(The author recognises that the phenomenon discussed below is not, in fact, limited to people who are married and in love. I’ll get to marriage in romance novels some other time.)

[TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of infertility and failed pregnancies below.]

[SPOILER WARNING: This piece discusses happenings from the first and third episodes of the new season of Doctor Who, as well as containing mild spoilers for Game Of Thrones.]

Last time on Hopeless Reimantic we talked about virginal heroines, and while I wasn’t totally positive on the topic, I will give the virginal heroine this: at least most of the time, she doesn’t stay virginal throughout the book. That trope has an expiration date, if you will. This next one is actually significantly more irritating to me – partly, admittedly, because it’s outside my experience in a way that I have no particular interest in remedying, but mainly because even if I didn’t feel that way I still think I’d find the topic clumsily handled and often just shoehorned in to make the romance more…legitimate.

Not everything has to be about babies, guys. Image by the illustrious Kate Beaton (http://www.harkavagrant.com), shirt by topatoco.

That’s right, folks: I’m talking about babies. Well, in brief. I suppose more accurately (and more vaguely) what I’m talking about is parenthood.

I suppose putting this column in second is kind of cheating, because it jumps to the end of the standard romance novel narrative – or, depending on how much edginess we’re going for, about three-quarters of the way through – and for that I apologise, but I promise you that the baby trope is all-pervasive enough that it’s not going  to matter. An Extremely Standard Romance Novel, you see, goes something like this:

1. [Play]boy meets [virgin] girl
2. They deny their attraction to one another for a while (usually this consists of Mr Man insisting that our heroine is Just Like All Other Women and although she makes his dick hard he could never actually love her, and our heroine protesting any kind of attraction to Mr Man at all)
3. Inevitably, sex.
4. A brief honeymoon period, usually compounded by more sex
5. Some kind of big misunderstanding that breaks them apart [at this point the heroine may or may not discover that she is pregnant]
6. Reunion. Marriage. BABIES.

The story outlined above is common to a lot of romance novels (including our old friend from last time, Bought: Destitute Yet Defiant) but it is by no means the only sprog-imbued narrative out there in Romancelandia. Nor is it even the most baby-heavy. A quick search on Dear Author for “babies” turned up eight pages of hits and reminded me that Dear Author actually has a tag for “secret baby” plotlines – yes, they exist, and they’re common enough that they get their own category on review sites. These stories might start out with two separated lovers meeting again after many years – but wait! She has a child! The fact that it’s his child is blindingly obvious throughout, but often only revealed at the very end! What could be more romantic?

A nicely infuriating example of this trope on my Kindle is a little tale called Emergency: Wife Lost and Found – a Mills&Boon Medical Romance by Carol Marinelli that, to be fair, I have to admit was less awful upon revisitation than I remember it being the first time around. It’s a reunion tale between two doctors who met in medical school and married young because – shockingly – they got pregnant, but whose marriage then fell apart upon the loss of the baby.

This is not, to be clear, in itself a storyline I take issue with. The loss of a child is a devastating one, and especially to a couple who married essentially because of the child (there are some token protests that it would have happened anyway because they were in Real True Love, but still) – I can only imagine the effects of that on their relationship. It’s no wonder they divorced, and believeable that their meeting again after so long would be fraught with emotional tension (and I don’t wanna go into the whole thing, but there’s a lot of emotional tension for their meeting to be fraught with). And it’s understandable that some of the tension between them also comes from Lorna, the heroine, having since discovered that due to endometriosis she’s unlikely to carry another pregnancy to term. I would actually have been extremely interested in a book that had dealt with those issues – that explored the characters coming to term with Lorna’s infertility, and how that might have changed or strengthened their relationship.

The thing is, the book doesn’t actually deal with any of those issues. It skates over them briefly, and then True Love Sex happens, and Lorna…gets pregnant. Magically. And by the book’s epilogue, she has another child on the way, and her happiness is complete. See, true love fixed her!

