’t be afraid to express our feelings, and… Crusher is just like, no, we should be, and then leaves. That’s how the episode ends. And I was just like. What? What is this?
Oren: It’s so weird watching the end of Next Generation, where they were allergic to love interests. They could maybe mention that maybe Troi and Worf we’re thinking about it a little, but then some dialogue suggests maybe that’s not gonna happen after all. And then you skip forward to Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and it’s like they can’t pair up the characters fast enough at the end. Bashir and Ezri are dating now.
Chris: Talking about forced romances. Those two have their entire romance talking to other people about their romance.
Oren: And also, Chakotay and Seven are dating now. It’s like we just have to pair off everyone immediately.
Bunny: I think that is something that TV shows do suffer from is they can’t end the show single or something’s gone wrong.
Oren: Yeah, in Voyager, it was particularly funny because I don’t even think that it was an issue of needing to pair everyone up. I honestly think it was they could not think of anything else for Chakotay to do in the finale, and they were just desperately trying to find some material for him.
Chris: That’s how badly they had neglected his character.
Oren: Because the writers have never liked Chakotay, and they have nothing to do with him. Because they abandoned his character halfway through season two. So, that was all they had. It’s like, I guess he could be dating Seven? Why not?
Chris: One of the three characters they actually liked.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: By the end.
Oren: Seven was never gonna be with Janeway or the Doctor. Which were the two characters audiences actually shipped her with. It might as well be Chakotay; why not?
Chris: So, any other good love interests? bad and love interests?
Bunny: I think this is why I asked that question at the beginning; it’s because one of my favourite love interest question marks is Waymond from Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. I love Waymond. He is such a cinnamon roll.
Chris: Oh yeah, he’s great.
Bunny: Yeah, and I think Everything, Everywhere, All at Once does a good job. They’re already together, but they have problems. So, it’s still interesting to watch them work on their relationship. Especially with the different versions of Waymond and the main character having to navigate both that and regret about her past and how he factors into that. I think Waymond’s a great character.
Oren: Everyone does love Waymond. He’s fantastic. I’m super excited for him to be in season two of American Born Chinese. It’s not technically the same character, but in my heart, I believe it’s the same person.
Bunny: We’ll take any Waymond we can get.
Chris: Yeah, definitely. The characters are very different, so we can see how they might complement each other type situation. One of my favourites right now since we’re watching Ghosts, the American version. So this is a sitcom with a bunch of ghosts in a mansion. So, the character of Nigel, Isaac’s love interest, and I just think that they work really well together. For one thing, they are both soldiers in the Revolutionary War, but Nigel was fighting for Britain and Isaac was fighting for the Yankees, obviously, but they’ve been ghosts in the same property for hundreds of years, and so that old history is faded, but it’s still present to create some level of tension and to give them obstacles to overcome and they initially get together, and then later it erupts again when they realize they’re basically two enthusiastic fans for opposing teams.
Oren: Yeah, it gives them a lot of drama to come back to, and it doesn’t feel forced because it’s the sort of thing you can believe that they would sit on for a little while, and then it would build up until they can’t hold it back anymore.
Chris: Another thing that I think works really well is, again, because they’re from the same time period, even though they’re on opposing sides, in this context, we have ghosts from people who’ve died over the period of a thousand years. And so the fact that they come from the same time period also means that they understand each other’s social mannerisms and they have the same social conventions, which clearly gives them something in common that’s really important. But something that’s different, again, creates tension is that Nigel has more experience with a relationship than Isaac does because Isaac was in the closet his entire life. And Nigel starts to get impatient at how slow Isaac is moving because this is very new territory for Isaac. Again, gives them something that we can understand both of their sides, and it creates some reasonable conflict in their relationship, but they still have a lot in common. I like those in particular.
Oren: My current favourite love interest, if anything that I’ve watched or read recently, is Miorine from The Witch from Mercury. And she and the protagonist, Suletta, just have big opposites attract energy because Suletta is the cinnamon roll, whereas Miorine is like the ruthless business leader, and they’re great together. They do the fake dating becomes real dating thing because some weird engagement rules that would take a million years to explain, but it’s very cute at the end of the show spoilers for season two, if anyone hasn’t seen it, but at the end they get married. And at first, I was a little annoyed because I was like, they never kissed! That was weird. And then I thought about it, and I was like, nobody in this story kisses. Not even the hetero couple’s kiss. This is just not a kissing anime. It ended up working just fine. But they just have sparks; they disagree on some things, and they support each other. They grow tomatoes together, which is very cute. And I didn’t expect tomatoes to be the symbol of love, but here we are.
