I Love You Because I Cant Control You / Literature

People who fall for somebody they can't control in Literature.

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By Author:

• Jane Austen:
  • Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth Bennet is smart enough to realize this is why Mr. Darcy fell in love with her — she was a welcome change from the likes of his Clingy Jealous Girl Caroline Bingley.
    Elizabeth: Now be sincere; did you admire me for my impertinence?
    Darcy: For the liveliness of your mind, I did.
    Elizabeth: You may as well call it impertinence at once. It was very little less. The fact is, that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking, and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike them. Had you not been really amiable, you would have hated me for it; but in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself, your feelings were always noble and just; and in your heart, you thoroughly despised the persons who so assiduously courted you.
  • Interestingly, Austen takes the opposite approach to the trope in her next novel Mansfield Park, where Henry Crawford and his sister are both fully aware that the only reason he wants to make Fanny Price fall in love with him is that she's the first girl who doesn't fawn over him and crave his attention. The difference from P&P is that It's All About Me in Crawford's case.
  • Gender flipped in Austen's Emma, where Emma falls in love with Mr. Knightley, one of the few men of her acquaintance who don't worship her or treat her like she's perfect.

By Title:

• One of the reasons Iason is so attracted to Riki in Ai no Kusabi is the latter's rebellious nature and defiant pride. The more Riki fights and resists him, Iason becomes more excited and determined to get Riki to submit willingly.
• The Apothecary Diaries has a platonic example: Jinshi, a male eunuch in the imperial harem, is incredibly pretty and almost everyone tends to judge him by his looks (he is also frequently propositioned by both men and women of the court, which annoys him since he has no sex drive). Maomao, however, just finds him smug and annoying and tends to respond to his antics with Death Glares and Face Palms. Jinshi, meanwhile, finds her bluntness and contempt for him incredibly amusing and gets a kick out of interacting with her as a result. He later falls hard for Maomao anyway, even considering a candidate for marriage because —surprise, surprise— he's actually royalty.
• The Black Magician Trilogy: In The Ambassador's Mission Achati laments his control over his slaves — "Only when the person could easily leave you do you appreciate it when he stays" — and seems to have taken an interest in Dannyl at least partly due to a more equal status.

• Discworld
  • In Carpe Jugulum the young vampire Vlad becomes interested in Agnes/Perdita because she is able to resist his mind control due to her split personality.
  • In Going Postal, Adora Belle Dearheart catches the eye of Moist von Lipwig for being almost completely immune to the former con artist's charms.

• In The Finishing School Series future duke Felix ignores the girls that throw themselves at him and only has eyes for the protagonist Sophronia who finds him arrogant and is far more focused on excelling at her espionage training than catching a rich, titled husband.
• This is supposedly why Christian is in love with Ana in Fifty Shades of Grey. He claims this is a draw of Ana's, why he loves her... except her moments of defiance send him into a rage more often than not (sometimes on the same page) and he is still very controlling of her.
• Captain Luthar first falls for Ardee West in The First Law because she's the first woman he's ever met who's honest about her low opinion of him.

• Cassandra, the Physical God antagonist of Full Tilt, has been preying on people's fears for at least several thousand years, but she's never once felt fear herself. The protagonist initially drew her attention by being the sole survivor when she sent a school bus careening off a cliff, but when she challenges him individually, she's both unnerved and strangely turned on by his lack of any apparent weakness for her to target. At various points, she flirts with him, taunts him, offers him a job, and begs him for mercy. (Only that third one seriously interests him, and not for very long.)
• Caine for Diana in Gone. He fell for her because she was the only girl who hadn't fallen for his charms.
• Possibly the only reason for Scarlet O'Hara's obsession with Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind is that he is not affected by her "powers of seduction"... at least, not enough to leave his wife.
• Graceling Realm: The titular protagonist of Fire falls in love with Prince Brigan partially because he is one of the very few people who has a strong enough mind to resist the mind-altering effects of her inhuman beauty.
• In Harry Potter, Harry becomes romantically interested in Ginny after she backs off, makes her crush on him less obvious, and interacts with him in a platonic and friendly manner. In this case, it's less that Harry enjoys the challenge of pursuing her and more that he finds it unnerving and smothering when girls try to get him to love them.
• The Heir Chronicles: In The Wizard Heir by Cinda Williams Chima, protagonist Seph has always been able to get any girl he wants thanks to his magically-aided charisma. Then he meets Madison Moss, whose Anti-Magic makes her immune. You can guess where this is going.

