Cover picture: the stepback of "Blue Heaven Black Night" by Shannon Drake.

The MMC of my current romantasy WIP is a knight.

He might not have a shining armor because that doesn't fit in my fictional cultural setting, but other than that, I'm playing it straight, as if he popped right out of a courtly love poem. He is chivalric. He is honorable and adheres to a strict code of conduct. He is pious and chaste. He is loyal to his king. And, more to the point in a romance, he is utterly devoted to the princess he serves and loves, and puts her on a pedestal while silently yearning for her against impossible odds.

In other words, I'm pulling a reverse George RR Martin, and not only because I'm actually writing a book and plan to finish it in less than a decade (forgive my snark but don't tell me this guy doesn't deserve it). I have zero plans on subverting this character trope. My knight isn't going to go rogue. He's not going to become bitter and disillusioned. He's going to stay an honorable defender of the realm, though - spoiler alert - he is going to go against his vows of chastity at some point, for such is the intensity of his yearning, but only at his lady's command.

I've been thinking about a version of this story for about two years, waiting for it to develop into its final form and be ready to be put into words. I believe, looking back, that there was some amount of self-censoring involved. Anyone who's familiar with Romancelandia can understand why I wasn't super keen to trot out the idea of a princess/knight story, especially since my princess isn't secretly training to be a badass warrior and doesn't end up saving the MMC or something along those lines. She's by no means a naive, starry-eyed lamb, but he's definitely going to swoop in and save her from a scary monster and if I can reasonably insert a scene where he carries her on his horse, you're damn right I'll do it.

At least until very recently, I've felt like admitting to liking and writing these tropes might get you branded as overly conservative or promoting harmful stereotypes. But then I started to see Reddit posts in romance communities actively demanding recs for princess/knight stories and getting very few replies, simply because there are very few princess/knight romances and the ones that do exist are mostly old school, which many readers may find dated in terms of content and characterization, if not outright bonkers.

And yet the need is real. The fantasy is still alive and well. Some readers are craving this type of story, myself included - honestly, I'm just writing the book I want to read. I teach English lit in high school, and I recently gave a free writing assignment to my junior class. One girl wrote a lengthy romantasy-type scene where a knight pledges his devotion to a lady, culminating in him kneeling before her and kissing her hand. That alone was swoonier than a lot romances I've read.

What struck me most, though, was the very obvious way the knight was offering to serve the lady without asking anything in return. People might dismiss the princess/knight trope as sexist, perhaps because they immediately think of Disney princesses achieving a HEA only when they find their prince, but in fact, courtly love places the woman in a position of power (such as it could be in the Middle Ages). The lady attains such perfection in her lover's eyes that it can only subjugate him. He vows to be hers for all eternity, attempts to become worthy of her affection with noble deeds and ultimately lets her decide when they can consummate their love.

Personally I think that sounds like a pretty sweet deal in our day and age of "It's 2026 and we're living in a dystopian hellscape run by tech bros who make billions with AI pornbots". I'm happily married to a wonderful man, but if I were 16 today, I'd probably be hardcore fantasizing about a guy who gently brushes his lips against my knuckles and swears he'll follow my every command. Which brings me to another point that I've been pondering on ever since I read this essay on the Smart Romance substack.

The whole essay is well worth the read, but what really stuck with me was what Rena Rani says about the disparity between FMCs and MMCs in how flawed they're allowed to be, and what the entirely devoted, entirely non-confrontational book boyfriend means for how a story is driven in terms of romance and sex.

Put bluntly: heroines are increasingly allowed messiness and flaws, while heroes are increasingly drafted as emotional infrastructure—perfectly steady, perfectly available, perfectly attuned, and almost eerily unmarked by the relationship itself. The heroine’s flaws—jealousy, doubt, impulsivity—are coded as emotional texture. The hero’s flaws—pride, ego, bad timing—are liabilities to be written out. Human behavior in women becomes the plot; in men, it becomes a problem.

I don’t mean that contemporary heroes are “soft.” I mean they’re often written as beings without needs: no pride to bruise, no boundaries to defend, no competing obligations that can’t be rearranged around the heroine’s spiral. Scene after scene this year, I watched friction get preempted by omniscient caretaking.

Rani goes to analyze the logical steps that led to this point. Though neither Rani's essay nor mine will mourn old school alphaholes or wax poetic about the literal psychopaths that populate dark romance, I agree that this does present a particular problem in contemporary romance: where the hell does the conflict and the sexual tension come from if the MMC is a cinnamon roll crossed with a labrador?

In a conversation with Elise, whom I follow on BlueSky, we discussed the fact that it's a lot harder to find obstacles and conflict keeping the MCs apart in contemporary romance as opposed to histrom or romantasy. The MMC being 100% accomodating and available makes it damn near impossible. She put it this way:

It feels like the trend of the last few years has been to swing away from any conflict and sometimes to provide very little plot. I’m sure that speaks to something culturally that’s happening. As a reader it takes the satisfaction out of the HEA.

In my opinion, this is where the knight comes in, and why I think some of us have come full circle back to reading and writing princess/knight stories. It's a lot easier to write this sort of MMC in a fantasy setting (I won't say a historical setting, because even back in the Middle Ages courtly love was just that, a fantasy). The knight can offer unlimited devotion, but you can throw in as much forbidden love and monstrous villains and high stakes as you want to keep the MCs apart, pining for each other from a distance until they are overwhelmed by the force of their desire. Not only that, but as lovesick as the MMC may be, the simple fact that he might be, for example, betraying his king by having passionate sex with the FMC is more than enough to give him a truckload of friction and angst to chew on.

When it comes to romance, I'm firmly on Team Pure Escapism. I've never been very interested in reading or writing about characters whose circumstances I can relate to, though obviously I need to relate to their emotions. An idealized MMC laying himself at the feet of an idealized FMC transcends our reality in every conceivable way, but this is precisely why I'm craving it. I like to imagine that those who listened to troubadours sing poems of passionate love eight centuries ago felt the same.