This is my essay on the romance of authority. Please bear with me, because I’m not really structuring this like a formal essay. My general plan is to talk about a lot of related topics in a casual, easy-to-follow manner, and hopefully eventually arrive at some kind of conclusion in the end. I’ll inevitably ramble at least a little bit, and for that I am sorry, but that’s just the way I talk about things: excessively.

Let me first define what I mean by ‘the romance of authority.’ For the purposes of this exercise, let’s all assume we’re teenaged girls. Now you may not be a girl, or you may be (like I am) considerably past your teenaged years, but for the purposes of this discussion, in the way I plan to discuss it, we’re all teenaged girls. It’s important to lay this out as groundwork, because part of the romance of authority isn’t only the appeal of the authority figure himself, but also the relatability of the heroine who romances him. The authority figure isn’t nearly as appealing unless there is a suitable heroine available to court him. If no heroine is available in the canonical material, then the fandom will make up their own.

It’s very important to realize that the romance of authority is focused on two actors, and not just one. The object of adoration, the authority figure, is obviously very important, but the person with whom the reader self-identifies, the heroine, is equally important. That’s because the romance of authority isn’t about worshiping someone from afar, or even watching someone else more appropriate romance this person. We can do that all we like in our regular lives, because no matter who you are, an attractive and appealing authority figure isn’t all that far away.

So the romance of authority isn’t about distance. It’s about getting up close and personal with an authority figure. It is participatory fandom. We read these stories because we get something very important out of them. As the reader-heroine we get the opportunity to get close to a figure who’s normally forbidden to us. We receive care and affection and love from this figure whom we adore, and perhaps most of all, what an authority figure offers is safety and protection and control.

Let me break this down further. Girls, particularly teenaged girls, are often put into circumstances that are beyond their control. They don’t generally choose where they live, or where they go to school, and sometimes they cannot even choose what they study, or what they pursue as a hobby. At the cusp of adulthood, more and more responsibilities are being heaped upon them, but they aren’t seeing as many freedoms to balance out the scales. This is particularly troubling for girls who may sometimes be given even stricter rules as they grow up, as opposed to boys, who often enjoy more relaxed rules as they grow into their teens and late teens.

All of this creates a home/school/social environment that is stifling, an environment that a girl may very naturally wish to escape. The romance of authority provides an escape, because it offers a ‘become an adult free,’ card. If you enter into a romance with an adult, you become an adult yourself, while not necessarily being forced to face up to the same adult responsibilities. Like the Kagamine Rin song ‘I Can Take off My Panties,’ you end up in a miraculous in-between place, a paradise of having your cake and eating it too, where you can be an adult when it suits you, and retreat back to childhood when things become too alarming, relying on your authority figure boyfriend to take care of things for you.

This is what I meant by the authority figure offering safety, protection, and control. The safety offered by the authority figure is basically entirely at odds with the safety offered by parents-and-home. The parents-safety is something like a prison, where your freedom and autonomy are sacrificed for someone else’s convenience. But the authority figure’s safety is a safety built on your (the heroine’s) personal freedom. Because your romantic partner represents authority, he can protect you from other authority figures who wish to deprive you of your freedom.

The authority figure is “Someone who appreciates me for being me.” He doesn’t try to pigeonhole the heroine as a child, the way her parents do (well, he might try for a while, but he never succeeds in the long run. This is part of the pattern, and the appeal) but respects her as a capable person. He sees ‘the girl I mean to be,’ the fully developed person that the heroine is in the process of growing into. This is appealing because it says ‘you are wonderful, you don’t have to become different for someone to love you.’ You don’t have to ‘grow up’ to become beautiful, or appealing, or enthralling. You are already all of those things right now.

This is particularly important to girls because as anyone who has actually been a teenager can attest, there is no ‘growing up’ into someone different. You’re simply yourself, and every day you get a little bit older, and you’re always constantly changing, but there’s no magical day when you suddenly become an attractive bombshell grownup. That’s a complete myth. As teenage girls grow up, they begin to panic that they haven’t yet metamorphosed from school girl into sexy lady. The romance of authority allays those fears by saying instead, ‘you already are amazing. I love you now.’ And girls are willing to accept that truth because it comes from a bona fide adult, their authority figure. Coming from a peer or a parent, those words don’t mean much, but coming from an authority figure, the words suddenly have caché.

And even after we’re through with being teenagers (because we’ve aged out of the category), we still face almost identical problems. We still worry about our self-worth, because we still haven’t become sexy bombshell ladies. We aren’t confident and self-possessed and in control of our lives. We feel threatened by our families who still seek to restrict our autonomy by laying out guidelines and expectations of what they think we should do with our lives.