Secret babies and miracle pregnancies are not limited to contemporary romance fiction, either, although it’s only here that the total absence (or extremely brief, give-it-one-sentence-and-handwave-it-away mentions of) abortion, adoption (either way!) and foster care are so totally and thoroughly angering. Historicals often feature a heroine whose dark secret is that, for whatever reason, she thinks she can’t have children but then, inexplicably, has at least one child by the end of the book; the widow whose husband never gave her children, but who then meets the hero and gets pregnant so fast you’d think they had some sort of corresponding velcro arrangement, is a particularly common one. Because that is the miracle that true love can provide.

True love also, incidentally, provides the incentive for wanting the kids in the first place in roughly half of these cases – there are quite a lot of cases of heroines (and heroes, to be fair) for whom a family was always endgame, but also a depressing number of heroines who get pregnant, having never wanted or thought about children before, and are midway through a totally justified freakout when they realise that the baby must be Mr Man’s and melt into a puddle of warm, maternal goo and aren’t scared anymore. And don’t get me started on the reaction some heroes have to this. I distinctly remember a book I read a few months ago – it was called Momentary Marriage, one of those “we’ll just marry for a year or so to help us both out of a jam that could totally not be solved any other way!” storylines – and the hero of our tale not only makes plans to impregnate the heroine without her knowledge so that she’ll stay with him, but spends about half a page getting turned on at the idea. If art does imitate life, there are a lot more pregnancy fetishists out there than you’d expect. All I’m sayin’.

The thing is, while this trope may be extremely common in romance novels – overwhelmingly, nauseatingly common, even – it isn’t confined to them. Remember Asylum of the Daleks, the first episode of the new season of Doctor Who? That one that came out a few weeks ago? Remember Rory and Amy’s Fifty Seconds Of Conflict, when he shouts at her for leaving him and her response is WELL YOU WANTED CHILDREN AND I CAN’T HAVE THEM, SO I GAVE YOU UP RATHER THAN ACTUALLY TRY TO HAVE A CONVERSATION ABOUT THIS? Yeah. Because in the UK in 2012, apparently adoption doesn’t exist, and neither does speaking to your partner. Later on in the series we have Mad Scientist Alien, who looks at Amy and can immediately tell that she’s had children because she is sad and fierce and caring, as if motherhood is the only experience that could confer these characteristics. Genre-hopping a bit to Game of Thrones, we have Daenerys Targaryen, who becomes a mother to her people because she’s never going to have children who aren’t dragons. (Which I personally don’t see the problem with. I would much rather have dragon-babies than baby-babies, although I suppose feeding them would be something of a negotiation.) And these are just the examples I can think of off the top of my head.

I appreciate that a lot of people do want children. I appreciate that some would even go so far as to say that their children are the best things in their lives, and that is valid and legitimate and completely worthy of representation in fiction. In spite of all that, though,  as you may be able to tell, I have extremely little patience with this trope, and I’m going to try and explain why without sputtering too incoherently. Bear with me a moment.

Okay.

Okay.

First of all, I have a huge problem with motherhood being portrayed as the only really worthwhile thing a woman can aspire to. Motherhood is worthwhile, and it is important, and it deserves to be venerated and respected. But I object to the idea that it is the only thing that is worthwhile and important and worthy of veneration and respect. This elevation to the exclusion of all other things is not, as I’m not the first person to point out, extended to fatherhood, either – a man who never has children may well have been doing other, equally important, things, whereas a woman who’s never had children is often seen as an object of either pity or scorn.

So far, it seems that the only wish-fulfilment medium aimed specifically at women overwhelmingly portrays babies as the reward a good woman gets for being a good person and a good lover and without which no other goodness is really, truly good. Where does that leave women who have real-life style infertility – the kind that isn’t fixed by falling in lasting love – or those who just never had that wish in the first place?

