Duke of Midnight

[psocoptera]

Duke of Midnight, het romance by Elizabeth Hoyt. I'd seen this recced as "Batman, but in 18th century London", and that was basically correct - he saw his parents get murdered and is now running around at night in a costume fighting crime - but a lot of the fun of it for me, for awhile, was trying to figure out whether more of it matched up to more Batman business. Like, we meet a character named Ridley, could he somehow be the Riddler, there's some archery stuff, is someone here Green Arrow. As it turned out, though, the book is much more interested (legitimately!) in the mythology of its own series (it's book six of twelve-ish in one of those web-of-friends-and-relations historical romance series) than in playing fanfic-AU games with Batman mythology... entirely reasonable and proper, but not having read the first five nor planning to read the remaining 7+ (there's some novellas), I ended up feeling a bit let down. Although the bit where (spoilers!) some random barely-previously-named dude who's apparently the hero of an earlier book deals with the villain while the leads are having Drama was pretty funny. (Except that I had thought there was a significant chance they were setting up the *heroine* to get to kill him... there was a *ton* of "she's a huntress" imagery and language... so even that was kind of meh.)

Thinking about how the sometimes-elaborate continuities of romance series contrast to the continuities of things like comics: because happy endings are intrinsic to the romance genre, series romance creates a sort of ever-widening pool of stability and closure, in contrast to the permanent instability of things like comics and soap operas, where you know there's always going to be another story line that disrupts any closure that's been reached. A convergent vs divergent series maybe, if you like a math metaphor. Series romance is also unusually egalitarian for series in the way that every installment asks you to care most about a new and different pair of characters, vs Buffy or Batman or whoever always being the star of their title. Maybe ensemble titles like Avengers or X-Men have some of that, but I have the impression there are always first-tier and lesser-tier characters in those. Although, hm, certainly people have their *favorite* Bridgerton, or their favorite Brother Sinister, or their favorite Montgomery/Taggert. But is that the same as being a headliner? I sort of think not.

Comments

[katherine]

"series romance creates a sort of ever-widening pool of stability and closure" is fantastic.