Romance is a genre that is built on emotionally-charged conflict, and there are fewer things stronger than emotional resonance. You don't just want to make the reader
feel, you want to make them feel in a way that evokes the emotional experiences of their own life. When you read a story about someone who is struggling in the same way that you have, when you get sucked into the story and think "This character is
me," that's super powerful. And that's what many romance stories are trying to do.
Visual novels, particularly bishoujo games and otome games, tend to focus on adolescence. (See the large number of stories set in Japanese high school.) They're essentially teen romance novels. Here's a dirty little secret about teen romance novels: they're mainly written for teens. And teens are, in many ways, inexperienced. In fact, many of the teens who read romance novels have never experienced a real, healthy relationship. So if you write a novel about the development of a real, healthy relationship, it's much harder to have emotional resonance. What these inexperienced teens
have experienced is: having a crush,
wanting to be with someone but not knowing how to express it, and fantasizing about what the perfect relationship would be. So if you want something that will emotionally resonate with teens who are inexperienced in love but highly experienced in the
feels that puberty and hormones deliver, then that's what you need to deliver: social awkwardness, frustration and longing, and a healthy dose of wish fulfillment that matches their fantasies.
Here's the issue: emotional resonance feels real. It's like a validation of your own experiences and emotions. So if you create a story that hits all of the right beats (something that a 14-year-old can relate to while also delivering wish fulfillment), it will
feel real even if the relationship that you portray is horribly unrealistic. By the same token, you could portray the most realistic healthy human relationship, and if it doesn't match up with what the 14-year-old's version of what love and romance is, then it will feel unrealistic. So if you want to have a story that feels real, you often have to chuck certain elements of realism out the window.
That's my cynical take on it, anyway. My understanding is that Twilight and many other highly successful teen romance novels follow this formula pretty closely. Have a hyper-generic protagonist to avoid breaking that emotional resonance (so your audience can look at the main character and say "This girl is
me, unpopular and misunderstood but actually truly beautiful and wonderful and lovable if only the people around her would open their eyes!").
I myself am not immune to the charms of a well-engineered romance story. I've been quite enjoying the anime Oregairu. It's unrealistic in many ways, but it's an incredibly feel-good show, because on a fundamental level it's about a likable guy who is trying his darnedest to be decent to the people around him. Because he's so selfless, it's impossible not to root for him. He
deserves to be happy. I get emotionally invested in the story, because I want desperately for him to succeed, even though he does everything wrong when it comes to romance from a "realistic" perspective. And of course the protagonist Hachiman seems very much to be engineered with a "This guy is you!" approach: he's not one of the cool popular kids, but he is actually super witty in a deadpan sort of way, and people who do take the time to get to know him think he's a great guy. Everyone fancies themselves as being that character: "I wasn't one of the cool popular kids in high school, but I'm actually super clever and witty, and I know that people would think I'm a wonderful person if only they took the time to get to know me!" Everyone wants to be like Hachiman, and lots of people can see some of themselves in Hachiman. That's what makes him such an effective protagonist.
HiddenCreature wrote:Here, if you're charming enough, you can just meet someone, have a quick chat, and then schedule a date. But to be fair, a lot of guys even in my country are too nervous to do that, as I was once.
As you say, most guys are far too nervous to actually chat up a girl and ask her out. (Even moreso when you look only at the portion of the population that plays bishoujo games.) The minute that you give your bishoujo game protagonist the confidence and agency to take initiative and directly ask a girl out on a date, you've made him a character that most of your audience can't relate to. It takes them out of the story, even if that behavior is realistic. That's why you have to "
meet cute." Most "meet cute" scenarios are horribly contrived unrealistic events, but they feel "real" in the sense that they're spontaneous (and you can never predict the unpredictable). And because of their randomness and spontaneity, and because all of the characters involved lack any sort of agency,
anyone can look at them and say, "Hey, this could happen to me." That actually makes them more realistic in the mind of someone who lacks confidence and initiative.
