{"id":32909,"date":"2017-08-17T01:00:27","date_gmt":"2017-08-17T05:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32909"},"modified":"2018-09-18T11:11:40","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T15:11:40","slug":"qotd-can-you-describe-romance-novels-as-pretty-people-behaving-stupidly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/08\/17\/qotd-can-you-describe-romance-novels-as-pretty-people-behaving-stupidly\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Can you describe romance novels as &#8220;pretty people behaving stupidly&#8221;?"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>I\u2019ve been learning about the romance genre recently. I have no intrinsic interest in it at all, but I have an intelligent friend who plows through romances the way I read SF, and we\u2019ve been discussing the conventions and structural features of the genre. Along the way I\u2019ve learned that romance fans use an acronym TSTL which expands to \u201cToo Stupid To Live\u201d, describing a class of bad romance in which the plot turns on one or both leads exhibiting less claim to sophont status than the average bowl of clam dip.<\/p>\n<p>My wife and I have parts in an upcoming live-action roleplaying game set in early 16th-century Venice. As preparation, she suggested we watch a movie called <em>Dangerous Beauty<\/em> set in the period. I couldn\u2019t stand more than about 20 minutes of it. \u201cIt\u2019s just,\u201d I commented later \u201cpretty people behaving stupidly.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>On reflection, I\u2019ve discovered that PPBS describes a great deal of both the fiction and nonfiction I can\u2019t stand. It\u2019s a more general category that includes not just TSTL, but celebrity gossip magazines, almost every \u201cromantic comedy\u201d ever made, and a large percentage of the top-rated TV shows (especially, of course, the soap operas).<\/p>\n<p>Eric S. Raymond, <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=204\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Pretty People Behaving Stupidly&#8221;, <em>Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2005-08-29.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019ve been learning about the romance genre recently. I have no intrinsic interest in it at all, but I have an intelligent friend who plows through romances the way I read SF, and we\u2019ve been discussing the conventions and structural features of the genre. Along the way I\u2019ve learned that romance fans use an acronym [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,41],"tags":[1235,122,139,101],"class_list":["post-32909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-quotations","tag-esr","tag-movies","tag-psychology","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8yN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32909"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32910,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32909\/revisions\/32910"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}