Bunny: They’re red like hearts.
Oren: They are, and they are very charismatic tomatoes, the way they’re animated. I’m guessing that probably wasn’t cheap.
Chris: I think a good one from comparison, before we go, is book Lockwood versus show Lockwood.
Oren: Oh my gosh.
Chris: This is, again, this show; it’s on Netflix, Lockwood and Co., and so it’s got one season, which is equivalent to the first two books in a five-book series. It covers basically the same plot points, and the writers did a fantastic job of faithfully adapting the books, but at the same time making lots of little improvements that really make a big difference. And so, my experience of reading the books afterwards was surprisingly frustrating just because those little things bug you and you’ve seen them fixed. And it’s hard to deal with the unfixed version.
But in the books, you can tell that the writer, who is a man, again, even though the main character is a young woman, that he likes Lockwood better. And he’s more attached to Lockwood than to Lucy. And as a result, he’s giving Lockwood too much candy. I’ve definitely seen worse. It’s not like Lockwood gets all of the agency and Lucy doesn’t get any. Lucy gets agency. I would turn down the Lockwood agency a little bit, but again, I’ve seen much worse. But he just seems like a flawless character, and again, Lucy has a big crush on him, and so he needs to be attractive enough for her to have a crush, but it’s a little bit too much. It feels like she doesn’t really like him because her idea of him isn’t the real him.
Oren: It definitely feels like she’s… put him up on a pedestal, and then it turns out that he actually just was that thing she put up on a pedestal the whole time. Which is just not that satisfying. It feels like she should have gotten at least a little bit of a let-down when she builds him up that high.
Chris: So for show Lockwood, they just took a weakness he actually has in the books but then made it more present. And then they made it so that Lucy got fed up with him over that. Which is that he’s too reckless, and so that created a little antagonism, but they also created the romance a little earlier and made it feel a little more mutual early on, which I do think that in film really helps with the chemistry. I think the viewpoint character long after their crush actually works better in novels than it does.
Oren: Because we can’t hear the protagonist’s narration in film, usually. Hopefully.
Chris: We’re not in their head, and it really helps to see the actors play up their mutual attraction. I think that, again, bringing in his flaw that was already in the book and then actually showing her getting fed up with him sometimes really made it work a lot better.
Oren: Bunny, you need to tell us one you don’t like.
Bunny: Oh, one I don’t like. Oh, I’m sure there are many. The problem is I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction recently. Don’t come after me. One that I found a little strange, this is in the Bone graphic novel, the romance between the main character and Thorn, just because it’s one of those that feels… one-sided in the opposite direction of how it normally is, which is that the main character longs after Thorn. And sometimes it seems reciprocated, and most of the time it doesn’t. I’m not quite sure what to make of that.
Oren: Aw man, it’s been forever since I’ve read Bone. I barely remember this character.
Bunny: She’s one of the main characters, so the protagonist is Fone Bone. And then Thorn is basically the princess who’s been kept out of the public eye because of history that happened, and everything got overthrown by the rat creatures and she doesn’t know she’s a princess and she’s been kept in hiding, and then her powers start manifesting and stuff like that. She’s the granddaughter of Grandma Thorn, who is one of my favourite characters ever.
Oren: Yeah, I can’t help but notice that in this story, this is one of those ones where the protagonist is a anthropomorphic shape, whereas the love interest is a conventionally hot lady.
Bunny: Yeah, no, we don’t have any female Bone creatures, and I think they didn’t lean further into the romance just because that would be very strange. The Bone creatures are just these silly-looking little creatures, and they don’t really wear clothes, and… It would just be confusing to actually pair them up, but at the same time, they still have Fone Bone have this crush on her, so it’s just a bit strange all around.
Oren: Where is that even going?
Bunny: Yeah, and it doesn’t really go anywhere. He’s infatuated with her, and then, I guess, he settles into a, I don’t know, an appreciation of her? Which, that’s better than a lot of stories with this premise go. It’s an infatuated character who doesn’t become obsessed by the end of it.
Oren: I long for a deep appreciation of you. Alright, with that, I think we’re going to have to close out this podcast. Will we ever get together with that other podcast we mentioned, who is definitely real and lives in Canada? Who knows? We’ll find out next time, maybe.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, support us on Patreon. Just go to Patreon.com slash Mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Callie Macleod. Next, we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, there’s Kathy Ferguson, the professor of political theory in Star Trek. We’ll talk to you next week.
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