HiddenCreature wrote:That's how a lot of romantic comedy movies are, too. I can't think of one that focuses on what happens after the couple is married. It's always the chase during the first set of dates, and once that's over, so is the excitement.
I feel like you kind of answered one of your own questions here. The truth is, wanting something is often more fun than having it. Build-up can be even more intense and exciting than the release.
Stories are inherently about conflict. The protagonist wants something, but something is prevent him or her from obtaining it. That's the premise of your movie. On the subject of rom-coms that focus on what happens
after the wedding, nearly all of them begin with the premise that the marriage is dysfunctional, and the movie is spent trying to repair the movie. For example, The Palm Beach Story. It's actually very similar to the "standard" rom-com plot, where you have a man chasing a woman, who eventually learns to love him.
HiddenCreature wrote:But personally, because it's wish fulfillment/pandering, I think it's very unhealthy for its demographic. Primarily because they grow up actually believing this stuff could happen. It's no secret they're targeting young men who can relate to someone who isn't very social, and clearly doesn't know the required skills to actually date these kinds of girls.
Ah, and here we arrive at the uncomfortable part: creating stories that are engineered to emotionally resonate with emotionally immature teenagers can end up teaching them some very incorrect things about how romance actually works.
This seems to prompt the question: is it irresponsible to portray romance in this idealized unrealistic manner? Isn't it in some way unethical to deliberately manipulate your audience's emotions--to "trick" them into feeling good while reading your story?
I'll speak for myself. As mentioned before, I'm not immune to the charms of a good romance story--Oregairu is still immensely enjoyable for me. However, I have a heightened awareness for issues like lack of realism in teen romances. I used to love reading shoujo romance manga as a teen, but now I have a much harder time enjoying shoujo manga because I find the behavior of many of the characters frustrating and unrealistic. It's impossible for me to go back and enjoy some of the stories that enthralled me as a teen.
Realizing in retrospect what those stories did to me, I don't resent being "manipulated" or "tricked" into feeling a certain way. In fact, I
want the story to manipulate me. I read fiction because I enjoy being lied to. When I pick up a horror novel, I want it to scare me and elevate my heart rate--if that means putting the characters in a hyper-unrealistic situation where they are being chased by a maniac with a chainsaw, so be it. When I pick up a romance novel, I want to feel for the characters, and have my heart rate elevated (for a slightly different reason than the horror story). If you're writing a horror or romance novel, it should be your goal to manipulate the metabolism of your reader.
Braveheart draws some criticism because it is based on "historical" events, but isn't actually historically accurate. I think Braveheart is a great film. Braveheart isn't about William Wallace, the man. It's about William Wallace, the legend. If Braveheart was marketed and presented as a documentary or biopic, then that would be problematic. But Braveheart is entertainment, and it works great as entertainment. Similarly, Twilight isn't intended to be an instruction manual for love. It's just entertainment.
Good stories tell lies. "Love conquers all," "Crime doesn't pay," "Virtue is rewarded." Many people don't actually believe these things, but pretend that they're true. We like to believe that a wimpy nerd could beat up the school bully. We like to believe that we could win the affection of the most beautiful person in class. We like to believe that dragons exist. Because even if we know that these things aren't true, it's fun to open a book and escape to a magical dreamworld where these things are real.
Regarding your concern in how media affects viewers, consider as an analog violence in media. There are people who express concern over depictions of violence in media, and argue that violent video games and movies teach children unhealthy lessons, like "winners overpower their enemies using violence," and "harming humans is entertainment." Of course, there are numerous counter-arguments to this, most of them making points about freedom of speech, artistic expression, and so on. But I think one of my favorite defenses of violent movies was succinctly expressed by Quentin Tarantino in a television interview when discussing his movie Kill Bill:
J: "Why the need for so much gruesome, graphic violence?"
Q: "Because it's so much fun, Jan!"
Is it healthy to watch Uma Thurman kill 90 people and paint the walls red with their blood? I don't know, but it sure is fun to watch. Ultimately, I feel it's the responsibility of the viewer to separate fiction from reality.