The male perspective

[igenlode]

I wonder if the reason why so many fans complain that they find Raoul dislikable in the Leroux novel is that this is the experience of being in love for the first time being depicted from the male perspective by an actual male author, whereas what they are used to seeing in romance novels is the male viewpoint as imagined by women? (And why is the fandom so overwhelmingly female and romance-oriented, anyway? The novel wasn't written to appeal to lovelorn ladies -- Leroux was a thriller/mystery writer...)

It also occurs to me that female romance novels normally feature experienced and/or older men as the love-interest rather than very young and inexperienced ones, whom women presumably don't find attractive -- the plot is generally 'woman heals heart of man who has learnt to distrust her sex' or 'woman wins true love from seductive rover', not 'boy falls head over heels in love with someone his own age'. Of course, when you are writing obligatory sex scenes you pretty much need to have a practised male protagonist (unless it is Erik the Masterful Virgin :p)

Comments

[igenlode]

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