Green Flags, Red Flags, & Why We Want Both

What makes a fictional love interest a red flag or a green flag, and why are readers drawn to both?In this episode of What Lives in the Lacuna, we take opposite sides of the red flag/green flag debate. E. Donohue makes the case for Team Green Flag, exploring characters who respect autonomy, communicate honestly, understand their own emotions, and treat the people around them as equals. From contemporary fiction to Irish mythology, Fionn mac Cumhaill, and the Fianna, she looks at the ways stories can create models for what we value in our heroes and even help define the standards a culture holds itself to.Remy takes up the banner for Team Red Flag and asks why fictional danger, obsession, intensity, and power can be so compelling when those same behaviors would send us running in real life. Drawing on research into fiction as a kind of social simulation, we explore the distance between fantasy and endorsement, the agency readers have inside fictional worlds, and how stories can give us a controlled space to experience, question, and think critically about things we might never choose for ourselves.Along the way, we tackle Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, dark romance, consent, content warnings, and the difference between a story that openly invites readers into dangerous fantasy and one that disguises unhealthy behavior as an ideal. Neither red nor green turns out to be quite as simple as the debate suggests, and we eventually arrive at the eternal question: what happens when the bear tells you up front that it’s a bear?The conversation then comes back to where the episode began: the very different love interests we write. Remy turns the questions on E. Donohue to talk about Nine Waves, the first book in her historical fantasy trilogy, and Liam the extremely green-flag hero who may have convinced Remy that fictional men do not, in fact, need to be walking warning labels to be interesting. By the end, Team Red Flag versus Team Green Flag becomes something bigger: a conversation about what fiction allows us to explore, what stories can model for us, and the freedom readers and writers have to choose the stories that speak to them.Resources & Works MentionedOver Nine Waves by Marie HeaneyThe Fionn Folklore DatabaseEncyclopaedia Britannica: Fenians“The Cognitive Science of Fiction” by Keith OatleyThe Knight and the Moth by Rachel GilligThe Once and Future Queen by Paula LaffertyOne Dark Window by Rachel GilligThe Ritual and The Sinner by Shantel TessierWorks by Elle ThorpeTwilight by Stephenie MeyerFifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James“Down by the Glenside” / “The Bold Fenian Men”