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HEA = Happily Ever After in romance lingo.
Alias, the TV show, has a new twist. Basically, it's "avenging pregnant kick-ass heroine looking for her lover's killers." The TV show had done the unthinkable; it killed off the hero, Vaughn.
Alias, of course, is famous for killing of some of its more popular characters and then bringing them back again through extraordinary means, some of which bordering on sci-fi Mission Impossible. We have had bad guys coming back looking like the dead good guys through some kind of DNA matrix (don't make me explain it!) plastic surgery. We have had a dead mother that faked her own death. We have had a serum that can make a guy look dead and then revived with an injection (think Romeo and Juliet poison).
But always, the hero and heroine, Vaughn and Sydney, remained steadfastly ALIVE and star-crossed covert operatives in love. This season, Vaughn is gone. Most of TV-land fanatics are horrified because it's always been Vaughn and Sydney for-evah, and that's the way it should be in a romance.
So the question to many fans who don't read spoilers is, is whether Vaughn truly dead or not. Let me also add that the episode shown had Vaughn riddled by machine gun bullets so if he does come back in the real world, it's probably without many sections of his internal organs. But hey, this is Alias, the show with a touch of sci-fi and paranormal predictions in them.
As a romance writer, the subject of killing off the hero is a taboo area. You can't kill of the hero, not in this book, or in later books. It has been done before but the outpouring of hate and horror by romance readers remain absolute--if any writer does it, be prepared for the lash of emails and online posts warning other readers NOT to buy your book because of the hero's demise.
As a writer, I have to explore the reasons why a writer chooses to do this. It isn't an easy thing to kill off one's hero in a romance; you're, after all, half-way in love with him yourself. Why does the writer feel a need to end the happily-ever-after couple's happiness and even restart a whole new romance for the surviving half?
It's not, I'm sure, because the writer is out of ideas. Most uber-writers have drawerfuls of ideas for future plots. So why pull out the "kill the hero/heroine" card? Imagine if I have Stash killed off in a later book. Marlena would be unstoppable in her anger. Yeah, it would be a challenge to write such a book but in a romance, what would I accomplish? To show that there is always another type of happy ending, one that is just as complete, yet different, from the first one?
It doesn't feel right in a romance, does it? A love story--woman's fiction, I believe they call it these days--yes, that's totally possible because that usually is a story of a woman's empowerment, refinding herself, so to speak. Deviation from the romance genre themes is acceptable.But romance comes with a guarantee; the reader is giving her trust to the writer to take her through a journey of love that ends with a happily-ever-after. If you break that covenant, then you're taking away your reader's suspension of disbelief.
It's this uniqueness in the genre that a romance writer has to preserve. And be proud of. Many critics sneer at the happily-ever-after, at the focus on the couple's journey instead of plot, at the "romance" because like Oprah said, "it's not the real world, honey." Yet millions of readers buy the stories for their end that HEA ending, so what gives?
And then comes an author who decides to kill off one of the main characters in another book, and give another HEA. It's not working for me in Alias and I don't think it'll work in a romance. I miss the romance between Vaughn and Sydney, the idea that no matter how tough their world is, their love is real and for-evah, and besides that, the writers of that show had nurtured the whole relationship for four years. And in the fifth year, for some unknown reason, bang-bang, Vaughn was killed in the first episode.
Again, I sit and wonder--why did the writers do it? Shock value? Progression of a character? Exploration of pissed-off pregnant kickass heroine's hormonal rages? I don't know. But it isn't working. It's depressing. And that's not what a romance is, is it?
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