Common Cliché's in Paranormal Romance

I'm currently toying around with the idea of writing a paranormal romance. Although I'm largely unfamiliar with the genre, what I have experienced of it is complete and utter crap... and I'm curious to determine if this is due to the various Smeyer's of the universe, or merely the subject matter itself.

I'm looking for common themes, plot devices and cliché's found in paranormal romance stories to toy around with and explore their darker implications (such as the whole "impressing/bonding/lifemate" concept)

Hmmmm: Interspecies (ish) relationships. Two things are pretty constant here: first, it's never the woman who's the only one with powers. Either they both have powers or only he does. (She usually gets them later.) Also, the powers always have a direct physical element like blood drinking or shape shifting; it can never be just a wizard and his girlfriend getting it on.

Also, when magic is introduced as a plot device, it is the only thing allowed to resolve anything ever. Characters can't just sit down and talk out their problems; they need to scheme with love philtres (however the hell you spell that) and mind-blowing psychic super sex better than any mere mortal could ever experience.

Drawbacks to magic/superpowers either a) don't exist b) exist in theory but never put in an appearance or c) put in a token appearance but always have some bullshit "out." Meaningful, gut-wrenching, irreversable sacrifices are never an option.

I suggest looking though a number of publishers' writers guidelines. These sometimes have useful information on what NOT to send. Copied from Circlet Press:

Circlet Press wrote:

1. Humans have sex with aliens as part of “diplomatic relations.”
2. Aliens come to Earth in search of semen/life energy.
3. Two people have sex and THEN we find out one of them is an alien/vampire/android/elf! (Who knew!)
4. Vampire falls in love with a blood doctor/researcher/scientist.
5. Dragon falls in love with “virgin sacrifice.”
6. Human stumbles accidentally onto a faerie ring orgy.
7. Artist falls in love with beautiful man or woman in a painting–turns out he or she’s a vampire, still alive and becomes his muse.
8. Vampire picks up victim in a bar under auspices of sex, seduces victim, then kills victim. (Nor, Surprise Ending #1: The ‘victim’ is a vampire hunter! Nor Surprise Ending #2: Victim turns out to be a vampire too!)
9. Lonely woman conjures perfect man out of magazine, off cover of romance novel, or her own dreams.

This isn’t to say that these ideas automatically make bad stories. Some of them were good–once. But we’ve seen them too many times already. Originality counted for a LOT in choosing the winners of the Best Fantastic Erotica contest.

Editorial director Cecilia Tan was on a panel at a convention a few years ago about the over-used ideas in erotic sf/f and the audience came up with an even longer list of things they have already seen and don’t need to see again. The list included: the “ghost sex” haunted house story, story of the last man alive/last woman alive getting it on, Adam & Eve references, naughty tentacles and alien anal probes, multiple breasts, the “interstellar whore,” a chemical or disease turns everyone horny, time-travel leads to sleeping with your parent(s) to create yourself.

Use any of these ideas at your peril–even the readership says they are sick of them.

How about that massive age gap between a centuries-old vampire and his human girl? Usually this is kind of glossed over, but really, would a centuries-old vampire really care what shoes some teenage bint bought?

One extremely common trope is "supernatural creatures hiding the shadows". Frankly, I think it's massively overdone and generally implausible, but you might find it works.

Quote :

multiple breasts

Isn't two a multiple?

Trioculus wrote:

Quote :

multiple breasts

Isn't two a multiple?

From now on, every romantic fantasy heroine shall have a monoboob.

ZoZo wrote:

How about that massive age gap between a centuries-old vampire and his human girl? Usually this is kind of glossed over, but really, would a centuries-old vampire really care what shoes some teenage bint bought?

That's true in a lot of fanfic. Look at the Legolas x Bamf!Sue stories. It seems to be almost universal that most people can't imagine, at least not internalize, a level of experience and maturity greater than their own. How many of us really understood our parents' points of view when we were kids? So they write adults (or centuries-old elves, vampires, aliens, etc.) as people their age with different birth dates.

So, yeah, what is a vampire who was around for the news that that crazy Columbus guy found something after all going to have to talk about with a teenage girl who has never known a world without the Internet? Her new shoes are definitely not on the list.

Lysander wrote:

From now on, every romantic fantasy heroine shall have a monoboob.

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The biggest cliche perhaps, is the one appearing at the end of Twilight where the supernatural partner turns the human partner into one of them to prevent them bleeding to death/dieing from an illness.
This could be subverted if the formerly human partner really doesn't want to live as a vampire or whatever and is mightily pissed off. To my knowledge, that hasn't been done before.

The title of this thread hurts me deep inside.

