Alpennia Blog: Fate isn't what it seems

[hrj]

I'm a very good girl and, although I do go poking around online to see what people are saying about my books, I firmly believe in the principle that reviewers should be allowed to be under the illusion that I haven't done so. (I've slipped up a couple of times if someone had a specific factual question about something in the books that I thought they might appreciate having answered, but I shouldn't have done even that.) But sometimes there are themes in multiple reviews that spark useful blog topics, and with the serial numbers sufficiently sanded down, I think it's reasonable to use them as inspiration.

A couple of times I've seen comments that people have the impression I write "fated soul-mates". And it's easy enough to see where that impression could come from, but it overlooks the fact that none of my characters are entirely reliable narrators. Not everything they believe about their world is true. And not everything they say about their beliefs is something they sincerely believe.

There is a point in Daughter of Mystery when Margerit and Barbara discover that their mothers knew each other as girls and were close friends. And the nun who assisted Margerit's mother with a mystery to help her achieve a successful pregnancy mentions in passing that, having used Barbara's pending existence as part of the ritual, she wasn't at all surprised that the two women had found their own bond. Mind you, when the nun later discovers the romantic nature of that bond, she's greatly disturbed, and it's clear that wasn't at all what she meant! But Margerit turns the nun's earlier words around to argue that maybe their love was one of the consequences of her miraculous existence.

The thing is: this conversation doesn't mean that Margerit and Barbara were "fated" to fall in love. It doesn't even mean that Margerit believes they were. It means they live in a society that believes that God directs the details of people's lives and that rhetoric to that effect is ordinary--but not necessarily meaningful. If, in a contemporary, non-magical romance, a character says to two lovers, "Clearly God meant you to find each other," does that make the story about "fated soul-mates"? No, it doesn't.

To me, a "fated soul-mates" romance implies that two characters have been drawn together against the pressure of circumstances and in despite of the direction their lives were going. Margerit and Barbara's paths crossed, not due to the mysterious forces of fate, but specifically because the social connections that existed before their births continued to keep them in the same circles. Baron Saveze was a solid bridge for their lives and acted deliberately for his own purposes to keep them connected. The romance wasn't part of his plans, but it was an unsurprising outcome.

There is a similar misdirection in The Mystic Marriage in the "sweetheart-finding charm" that is part of the amusements at Jeanne's Floodtide party. Like many traditional romantic-partner games, it purports to tell the participants whom they will some day marry. So a superficial reading of the incident where it points Antuniet at Jeanne might put it into the category of "fated soul-mates" tropes.

This reading doesn't stand up to an actual analysis of the divination in action. All of the other women who were matched up by the charm were already in known romantic relationships. For them, the divination clearly wasn't foretelling an as-yet-unrealized fate; it was responding to an existing attraction. And I hope that the development of Antuniet's attraction to Jeanne was clear enough in retrospect that we--like her--understand that the divination wasn't creating the romantic bond, it was forcing her to recognize that she had already fallen in love and would need to deal with that.

I don't see Antuniet and Jeanne as soul-mates at all. I see them as two people who had the space to fall in love with each other due to the combination of being brought together in a specific context, with a specific set of needs and constraints, and with the emotional ability to respond to it. Antuniet could easily have gone through her entire life without ever falling in love at all. And Jeanne has been in love just as deeply several times before.

Given that I don't believe in fate or supernatural forces, it would be rather odd if I held up "fated soul-mates" as a desirable basis for a happy romance. To the extent that my fiction is creating realities I want to believe in, I very much want to believe that romantic happiness is never tied to the luck or chance of encountering one very specific individual at the right time, under the right circumstances.

Comments

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I remember finding the concept of soul-mates or your "one true love" terrifying as a teenager. What if I never found that needle in the haystack? Would I never find love? Would I never be happy?

I think it's easier to dismiss that concept once you've gained experience of the fact that love takes work, and that it (can) take a choice, and while I'm perfectly willing to say that it's highly unlikely I'd have found someone else as perfect for me as Joel if I hadn't found him, I don't think it's fair to me to say that I wouldn't have, precisely because once I found him, I stopped looking. There may be others out there. But I don't care, because he's my one.

[lifeofglamour.livejournal.com]

I like this. Particularly as somebody who doesn't believe in "soul mates" or fate as a driving force in life, I like how you show that people can and often do construct a narrative to support the story they want.

[katerit.livejournal.com]

Your characters take time to fall for each other - there are a lot of other romances where the characters meet and then just have a mystical bond whether they resist it or not. There's that strange cosmic flash. I've never really enjoyed that. In my own life, which could have moved along several paths, the one person I can't remember meeting from my college group is the one I eventually married. I do joke about him having given in to his fate (or doom) but, no, we weren't fated.