The Men of Therreth
I have very deliberately not written about my male leads on my blog - or even the marketing material on my website - because I wanted to keep the focus on the women. But today, in conversation with a beta reader, a ship name naturally slipped into the conversation - “Galerena” - so in honor of that, here is a blog post about the men of Therreth! (Tangent: yes, in an ideal world, I’d love for Serena’s name to come first but “Serale” doesn’t sound as good as “Galerena,” so there you have it.)
One of the things I was particularly careful about in my writing was to not make my male leads perfect “book boyfriends.” I didn’t want them to be too perfect or to exist simply to help the female lead along on their journey. Don’t get me wrong: my female leads’ interactions with every character matters for their development, so if there is a male love interest, then those interactions will be a part of the female lead’s character arc. But I didn’t want that to be their sole purpose, because that would be disrespectful to the male character. I would never want a female character to be treated that way, so of course I would not do that to a male character.
With that in mind, there were three ways I tried to add dimensionality to my male leads.
First, I tried to have them start with a flaw that the female lead helped them overcome either through direct conversations about his flaw (as with Anisha in Forbidden Ember) or because she serves as the motivation for his desire to do better (as with Serena and her love interest in The Acolyte’s Heresy). This worked best when the characters had a lot of on-page time together, but even when they didn’t, I did work it into the flashbacks how the female lead helped the male lead become a better person (as with Kara and her love interest in The Acolyte’s Heresy).
Second, when there was not a lot of on-page time together, I deliberately tried to set the male lead at cross-purposes with the female lead (as with Rissa and her love interest and Rhenise and her love interest in Rissa Must Die, Kara and her love interest in The Acolyte’s Heresy; I did this also with Anisha and her love interest in Forbidden Ember though they had a lot of on-page time together because this was more of an enemies-to-lovers story). Usually not outright enmity, but just slightly different enough purposes that the male lead’s story purpose was not simply to facilitate the female lead achieving her story goals. I wanted there to be a real reason for them to exist, something for them to pursue, even if the female character was not romantically interested in them. I wanted to make them a fully-fleshed person, and that meant setting up natural points of friction that had consequences and stakes for both their relationship and their broader plot.
Third, I really had fun with showing the male leads from two different perspectives! Both POV characters in my dual POV novels are female, and so showing how the same male character comes across differently to different women was really fun and “complicated” the perspective that the romantic partner has. This was a big part of writing Serena’s romantic interest in The Acolyte’s Heresy, because Serena and Kara have very different kinds of relationships with him; Kara’s relationship is more like an over-protective older sister towards a tantrum-prone younger brother while to Serena, he is the gallant duke who is helping her learn to make her own choices as she leaves the restrictive monastery she grew up. I’m still working on leaning more into in Forbidden Ember: Anisha’s male love interest is also Therise’s romantic rival, so her perspective on him will diverge from Anisha’s (also because Anisha and Therise’s perspectives are in different timelines).
I originally wanted to use some tropey keywords to help the GEO along, but then I realized that none of my male leads easily fit into the boxes. Which is great from an originality and craft perspective, but not-so-great from a marketing perspective… Anyways, no shadow daddies or golden retrievers here.
But let me end with a couple keywords to describe the positive qualities each of my male leads (as I’ve emphasized, they have negative qualities as well!):
K: honorable, patriotic, willing to sacrifice himself if necessary
S: protective, able to see the bigger picture, stands up for the weak
A: respectful of others’ autonomy and strengths, patient, cares about his community
G: strong moral compass, always need to be doing something good, learns from his mistakes
H: takes responsibility for himself and the people he loves, fierce, protective
D: generous, honorable, hardworking
Also, for all of them, feminist. My male leads are all feminists. Which is actually relevant because I wrote my world to purposefully have sexist elements. Whether it’s a specific empire or kingdom or duchy or a specific religious sect, some of the men do not respect women as equals. To be fair, I gave all my male leads in-world reasons to have an in-world advantage when it comes to respecting women as equally capable as men (they either spent a lot of time in the Zhuri empire or adhere to Salvation, Xotidie, or Fortitudo) but it was something that I admire in men and is a priority for me in all my romantic leads.
Though now that I have written that, I wonder if it would be fun to play with a male lead who’s flaw starts as being sexist and then he becomes feminist…
Anyways, if you are interested in slow burn romance with feminist and complicated male leads, you are in the right place when you open the doors to Therreth!
