Observation Journal: Ridiculous (but charming!) situations

This page of the observation journal is the result of reading Regency romance novellas and discovering a pattern of things that amused me far too much.

Left page: Forgetting how to draw a kookaburra in spite of having just seen one, and making my housemate watch The Ship Song Project video. Also a note about the “charm of specificity”. That day, it was in relation to seeing a piano removal van, but it applies to most very particular things — shops that only sell sale signs, or industrial sheds advertising billiard table resurfacing. I think it’s one of the reasons the Caudwell manoeuvre works.

Right page: This is another take on finding out why I feel a way about a thing (see also: YA road trips; staginess; alt-DC rom-coms). 

For reasons involving April 2020 and a hospital procedure, I’d been on a strict reading diet of very light romantic comedies and Regency romance novellas. To begin, I simply listed ridiculous situations which kept showing up and which, for all their wild improbability, thoroughly delighted me every time they appeared on the page. starting with the classic “Oh no! I am trapped in a wardrobe with you, my enemy!”

I then listed what seemed to be the necessary elements of each (e.g., attractive enemy, unaware protagonist, potential for antagonist to discover them, wardrobe, reason to be in it).

Once I had those lists, patterns started to emerge. For example, all the situations shared a degree of unlikelihood combined with abrupt intense proximity [Edit — I developed this further in “Unlikely Intense Proximities”]. On the other hand, there were two distinct orders of things: situations which moved characters from passion to love, and those which tended to move them from love to passion. There’s also a note there which says “for difference between romance and Gothic, consider each as it appears in Jane Eyre”, which I’m not sure is entirely substantiated, but is entertaining to consider.

Here’s the full list (I developed it further later in the journal, but if you like tropes, I also tweet about them occasionally). A note: these are the patterns in the books I’d just read, not requirements — there are of course other variants.

1. “Oh no! I am trapped in a wardrobe with you, my enemy!”
   1. attractive enemy
   2. unaware protagonist
   3. antagonist to potentially discover them
   4. wardrobe
   5. reason to be in it
2. “I, a sensual — but repressed and terminally honourable — person am trapped in an isolated manor with you, a dangerously attractive (but terminally honourable) stranger! Oh no!”
   1. Sensuous, unusual, but trapped-by-circumstances innocent
   2. Stormy, unusual, but honourable (ish) second party
   3. Isolated location and weather
   4. Locals who could discover them
3. “I have had a crush on a person for a long time, but now that it is about to be reciprocated I have matured enough to realise that it is you, stormy acquaintance, whom I really love. (Oh no.)”
   1. Innocent
   2. Object of attraction (unworthy but obvious)
   3. Object of affection (unconventional but harbours [own?] crush
   4. Time pressure
   5. A knowing and affectionate parental figure
4. “In an unlikely turn of events I, an unassuming but fervent individual, am betrothed to the unsuspecting object of my affections, whose would-be-true-love is determined to part us. Oh no!” 
   1. Unassuming, passionate innocent, undervalued
   2. Societally valued object of their affection, apparently oblivious to value of protagonist
   3. Reason for Marriage of Convenience (class/$/reputation)
   4. Dashing rival (a close connection or sibling of protagonist) [not necessarily, see e.g. Heyer, but in all the ones I’d just read]
   5. A calm and functional marriage
   6. Bluff loyal supporter (optional)

Observation journal lessons:

• Being silly when listing or classifying something generally pays off (see this list of paint personalities).
• It makes it easier just to get a list onto the page for later analysis (and not worry about what form that analysis should take) — and often reveals patterns of how I feel about things.
• It also catches the glee (or other emotion) I associate with those things, which makes it easier to use them for my own projects later.
• Apparently I use the term “Cabot-ish” instead of “rom-com”.

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Observation Journal — Blue bees and alt-DC rom-coms

On this page of the observation journal, I was again thinking through a pattern I’d noticed across a few books. It also features a blue bee sighting.

General journal notes: I occasionally use the journal to look a little more closely at something I enjoy. Some previous journal posts include The appeal of staginess, Breaking down patterns, and Things that tell you what they’re doing. I’ve since expanded it to look at, for example, the charm of tiny contained worlds in art — I’ll post that journal page in due course, but it led to the Ominous Groves calendar page.

In this case, I had already thought of a few key elements of the idea I wanted to analyse, so I went directly to thinking more closely about each of those. It’s a different approach to the central mind map and detailed tables I used previously, and was more useful for collating things I already wanted to say. You’ll see the note in the reflection area at the bottom says I’m still looking for a structure for these notes.

The purpose of these sorts of notes is to try to look under the hood of something I like (pictures or stories), and see what makes it work. And to find mechanisms and tools I can use to build or fix my own work.

But on to the question, which was — what is the appeal of romantic comedies set in an alternate version of Washington DC?

