Love interest

A character who is there to provide a romantic outlet to another character.

In many, many cases, this is the only role open to female characters within masculine narratives. Male characters get to have adventures with other male characters; the female love interests are there to give heterosexual credibility to those homosocial males, or to serve as damsels in distress when personal stakes are needed to advance the plot.

The traditional storyline wherein it is a female character who has a male love interest tends to be romance, where the love story itself is the adventure. CF: Joanna Russ's essay, "What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can't Write".

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