: Re: How do you write boy & girl protagonists without turning them into a love story? I've played with the idea of a multi-book fantasy story for years, where a female and male protagonists' lives

@Candy753

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You have two options to deal with the situation, which will be on the mind of readers.

One is to blatantly ignore it. This is the post-feministic way: Treat the boy and the girl as human beings, romance between them simply never happens, describe their friendship and - through the telling of the story - create the frame that non-sexual friendship between girls and boys is completely normal. By not talking about it at all, you make it something that doesn't need to be especially addressed.

The other is to explicitly resolve it. Make the protagonists struggle with romantic feelings towards each other, then resolve them into friendship. Or make it explicitly clear that they are not romantically or sexually attracted to each other. Or, if your audience is adults, let them have a romantic or sexual encounter that doesn't work out, but they stay friends. This is, in my experience, one of the most common cases of real friendship between men and women where none of them has any hidden feelings - when the "let's fuck" part is out of the way, both decided it was pleasurable but beyond the initial desire, nothing, let's stay friends.

What I think will not work is something halfway. You need to blend the topic out completely, or confront it. If you try to mention it in passing, you enter this "Bob and Alice are friends, though Bob is still hoping for his opportunity" vibe.

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