between the salt water and the sea strand

[lotesse]

Been thinking about "specialness"/supernaturality in romantic geekstuff. This was actually sparked off by my attempts to explain Twilight to my boyfriend - I ended up talking about the fantasy of the supernatural lover/fantasy objects who sweeps off the ordinary girl with whom we all identify. He asked it the gendering ever went the other way around. I've been making lists! Pairings which involve in some way falling in love with the "other," sorted by gender:



"Special"guy/ordinary girl pairings:
Jareth/Sarah (Labyrinth)
Edward/Bella (Twilight)
The Beauty and the Beast stories
? Harry/Ginny (Harry Potter)
Howl/Sophie (Howl's Moving Castle)
Sam/Jess (Supernatural)
Inuyasha/Kagome (Inuyasha)
Dracula/Mina (Dracula)
? Erik/Christine (Phantom of the Opera)
Winry/Ed [/Al] (Fullmetal Alchemist)
Goranu/Mitsuko (Little Sister, Kara Dalkey)
Kim/Mairelon (Mairelon the Magician, P.C. Wrede)
Ares/Xena (XWP)
Peter/Wendy (Peter Pan)
Tam Lin/Janet (Tam Lin)
eta: Jesse/Winnie (Tuck Everlasting)


"Special" girl/ ordinary guy pairings:
Taran/Eilonwy (Prydain)
? Han/Leia (Star Wars)
Buffy/Riley (BTVS)
Glinfiniel/Thierry (Windleaf, Josepha Sherman)
Beren/Luthien (Tolkien)
The Selkie Wife stories
Tristran/Yvaine (Stardust)
John/Aeryn (Farscape)
River/Simon [/Mal] (Firefly)
Caspian/Ramandu's Daughter (Narnia)
Elphaba/Fiero (Wicked)
Saaski/Tam (The Moorchild, Eloise McGraw)


Everybody's special pairings:
Buffy/Angel [/Spike] (BTVS)
Alanna/George [/Jon] (Tortall)
Daine/Numair (Tortall)
Ron/Hermione (Harry Potter)
Sam/Madison (Supernatural)
Ged/Tenar (Earthsea)
Will/Lyra (His Dark Materials)
Cimorene/Mendanbar (Enchanted Forest Chronicles)
Sabriel/Touchstone (Sabriel)
Jakkin/Akki (Pit Dragon Trilogy, Jane Yolen)
Wren/Connor (Wren Books, Sherwood Smith)



I'm sticking to het, specifically because I'm interested in the gendered implications of "otherness" within heterosexual genre romance narratives. From what I can tell - and I guess I'm pretty much reading from a female-oriented mindset here in terms of fantasy and identification - "special" guy pairings seem like they play into a much more predatory, dom/sub kind of thing, and the attraction is located in the idea of being wanted by someone so different and wonderful and strange. “Special” girl pairings are more about a conflation between women as other in patriarchy and women as literally different “other.”

Anything you want to add to the lists? Anything I missed? Implications?

Comments

[theprimrosepath.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think a case could be made to place the Beauty and the Beast stories under the "Everybody's Special" category. Yes, the beast is this mysterious and tragically romantic figure who has chosen tiny little me for his object of affection...but the moment I love him back, I become special too; he can't be human again without me. The part of those stories that I always found most appealing was that the prince needed me to ride in and save him.

May I ask about the ? by Erik & Christine? Because I'm having some conflicting thoughts on that one too. In any case, you could also arguably put Raoul/Christine on that list too.

Might we also add Meg/Calvin to the "Everybody's Special" list?

[lotesse]

Beauty might be needed, but not because she is magical, per say. She's just a human girl, if an especially open-hearted or perceptive one. Whereas the Beast is a magical creature, a man-animal hybrid, the product of a unnatural spell.

I question-marked Erik/Christine because, while Erik does function as a mysterious inhuman other, he is in reality just a messed-up dude.

Meg and Cal, are, I think, both essentially ordinary. It's why I love them - they're a boy and a girl, not fairies or ensorcelled royalty or part-demon or anything like that. They're human beings who interact with the extraordinary, but neither of them are different in kind from you or I.

There are my rationales, but my head could also be on all wrong, I dunno.

[theprimrosepath.livejournal.com]

I think my brain skipped right over the "supernaturality" element and began equating "special" with "dominant" - which meant that I was evaluating the "Everybody's Special" category in terms of equal footing in the relationship, and that's probably a completely different conversation in itself. :)

Re-evaluating for that supernatural element, I'd have to agree with what you pointed out.

[lotesse]

Right. I guess I'm looking to see if there's a correlation of any sort between the two, whether direct or inverse. So "special" equates weird, inhuman, or otherwise abnormal.

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

I love that you included The Moorchild.

