Anyone who’s been following this blog for awhile probably knows that I’ll take a “beta” hero over an “alpha” hero any day, but that mostly I wish the distinction didn’t exist. Actually, I don’t think sociology upholds the dichotomy at all so outside of romance novels, the distinction really doesn’t exist. It’s arbitrary, unrealistic and
Tag: hero worship
The Man and the Hero
There has been a lot of discussion lately in the Romancelandia blogosphere about Alpha Males and Beta Males and Theta Males and Gamma Males. Am I missing any Greek letters there? And while I understand the marketing reasoning behind each of these category distinctions (especially for those of us who read romance for the heroes
Hard-Bodied Heroes…And Not
If romance novels are to be believed, almost all men, at least, those worthy of attention, are hard-bodies. They all run and lift weights and work with their hands, even if they don’t. Because they all look like the models on the covers, right? I know that romance is all about the woman’s fantasy and
The Most Broken of all the Broken
The other day, my proclivity for loving really, really broken characters and gleefully watching as an author puts them through the wringer came up in a conversation on Twitter. The context was Jackie Ashenden’s Having Her, in which a hero with a schizophrenic mother and a heroine with a struggling business and virginity issues tumble