• Sophie from Howl's Moving Castle (the book) is clever enough to recognize that Miss Angorian, who is not only capable of resisting Howl's charm and is engaged to another man but also smart, pretty, down-to-earth and confident, will steal Howl's heart after witnessing their first meeting but it was Sophie who actually made Howl fall in love with her in the end.
• InCryptid:
  • Artie is an incubus, who naturally gives off pheromones that attract humans attracted to men (other than blood relatives, who are immune^note Incubi and succubi can interbreed with humans, and he has a human mother and cousins). This is a problem since Artie has very little control over his pheromones, to the point that he's a Hikikomori by necessity. Part of the reason he's in love with Sarah is that she's not human^note Not even a mammal, and her species is from Another Dimension, and so she's the only non-relative his age who he has no effect on. Sarah, on the other hand, is a member of a telepathic species who are infamous for being Backstory Invaders and forcing other sapients to like them and give them whatever they want. Sarah, being one of the few Token Heroic Orcs of her species, wants to avoid this as much as possible, and it turns out Artie's ancestor passed down some genetic immunity to her telepathy, so she can't make him love her unconsciously, and would never do so deliberately.
  • It's implied this is the case with both Sarah and Artie's parents as well: Artie's incubus father Ted fell in love with Jane Price when he found out his pheromones were mostly ineffective on her, and Sarah's mom Angela, who's the same species as her, is Happily Married to a Revenant Zombie, whose mind she can't read.
• This is how Bobby and Oran feel about each other in The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn. Oran isn't swayed by Bobby's charm and savoir-faire and uses her stature as a TV reporter to try and hold him accountable for his outlandish actions with the Dodgers, which earns his interest. Bobby, on the other hand, doesn't let himself get swayed by her reporting, which she finds fascinating. They eventually get together and are married at the end of the novel.
• A non-romantic version of this is apparently a big cause of Breeze's friendship with Clubs in Mistborn. As a Smoker, Clubs is immune to Breeze's Allomancy, and he is immune to more mundane methods of emotional manipulation because everything makes him grumpy.
• In the Novels of the Jaran, Ilya falls in love with Tess because she constantly defies him when nearly everyone else in the Jaran obeys him. The fact that she doesn't fall for his charisma and good looks like most other women probably factored in, too. Not that that stopped him from trying to control her anyway...
• The Perfect Run: Being a Head-Turning Beauty who was Born Lucky, Fortuna is infatuated with Mathias, and in another loop Ryan, when they seem to be totally uninterested in her.
• In The Poster Children, Charm Person Gloria falls for John Wright because he's immune to her pheromones. Unfortunately, they can't convince others of this, so at the first chance, Gloria gets imprisoned for supposedly tricking him into marriage. She's also kept from seeing her son because of this.
  He could say no, so she had to say please.
• This is eventually the motivation by which Courtney Thane is shown to be in love with Alix Crown in Quill's Window: Her aloof, diffident nature is a stark contrast to any other woman he's met.
• In Super Powereds Angela feels this way towards Chad. Amusingly, it is later revealed that between the strange nature of his power and his own social cluelessness, he more or less fell in love with her without noticing and just needed Roy to explain as much to him.
• In the Rose of the Prophet trilogy, this is what keeps drawing Khardan back to his (divinely mandated) wife Zohra despite everything she does that antagonises him- with every woman in his tribe willing to throw themselves at his feet, Zohra is the one woman who never gives him an inch. The story even mentions as such when Khardan refuses to take another wife after marrying her, noting that Zohra makes other women seem boring by comparison.
  There were times, however, when he admitted to himself that the eyes of the sparrow were dull and lackluster after one has looked into the fiery black eyes of the hawk.
• In The Scholomance, Orion becomes fascinated with and develops a crush on El because she's the only one who doesn't worship the ground he walks on for his skill at killing maleficaria. Consequently, she's also the only one who treats him as a person and not just as a tool to be used. Though El's narration claims she finds him annoying, it's clear that she cares for him as well, and the two end up as Vitriolic Best Buds. At the end of the first book, it's clear that El reciprocates his feelings, but doesn't want to act on them because falling in love at the Scholomance is a good way to get your heart broken when your lover more than likely dies. By the second book, however, the two become a couple for real.
• Skin Game reveals that the Fallen Angel Lasciel has developed a perverse fascination with Harry Dresden- the only mortal in thousands of years who not only refused her temptations but convinced her psychic imprint to leave his mind.
  Lasciel: (during her Motive Rant) No one's ever turned me down before, Harry. Not once.
• The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries
  • In the novel (and its TV version, True Blood), this is the reason Sookie was first attracted to Bill: She realized she couldn't hear his thoughts.
  • It's implied that Eric and Sookie's relationship has elements of this. She can't read his mind, he can't glamour her or make her quit her job and live safely as an odd type of housewife. This has nothing to do with the challenge and everything to do with the fact that hearing a guy's thoughts tends to really screw things up for Sookie, e.g. unflattering commentary on her body.
• The Twilight Saga has a variation: "I love you because I can't read your mind." He actually can, and regularly does, control her. Also, it's implied that it's supposed to be because Bella is way too good to fall for looks alone... except that's all she talks about when she describes Edward, so the meaning is lost.
• Averted in The Vampire Diaries. Elena notes that Meredith is the only female who seems immune to Damon's charisma, but this only serves to make Damon rather wary of her.
• In Watersong, Penn develops an obsessive love/lust for Daniel because he is immune to her siren song, making him the first person in millennia to actually stand up to her. She admits she wouldn't be nearly so interested if he fell under her spell and just mindlessly worshiped her like everyone else.
• This is a large part of the romance between Victoria Dallon and Dean Stansfield in Worm. Vicky has an aura which causes people to either be in awe of her or terrified of her, while Dean has the ability to read people's emotions. However, their powers interfere with each other: Dean can't read Vicky's emotions and is immune to her aura. As such, each of them is pretty much the only person with whom the other can have a quasi-normal romantic relationship.
• Wuthering Heights: Edgar for Cathy Earnshaw. She walks all over him, ignores his wishes, throws temper tantrums, and obviously prefers the company of Heathcliff, and yet he refuses to give her up.
• In the X-Wing Series, "Face" Loran invokes this trope with Dia Passik, who because of her tough childhood never saw any of his films, and thus is just about the only woman of her age who doesn't gush over him. Although he meant it ironically, in the end, the two of them do get together.

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