Our authority figure boyfriends step in and quietly say, ‘Let me handle this,’ and then they handle it for us. It’s exhausting to stand up to the pressures of the world alone. There is really no describing the kind of comfort that comes from knowing someone is caring for you to the best of their ability. The authority figure romance provides a girl with someone she can rely upon, someone she can depend on, someone who’s eminently capable, someone she can have confidence in.

In many modern fictional depictions of romantic relationships, women are really sort of expected to be the ‘grownups’ while the men are allowed to be what amounts to overgrown boys. And this dynamic doesn’t seem to be something that the women have sought out, more like it’s been thrust upon them, and they have to be willing to accept it, or consign themselves to spinsterhood. Girls who find the romance of authority appealing aren’t really interested in a relationship like that, where they have to be the mother of their boyfriend, get him out of trouble, buy his dinner, make his lunch, pay his bail, etc.

Instead, they want a real, honest adult, someone who takes responsibility for their actions, generally follows rules, and can pay for his own dinner. (Sometimes, he’s even nice enough to pay for your dinner too.) They want a man who dresses well, remembers to shave, and actually combs his hair.

Of course, what many girls are told over and over again as they’re growing up is “Someone like that would never want someone like you.” How devastating to our collective self-esteem is that kind of statement?

The romance of authority is a fantasy. That’s what makes it appealing, but it’s tragic when we’re presented with the idea that dating a competent adult is as much of a pipe dream as Prince Charming on a white horse descended from Fairyland.

And there’s another major reason the romance of authority is so appealing to us: it’s because the romance of authority subverts and actively destroys social order.

Who doesn’t like social order? Why, the people that the social order craps on most luxuriously, of course.

Girls are told repeatedly: you can’t have this, you can’t have this, you can’t have this. They’re told: No one will want you. Become different. Accept anyone who will pay attention to you, otherwise you’ll be all alone. They’re told: that person will never love you because of who you are. You are unlovable. You are untouchable.

(I am not saying that boys are not also told this. I believe that they are, and this point remains valid, but right now we’re all pretending to be teenaged girls, remember?)

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Everything in the social order tells you that you are forbidden. Media tells you you’re unattractive while at the same time hypersexualizing you. Stories about romance and finding love are never about girls like you, girls in your circumstance, girls who want what you want. You watch stories about love, because you wildly yearn for it, but the stories rarely satisfy you, because they don’t give you what you want. Everything tells you ‘you should be like this if you want to be accepted.’ They tell you ‘this is what you want if you’re normal.’

But you aren’t normal, because no one is, or maybe everyone is, and normal doesn’t mean anything at all, because everyone is different.

One thing is for sure, you don’t want what they’re selling.

What they’re selling supports the social order. You probably don’t care whether it supports the social order or not. What you care about is that it isn’t what you want.

You don’t want the hero. If anything, you probably want the villain.

That’s why there are dozens of stories about Hermione Granger dating the Joker. (Seriously, there are.)

Anyway, the romance of authority doesn’t just bend the social order, it roars through it like a freight train. An older adult figure of authority actively falls in love with a teenaged girl, someone he has authority over. The world says ‘A man like that would never love a girl like you,’ but the romance of authority denies that, because he does, and it’s powerful because it’s real, sincere love, love that you can hold onto. It’s love that defies social precepts, love that is difficult, love that is often expressly forbidden by law and social custom, and that is one of the reasons it is so appealing.

It’s a way of proving that the love is powerful, that it is intense, and legitimate, because so many barriers are thrown up before it that must be destroyed before it can be had. The romance of authority is spell-binding, because inherent to its nature is the statement of ‘I’d go to hell for loving you.’ The heroine (the reader) already knows what it’s like to be defiant of social customs, because she already loves this person who is forbidden to her (the authority figure). She’s already a pariah, an outcast from the normal because of what she wants. What the romance of authority does is have the authority figure respond just as powerfully. He’s an authority figure, an individual who stands as a symbol of rules and of order, but he denies that order when his feelings contradict it.

This is a very powerful fantasy for a reader-heroine. She destroys the social order herself by being someone that the authority figure can and does love. She’s already a rebel, and he becomes something of a rebel by accepting his feelings for her. He remains an authority figure, someone who represents rules and order and power, but he’s willing to deny all that for her, and possibly lose everything in his life because of it.

In this way, the heroine-reader is always an incredibly active party in all of these stories. She is the one who arrives to enact change on a static situation.

People often complain that most young adult novels follow the same script: a girl with some weird supernatural power that she doesn’t understand meets a boy (or two boys) and then they proceed to change her life. In the romance of authority, the exact opposite happens. A heroine arrives on the scene and then proceeds to profoundly change the life of the authority figure she encounters.

This is the appeal of Hades and Persephone. Suddenly the new queen of the underworld, Persephone, takes it upon herself to drastically change the life of the lord of the dead, to change the whole of the world that surrounds her, creating echoes that will resound through time and space. How could she not? She’s the goddess of spring and life and flowers descended to the land of the dead. Honestly, the story just writes itself.

