COGA: A Little Thing Called Love

[Commander]

Commander's Opinionated Gaming Articles

A Little Thing Called Love

 

Ah romance, it's a genre of writing that every writer who does not live under a rock knows about which is the biggest genre in literature. I'm a science fantasy writer personally, but that doesn't mean I've never read a romance novel before. I've also admittedly watched a couple Hallmark movies (since my mom was watching TV) and I thought they were alright. And now I remember Time Traveler's Wife which was my punishment one day. And since I'm losing man points anyways, I watch Food Network's Halloween Wars. Yes, this actually does have relevance to what we are talking about. If you are about to click away from the article or make a comment about why you hate romance, I ask that you stop what you are doing and continue reading. I'm not going to change what you think of it, but how you view it.

 

So let's just define romance for a moment. I really want to clear something up before explaining how I define it. I've seen people bring up text book definitions of words to try and prove a point. That's good and all to bring up the origin of a word, but often changes over time such as epic, edgy, and gay. When arguing at a formal or professional level, you need to omit slang and stick with the textbook definition. We are not defining the proper term and use of the word here and if you aren't sure what it is, there's a beautiful thing called Google. We're going to focus on the more informal definitions. You know how words tend to have something applied to them like Sardines are stinky. You tend to apply stinky fish and sardines interchangeably but both make you think of something that smells bad. So romance is a word that will make people go bleh, it's so cute, or some very erotic thought I cannot speak of. It's a generalization, but it gets a majority of people.

 

Let's start with the people who would go bleh at the thought of the word. Most of those people are males. I'm talking about works of romance when it comes to this and not the overall concept of a guy falling in love with a girl though the number of singles does go up each year. At least I think that's what I remember from Sociology. So how do I know that it's mostly guys? Let's learn a little Japanese. The term shonen means "few years" and is a genre used to define Japanese material aimed for young boys. These tend to have a heavy focus on action and adventure. They also have a big emphasis on visuals. The term shojo means "young girl" which is used to define material aimed for young girls. These focus on romance and relationships. These err on the side of emotion. So when the term romance is used, people think of content written for girls or females.

 

Why even is there segregation like this? I could say that it's how society defined gender roles, but that's the bullshit answer. It has to do with two things: media and prejudice. Media control is something very hard to explain, but it is an influence and form of control that grips everybody. This is probably one of the best examples of how powerful a tool it is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

 

Media helps define who you are as it exposes you to things such as what a gender is and what they do. It's not the only source as your parents, friends, and other people affect this as well, but media is a massive entity that keeps growing. This article is part of this media. The people who create this media want viewers so that they can generate income so often they skew to creating based on the social norms. In other words, they tend to write media for males to be full of action and romance/emotional stuff for women as that's what appeals to them. Basically it is a telling of what men and women should like but without physically saying it. How this is enforced is due to prejudice. People judge you for the media you watch and the things you do and talk about. I'm assuming y'all are fans of Pokemon or have been in the past so you know exactly what I'm talking about. In high school (and middle school), people make fun of you for playing kiddie games. This either pushes you to hide it but more often steer towards the social norms of what people use for media. The younger you are, the more influential it is due to children being very naive.

 

What this media is teaching boys is how to be men. It's not the only thing, but one of the things that influences it. Boys are taught that men have to be tough and strong which a lot of them probably aren't (though I did get dog piled by a bunch of 4 year olds....those demons). It's kind of like they have to be a strong pillar of support for that woman in a relationship so they also can't do stuff like cry and need to be the one to take the initiative or action. I can't really explain the visuals one as I think part of that is actually chemical implants over what is actually taught for them to like and enjoy. That's a good research project if you're ever in need of one in Sociology or Psychology.

 

Next, we have the people who think it's kind of cute. Now I get to talk more about actual romance. So I would say a majority of romance works are a guy and a girl meeting each other and overcoming the conflict to reach a happy ending. Sometimes it's a marriage and sometimes it is just a good relation. Love and romance are not complicated subjects, but trying to put it into words and generalized is a bit harder. I tend to group it into phases, but grouping them leads to problems and exclusions so just as a warning: you can disagree with how I do this and it's perfectly acceptable.

