I hope it’s clear that Fae is falling into the grave that she was standing over in the previous panel. Also romance!
I’m not a really big fan of romance in stories because there are very few instances where romance is done well, at least in Hollywood. And don’t get me started on love triangles… I hate love triangles with the fiery passion of a 1000 suns. However, as I get older I understand more and more why even the stupidest of romantic subplots make some people happy and have actually come to enjoy some plots that I use to hate.
For example, I use to loathe Romeo and Juliet. Romeo has a cat’s fickleness and Juliet has self-esteem issues but now that I’m much farther from my teenage years the story to two “star crossed lovers” is amusing in a very special way. To me Romeo and Juliet is very much a dark comedy where we as an audience get to laugh at two rebellious, hormonal teenagers doing what rebellious, hormonal teenagers do best – doing extremely stupid, shortsighted things in the name of “true love”. In that same vein we get to witness the absurdity of generational feuding. It’s a funny story.
While I bring up Romeo and Juliet, it actually has nothing to do with the current scene. I prefer for Romantic subplots to only become explicit if the subplot has some bearing on the main plot. The tremendous impact of Hope and Noliidae’s (the arboreal’s name) relationship on the history of Viosia (where Eternity Complex is set) hasn’t really come up in the story, yet. But it will.
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Yeeaah, I tend to not be a fan of fictional romance, because it’s so hard to pull off. It’s one of the most character-driven story types, so without exceptional characters, it’s so easy for it to not work. Especially if the romance is a subplot of another story, which means the main plot can get sidelined by the romance, or the romance can get sidelined by the main plot.
This is why it was so refreshing for me when I saw the movie Her…I thought it was a fascinating concept with great characters that managed to build a really good romance story.
I think you just hit all my worries about writing romantic plots/subplots on the head. I agonized about how this scene begins and this page in particular because I was and still am uncertain about if the plot and romance are integrated well enough to act as a cohesive story. In the end I ended up with the scene starting as it does because so far who Hope was has only been seen through other’s biased filters.
Honestly, I completely passed on seeing Her because I thought it sounded like the plot for an awful rom-com. Now I’m going to have to check it out once it’s available to stream on Netflix since what you wrote makes me think it is not a rom-com nor awful.