Fish Out of Water

She is wearing the wrong shoes. Not fashionably wrong, functionally wrong, and the ground here is mud with gravel through it, and everyone in the yard has now noticed the shoes and is being polite about them. Fish out of water is a plot-shape in which one half of the couple is transplanted into a world that is not theirs, and the other half belongs to it completely. City into country, money into work, a woman raised loud into a family that does not raise its voice. The specific transplant varies. The structure does not. What the trope promises is a courtship conducted across a real gap in competence. He is fluent here and she is not. That inverts the usual romance power arrangement in a way readers find satisfying, because for once the person doing the teaching is doing it in a domain that has nothing to do with money or status. He knows how to fix the pump. That is worth something here, and she can see that it is worth something, and neither of them can pretend otherwise. The make-or-break element is whether the new world genuinely resists her. This is the diagnostic. A world that resists has rules she keeps breaking without knowing, people who do not warm to her on schedule, and a set of competences she cannot acquire in a montage. A world that does not resist is a backdrop with charming locals in it. The reader can tell within fifty pages which one she is in, and the difference determines whether the story has any stakes at all. The failure mode is the instantly charmed town. She arrives, she is a little out of place for two chapters, and thereafter everybody adores her. The gruff neighbour softens. The suspicious matriarch decides she is good people. Whatever the world was going to demand of her, it has waived. And with the demand goes the trope, because the shape needs her to be changed by the place, and a place that adjusts to her cannot change her. There is an equal and opposite failure worth naming, which is the world written as an obstacle course of hostile idiots. That version flatters the transplant and patronises the locals, and it produces a book in which the heroine is right about everything and merely has to wait for the natives to catch up. Both failures come from the same root: the writer has a view about which world is better, and the view has leaked into the plotting. The strong version has no such view. The place is not superior to the place she came from. It is different, and it is coherent, and it works for the people in it, and the things it asks of her are legitimate. She gives some things up. She keeps some things the place would rather she did not, and it accommodates her on those, slowly, because he vouches for her. Then someone hands her a pair of boots that fit, without comment, and she puts them on. That is the shape. Not the arrival. The first morning she does not think about her shoes.