So why is it so often that the authority figures that we love are not the heroes, but rather the villains, or are otherwise side characters, rather than protagonists? That’s because stories that are marketed to the mainstream rarely have romances of authority in them -- certainly not as the main love story. Of course, there are exceptions. The Sound of Music is most definitely a romance of authority. Jane Eyre (and everything else Charlotte Bronte wrote) is a romance of authority. There are others, naturally, and I could make an exhaustive list, but it’s important to realize that these stories are the exception, and not the rule. These sorts of men are rarely the protagonists in love stories.

(They’re rarely allowed to be protagonists at all, which is why the books are about Harry Potter and not Severus Snape.)

Many, many stories are told from a masculine perspective, and are often coming-of-age stories in which a boy becomes a young man, and likely finds romance along the way. Harry Potter is like this. Final Fantasy X is like this, which is why it is a story about Tidus, in which Auron is only a supporting character (albeit an important one). Mostly, authority figures in fiction are consigned to the roles of mentor and/or villain. Girls seeking the romance of authority want to break their authority figures out of these narrow roles and let them experience their own stories, stories that are authored by the girls themselves (both literally, as writers, and figuratively as reader-participants).

Honestly, stories that feature the romance of authority prominently often make people profoundly uncomfortable (because of how much it subverts the social order) unless that romance is packaged to be incredibly twee and family-friendly, as it is in The Sound of Music.

(And people will still complain about even that. Go home, Karen. This book is not for you. Stop trying to harass other people who are just trying to quietly enjoy a story that makes them happy.)

Many critics of stories that feature the romance of authority seem to imply that women who wish for it ought to be ashamed of themselves, that they deny themselves agency, that they are content to give up their autonomy to someone ‘who has power over them,’ but that completely and entirely misses the point of the romance of authority. The romance of authority is about girls having incredible strength of their own, strength to tear down social precepts, strength to deny the order of the world when it denies them, strength to create something better in its place. By telling us as women what we are allowed to want, the world tries to constrain us even further, by trying to make our oppression into an internal conflict, where we oppress ourselves for wanting something that is ‘bad for us,’ or ‘degrading,’ or whatever else has been cooked up for us to swallow.

(Don’t swallow it. Put those ideas where they belong: into the garbage.)

It’s important to remember that we are allowed to want what we want.

We are allowed to love what we love.

That doesn’t make us less than we are and we shouldn’t be ashamed of it.

So I’ve noted before that authority figures in fiction are mostly confined to being either mentors or villains. As mentors, they’re tired old bastards like Auron, or teachers like Severus Snape or Himuro Reiichi. As villains they’re characters like Hannibal Lecter (in Silence and Red Dragon) or even the Grinch from How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Grinch x Cindy Lou Who 5ever). Whatever their shape or form, these authority figures generally have some things in common.

They stand alone, either by choice or by circumstance. No one is particularly close to them. They’re suffering from personal problems that they have no ability to solve on their own -- loneliness, depression, self-hatred, general disgust for most human beings -- the list is usually something like this (and now you can see why they’re so often villains!).

Why are we attracted to such incredible signs of weakness in these authority figures that are supposed to represent strength and comfort and protection? Because their weaknesses make them human. They pull them down from their pedestal of authority and allow us to get close to them. We also love their weaknesses because we are weak ourselves. We see their pain and confusion and distress and think “That person is just like me. Maybe if we were together, we could get through it.”

That isn’t a desire for codependence. It is a desire for interdependence.

An important thing to realize about the romance of authority is that it’s not simply about having a superhero authority figure swoop in and solve all of your troubles for you. Girls are incredibly attracted to competent men with these problems that they can’t solve on their own because they want to help solve them. They see them and think ‘this is something I can do.’ They think ‘I’m alone, you’re alone. If we’re together, we don’t have to be alone anymore.’ The tormented authority figure presents the idea ‘No one can love me because of who I am and what I have done,’ but what the heroine-reader says is ‘I already love you. You don’t have to be afraid.’ The heroine-reader is a pariah-outcast who grants absolution because she loves someone considered unlovable. (Much as she herself is considered unlovable).

The authority figure says ‘No one can love me because of x.’ The heroine disagrees by saying ‘I already love you.’

The heroine-reader says ‘No one will ever love me because of x.’ The authority figure denies by saying ‘I already love you.’

It’s a reinforcing circle. The heroine can have confidence in herself because she is loved. The authority figure can begin to work through his own problems because he is loved. This is the basic interior dynamic of the romance of authority. The authority figure is someone who appears to be strong, but is weak, and needs care. The heroine is someone who appears to be weak, but who becomes strong through caring for someone else.

She doesn’t need to be delivered from anything, because she is the deliverer.