| Quote: | | It's a tack worth taking in shoujo romance, which absolutely tends to glorify the idea of first love = true love. We see it over and over again in the genre, whether it's the protagonist ending up with a childhood friend, the person they've had a crush on since preschool, a young(ish) teacher, or just the bad boy they started dating due to an inexplicable and credulity-straining series of events. |
To be entirely fair, while yes, there's a tendency toward "first love = only love ever", it's not the only prominent, or even the default, template. There's also a lot of stories where the protagonist's first love is not the boy who she's very obviously going to get together in the end - she falls in love with someone else, it doesn't work out, and then she ends up with the boy who'd been faithfully loving her all along. (This is what JP fandom calls ateuma, a love interest who is obviously not going to be The One, but exists to facilitate either the male lead realizing that he loves the heroine, and/or the heroine to crush on him, get her heart broken, and find that what she really needs is the male lead's love.)
Also, a lot of it is within the timeframe of the story. So yes, the protagonist may end up with That Boy in a happy ending, but also they're teenagers, and we have no idea how long their romance is going to last. Some stories have a babies-ever-after type of ending, but there's also a lot where the characters just kind of walk off into the sunset and technically we have no idea what's going to happen in ten years' time. So I'd say it's romances with adult protagonists that tend to really lean into the do the "first love is the only love" thing, where the adult characters are fixated on their teenage romances.
(And then there's the rare work, like Paradise Kiss - which ruined the shoujo romance genre for me forever - where the girl does actually end up with the boy she loved first and kept admiring and being fond of all along, but it takes them a decade or so to eventually find each other romantically, having all sorts of relationships in the meantime.)
|
