The Girls Are Fighting: The Lesbian Fascination With “Enemies to Lovers”
There was no other living woman in the world who had done anything as intimate to Barhu as chopping off two of her fingers.
-Seth Dickinson, “The Tyrant Baru Cormorant”
An exposed neck. A cocky grin, a severe glare. The tip of a blade against a throat. Controlled breaths, straying eyes, the fragility of power, the tacit exchange of control, threats delivered in a coquettish purr. Anchored in such images is the romance-drama trope of “Enemies to Lovers”, pernicious tales of romance whose deuteragonists stand at opposing ends of a conflict. A cursory search takes one to the Fanlore wiki, though the bones of the motif have a much more timeworn origin. Tales of “star-crossed” lovers are as old as the writing of love itself, or at least as old as Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe. These tales often offer their protagonists a dichotomy: forget love and acquiesce, or struggle to be free. By itself, this has more than enough appeal. But ETL romance understands that the fight for freedom is rarely so straightforward, especially when the combatants are so entrenched in the systems that bind them. Would-be lovers in this genre are armored behind ironclad codes of conduct that restrict intimacy to antagonism. The only way to become close to their paramour is to antagonize them, and the duel becomes entangled with the ritual of affection until they are indistinguishable. The best of these stories bring their characters, through mutual and repeated conflict, to confront the restrictions a loveless world has imposed on their heart — and to tear out the chains, with all the bloody mess that requires.
It’s a huge hit with lesbians.
Once, Enemies to Lovers had been relegated to a playful undercurrent of rivalry between titular boy/girl couples otherwise all doe-eyed for each other, or, worse, to Brangelina action-comedy outings. At some point over the last decade, the already flimsy walls between writers’ rooms and fanbases crumbled at last. With that came a vivification of the sort of sanguine, emotion-driven conflict that fans had been producing en masse for decades. And Enemies to Lovers grew from niche appeal fanfiction trope, to cornerstone of internet literature, to syndicated media. Perhaps the two most notorious examples are BBC America’s Killing Eve and Netflix original She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. The former centers on the lethal game of cat and mouse between an MI6 agent and a professional assassin. Killing Eve has not yet had anything resembling a traditional romance scene, but it is, from the very first episode, powered by mutual obsession, sharp and unsubtle like a love letter papercut. Agent Eve’s closet sapphic fascination with female murderers earns her a spot on the investigative team trailing international assassin Villanelle. As for Villanelle, the first thing she does to Eve is gawk at her hair. Season 2’s climax has the assassin holding a knife to her opponent’s throat, only to spare her — not before leaning in to smell her neck.
She-Ra’s ecstatic finale, on the other hand, brings the series to a close with the first-ever lesbian kiss on Y7 television. The kiss is five seasons in the making; to be sure, five seasons featuring an expansive cast of characters, an overarching sci-fi plot and more satisfying emotional arcs than you could shake a binge-watch at. But the engine powering the show is the rupture between child soldiers turned revolutionary leader/would-be conqueror Adora and Catra. She-Ra’s themes are all those of difficult love: violent trauma, the indoctrination and internalization of oppressive values, the burden of duty, and victory at last through an open heart. This instinctive understanding is what attracted lesbians of all ages to She-Ra even when it wasn’t a sure thing that Catra and Adora would end up together. Tussling in the dirt, claws out, with the girl you never dared fess up to, is an inherently lesbian activity.
The boundaries of what a woman is allowed to be and express are strictly controlled in the service of submission. The perfect woman is demure, patient, sweet, resilient in the face of adversity but not resilient enough to stand up and fight. Expectations double up for lesbians, by definition missing a key piece of the puzzle that is socially acceptable womanhood: availability for pleasuring men. We all have our ways of dealing with our social station, and just about none of them are flawless conformity. That would require women to not feel anger. And we do, of course we do, volcanic solar flares of rage in their simplest form. Expressing such raw fury, though, leads women to social and professional ruin much more often than men. So we also metamorphose anger into a unique, icy seething, a rapier underneath the cloak. It is an involuntarily acquired skill, resulting from the repeated motions of hiding irritation from catcallers, internet strangers, professional superiors, misgenderers, friends-of-friends, even family members. But it is a skill. You wield it and you make it yours and you never cave, even when you pretend you do.
