I never mastered that art. I am a little too opinionated, a little too stubborn, and a little too predisposed to telling fools to go jump in the nearest body of water to ever be referred to as so nice. I’m not a mean person, but I’m not so malleable and able to bend to the whims of those around me to ever be called so nice.
You know the kind I mean. No one ever says a word about them that is remotely negative. They charm the hero, his best friend, the dog, the cook (of course the hero has a cook), the butler, the household staff- soon the heroine gets better treatment than the hero and everyone’s looking at the hero like he’s Satan’s left asscheek for being out of sorts with that so nice young lady.
Why is this a common device? From historicals to medievals to contemporary romance - even contemporary suspense, when someone might be trying to kill the heroine, which is a shame because she is so nice, the perfectly amiable heroine is everywhere. Why the hesitation to paint a chick with some flaws? And I don’t mean the size-12-oh-God-I’m-fat kind of flaws either.
I have a theory that it’s easier for women, who make up the majority of the romance readership, to forgive massive flaws in a hero (like, oh, say, raping the heroine, Mr. Historical Manstud) but it’s harder to forgive massive flaws in the heroine, because essentially, as a fellow woman, that’s her imaginary competition. The reader wants to like the heroine, wants to root for her and be her friend, and having her crafted with major personality flaws or the penchant for making boneheaded decisions creates a scenario where the reader knows better, and that there heroine might be so nice but she is also so stupid- and therefore, she doesn’t deserve that fine man.
The book I’m reading right now features a criminal heroine - she’s a no-mistaking-it felony-committing criminal - and yet she’s so charming and so nice that everyone adores her, and whenever the accusation surfaces among the charmed masses that her motivations might be less-than-pure, there’s no way they’ll believe it. Is this a plot device to arrange reader sympathy? Is her unmitigated niceness a way to circumvent dislike on the part of those readers who have been victims of her brand of criminal activity? She might be a criminal but, oh, she’s so nice. She’s a good person. Bless her heart.
Hi, I’ll have the unbalanced dichotomy with a side order of bullshit, please.
My problem with the heroine who is so nice is the lack of redeeming that goes on. Most often, she redeems the hero from his snarly, cranky ways with the soothing balm of her eternal niceness. Or maybe she speaks up for herself and tells the mean antagonist to go fuck herself, but no one thinks otherwise of her for doing so.
More importantly, I don’t like people who are eternally so nice in real life, and as heroines, they’re vanilla. They’re boring. I continue reading the book and think, ‘Are you really that nice?’ At the end of the story, not much will be done to alter the heroine’s overall niceness because the heroine, and here’s what makes me really mad, is happily reinforcing the idea that women are always nice. We’re never mean. We are supposed to be so nice.
Fuck that.
*note: RWA-forbidden word count: 3