And that brings me to my next point. I’d like everyone to bear in mind, by the way, that I say this next part as a person who doesn’t actually like children that much. I’ve definitely mellowed towards them as I’ve grown older – meeting some actually nice ones that I wasn’t forced to hang out with because I was presenting female at the time has helped – but I’m not a particular fan. They’re okay; I might want my own someday, but right now I’m leaning towards not. (That’s right, Friend Of My Friend’s Family Who Wrote Me That Poem About How Not Having Kids Is A Waste Of My Genes Five Years Ago¹ – the answer’s still no.)

Let’s review, shall we? So far this segment we’ve talked about pregnancy, secret pregnancy, miracle pregnancy, infertility, abortion, adoption and the concept of motherhood.

What have we not – really – talked about?

Any actual babies.

I do understand that it can be difficult to write about the children in child-plotlines themselves, especially if the story in question is actually supposed to be focused on relationships between adults. But there’s a pretty big difference between “this character is important but doesn’t really do much beyond eat and cry and poop, so I can’t write too much about them” and “we need something important in this story! What’s important to women? BABIES! Let’s put some babies in here”.

I suppose my overwhelming thought is that if it’s so difficult to write about pregnancies or children in a well-rounded way that makes them more than plot devices (or Plot Moppets, as the good folk over at Smart Bitches refer to them) writers should maybe think more carefully about including a pregnancy storyline, and how to treat it if they do decide to put one in (as, er, it were). Babies are the tiny humans that shape the future of our world. They deserve more respect than that.

That’s it for today! Next time on Hopeless Reimantic…either marriage or playboy heroes, I haven’t decided yet.

See you then!

• Kate Beaton’s “Shut Up About Babies” shirt available here.

1. True freaking story.

First up, there’s something interesting about the way the series presented sexuality. Straight sex was shown in abundance, with not one episode going by that failed to meet HBO’s Mandatory Nipple Quota. That said, very little of it was what you could consider “ordinary” – instead we get an array of incest, non-consent and prostitution. We never see Ed and Catelyn Stark together, or any of the show’s other (non-sibling) couples. The closest we have is Danaerys and Drogo, and by the time their partnership becomes less disturbingly non-consensual we pretty much stop seeing them as well. Straight sex, then, is abundant but somehow always unpleasant.

Renly and Loras: soon to vanish from the screen faster than you can shave an armpit.

Homosexual acts are distinctly less common in the series. Between female characters we get some slight implications with Danaerys and one of her serving girls as she learns how to please Drogo, a scene that is noticeably less graphic than the straight scenes in the show. The one time we are shown things by the same standards is a particularly unusual scene. The focus throughout is pretty much entirely on Lord Baelish as he instructs two recently arrived prostitutes. The scene is somewhat reminiscent of moments from (link is not worksafe) American Psycho, where Bateman does much the same, the sex a mere sideshow to his monologue. It places the male character directly at the centre of the scene and becomes almost parodic as Lord Baelish informs one of the pair to “be the man” in their actions.

And lastly, gay male pairings. We get one, and it’s an interesting one. On the one hand, it’s significantly more overt than it is in the books. Where the books give us a few sly remarks and implications from people, HBO pretty much flashes a giant neon “HEY GUYS, THEY’RE BONING” sign. And yet nothing is actually shown, only implied by sound effects, and the pair are then immediately written out for the rest of the series. Yes, they leave in the books as well, but given that HBO has already shown willingness to make changes, why not go a little further and develop them more fully? Certainly, HBO hasn’t shown a problem showing male relationships in past titles – see Michael Hall and Mathew St. Patrick in Six Feet Under, for example. So why the shying away this time?

Next up, issues of race. These have been widely discussed across the internet (see for example this, which we recently linked to), so I won’t go into it too much here. In summary, the handling of race is fairly disappointing and the presentation of the Dothraki never rises much above the Savage Other. The one key comparison that really illustrates this, and which is worth talking about in a little more depth takes place in the first episode.

Viserys simply can't *cope* with all this awfully tiresome uncivilisation.