:/:

Wen Spencer's novel Tinker is a non-vampire example. It started out great, settled into good for a large part of the story, and then erupted in an explosion of WTF-ery when the Hawt Elven Prince turned the increasingly Sue-ish title character into a perfect elf through Speshul Magik Sexx0rz. Yeah.

I do recall reading a story, somewhen, somewhere, in which the newly vampirized human is furious with the vampire who changed her, but to save my life I couldn't tell you what it was, or who wrote it. I think it was profic, but I'm not even certain about that.

I wish I could write this book: The main character is a vampire hunter. One of the vampires she is tracking has a crush on her, and is kind of stalking her, unable to either reveal himself to her or leave her alone. When something bad happens to her (accident in an old building, maybe? or a trap set by a vampire?) he transforms her because he can't bear to lose her. She wakes up as a vampire, totally rejects him, and runs off in near insanity, a condition not uncommon to newly transformed vampires (something to do with their undead bodies not being able to handle the last vestiges of their living hormones). When she comes back to sanity, she's killed several people and done who knows what else, and the vampire hunters are on her trail. She has to deal with the conflict between her conscience and ethics, which are telling her to let the hunters kill her, and the vampire's overwhelming drive to survive at any cost, which has a lot to do with why these dead guys can walk around in the first place. Former partners (professional or romantic) could be part of this, along with friends, employers, and who knows what else. And, of course, there's the vampire that loves her, or at least he thinks he does.

I dislike vampire stories, but I'd read that one.

Circlet Press wrote:

the “interstellar whore,”

Okay, something about this just cracks me up. Why the scare quotes? Why the singular tense?

I can just imagine the back cover blurb: "Most whores are content
to only fuck people from their own planet, until one whore DARES TO
DREAM of being fucked on new alien worlds. This is her story."

Wandering Critic wrote:

I dislike vampire stories, but I'd read that one.

I'm sick of vampires verses werewolves, but I'd die to read one where vampires fight mad scientists.

I just want to see Count Dracula fight a twenty-foot tall giant robot powered by a miniature sun. Is that so wrong?

The 'interstellar whore' made me think of Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (some say her erogenous zones start 5 miles from her actual body; Ford Prefect disagrees, he says six).

Paranormal/urban fantasy romances (not that I've actually read many as opposed to hearing about them) almost always seem to use one of the following as the shadow-inhabiting supernatural folk:

-Vampires
-Lycanthropes (generally werewolves)
-Vampires
-Tolkien-esque elves or fey
-Vampires
-Humanoid demons
-Vampires
-Did I mention vampires?

It seems to me that there's plenty of scope for using other types of beings from European mythology and even more for using ones from other mythologies. One I'd like to see/write (as urban fantasy rather than paranormal romance necessarily) is the Valkyries of Norse mythology in a modern setting. They supposedly would hang around battlefields choosing particular warriors to die and be taken to Valhalla. It could be interesting if a modern-day soldier/gang member/cop caught a glimpse of a Valkyrie, or gave his perspective on getting recruited as an Einherjar (the warriors who live in Valhalla). The mythology could also be played with to have Valkyries be former mortal woman (so a woman soldier gets recruited as a Valkyrie). The Valkyries could also hang out in normal human society between jobs - a Valkyrie being ordered to cause her human boyfriend's death in battle because he'd make a great Einherjar is prime fodder for some romantic angst.

Edit: Huzzah! 200 posts! Finally I lost my 'Peanut Butter Lubricant' title!

Hmmm ... maybe Valkyries in Iraq. Now that would be an interesting one.

While I'm thinking about the supernatural and Iraq, how about if a returning soldier unwittingly brought home something worse than a camel spider ... like, oh, maybe a jinn. That could make for a hell of a story.

Of course, there wouldn't be much of an opportunity for Teh Hawt Sexx0rz, so I doubt if the fangirls would be interested, but it would certainly be a nice change from the endless vampires, sparkly or otherwise.

I can't understand how a dead man (aka vampire) could father a child, and how it could be a "half vampire" if he did. You can't be half undead any more than you can be half dead. If he somehow could produce sperm (kind of contrary to the whole concept of undeath and all, but if) the resulting child would be either human (if the sperm didn't have vampire-transformation capability when they bit the egg) or vampire (if they did) ... not halfassedly in between. Not, of course, that it would do any good to tell Smeyer that.

I think the only way vampires procreating the "normal way" could work is if, say, a male vampire sleeps with a living woman very shortly after his death, a few days at most, when there might still be living sperm cells in his body. But like Wandering Critic said, those resultant children would probably tend to be human.

I personally hate "half vampires" and such myself, because they tend to have all the Kewl Powurz of being a vampire, without the drawbacks (ie the need to drink blood, the allergy to sunlight, ect). "Half vampire" has almost become "Instant Sue/Stu" to me.

