You’ve seen it before: The hero drops his voice into its lowest register, so you know he means business. I never want to see you again. The love interest’s eyes fill up with tears. Is this real? Why are you doing this? Beneath his stony façade, he’s heartbroken too, but there’s no help for it. For her own safety, he has to nobly deny his own happiness, and hers, and go off into the night, a lone wolf once more. If not, what of his enemies? Etc.
I have seen this scenario play out, conservatively, one trillion times without anyone asking any follow-up questions like “Doesn’t Doc Ock already know he cares about MJ, though?” or “Why does she think this will solve her problems?” My private trope rule is that the required level of in-universe plausibility for deploying a given trope stands in direct proportion to the plot significance the trope is being asked to bear. If there’s only one bed for a couple of chapters or a single TV episode, I don’t need a ton of groundwork from the writers on that. If the characters are enemies who then become lovers, and that’s the whole arc of the book, then I am going to need some solid basis for their starting enmity, and I will then need it to be resoundingly overcome. Put in the litcrit language of Tumblr nerds, I need the load-bearing tropes to have a rock-solid Watsonian grounding.
The formulation of Watsonian vs Doylist explanations distinguishes between in-universe and extra-textual reasons why certain things happen in a story. The Watsonian explanation draws only on in-universe context: Spider-man has trauma from what happened to Gwen Stacy, so it makes sense that he would try to protect MJ by breaking up with her even though they are in love. (This doesn’t help us explain what Tobey Maguire’s problem is, but I do not have time just now to get into all the various Spider-mans and my feelings about Gwen Stacy.) The Doylist explanation acknowledges the motives and intentions of the writers: If the hero’s relationship is all sunshine and roses in between supervillain attacks, a narrative avenue is foreclosed. If he gets together with his girlfriend once, and then he breaks her heart to save her, that means the writers, and the readers, have the fun of getting them together a second time.
It is fun. I do like it. But I’m damned if I can think of a romance trope that’s gone so thoroughly un-deconstructed.
For whatever reason, authors count so much on readers recognizing and enjoying this trope in SFF romances that they don’t bother coming up with a plausible Watsonian reason for its inclusion. It’s just what happens when a certain brand of SFF protagonist has a romance that stretches over more than one movie/book/season. I want writers to ground this sequence of events in character and relationship, but it’s maddeningly rare for them to actually do it. The audience is asked to take it as read that the heartbreaker is acting in their partner’s best interests, and that the heartbreakee eventually comes to understand this, doesn’t mind too much, and is prepared to move the relationship forward as soon as the heartbreaker stops actively trying to break their heart. Until this literal year, nobody, not once not ever, has bothered putting in the work to convince me that any part of this sequence of events made plot or emotional sense.
This year brought us Margaret Owen’s Holy Terrors. It’s the third in a trilogy about an angry, selfish girl named Vanja who made it through a lifetime of neglect and abuse with a crop of emotional and physical scars, a talent for picking pockets, the favor of the gods (sometimes), and a healthy hostility for rich people. Against both their better judgment, she falls in love with prefect Emeric Conrad, whom she variously describes as a “human civics primer,” an “accounting ledger made flesh,” and an “intolerable filing cabinet.”
(Here the author of this piece has been compelled to delete a ten thousand–word manifesto about the greatness of the Little Thieves series. If you like the TV show Leverage, or you enjoy digging your teeth into solid character development, or you just hate rich people, you should read it. The first book is Little Thieves. Thank me later.)
At the end of the second book, Painted Devils, Vanja leaves Emeric for his own good, on the principle that their enemies will use her against him if they’re together. She’s really cruel about it, to make sure it sticks. She takes off with the Wild Hunt and intends never to see him again. Then you will never guess what happens in Holy Terrors. Yes! She sees him again! Now he’s engaged! And you know what, I talked a big game earlier about my expectations for load-bearing tropes and what the authors owed me, but I have to be honest right now and admit that Margaret Owen had me for cheap. I didn’t need her to unpack one single thing. I love these characters. I had been waiting several years. Emeric shows up engaged, and I’m like, yes, good, great, I accept. Vanja left him for his own good. Now he is engaged to someone else, and they have to stop a magical serial killer together. Daiyenu.
But these books are operating on a different, better level, and a good chunk of Holy Terrors is dedicated to unpacking what Vanja did and why she did it. Margaret Owen does with the trope what you’re supposed to do with tropes: She uses it to tell us more about these two characters and how they relate to each other and what that means for their future. Vanja’s starting point, at the end of Painted Devils, was her certainty that she would always be a weapon someone would use against Emeric. (What of his enemies?) No matter how often he promised her it wouldn’t happen that way, she knew he’d eventually be forced to choose between his life’s work and his relationship with her. So she leaves. She breaks his heart, to save him.
Or… Is that what she does? Is that why she does it?
In a book about the many lives we could have lived, Owen produces a world of possible answers to those questions. The deepest, most painful reason for why Vanja did what she did is that she can’t believe she’s good enough for Emeric. When she thinks about staying with him, she remembers how her mother—who abandoned her when Vanja was four years old—used to say of her, “Whatever she touches falls to ruin.”