The Starks, as we are first introduced to them, are going about the business of executing a deserter from the Night’s Watch, the brotherhood that guards the great wall in the North. It’s all shown as very grim and honourable, in that way that the Starks are throughout the series. No one takes any joy in it, but it’s a necessary task and the younger Starks learn a lesson about duty and suchlike from watching this poor chap get beheaded. Later we see the marriage celebrations for Danaerys and Khal Drogo. It’s a wild party with dancing and public sex. A fight breaks out over one of the women, ending with the disembowelling of the loser. Two public deaths, two very different contexts. When the (very, very white) men of the North kill someone it’s honourable and we sympathise with them. When the Dothraki do it it’s savage and lets us know that they’re Not Like Us. And that’s a problem.

Lastly, a minor character worth discussing: Lysa Tully, sister to Catelyn Stark. She’s an uncomfortable character, and a hard one to depict tastefully. If Cersei Lannister has something of the manipulative Lady Macbeth to her portrayal, Lysa Tully is entirely caught in the moment of “out damned spot, out I say!” Driven into a state of paranoid mania following the death of her husband, and with an entirely inappropriate relationship with her sickly son, there’s just something awkward about the implications of her character. As with a few others (notably Hodor), it’s a character that it’s hard to see how HBO could have done right without massively deviating from the source material.

Okay, that’s the last I’m going to say on Game of Thrones until season two rolls round. In the mean time, book five is finally out after a generation-long wait, so there’s that to get through between now and next spring.

In my initial review of the first episode I said that the female characters were a bit weak, and didn’t get much screen time. But, like their counterparts in the books, there was a good chance we’d get to see them develop into a pretty well-rounded bunch of characters. Let’s take a look at a few of them to see how HBO did.

Danaerys Targaryen

Danaerys (Emilia Clarke) was one of the more problematic characters in the first episode. She’s presented as a mostly passive tool for her brother’s plans of conquest, and pushed into a forced marriage with a disturbingly non-consensual first night. By the finale episode things have… sort of improved? She has definitely developed as a character, becoming a leader in her own right and banishing any notions that she might be passive or weak (“I do not have a gentle heart,” she declares).

She’s stood up to her brother, dealt out harsh justice, and worked to improve people’s lives by attempting to make the Dothraki end their practise of raping prisoners from their raids. Oh, and she’s got her own dragons, the first to be seen in a long, long time. On the other hand, the presentation of the dragons highlights one of the remaining issues in how she’s depicted. Rather than striding into the fire untouched and walking out resplendent, a reborn queen with her dragons behind her, she’s found the next day, curled up and naked, providing the episode’s HBO nipple quota. It’s also possibly the first use of a strategically placed dragon in mainstream TV.

The other issue with Danaerys is that her entire relationship with Khal Drogo just feels more than a little Stockholm Syndrome-y. The show never really addresses that first night, or the other occasions where we see her having sex against her will. Instead, she just learns to love him, and most of his respect for her seems to come solely from the fact she’s carrying his child. It’s not ideal.

Continuing the theme of arranged marriages…

Cersei Lannister

Evil, incestuous, and an arch-schemer, Cersei (Lena Headey) was presented initially as almost a caricature of the Ice Queen archetype. Ten episodes on, and she’s still evil, still incestuous, and still manipulative. But she’s also a lot more human and almost sympathetic. We’re given a genuinely revealing conversation between her and King Robert (Mark Addy), in which we glimpse a young woman who was married for political reasons to a king who was in love with a dead woman. We see how, raised for almost exactly this purpose, she tried to make it work, and how their flaws destroyed them and bought them to the sad state they’re in now. It makes her something a little more interesting than just evil for evil’s sake.

Sansa Stark

The last character linked by an arranged marriage is the young Sansa Stark (Sophie Turner). She’s perhaps the one we’ve seen the least progress out of. Raised from birth to meet the expectations of what a noble lady should be, and to someday marry a prince and have lots of little noble children, she’s got a lot of conditioning to overcome.

