Mr. Darcy Needs To Be A Dick

How flawed can a main character in a romance be?

Industry standards are pretty firm in that main characters in a romance need to be above reproach. If they have flaws, they are worked out within the text; if they have dark backstories, it’s best if it’s revealed they were really trying to protect someone else and have been misunderstood all along. Even in fields like professional sports or policework or blue-collar labor in which we know the real people in those jobs who have access to current debates on inclusive language and respectful tone towards all other walks of life are few and far between, a big part of the escapism in romance, especially queer romance, seems to be characters who always know all the right words and phrases. (1)

Fun fact: When googling freely available images of Pride and Prejudice, google AI told me his name is "Admiral Darcy". I guess we've taught AI poor reading comprehension already.

And these tropes are important for the genre! They go all the way back to the Ur-Text, Pride and Prejudice. How could we root for Mr. Darcy if his actions weren’t motivated by protecting his sister and his friend, even if they were in part misguided? How could we end the book incandescently happy if he hadn’t worked on his flaws and bettered himself to deserve our heroine?

But much like the job interview pitfall of choosing a weakness that isn’t actually a weakness (“I’m a perfectionist”, “I work too hard”), I posit that the pressure on romance protagonists to be above reproach leads to less interesting character arcs.

See, Mr. Darcy isn’t just prideful and misguided because that’s who he is. It’s who he was raised to be, and the book is very pointed in telling us that. His behavior is a class issue. He believes himself to be smarter and more worthy than others on the basis of his birth, and while he is revealed to be smarter and more worthy than, say, Wickham, he needs to learn following the lessons he was given as a child means showing respect for the opinions and situations of those less fortunate than him.

This is not to say I always need the characters in a romance to be deeply flawed and complex individuals working out the ways in which systemic oppression has affected their lives. Sometimes the story is better served by having a strong external plot with characters trying their best to work with or against it. However, romance is by its very nature one of the most introspective and character-focused genres out there, and at the risk of sounding like a crotchety old lady, I appreciate that and want it to stay. Let the protagonists make mistakes. Let them say thoughtless, even cruel things and then learn to do better.

The scary thing is being attached to another person. Do you get it? It's scary because you give up your independence and have to rely on someone else, just like in a relati---

We live in a time that more and more rejects subtlety in all its forms. The music industry

has embraced the single entendre in Sabrina Carpenter and Taylor Swift’s newest albums (not knocking either of them or fans thereof; however, both albums are not for me for this very reason). Horror movies are heading away from “this eldritch nightmare subtly represents this real-life fear” to “we explicitly made the real-life fear the monster”. And some readers are rejecting the tried-and-true staple of the romance genre – the unreliable, flawed narrator.

Romance lives on a close third-person or first-person narrator who is in the character’s head. A big part of being a person walking through the world is that you don’t always know everything that’s going on. To capture a voice I want to read as a character on a journey to a better place in life, half the joy (to me) is the dramatic irony of sitting in the passenger seat and yelling at the character to figure it out already. The other half is in the oh so satisfying moment when it does click.

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When I write, I care a lot about creating this moment. For me, that means I try to give my characters flaws inkeeping with their lives and backstories. In Two for Holding, which comes out on October 28^th, I could not see my way into writing about hockey players without including some of the less savory aspects of the lives they lead: a kind of monomania leading them to value their careers above and beyond anything else in their lives and the results of growing up in a culture mired in pervasive misogyny and homophobia. Of course in a romance these traits need to be addressed and improved upon, but it’s up to readers as to how that element works for them. With the world in general being the way it is now, I fully understand readers who don’t have the energy or interest to engage with these kinds of flaws. It’s also fully up for debate if I succeed as a writer or if the conclusion of the arc is unsatisfying for readers.

There are plenty of examples where it doesn’t work. I hope to never compare my books to the 50 Shades franchise, but that is an example of a series where for a lot of readers, the flaws in the main characters don’t work because the narration seems unaware that they are flaws and the resolution for them is therefor unsatisfying. So does that mean 50 Shades is a bad book? Or is it the inception of Dark Romance? Ultimately, in my opinion, being able to have that debate is the whole point.

My one wish as a reader, writer and a lover of all things romance is to keep the flaws. Keep the complexity. Keep the subtlety. Let readers have something to sink their teeth into and think about while they’re reading, and let us come to our own conclusions about whether it works or not.

(1)    A major and currently popular exception being the dark romance subgenre, where I’m told the whole point is morally grey love interests. I’ll be honest, it’s not my wheelhouse, so I’m leaving that out of this essay because I know nothing at all about it.