Journal: Love Interests

Journal: Love Interests
by Paul Adams

Today, my thoughts center on the concept of love interests and a few of the issues surrounding them. See, a good romance is a difficult thing to nail, and there are way too many books, movies, TV series, and other forms of story-driven media in which the romance is the worst aspect of it, or the love interest character themselves are the one character that the story could do without. Today I will detail two specific trends that I have noticed, and try to work out a possible remedy for them.

The Mary Jane Effect

So the Mary Jane Effect is a common occurrence that I have named after Spider-Man’s long-running love interest Mary Jane Watson. This phenomenon occurs when a character, most commonly the love interest, is a complex and thoroughly fleshed out character in their own right in their original version, but, because of their role as “the love interest,” are sapped of all personality and turned into little more than “a generic love interest.”

In the original comics, Mary Jane was not written to be a love interest. In fact, the character was created and written to contrast with the actual love interest of Gwen Stacy. She was a type of “anti-love interest,” a character designed to show how much better Gwen was by comparison. Because of this, Gwen became very much the “generic love interest” as mentioned earlier, while Mary Jane was allowed to develop and grow into an interesting and complex character. The story moved forward, Gwen died, Mary Jane became Peter’s shoulder to cry on, and eventually, their relationship came to its natural conclusion and Peter and Mary Jane were married.

Unfortunately, most media adaptations of the Spider-Man comics came after this point in time, thus, because she was Peter’s official undeniable wife by this time, Mary Jane was the one cast in the love interest role in those adaptations. And because she was “the love interest” in those adaptations, she became nothing more than a “generic love interest.” Interestingly, because of this, Gwen Stacy was then written specifically to contrast with Mary Jane in the Amazing Spider-Man series of films, in a sort of reverse Mary Jane Effect.

Mary Jane is the most obvious and well-known example of this effect, but it has cropped up in a number of other adaptations, such as Chi Chi in Dragonball Evolution, Annabeth Chase in the Percy Jackson movies, and most if not all of the love interests portrayed in far too many superhero movie adaptations.

CW Love Interest Syndrome

If the Mary Jane Effect has one saving grace, it is that its victims are just boring. In the case of this next phenomenon, however, those who suffer from it become tiring, infuriating, and often downright intolerable. I’ve named this phenomenon after the programming channel called the CW, who are notorious for their instances of it. The effects of this syndrome are the result of the writers of a work being incapable of doing anything with the love interest besides making them a minor antagonist any time they appear.

Perhaps the CW’s most maddening example of this is Smallville’s Lana Lang. Lana Lang is introduced as the object of our hero Clark’s desire, and many episodes center or at least include his attempts to gain her affections. While this was all well and good for a while, after a while, Lana’s appearances in each episode tended to go something like this.

Some superpowered villain is threatening innocent people.

Clark needs to stop the villain, but his doing so will conflict in some way with Lana’s expectations of him.

Clark chooses to save the day, even if it means losing Lana in the process.

The audience is treated to a truly, truly, wonderful and not-at-all unenjoyable scene of Lana chewing him out and telling him he’s a worthless piece of trash.

The next episode starts with Clark working to repair the relationship.

Rinse and repeat, for seven endless seasons.

After a while, you start to wonder why Clark is even remotely attracted to her any more, or if either of them actually has any real emotion connection with the other outside of simple sexual attraction.

An interesting case study of this syndrome, one that I feel truly demonstrates the CW’s true ineptitude in this matter, is their handling of Laurel and Felicity in their series Arrow. When the series began, Laurel was introduced as Oliver’s intended love interest. And right from the beginning, Laurel proved herself to be an almost uncanny recreation of Lana, filling the exact same role Lana did in every episode, and spending way too much of her dialogue telling off Oliver and spelling out exactly what was wrong with him in every single scene between them.

Then came Felicity, a quirky computer geek that Oliver recruited to be his tech support on his missions. Felicity was a fun and interesting character who contributed to every episode she appeared in and worked well off of Oliver’s stern demeanor. Naturally, most of the show’s following gravitated to her as a far superior alternative to Laurel’s tired and aggravating portrayal.

When the show moved into its third season, the creators seemed to take the hint and listened to their fans, shifting Oliver’s affections to Felicity and making her the full-time love interest. In what might be the fastest character derailment ever recorded, over night, Laurel became an interesting and complex character, contributing to the story and following a strong character arc of her own, while Felicity soon became one of the most insufferable and obnoxious characters on television, existing only to tear Oliver down and make him hate himself for doing what he had to do.

Both of these phenomena appear far too commonly in fiction, and, I feel, have been major contributing factors to the general stigma many have toward romances in other genres. Because of these occurrences, the concept of a love interest in fiction has come to be seen as either contributing nothing to the plot or making everything worse with its mere presence. However, like just about everything else in fiction, it can be done well if handled properly.

What seems to be a possible solution to the Mary Jane Effect, and “generic love interests” in general, is to write a character first before you write a romance. Mary Jane, as well as Chi Chi, Annabeth, and various other superhero love interests, were not inherently written to be love interests. They were written to be characters first. Mary Jane started out as the anti-love interest, which led to Peter falling in love with her for who she was. Annabeth was written to be a complex character who developed a strong and loving friendship with Percy, and romantic interest didn’t really even start to grow between them until the third book. In Dragonball, the character of Son Goku had no concept of romance at all, and didn’t really even grasp the concept of male and female. Chi Chi was a side supporting character who tricked Goku into marrying her. In each one of these, the characters were characters first, their role as love interest came naturally and in the best interest of the story itself.

As for the CW Love Interest Syndrome, I feel a remedy is going to be a little more complicated, but not undoable. For this, I think I will turn to Annabeth Chase of the Percy Jackson books, not the movies. What makes Annabeth and Percy’s relationship work in the end comes down to three things. A) Annabeth was established as her own character first before developing a romance with Percy; B) A genuine emotional connection was formed between them, so that the reader knew that, without a doubt, even when they fought or got mad at each other, they truly did care about one another; and C) the author made sure that the story was better when Annabeth was around, not worse.

Of course, we’ve already dealt with the first, but I feel it does still apply. Lana and Laurel would both have been better characters if they had actually been characters beforehand. As for a genuine emotional connection, I look back over Lana’s entire run on Smallville, and I can’t for the life of me remember a moment when I felt as though Lana and Clark actually cared about each other outside of wanting to get in each other’s pants. And of course, making sure that the story is better when the love interest comes around, not worse. I feel this tends to go a long way toward getting the reader or viewer on the side of the romance. If everything gets worse whenever the love interest comes around, of course the audience wouldn’t want them together with the main character. We’re supposed to want the main character to be happy, aren’t we? Not tormented for the rest of their natural life. In the cases of Lana, Laurel, and Felicity, any time they came on screen, the story ground to a halt and the situation became that much worse for everyone else in the cast. But when Annabeth and other better written love interests came around, they contributed to the plot, actively helping to resolve each given situation, instead of hindering it. In the third book of the series, Annabeth goes missing for a time, and the audience felt her absence just as much as Percy did. And that’s how I think any good love interest should be handled. The audience should miss them when they are not around, instead of groaning when they are.

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