Trioculus wrote:

I think the only way vampires procreating the "normal way" could work is if, say, a male vampire sleeps with a living woman very shortly after his death, a few days at most, when there might still be living sperm cells in his body. But like Wandering Critic said, those resultant children would probably tend to be human.

I personally hate "half vampires" and such myself, because they tend to have all the Kewl Powurz of being a vampire, without the drawbacks (ie the need to drink blood, the allergy to sunlight, ect). "Half vampire" has almost become "Instant Sue/Stu" to me.

When I was sort-of-writing a vampire series (never got anywhere) I toyed with the idea that a woman got bitten whilst pregnant so her baby was born with some vampire characteristics. As the pregnancy was very advanced at the time, the baby wasn't in there for long and there wasn't time for enough blood to transfer for her to become a full vampire.
Her vampire mother gave birth in an alley and someone found her and handed her in and she ended up brought up by adoptive parents who had no idea she wasn't a normal girl.
I dropped it because I couldn't think of a plausible reason why the vampire mother hadn't just eaten her (my vampires went crazy when they smelt fresh blood) and because I thought it would be better if she'd developed her unusual agility and strength through gruelling sessions at the gym rather than having advantages handed to her on a plate, I hadn't heard the term Mary-Sue at this point but I understood the concept.

The whole psychic bond/bonded mate thing where the vampire/werewolf and his (almost always his) lover (almost always female) perform a ritual or drink each others' blood and from then on they are bound together for eternity blah blah blah.

Cyberwulf wrote:

The whole psychic bond/bonded mate thing where the vampire/werewolf and his (almost always his) lover (almost always female) perform a ritual or drink each others' blood and from then on they are bound together for eternity blah blah blah.

I absolutely hate this particular trope, maybe because I'm older and have some concept of what 'eternity' means. I don't think you're average Sparkle! Sue is capable of grasping the idea of forever. Eternity means just that; you'll remain the age you were when you were turned forever. Time will pass and the world around you will change again and again, but you won't. You're one of the walking dead, and unless someone gets fed up, catches you off guard, and manages to kill you, this will be your life from now on.

I, frankly, wouldn't WANT to live forever, no matter how hot the guy who bit me was.

I think that's the whole point the fanbrats don't get at all: walking dead. Dead. Not alive. DEAD. You're not super-happy-sparkly, you're DEAD. Walking around, yeah, but still dead. This is not exactly a desirable condition.

To be fair, a lot of vampires in fiction don't really have any of the characteristics of walking dead.

Fairlight wrote:

When I was sort-of-writing a vampire series (never got anywhere) I toyed with the idea that a woman got bitten whilst pregnant so her baby was born with some vampire characteristics. As the pregnancy was very advanced at the time, the baby wasn't in there for long and there wasn't time for enough blood to transfer for her to become a full vampire.

Someone promptly stole this idea from you, possibly went back in time, changed the character's gender, called him Blade and sold the concept to Marvel Comics.

See, now I have an idea that would *probably* fit under "paranormal romance" except that being dead is kinda gross. Zombies do not make good lovers.

Keith Fraser wrote:

To be fair, a lot of vampires in fiction don't really have any of the characteristics of walking dead.

Fairlight wrote:

When I was sort-of-writing a vampire series (never got anywhere) I toyed with the idea that a woman got bitten whilst pregnant so her baby was born with some vampire characteristics. As the pregnancy was very advanced at the time, the baby wasn't in there for long and there wasn't time for enough blood to transfer for her to become a full vampire.

Someone promptly stole this idea from you, possibly went back in time, changed the character's gender, called him Blade and sold the concept to Marvel Comics.

[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.] Good thing I never wrote it then.
I've heard of Blade but I didn't know that was how he was created. I must watch that film one day.

Wandering Critic wrote:

I think that's the whole point the fanbrats don't get at all: walking dead. Dead. Not alive. DEAD. You're not super-happy-sparkly, you're DEAD. Walking around, yeah, but still dead. This is not exactly a desirable condition.

There's a great episode of Buffy called "Lie to Me", where one of Buffy's friends from her old school wants to become a vampire because he's got cancer and would rather "die young and stay pretty" than waste away. She has a fantastic speech that goes, "That's not how it works, brain-trust! You die, and a demon gets your body. And it looks like you, and talks like you, but it's not you."

Cyberwulf wrote:

The whole psychic bond/bonded mate thing where the vampire/werewolf and his (almost always his) lover (almost always female) perform a ritual or drink each others' blood and from then on they are bound together for eternity blah blah blah.

Not always female; I've read many a gag-worthy Snape/Remus fic that had this premise (though, granted, a lot of Remus/Sue fics have it, too).