samoaphoenix
May 27, 2022 at 12:28 AM UTC
The marriage of convenience trope where the couple actually ends up falling in love for real is tough to pull off believably, tougher than the plethora of Regency romance books that use it would have you believe. For one thing, it can lend itself to uncomfortable questions of agency, since to get the couple into the position where they need to commit for life without actually knowing each other all that well means there’s a lack of better choices–they wouldn’t get married at all if they had their druthers. Kitty circumvents this in a particularly clever way in The Second Age of Retha books, where it’s the characters’ *avatars* who commit to each other in order to get the in-game perks of a “betrothal,” not the real people playing them, so there’s no aspect of them being stuck together forever if they actually turned out to be incompatible. The other thing I like about Kit and Solus Miles’ growing emotional connection is that it is suuuuper slow burn, playing out across multiple books. It makes the possible endgame of them getting together in real life a believable outcome–if frustrating in the here and now because it’s been so long since we had a new book in the series. (We love you Kitty, take care of your health first and ignore our whining.)
I also like the way she handled this trope in Royal Magic because of how upfront the characters were about their expectations in entering the marriage, and how this is actually helpful to their relationship in the long run. They both felt as if they had to hide their true selves from the world because of expectations placed on them, but once married they didn’t need to “perform” for the other and so got to see the real person under the facade. But I felt as though they each could have been happy enough even if they *didn’t* fall in love with each other, because their marriage was rooted from the beginning in a place of honesty.
Normally I’m not the hugest fan of this trope, but you can tell Kitty has put a lot of thought into how to make it work believably within the characters and worlds she’s created.