By the end of the series she’s still the most passive of the characters, still being used in other peoples’ schemes instead of forming her own. But she has at least seen that the dream she was sold was a false one, and that Joffrey is not a good king to marry, or even a remotely decent person. We get a brief glimpse of some steel in her as she talks back to him and moves to throw him off the castle wall. It’s not much, and she’s punished for it, but it gives us a hint that she might eventually get to be as cool as her sister.

Sansa: “I’m supposed to marry Prince Joffrey. I love him, and I’m meant to be his Queen and have his babies!”

Arya: “Seven hells!”

Which leads us to…

Arya Stark

Ah yes, Sansa’s sister. Standing alongside Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion Lannister as one of the best cast characters in a well cast show, Maisie Williams’s Arya is the polar opposite of her big sister. Sword-wielding, cat-chasing and adventurous, Arya actively rebels against the rules for what a noble’s daughter ought to be. On the one hand, this makes her incredibly badass. On the other hand it’s notable that she only gets away with things and survives because people mistake her for a boy. It highlights just how tight the gender roles are in the Seven Kingdoms, that even her father – a remarkably open minded man for the setting – can’t conceive of a life for her that doesn’t involve marrying a lord and having lots of offspring.

Where Arya is allowed to practise her sword fighting only as a father’s indulgence for his wilful child, and told she’ll never be a knight, her brother Bran continues to train in archery back at Winterfell. Arya is the more skilled of the two (shown in the very first episode, as she makes a shot Bran can’t), but as a girl it’s inconceivable that she could live that life, just as it’s impossible for Bran not to.

And lastly, amongst our main characters…

Catelyn Stark

She’s quite possibly the best of the bunch, in a quiet and determined way. She’s not got Danaerys’s flair or Cersei’s scheming prowess, but she gets things done and will not be stopped. It’s Catelyn (Michelle Fairley) who comforts her son after Ed’s death, not the other way round. It’s she who sums up what needs to be done: “We get the girls back. Then we kill them all.” It’s she who walks into a not-entirely-friendly castle keep alone to make the deal that’ll get their army across a major river. It’s nice to see an older female character on this show who knows what needs doing and gets it done.

On the other hand, there’s an issue with the repercussions of some of what she gets done. Her capture of Tyrion sparks a lot of drama, sees people killed and injured, and is one of the contributing factors to the war that breaks out. The whole treatment of it smacks a little too much of “flighty women do not think their actions through, and men must pick up the pieces.” It’s a key part of the plot in the books though, so that’s on Martin as much as it is on HBO.

There’s half a dozen secondary characters worth discussing as well (Shae, the Wildling woman, Sansa’s nursemaid, Catelyn’s sister), but not nearly enough room to discuss them. Damn you GoT for being so sprawling. Overall though, there are still definite issues, and there’s always the obligatory HBO nipples in each episode, but the characters are improving and will hopefully continue to do so if they stick to the course of the books. Roll on Spring 2012 and Season 2.

All images copyright HBO, taken from A Wiki of Ice and Fire

What’s been almost more interesting than the content of the show itself has been the response from critics. Ginia Bellafante kicked things off in the New York Times, labelling the show as “boy-fiction”, and suggesting that the standard HBO sex has been thrown in to appeal to otherwise disinterested female viewers. Because obviously boys like swords and fighting and girls like sex and drama. That’s how gender works, right? Wait, no.

Annalee Newitz at io9 argues back, but instead of dismissing the whole notion of gender essentialism and stories that are “for” one gender or another Newitz takes it the other way, arguing that this is clearly a tale for women. Oh, wait, perhaps it’s a satirical exaggeration of the idea, to highlight the ridiculousness of Bellafante’s review. Well, hopefully it is. It still doesn’t get around the issue of thinking people of any particular gender are wired to want certain things from their fiction, though.

Ilana Teitalbaum weighs in with a more straightforward critique of the ways in which Bellafante’s review is terribly misguided over at the Huffington Post, and probably provides the most sensible view on the discussion. I’m going to quote her here, because what she says is worth repeating for anyone too lazy to click through the links.

