it's the little things tripping you

[ratcreature]

I'm reading an erotic romance novel, so the characters are having sex early on, and the heroine's and hero's chemistry is decent, but I just can't get into the sex scene, because when the heroine woke up in the morning her dog was mentioned, and she didn't take it with her. So the heroine and hero had this chance meeting (well actually their second, but that's kind of irrelevant) some time before noon, and eventually we are getting to marathon sex in the evening after they do a lengthy lunch, and the heroine never got back to her apartment for her dog at any time.

How am I supposed to like a character who just forgets their dog because of pants feelings? Also it will certainly have peed and pooped in her apartment at this point.

Comments

[marcelo]

Ouch. Can we retcon a roommate with dog duties or something like that? Because otherwise, yeah. I can relate to your reaction.

[ratcreature]

Right now I'm still waiting how the dog situation will be resolved, if at all. The next stage of the sex scene didn't endear me to the heroine either, because she used a hotel employee bringing room service to push the hero's humiliation boundaries with nudity. And I'm torn in that the humiliation bit works with my kinks, but involving hotel employees as voyeurs in your sex play without asking them in advance isn't cool either, even if you tip them well afterwards.

The logic in this novel seems to work more on the porn level...

[marcelo]

Porn logic/ethics indeed...

[ratcreature]

It might have been fine if it had just gone for being porn, but that was not the genre it was trying for. And unfortunately as things went on it even tried to throw in some more angsty plot stuff and the logic faults did not get better once they went beyond sex logistics, only with even less porny to at least excuse them.

[princessofgeeks]

Maybe we can put this down to the writer forgetting and not the character?

I know that would make ME feel better.

[ratcreature]

Yeah. The heroine has a basement apartment in a house with an older lady. I'm just going to assume that the dog stays with the nice, conscientious neighbor when the heroine leaves for her day long sexcapades....

[escritoireazul]

Oooh, that would trip me up too. Poor puppy.

[ratcreature]

Yeah. Give the heroine a cat if the pet needs to be left alone for that long, or better yet one of these Japanese robot dogs.

[lilacsigil]

Pretend it's a tiny house-trained dog that thinks it's a cat, like my aunt had! She would pee outside on walks but strongly preferred to use the litterbox.

[ratcreature]

Here people don't really do that, even with tiny dogs, so that didn't even occur to me. It was a dachshund though, so that could work. For the pee at least, but I think even with that you can't leave the poor dog for over a day (the sex dragged on into an overnight stay).

[lilacsigil]

People don't really do that here, either. It was a strange dog!

[ratcreature]

My brother told me one one of his two dogs doesn't like to go if you look at her, so clearly some dogs are just strange. (And it's not housetraining trauma where she got scolded for peeing by some human seeing that -- he had her since a puppyhood and did the whole positive reinforcement of praising and treating when she went outside, and just picked her up when she went inside, and her housetraining went well.)

[mific]

The little real life details really matter when you're writing. Not that responsible pet ownership is a little detail, but still. I hate it in sex scenes if they don't clean up so that they fall asleep glued to each other with spunk, or if one character's surprised after a shower, and despite toweling their hair, we're told that it's "dripping". Towel your damn hair properly! Beds and dampness don't go together!

[ratcreature]

Yes, logistics matter. And I wasn't the only one who noticed either. When I put this into Goodreads, I saw at least one other comment mentioning the abandoned dog.

[sillimarilli]

It's things like this that make me feel very very tired when someone puts fanfic down in favor of published writing.

[ratcreature]

Well, the erotic romance in question actually seems to have been self-published. (There's quite a lack of femdom with m/f romances, sadly, so I'm not super picky, and the free sample seemed promising, only it went downhill from there.)

[sillimarilli]

ugh. Yeah, I hear you about the lack of femdom stories. Well, yeah, that makes it even worse, doesn't it.

[ratcreature]

Well, at least I can hope buying it did a small part to show the market femdom romance, so I regret spending the 3€ less than for more popular genres.

[saraht]

I am 100% in support of this criticism's validity.

[ratcreature]

It really threw me out if the story. I guess considering that one way my anxiety nightmares sometimes manifest is dreaming that I forgot to feed my rats who've been dead for years (and well cared for while actually alive) I'm maybe unusually sensitive to such pet issues. But otoh it shows a really different characterization than what the author tells the reader the heroine is supposed to be like, and that's just bad writing.

[saraht]

I HAVE THIS ANXIETY DREAM ALL THE TIME *JUST FROM DOGSITTING*.