 

The first phase of a romance is what I like to call the backstory phase. It's basically everything that lead up to the second phase. Every character kind of has a story that defines who they are and why they do what they do. Backstory isn't necessarily needed to make a good character and usually should only be used to give a better understanding of them. Most of it happens before the start of a story, but sometimes writers do include this to help build the setting. Stories are not always linear so usually this is sprinkled out for a story, but we are looking at a relationship so everything happens before that needs to be put somewhere.

 

The second phase of a relationship is best described as the cliché "love at first sight". It's not necessarily the first time the two characters have met or even known about each other. This is the stage where at least one character has attraction to another character. There is no proper length for this phase as it tends to be the development before the start of a relationship. Sometimes it is 30 seconds and sometimes it is 60 years. It also could be both characters feel the same exact way. This is where most romances start, but I do want to clear something up. The whole other person being ignorant is overused as to why two characters aren't together right away. Fear is a more reasonable one and has a better drive and how varied it can be. Personally, I find this phase to be the most boring, but we'll get more into it later.

 

The third phase is actually very short and is a stage of acceptance. One character confesses their love in which either they face acceptance or rejection. Basically it's giving characters awareness for feelings for each other. If the two confess their love, then you'd move on to the next phase, but if a character gets rejection then either they move on to another character or skip the next phase or simply go back to the second phase. This is not a straight line or works in one single way. Sometimes the person who rejects them doesn't have feelings or doesn't have enough and time is needed for a relationship to grow.

 

Now we get into the messy phases. The fourth phase or stage is what I call the honeymoon phase. Another name for this could be "Happily Ever After" because so many romance works end at this stage. The thing about it is that this stage and the next are often flipped in order to try and make a story more interesting. What I personally call this stage is the delusional stage. At the start of early stages in certain phases of a relation such as a first date or marriage, people tend to overlook and not see the faults and issues with the other person giving them the impression they are a perfect fit and match everything they wanted out of the other. It has to do with hormones and chemicals in your body since people often want to feel pleasure so it gives them more of those thoughts over any negative ones. This stage varies depending on the two characters, but this is the one and only phase that will eventually come to an end.

 

The next phase we have is the conflict phase. Every relationship goes through this and it's basically something that creates and obstacle or stops a relationship. People and characters have faults and these faults to affect those who are around them. There's the whole cliché "guy cheating on the girl" conflict which many of you are familiar with at this point. This conflict brings pain to the characters which affects them deeply. Of course it could be something silly or shot like fighting where they should go to eat. I'm not going to go too detailed into this phase, but it's best placed after the honeymoon phase as relationships usually start off really good. It could honestly be placed at any given moment.

 

The next phase has many names but I'm personally going to call it bond renewal. The problem with conflicts is that there's no one way to write how it's resolved so I can't call this a resolution. When a conflict happens, something has to come out of it. There are two things that happen: a bond is broken or renewed. A broken bond could stay in the conflict stage or it could move to finding someone else. There is the possibility that nothing came out of this but that is part of the conflict which will cause buildup. Bond renewal just means that the conflict no longer is affecting the relationship.

 

The cycle of trust would be the next phase. Something about conflict and resolving it is that it builds trust. The best way I could describe a person mentally is a pumpkin. They look hard and sturdy on the outside, but often are a bit hallow and messy on the inside (and full of guts). There are these things called layers which is information about a character that they are only willing to share with a certain amount of trust. The more layers characters get into, the more they trust each other and the more they bond. This cycle is an ongoing repeat of conflict and renewal, but all cycles do come to an end. Which leads me to talk about...

 

The final stage: the end. Defining the end of a relationship is very tricky which I actually would not put it as divorce or a break-up. Death is one thing that can permanently end a relationship. Though a relationship still can go on even if both participants are deceased. The end simply states that nothing more will come out of this relationship. I like using death to define this as one who is dead is very still and very lifeless. Why I don't put divorce or a break-up here is that it is part of a conflict phase. Issues will arise with both participants being alive and conflicts will never just end. Sometimes they do though and maybe the two eventually get back together. Now if we do dive in and say death is not the end of the relationship we do get into some more psychological things which I don't want to talk about. Death is a very big subject and one that can be talked about hours upon hours so we'll end it there.

