Fannishness is supposed to hate "the jocks;" Raoul is "a jock," and thus we are "supposed to" hate Raoul.
That one does seem a bit convoluted, given that canon Raoul *isn't* 'a jock' in the first place, so you first have to impose a paradigm that doesn't (as I was complaining) in any obvious way apply, and then proceed from that to the further confusing identification of 'people who read fanfiction' with 'losers'... (I'm not all that fluent in "American high school", which is a culture/dialect that doesn't really exist here, possibly because we don't have an arrangement whereby you can be forced to repeat a year's school until you pass, and thus don't have a set-up where the stupidest boys in class are bigger and stronger than everyone else(?))
Another thought: one common fanfic assumption is that if there's relationship writing in a story, that story "has to" follow the standard romance-novel tropes. POTO clearly doesn't, and while romance-writing may be one possible transformative-work interpretation, there's room for many others.
I think basically the issue is that Raoul does *not* exist in order to be the heroine's designated Love Object :-p POTO is about as much a romance-novel as The Four Feathers is. Falling in love is a major part of that protagonist's motivation -- "in a novel often referred to as a Boy’s Own adventure, our hero isn’t a combatant at all" -- but the story is in no imaginable shape or form a piece of romantic fiction.
In a romance novel, the love-interest character is presumably carefully curated to appeal to a female audience and to represent the deepest desires of the heroine; Raoul is simply Leroux's amateur detective, provided for the purposes of maintaining suspense :-p
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branchandroot
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Date: 2023-08-04 08:10 pm (UTC)That one does seem a bit convoluted, given that canon Raoul *isn't* 'a jock' in the first place, so you first have to impose a paradigm that doesn't (as I was complaining) in any obvious way apply, and then proceed from that to the further confusing identification of 'people who read fanfiction' with 'losers'...
(I'm not all that fluent in "American high school", which is a culture/dialect that doesn't really exist here, possibly because we don't have an arrangement whereby you can be forced to repeat a year's school until you pass, and thus don't have a set-up where the stupidest boys in class are bigger and stronger than everyone else(?))
I think basically the issue is that Raoul does *not* exist in order to be the heroine's designated Love Object :-p
POTO is about as much a romance-novel as The Four Feathers is. Falling in love is a major part of that protagonist's motivation -- "in a novel often referred to as a Boy’s Own adventure, our hero isn’t a combatant at all" -- but the story is in no imaginable shape or form a piece of romantic fiction.
In a romance novel, the love-interest character is presumably carefully curated to appeal to a female audience and to represent the deepest desires of the heroine; Raoul is simply Leroux's amateur detective, provided for the purposes of maintaining suspense :-p