S05.32: Runaway Brides in Romance
It’s runaway bride week here at Fated Mates and we’re delightedly traveling down memory lane to talk Julia Roberts, Sally Field, the importance of significant lips for a proper mustache, and all the ways we love cold feet on the way to the altar! We discuss all the ways runaway brides can happen in romance, talk about our high expectations for this trope…and Sarah realizes she’s written two of them!
Our next read along is Sarah Mayberry’s Her Best Worst Mistake, an absolute banger of an enemies-to-lovers romance and one of our favorites. Get it at Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble or Kobo. You are in for an absolute treat with this one.
Show Notes
This week we’re talking about runaway brides (in the past, we also recorded an episode about Waking Up Married). Some of the primordial runaway brides are from movies: Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Runaway Bride (1999).
Sarah recommended an essay called The Bizarre Genre of Runaway Bride Romcoms, which has some other great movie rom-coms: Maid of Honor, Something Borrowed, My Best Friend’s Wedding.
We’re tired of kids' movies. Jen’s last one was Big Hero 6 (that is not hyperbole, she hasn’t seen an animated movie since 2014 when Lil Romance was 11). Other families movies we enjoyed: Ghostbusters (2016) and Fly Away Home (1996).
Growing up in the 80s, “those other channels” that weren’t one of the major networks were called UHF channels, I think?
Whew, the wedding industrial complex is no joke.
Our next read along is Her Best Worst Mistake by Sarah Mayberry.
A folder with PDFs of some of the links above.
Books Mentioned This Episode
Sponsors
E.F. Dodd, author of A Higher Standard
Available to preorder from Amazon
or on May 16 with a monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited
Sookh Kaur, author of Komal Needs London
Available now from Amazon
or with a monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited
7: Ghost Pepper Town: Warlord Wants Forever & Untouchable
We’re tackling the novellas this week, and finishing up the Wroth Brother Quartet with The Warlord Wants Forever (Nikolai) & Untouchable (Murdoch), as well as their incredible Valkyrie mates.
This episode, we’re talking about Myst’s weird chain, Danii’s loneliness, the responsibility of authors to readers, to themselves, to the text, and to literary history, and the way Untouchable hints at the enormous world that IAD is about to become.
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In two weeks, we’re back to the Lykae, with one of our favorite books — Pleasures of a Dark Prince, the last book in the first arc of the IAD series (this begins at the same time as A Hunger Like No Other). Garreth MacRieve, prince of the Lykae clan and Lucia the Huntress — the greatest archer of all time.
Show Notes
The Wroth Brothers are dreamy, and here are the books the feature Nikolai, Sebastian, Conrad, and Murdoch.
Take a look at the IAD Ranking Spreasheet of Wonder from the Wicked Wallflowers Podcast.
Sarah refers to our novella episode, but she means the Holiday Romances episode where we had a long discussion of the novellas as a form.
Jen collected some comparison screenshots from the original (A) and revised (B) versions of The Warlord Wants Forever. The two versions of the scene after the chain is broken; The two versions of the first time they have sex; and the two versions of Nix naming herself.
Dubcon romances have main characters who agree to sex play featuring "dubious consent."
A little more about the versions of Whitney, My Love. You can still find original versions on eBay or Amazon, but you'll pay more for them.
Jen mentions Eric Selinger at DePaul. He teaches classes on Romance at DePaul, which is local for her. SADLY, they don't have PhD programs. But you can read more academic romance talk at a blog called Teach Me Tonight.
The Hello Stranger review at Smart Bitches calls out the Orientalism in the novel, and features Lisa Kleypas' response.
The Memory Hole is a reference to 1984 by George Orwell.
A little more about why sheikh and Native American romances are problematic.
A definitive list of the qualities, skills, and powers of vampires in literature and pop culture. At some point, Jen's going to add IAD.
Retcon stands for "retroactive continiuity" and here's a great primer about it from the best dictionary, Merriam-Webster.
In two weeks, we'll be discussing Garreth & Lucia in Pleasure of a Dark Prince.