[LMB] An article referencing Herself at sequentialtart

[Sylvus Tarn]

On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 00:23 -0400, Paula Lieberman wrote:

> Eeep, I think you missed some of the point of the story--the woman -failed- 
> in her duties, she was not only supposed to seduce him, she was supposed to 
> fall in love with him.  She achieved the first, but not the second... it's a 
> failed love story, intentionally.   It's a tragic romance, the tragedy being 
> that the love interest was not there on both sides.   The overall tone is 
> bittersweet--surival achieved, but there was -supposed- to be a permanent 
> partnership/love relationship, and the woman chosen for the most important 
> role, one she had trained for her entire life, one her entire race depended 
> on... could not love the hero, and so the -romance- was doomed.
> 

> Tragic love is definitely an area of romance, albeit not much present today. 

Um, yes.  The only good one that comes to mind is Charles Harness'
Firebird, which was the very first book I got through the SFBC.  The
excellence of this retelling of Tristan & Isolde was such that I put
with their shenanigans much longer than I would've, otherwise.  Great
story, and my favorite time-travel story as well.

So it's not that I can't appreciate tragic romance.  I think something
else is going on.

I know I've read Rose on at least two occasions, and maybe I'd come
around to your opinion if I reread it again, now---I know my second
reading was more sympathetic than the first, though I'm pretty sure I
read rose & firebird within a 2 year period. I wasn't into unhappy
endings at all when I was younger. However, I think something in the
premise bothered me, like, who was in charge of deciding this woman was
going to be the one selected and trained?  In other words, it wasn't so
much the female character's fault, as the people who put in her in
impossible position of having to love someone she'd never met.  Yeah,
she volunteered, but succeeding, in effect, was luck of the draw, and
she didn't, according to your analysis, pull out a winning ticket. Now,
to my mind, that's cruel, and I guess I blame the author for coming up
with something so nasty.   

sylvus tarn
http://rejiquar.com