Each section of the book begins with a story about a choice Vanja could have made differently, and what her life would have looked like, then. It’s a hint at the story the book is telling. In one version of her life, Vanja goes straight and wonders if that has made her “worthy of a prefect.” In another, she and Emeric stay with each other, but it comes—as Vanja always feared—at the price of Emeric’s professional success. A voice in her head asks her, “How could someone like you ever be anything but a burden?”
At one point in the main narrative, a bruised and angry Emeric tells Vanja coldly that he knows why she left. “You needed to do to me what your mother did to you,” he says. “You needed to understand her, so you repeated her actions. You were trying to find answers by abandoning me.” It’s not the story Vanja’s been telling herself, the story of choosing to give up her happiness to protect the possibility of Emeric’s, but it’s not a million miles off the truth, either. Owen’s been showing us all along that Vanja’s relationship with her mother left behind fault lines that Vanja has had to learn how to live with. When a friend asks her if she still believes what her mother told her, that she could only bring harm to Emeric, Vanja says with all the honesty she can muster, “I’m trying not to, these days.”
This—the recognition that the heartbreaker is operating from a place of internal damage, rather than rational good sense—is already ten thousand times more interesting than any other version of breaking someone’s heart to save them than I’ve ever encountered in my life before. But Margaret Owen’s not done. In one confrontation, Vanja finally manages to articulate what Emeric was contributing to their dynamic. When they were together, before she left him, when she tried to point out problems to him, or voice her uncertainties, he hastened to insist the problems didn’t exist and he had solutions for her uncertainties. Without ever intending to, he made her believe that the only version of her he could love would be one that fit neatly into his life, the life of a prefect. “You saw someone you wanted to see in me,” Vanja tells him. “Not someone I ever could have been.”
So yeah: there was more to it than breaking his heart to save him. She messed up. He messed up. The thing is, though, none of that is the real problem, just the substrate for the real problem. The rupture in Vanja’s relationship with Emeric still matters, is still a thing to be repaired; but the truth she arrives at, ultimately, is that she couldn’t be with Emeric until she grew into a person who could be with Emeric. If this sounds like a tautology, it’s the tautology that underlines the romance genre. The best romances are stories of becoming. Romance protagonists don’t just happen to meet the loves of their lives. They have to become the self that can receive the love that will carry them into their happily ever after.I didn’t realize how much I was craving a proper Watsonian explication of the break-his-heart-to-save-him trope until Margaret Owen came along. She took the trope by the scruff of its neck, put it through its paces, and shook like seventeen different emotional truths out of it. I complained recently about romantasy’s tendency to reproduce tropes without bothering too much about them, and Holy Terrors is the glorious antithesis to that trend. This is tropes done right, the absolute acme of playing with tropes in SFF romance. Margaret Owen’s setting the bar that I’ll now always be asking the genre to meet.
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Holy Terrors
I’ve honestly always hated this trope, because it usually comes out of left field and it’s so predictable I can’t believe the characters don’t point it out. Like, every superhero does this, and just once I want their partner to be like, “So you’re doing that thing where you break up with me to protect me, but it’s really to protect you, and it’s not going to save me anyways because even if I’m your ex, if anyone ever finds out who you are they’re still gonna come for me, unless you’re dating someone else in which case this was pointless. Not to mention, you work places and have friends, so it’s really just offloading the same risk onto other people who can’t consent to it, and removing the one person in your life who can.” I’d really like at least one story where someone tries this, and the other person just goes “Stop being dumb, let’s get back to the plot.”
That said, I do have to admit when it comes up for a more internally consistent reason, and no one has to act like a total idiot to make it happen (yes, love can make us act like fools, but that doesn’t make it a pleasant read! Better if they are acting against their own desire, for a totally reasonable reason.) I do like the moment when they come back and realize it’s better to be together. (Or don’t, but still like each other, that’s been nice too.) It is pretty great.
You’ve sold me on my next read. I also hate this trope!! Mostly bc it is rarely loadbearing. I initially thought you were going somewhere else with it, and so I came in ready to bang my drum about the first fictional breakup I ever remember reading about and being so frustrated and sad about, but also completely understood. Jake and Cassie from Animorphs! At an age when all I wanted was happy endings, Animorphs nonetheless put in the work (YES, animorphs, covers of kids morphing into starfish etc, I promise) of making me accept that sometimes your faves die, get betrayed, and do the betraying. That sometimes love is not enough! Anyway, sorry to hijack the thread, but breakups when they are genuinely meaningful and not just to keep the angst levels up are worthwhile. And also, let people have healthy romantic relationships once in a while! It can still be interesting!!
Ok, but as a Little Thieves/Margaret Owen stan, I want to read the director’s cut of this article that adds back in the 10,000 word manifesto!
This is a great article about a great trilogy. I’m not sure whether to blame you or Margaret Owen for this, but I actually teared up while reading. (Maybe it’s just because I love Vanja and Emeric so much?).