One of the great joys of gay love is the ecstasy of closeness to someone who navigates the same gender as you. The lesbian appeal of Enemies to Lovers begins at self-identification. The anger we’ve so long kept concealed comes to be reflected at last in the women involved in these complicated, too-real relationships. You might feel a kinship with the explosive one or the conniving one. Maybe they’ll both be explosive, or they’ll both be conniving. The most textured characters might move from one end to the other, fury as lava seeping through the armor, ice-water shocks poured over raging fires. ETL romance’s female deuteragonists are necessarily multilayered, as the trope’s very core is cognitive dissonance. Here, you can see women acting on their resentments, succeeding or failing for it. You can see women who have fought tooth and nail for their positions of power, or women molded by the authority they were born into. There are yells and cold vengeances, barked orders and bedroom breakdowns. Reckless and imperious all at once, these and many more are the realities of feminine anger that Enemies to Lovers fiction allows us to explore. Like any emotion, it screams to be seen; like any skill, it begs to be challenged. Dueled. Ideally, by a pretty girl.
You wouldn’t duel an unarmed opponent. That is called predation. And the fear of being a predatory lesbian is a real, pervasive one, drilled into us by a media that insists women are mellow beasts of prey. Lesbianism places the onus on you to initiate relationships with other women, making you extra aware of your sharp edges. Enemies to Lovers romance obliterates this fear by forcing a situation that exposes your antagonistic facets to your object of affection — and hers, to you. Crucially, this is not the corrosive needling of a destructive relationship, where the interested parties have arrived at their lovers’ worst after being ensorcelled by their best. The dynamic here is the exact opposite. Our enemy is granted the rare privilege of seeing the totality of another girl’s guard, nimble or ponderous as it may be. All that’s left is to find what’s underneath. To pry your rapier into the fissures and find the lover prowling below.
When our worst side comes to light, we have to confront it. Just as the fear of being predatory, many of our most destructive behaviors are internalizations of social impositions. It’s because of this that authority is a long-running theme in Enemies to Lovers romance. Positions of authority are bargains with the devil: you can be strong if and only if you follow a strict set of rules. If you play the role long enough, the rules become ingrained, their own system of reward and punishment. It’s altogether not a hard bargain to rope lesbians into, in particular those of us who remain in unsafe situations and for whom quotidian life is something of a battlefield. Transgender women know this hypervigilance all too well. Certain strains of transphobia are predicated on the idea that transgender women are tainted due to our extended contact with the dominant side of the patriarchal equation. A categorical untruth, yet tragically easy to swallow. This is among the reasons why transgender women gravitate towards villainous characters. It feels good to be as bad as they say you are, and still win. Whether you carry that authority according to the strictures of your station or not, though, it eats at you. Therein lies the grace of defeat offered by ETL romance. When the would-be lovers fight as enemies, whoever loses has been unburdened of their invulnerability. They are fallible, human, and humans can fall in love.
The most expeditious way to arrive at this unburdening is through the most visceral scenes offered by Enemies to Lovers: fight scenes. For all but the truest of believers, physical control is the only form of power that can truncate social control. We are drawn to characters who wield weapons, and who wield them well, because they possess the power to quite literally cut to the heart of the matter. Fight scenes across all media are choreographed expressions of the fighters’ truth. They rely not only on the character’s skill with their chosen weapon, but on emotional beats: how important is the result of this fight, how do I feel about the person on the receiving end? Where other tropes abound in date scenes, Enemies to Lovers abounds in fight scenes. The loving couple cannot help but uncover feelings, both theirs and their opponent’s, with every thrust of the blade. The aftermath of the match can lead to some of the most dramatic revelations yet. Verbal barbs can be exchanged along with physical ones. And even all of those tools are optional. Raw, wordless expression lies in the face an opponent makes as their chin is tilted up with the point of a blade. The lesbian you are under duress, too, is worthy of being beheld and admired.