Context: It was April 2020 and I was in Brisbane, Australia. I was thinking of Casey McQuiston’s Red, White and Royal Blue, and Meg Cabot’s All American Girl, and the movie Dave (which I think I meant to write there instead of West Wing), and other fantasies of Washington DC. I was looking at reasons they appealed to me, and how they managed to feel “giddy, hopeful, charming”. And also, seen from outside the USA, these are a very strange genre. Finally, this wasn’t a critique of the genre (and clearly there is a lot more to be said!)— I was specifically looking for the elements which seemed to make it work.

Main points: There were six main elements that these stories seemed to share.

• Power combined with equality
  • There is a fantasy of power
  • But also the stated aim of equality (even if there is also hypocrisy)
  • The characters in a relationship often hold some power, which makes them potentially equal, even if that power is knowledge or secrets
  • The story can play with ideas of power
• A utopia, but with shadows
  • There tends to be a shining setting and a buoyant mood
  • There is a fantasy of the right thing having the potential to happen
  • But this state of affairs requires constant maintenance (which creates conflict without necessarily requiring an antagonist)
• Privilege paired with obligation
  • This exists in tension with the first point (power + equality)
  • It permits fantasies of nobility and noblesse oblige in an American context
  • All the thrill of access and secrets and a sort of White House Gothic
  • The privilege is potentially fragile (not just birth, one hopes)
• Unlikely proximity
  • Useful for the genre (meet-cutes, etc)
  • Characters are thrown together
  • There are many different interests in one place
  • Unlikely proximity is a function of the place as a constant, and a heightened mood, etc
  • It allows some small-town qualities without necessarily being weary of it
  • Rulers, the rich and famous pass through
  • Rarefied air and a small stage gives a city-state effect (and relates to privilege+obligation)
• Beauty and brains
  • Attraction and attractiveness, yes, because of the genre
  • But brains & competence & high achievers because of the setting
  • And this means that wit and banter can become effectively action scenes
  • [I’m also intrigued, lately, by books which create a milieu where the physical or intellectual attractiveness of the characters is explained by the setting rather than by coincidence/the fact that they are main characters]
• Learning curve and expertise
  • People are not (necessarily) born to this. There is always a learning/coming of age.
  • “Movement — country/America as a verb, not a noun” — I don’t remember what this means!
  • The learning curve contributes to the speed of the story and its arc
  • 4 years at a time, not generations [note: obviously there are dynasties, etc — this was in the context of the books]

It’s quite interesting to see which of these elements are shared with (for example) Regency romance, which these books occasionally remind me of (I did get into “unlikely proximities” on a later page). These alternative-DCs are the contemporary settings which most often feel to me like a Regency (but I have strange ideas about those). From a romance/rom-com perspective, it would be interesting to go back and look at the differences between this and Regency, and to see which other subgenres share the similarities. And it would of course be worth looking at the dangers, or what isn’t shown, and where books shift out of this genre when the fantasy of Washington starts to crumble, and how the genre itself changes.

Some of this reading (and these thoughts) fed into my post on the romance of the navigable world, for Meanjin.

Go. Home.

Read and Seen — April 2020

I’d been reading a lot of novellas, and thinking about books which felt just the right size, so above is Melisande from “Melisande, or Long and Short Division“, by E. Nesbit.

Books

• The Time Traveler’s Wife — Audrey Niffenegger. There’s some intriguingly ominous pacing in this one: the awareness of something bad that will have happened at some unspecified point. It reminded me of the countdown effect to some great termination or absence in Three Days to Never by Tim Powers, and also of how these are both in a way holding out on the effect in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which you’re just outright told what will happen, and then get to watch in horrified fascination as it inevitably unfolds. And the way other genres (mysteries, romances) expect the reader to know (to an extent) how the story will then, which make the thrill about the getting there. I read a few very centre-of-genre romances recently which managed to have me on the edge of my seat about how the characters would ever manage to resolve their situations.
• Upright Women Wanted — Sarah Gailey. Librarians of the Wild (again) West! The Handmaid’s Tale meets Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
• Red, White & Royal Blue — Casey McQuiston. Like reading a very explicit Meg Cabot for adults. It belongs in its own way to a very charming subcategory of romantic comedies set in a fantasy of Washington DC (All American Girl, Dave, etc).
• N or M — Agatha Christie. There was a scene in this, in which you know something bad has happened to a character (A). The following scene is of other characters playing cards, while waiting for character A. It’s incredibly tense, because it is so mundane and you’re waiting for it to be shattered, and then it… just doesn’t happen. Nothing intrudes. It’s surprisingly stressful. Not unlike parts of Picnic at Hanging Rock.
• A Civil Contract — Georgette Heyer. I liked it so much more this time around.
• Ceremonials — Katharine Coldiron. This is “a twelve-part lyric novella inspired by Florence + the Machine’s 2011 album” and one of only two Gothic-adjacent books I’ve read (in the last year, too) to draw their mythic resonance from the story of the Minotaur.
• Mistletoe Wishes: A Regency Christmas Collection (The Winter Wife, Her Christmas Earl, A Pirate for Christmas, Mistletoe and the Major, A Match Made in Mistletoe, The Christmas Stranger) — Anna Campbell. Look: people getting locked in a closet together is never not going to be funny.

Other

• National Theatre Jane Eyre