 

Now why did Commander take all that time to explain how love works? There's actually a few reasons. Do you see that honeymoon phase? There's a reason why that is such a big part of romance works and why so many people work with it. I said before that people like pleasure over pain. The honeymoon phase has such an emphasis on pleasure and the audience often feels good to see two people very happy. People like to see each other happy. But this leads to a massive amount of content focused on this and originality...isn't very original. So one could say "they are all the same" to romance works and not be entirely wrong. Even my mother who watches a lot of Hallmark movies admitted to this at points. Though that is movies which appeal much more to emotion.

 

There is something very cool about that cycle I just listed. It's not something that can just be applied to romantic relationships, but really to any positive character relations. Love is a very broad emotion that brings people together. They work in a very similar manner to how a romantic one does when you think about it. Usually it stops at a certain layer of a character so you won't ever find out everything about a character just through friendship. That's why including romantic elements into some things isn't necessarily a bad thing. Yeah, I hated them too when I was younger. But I'm not actually a fan of romance novels and books due to the heavy focus on visuals over character building. Not all of them do that, but the ones I read focused on that aspect which is why if you struggle on visuals you should read a couple romance books.

 

And the last feeling people may have is...the erotic stuff. If that made you uncomfortable to read, that makes two of us. So I'm not going to go to into these adult themes, not because it kind of is against forum policy, but more because the longer I talk about it the less comfortable people probably feel (that or purely entertained about me torturing myself). So you know how I talked about pleasures in people. This is one that a lot of people feel and greatly enjoy. It's supposed to be that way to promote reproduction which if it felt painful, the earth population would be much less than it is now. Much, much less. I'm not really into the erotic works even though I have experienced a few types of media of it in the distant past...but it is understandable why people would be into it...which guys are usually. It's a chemical impulse which for some people is the greatest of pleasures. Excuse me while I get some scotch because somebody is going to take this out of context and use it against me. This stuff tends to be geared towards males but...there's certain parts of this genre geared towards the ladies. I'm just going to move on now before I dig a bigger whole.

 

Something I've learned from my experience as a writer over the years is to not be afraid to get your toes wet into something new and even learn a thing or two from it. The best way to dive into something new is to not focus on the things you hate about it but things you liked or enjoyed from it. Find the pleasures in the pains. And don't let those social norms cloud your judgement or push you away from something. I'm not saying you should enjoy or binge on your out of your norm genres like romances, but try to at least find one to your tastes and watch it. My Little Pony is one of the examples that broke the social norm (a show tailored to young girls attracted young adults as well). Powerpuff Girls (the old, not the new stuff) and Sailor Moon also could be considered doing that as well.

 

Why is it so important for people to do this? It's to try and break the social norms. Have you ever herd the term "enslavement of the media"? Think of it as creators being forced to use certain elements due to it being what the target audience expects or wants and removes things that they feel could make them loose profits. Censorship in other words. These social norms have significantly decreased over the years already and the smaller they are, they allow creators to be more innovative and force people to be more creative, though having a few of the norms left intact is a good thing to serve as a roadmap. People control the media which controls the people in a sense. It's hard to understand as an individual, but when people step out and state they enjoy something it does create a chain reaction over time.

 

And for people who create works in any medium, you'll need to explore the elements of romance so it's better to get over that hatred of that idea now. You don't need to include romance elements, but it's hard to avoid them entirely. You just need to experience a lot of different things in order to better build you craft and find your own style. Romance isn't all about happy endings or always the whole stages of falling in love. Take a look at the movie “Up.” It's about a man trying to move forward in life after losing his beloved. Since most people reading this are gamers or into video games: Shadow of Colossus. Not a romance game but it is centered on one for its motivation so it's a good one play.