/It would be one thing if this whole book was a commentary on Nora's behavior, in which case it would be delightfully meta,/
You’d think so, right? I mean, those two respective lines of dialogue from Vee and Scott seem to indicate that Fitzpatrick knows what she’s doing and is in fact satirizing abusive relationships disguised as romance. But then you have the characters immediately forget about such statements and the “romance” between Nora and Patch continues to roll right along, business as usual. It’s sort of like Meyer with Charlie and Jacob.
/It's like she took the "bad boy" conceit and ran with it without bothering to figure out what the actual point of the bad boy trope is: the "I can change him, mama!"/jerk with a heart of gold, where he's not really so bad and actually enjoys petting kittens and tending gardens. No, Fitzpatrick seems to have put two and two together and gotten five and decided that bad boys are popular because they kill/hurt people, and that's what every teenage girl is searching for in a boyfriend./
Exactly. That's what most people have been saying about this: the most important thing about the “bad-boy with a heart of gold” trope is the *heart of gold.* Where it’s revealed that that the bad-boy can wear leather jackets, know how to fight, be from the wrong side of the tracks, and other common bad-boy traits, and still be a good and decent person.
I mean, take Batman for example. Yes, he wears black, yes, he’s brooding, yes, he has a tragic back-story, and yes, a lot of the time, he’s a jerk. But that doesn’t change the fact that he still cares about people, which is why he’s a superhero in the first place.
Patch? He doesn’t care about anybody but himself. Instead of trying to prevent people from getting hurt, he actively goes out to hurt people for his own selfish reasons. He has no sense of responsibility, never learns anything, and just does whatever he feels like doing, regardless of how it affects anybody else. He’s not even moral enough to qualify as an anti-hero, which is the role that most bad-boys fall into. He’s just a flat-out villain, end of story.
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Date: 2012-08-05 06:06 pm (UTC)You’d think so, right? I mean, those two respective lines of dialogue from Vee and Scott seem to indicate that Fitzpatrick knows what she’s doing and is in fact satirizing abusive relationships disguised as romance. But then you have the characters immediately forget about such statements and the “romance” between Nora and Patch continues to roll right along, business as usual. It’s sort of like Meyer with Charlie and Jacob.
/It's like she took the "bad boy" conceit and ran with it without bothering to figure out what the actual point of the bad boy trope is: the "I can change him, mama!"/jerk with a heart of gold, where he's not really so bad and actually enjoys petting kittens and tending gardens. No, Fitzpatrick seems to have put two and two together and gotten five and decided that bad boys are popular because they kill/hurt people, and that's what every teenage girl is searching for in a boyfriend./
Exactly. That's what most people have been saying about this: the most important thing about the “bad-boy with a heart of gold” trope is the *heart of gold.* Where it’s revealed that that the bad-boy can wear leather jackets, know how to fight, be from the wrong side of the tracks, and other common bad-boy traits, and still be a good and decent person.
I mean, take Batman for example. Yes, he wears black, yes, he’s brooding, yes, he has a tragic back-story, and yes, a lot of the time, he’s a jerk. But that doesn’t change the fact that he still cares about people, which is why he’s a superhero in the first place.
Patch? He doesn’t care about anybody but himself. Instead of trying to prevent people from getting hurt, he actively goes out to hurt people for his own selfish reasons. He has no sense of responsibility, never learns anything, and just does whatever he feels like doing, regardless of how it affects anybody else. He’s not even moral enough to qualify as an anti-hero, which is the role that most bad-boys fall into. He’s just a flat-out villain, end of story.