August 26, 2023

Thoughts on the Forced Nickname Trope

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This week I want to talk about a trope that seems to show up a lot in romance books, that I personally don’t like. While writing this essay, I kept feeling compelled to use qualifiers like “to me” and “personally”, but I’m just going to leave them hanging up here and do away with them everywhere else. Let’s have fun thinking critically about…

✨The forced nickname ✨

The forced nickname is a nickname thrust upon a character without their consent, and often in spite of said character’s very explicit “do not call me that” boundary. I don’t understand why it is seen as something “light” and “bantery” when one character makes it clear that they don’t like being called something, and the other character goes “harhar yes you do” or “harhar I’m going to call you that anyway”. Are we twelve years old?

I like nicknames. I think they denote closeness, inside jokes, intimacy, and joy, but only when they come from a foundational respect between the parties involved. When I turned seventeen, some of my online friends started calling me “chuckles”, and I loved it because I knew that with them, I was always laughing. Whenever they said it, I’d literally start laughing all over again. It not only indicates intimacy and friendship, but also can help that intimacy and friendship grow.

Forced nicknames, however, are not enjoyable to me for various reasons, including:

It’s most often a man doing it to a woman.

Under patriarchy, women are often taken much less seriously than men, and are not afforded the same respect as men. This trope showing up in romance novels, in which a man is forcing an unwanted nickname upon a woman, feels like an echo of that. 

Women are also seen as being more emotional and sensitive. Because patriarchy upholds men as being superior to women, stereotypical traits associated with womanhood and femininity are devalued and delegitimised.1

Writing a female character into a dynamic in which their simple request not to be called something is ignored feels like:

1. The man is deciding her feelings, wants, and needs are not valid.

2. If the woman stamps her foot or has another outward emotional response to the name, that negatively impacts the legitimacy of her feelings because she’s seen as being irrational.2

3. It also paints him as an asshole, though that take isn’t supported by the text, and often isn’t the opinion of many readers.

4. If he has no issue violating her consent and requests in this way, why should I trust and believe he won’t do the same thing in other situations?

But no matter who is forcing it…

It’s still not funny or cute, to me. As mentioned above, it’s a fundamental ignoring and crossing of boundaries.

Boundaries. Is it that serious?

I think so. As I mentioned in point four above, if someone can’t respect a simple request not to call you a name, I don’t understand why we’re supposed to root for them to get together or believe that the nickname-forcer won’t force other things upon the object of their desire, or ignore other reasonable requests.

My other thought about this is that I don’t think jokes are jokes unless all parties agree, even if the intent isn’t to actively do harm.

Loving relationships need a foundation of respect for the other person, and I never feel satisfied with a forced nickname persisting throughout the narrative even when the characters get together, and the nickname-receiver stops fighting the name. It has been argued that "as symbolic violence is impervious, insidious and invisible, it also simultaneously legitimises and sustains other forms of violence as well."3

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Condescension isn’t cute

So, I feel like forced nicknames are kind of condescending because there is a thread of superiority underlying it. “I know better”, or “I think this name suits you more”, or “You’re so xyz, and I want to take every opportunity to point that out even though it annoys you, or maybe because it annoys you”. I don’t know how many romance books I’ve read that force condescending nicknames on a receiver in such a way as to be insulting.

Calling a character who abhors violence and death by something that labels them as a perpetrator of said violence, especially when they’ve said they don’t like it, just isn’t cute to me. It’s rude and also illogical. I’m sorry! I had to say it. At least pick a nickname that makes some lick of sense.

Calling a character who has been shut-in, isolated, and raised in indoctrinated privilege “princess” feels really infantilising and completely devoid of empathy.

It isn't so much a tangible act of violence as it is a form of "everyday violence" that imposes a kind of control over the receiver, which feels even more tangible to me when we take gender dynamics into consideration.

But what if they like it in the end?

This might feel a little harsh, but this makes me think of rape culture rhetoric, abuse, and the ol’ “boys will be boys” adage. Oftentimes when readers and writers excuse the forced nickname simply by having the receiver begin to like it over time, it extends empathy and understanding to the nickname-forcer, while not doing the same for the receiver. It minimises, devalues, and delegitimises the receiver’s initial requests, often without acknowledging this fact, or by trivialising this fact. Because it was never “that bad” or “that serious”, right?

Except, and maybe I’m just “built different”, I don’t think this dynamic works for me, and I have a hard time believing that the receiver really just moved on and doesn’t care. It feels a little too close to victim blaming, in which the receiver is considered at fault or irrational for their own difficulty and emotional responses to the forced nickname.

Speaking of abuse, oftentimes romance narratives will have the receiver stop fighting the name, and start to accept it. As someone who has experienced and studied abuse, it reminds me of how a person can be worn down and conditioned to stop advocating for themselves, to stop seeing their own discomfort as valid, and to start accepting things to keep the peace. Oftentimes, we don’t even know we’re doing it. To what extent can we argue, without a doubt, that the receiver is not a victim of internalisation through continuous exposure?

And how many of us have heard the phrase “he just does that because he likes you”? Men forcing nicknames on their eventual lover just reeks of this gross rhetoric that teaches children that aggressive behaviour is an acceptable way to show affection4 and that any unwanted behaviour could be well-intentioned, so we should give the benefit of the doubt and look past the red flag that it is.

Maybe if the nickname-forcer and the receiver have an open and honest conversation, and the force apologises, then I can get behind it. I need to see some acknowledgement, validation and empathy being shown.

But they really don’t seem to mind.

I always feel a little baffled by this take, when the text shows the receiver advocating for themselves and asking the nickname-forcer to stop calling them something they don’t like. It feels a little dissonant or incongruous to have a character actively say they don’t like the name, but then not have any internal feelings about it, or have it really influence the narrative in any way, allowing readers to argue that it was “never that serious”.

He knows it pisses her off, but that’s banter! Or is it bullying?

Who decides?

It makes me wonder: If I take their lack of word for it, and if the narrative doesn’t give the reciever’s feelings any weight or validity, to what extent am I complicit in minimising and delegitimizing the those feelings? To what extent am I complicit in the social scripts that this trope is born from?

Those are all my thoughts™ for the week. What do you think? I want to know!

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