★★☆☆☆ – Not my thing.

A trope I can’t stand in sapphic fiction – and the mirrored version exists in similar measure in MLM stories – is when the romance is inflected around disagreeable men. For one, it’s a shame to have your sapphic romance hinge on, in the end, the actions of men. On a level more fundamental yet, however, a romance – according to my sensibilities – shouldn’t be driven by how horrible your preexisting partner is, but how wonderful the other party is. In fact, I find it quite uncomfortable to have to deal with the messy, hurtful business of choosing somebody specifically over another – let alone relishing in that.

And that’s this story: A Thelma and Louise-style (very Thelma and Louise-style) love story between two women where the constant throughline is how detestable the main character’s caricature of a husband is, and the appeal of the other woman isn’t sold very convincingly. (I myself am not particularly drawn to the “gruff & buff” archetype in the first place – even less so when she’s violent and displays a disregard for the value of human life.)

I understand from where the impulse comes, in homoromantic fiction, to contrast the romance with a destructive heterosexual relationship. For one, if you’re to depict self-discovery – finding that your sexuality wasn’t what you thought it was – the easiest way to do so is to depict choosing the homoromantic relationship over a heteroromantic one. That poses a problem, however, in that you don’t want the reader to mourn the lost relationship; to feel sorry for the ex-to-be – so you naturally make the preexisting partner reprehensible enough to preclude any sympathy. (Of course, there are cases where there’s a simple case of heterophobia at work – the stereotypical “fujoshi” model – but you needn’t go nearly that far to arrive at this trope.)

When an author goes down this inadvisable road, however, they’ve inadvertently hurt their own work in two ways. One is simple: Now you have an odious character that needs to be present throughout, meaning you’ve introduced a recurring unpleasant streak. More insidiously, however – and I don’t think this is recognized enough – you’ve undermined the self-discovery journey. Your character finding themselves – their sexuality; their love – is no longer intrinsic, but spurred on by the disagreeability of the alternative. For lack of a better turn of phrase, you’ve painted the situation in a light in which the preexisting partner, in a sense, “turned them gay”. Which I don’t imagine is usually the goal. The ultimate romance is, in at least some aspect, slightly hollowed out.

The trope of choosing to let the whole world go to hell in favor of your romantic relationship is one that’s always pleasant, at least. My favorite scene of the story is how this decision is characterized – it’s spun as a reaction to the Cold War; a decidedly savvy, satisfyingly setting-anchored bit of character writing:

I wasn’t the only one who found the new situation […] something of a relief. After so many years of expecting the worst, finding that doomsday had finally come – and that it wasn’t quite as terrifying as we’d all be [sic] warned – was vastly preferable to the tension of waiting.

I’m usually not one to sweat the small stuff like whether something is “realistic”, but primed by the sour taste the romance left in my mouth, it perhaps stood out a bit more to me that it is ludicrous that the most infamously well-armed nation in the modern world would fall to an army of folks wielding axes and swords (though perhaps they were sci-fi axes and swords – it didn’t quite come across how technologically advanced the invasion portrayed in this story was). And that the world would jump to welcome and venerate the raiders. Hm.

This story will appeal to somebody – but that somebody isn’t me. (It’s, I’d imagine, somebody who has a thing for butch women who ~take charge~.)