The characterization of fantasy as “boy fiction” is offensive to the genre and offensive to women. That we for the most part will only read what Oprah has picked, and especially if a woman wrote it, is a stereotype that is not only demeaning to women — it is also untrue…

…When we categorize books as “boy fiction” and “girl fiction” it’s just another way to promote gender stereotyping. It is predicated on the assumption that people will only read books that reflect their personal experiences, so therefore women will only deign to read about dating, shopping, and kitchen intrigues.

Okay, with that said, on to the show itself. Trying to avoid spoilers here, but apologies if any slip through. As an adaptation, it’s generally pretty damn solid. There are the inevitable minor changes that come with translating a work to screen, but there are none of the glaring alterations that make you stand up and go “They did what? But that’s totally out of character! Did they even read the books?” The casting is good (Harry Lloyd as Viserys Targaryen is palpably creepy and unpleasant), the costumes are well done, and Arya Stark and Tyrion Lannister already shine as the best characters. Arya Stark gets painfully little screen time though, which leads to the first issue with the show.

Danaerys Targaryen being blonder than thou.

The female characters, as of the first episode, do not get much representation. Hopefully this is a temporary thing and, like the books, we’ll get to see Arya, Danaerys, Catelyn etc grow into being hugely important badasses that sit firmly at the centre of key plot points. But right now they’re just not there. They get scarcely any screen time, and when they are shown they’re mostly cast in passive, receptive roles. Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) sleeps with a prostitute (because it’s not a HBO show without frequent sex and nudity) who gets more lines than Cersei Lannister and Arya Stark put together.

And Danaerys… Okay, this falls on the book as much as the adaptation, and it’s hard to see a way they could have worked around it, but her initial role as a tool for her brother’s plans, without any say in her own life, feels very awkward. Two scenes in particular are awkward enough to be uncomfortable to watch. First there’s the close up of a nude Danaerys (Emilia Clarke) being examined by her brother (and bear in mind this is a character written as being just thirteen in the book, though thankfully HBO seem to have aged her up a bit), to make sure she’s up to scratch for bartering away in exchange for an army, with oddly lingering shots of nipples and buttocks. This scene, which really should convey “look how bloody nasty and unpleasant Viserys is,” instead comes off more as “and here are some breasts, do you like them?”

And then we have the consummation of the marriage to the head of said army, Khal Drogo of the Dothraki, a scene that is shown to be even more upsetting and non-consensual than it was originally written. And it was pretty damn bad to start with. The scene is at least short, and cuts away before anything graphic, but it does raise the question of why someone at HBO thought “Hmm, what this scene needs is to be made a bit more rapey.” Seriously, there is pretty much never a time when this is a good thing for a piece of fiction. Ever.

Still, as said, there is hope that the characters will develop along the same lines they did in the book, so this issue might be a passing one. The second problem, though, is less likely to improve with future episodes.

Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), doing his best Douchey Prince Charming act.

The second issue, you see, is the unfortunate race failure. You could argue that it’s just being faithful to the books, but honestly that’s not much of an excuse. Everyone is oh so very white, and everyone we’re told is attractive (Cersei, Jaime, Danaerys) is oh so very blonde to boot. The closest we get to non-white characters are the slightly-tanned Dothraki horsemen with whom Viserys is trying to forge an alliance. And, of course, they’re depicted as crude savages. And I don’t mean “they’re a bit misunderstood” – we’re talking full on “these people are barbaric, they are not like us.” We see two men fighting over a woman, one literally pushing the other away mid-thrust and hopping on himself (which is a whole other pile of issues), before blades are drawn and someone gets disembowelled. True to the books it may be, but there’s a definite problem with a world where everyone is divided into groups of “white people” and “savages”.

Issues aside, it’s worth sticking with. If nothing else it’ll be interesting to see how they handle the events that happen to Eddard Stark, what with Sean Bean being their big name cast member.