For the "special girl"/ordinary guy I'd include:
Guiwenneth/Stephen, Christian, and George Huxley from the Ryhope Wood series. I doubt you've read the series but I think you'd enjoy it because there are interesting and multiple versions of folklore, cultural memories, what our minds are able to create, etc. I find the pairings to be extremely interesting because at different times George Huxley and his sons (Stephen and Christian) all fall in love with different versions of the same woman. I'd suggest reading Mythago Wood first; the author is Robert Holdstock.

It seems to me that nine times out of ten in vampire literature/movies the pairings lean toward "special" guy/ordinary girl, with a few exceptions like Buffy. As many of these novels are written by women, one could argue that the author might be living a fantasy through her characters but you also have the fact that Dracula, one of the major works that got the literary vampire rolling, was written by a man.

[theprimrosepath.livejournal.com]

but you also have the fact that Dracula, one of the major works that got the literary vampire rolling, was written by a man.

As was Carmilla, and pretty much all of the short vampire fiction up through the late 19th century, insofar as I've been able to find. I can't think of any early major vampire novels other than Dracula at the moment...someone refresh my memory?

Interesting that, though there are exceptions, it doesn't seem like the overall usage of the vampire character changes with the gender of the writer.

[lotesse]

It wouldn't - the vamp fantasy is all about predator and prey, and both men and women can get off on that sort of thing. The part of my brain that is a radical feminist wants to say that there's something significant in women's adoption of a male-created power fantasy - s/m as a (valid, healthy) survival response to the toxicity of patriarchal sexuality.

[theprimrosepath.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Mary Wilkins Freeman's Luella Miller? I like how she turns the tables a bit and uses the near-complete de-sexualization of her female vampire to illustrate the constraints of class and gender roles.

[lotesse]

No, I haven't - but Jewell Gomez does this really cool thing in her book "The Gilda Stories" with black lesbian vampires, so I do recognize that it can be done. I just think it isn't done often.

[lotesse]

Because I love The Moorchild! And okay, Ryhope Wood is on the reading list, thanks for the rec.

And I *hate* Dracula, because it skeeves me right out! Maybe because it was written by a man. I dunno, vamps in general freak me, because they're invoking this s/m fantasy of dominance, violent sexuality, and coercion. I get that some people are into that sort of thing, but it just icks me. Buffy/Angel is doomed, I think, to remain my only vamp pairing!

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

Dracula definitely has skeevy issues but that's probably one of the reasons why I like it. I can enjoy the reading experience and say, "Stoker, what were you thinking?!" at the same time. Mel Brooks' Dracula: Dead and Loving It is most likely my favorite vampire movie, especially because it directly parodies Bram Stoker's Dracula multiple times. I will admit that in many vamp pairings that I often want to say (to the heroine), "Look, I don't care if he's sexy and has this mysterious aura. If he starts acting like a bossy twit, just slam the door on his ass!"

[lotesse]

Yay Dracula: Dead and Loving It!

I just. With Dracula. The psychosexual issues are just too obvious for me. And Jonathan Harker is hysterically girly.

(note - you don't watch Supernatural, do you? A few weeks ago they fought black-and-white-movie!Dracula, and it was insanely awesome, and the ep is so totally worth your time even if it isn't your show - Monster Movie is the title)

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

And Jonathan Harker is hysterically girly. He is! Mina should've been the one sent to the castle at the novel's beginning; she would have handled the situation much better.

I saw the first two episodes of Supernatural on YouTube before it got yanked for copyright violation. (Oh, YouTube.) The other day I looked on the library catalog for Rochester libraries and it looks like a few have the DVDs. I just need to get around to requesting them.

[lotesse]

Check out surfthechannel.com - they index vids from, like, Japanese youtube and stuff. You can find almost anything over there, streamable.

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

I thought of one more "special" guy/ordinary girl pairing: Jesse Tuck/Winnie Foster from Tuck Everlasting.

I forget where I saw this icon, but I think it was yesterday. The image: Sam and Dean in a dark hallway. The text: "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good."

[lotesse]

OMG Jesse/Winnie for the win!

[ladymordecai.livejournal.com]

If you're looking at YA romantic fantasy, one of the series that made the rounds of my friends and I in middle school was the Night World series, by L.J. Smith. *is embarrassed*

In retrospect, they're not great, but the premise of the series is that the foundations of the world are being upset because Night Worlders keep finding human soul mates, which isn't supposed to happen (the Night World consists of witches, were-creatures, and vampires). The first book is pretty usual boy-vampire, girl-human, and he Turns her by the end. In the entire series, when the boy is the Nightworlder, the girl is human, and in the few cases when the girl is a Nightworlders . . . it turns out the boy is, too. So the girl never gets to be "special" and the guy human.

Just thought I'd add that, 'cause the entire series pans that way. There's like, eight books, I think. And I know LJ Smith has another series, but I don't remember it 'cause I didn't read it.

Good luck (and an interesting list)!

[lotesse]

No worries, doll, I'm sure we read plenty of equally-ridiculous things when we were sprogs.

Nightworlder sounds pretty darn paradigmatic. It's wild that the dynamics of this sort of thing are so deeply and strictly coded - there's definitely a "right" way.