The prompt immediately reminded me of IRON KISSED by Patricia Briggs, where Mercy is tricked into drinking from Orfino's Bane (a goblet that lets someone rob the person who drinks from it of their will). In IRON KISSED, the bad guy, Tim, has stolen a bunch of fae artifacts, including bracers that make him very strong and a Druid's Hide, which keeps his enemies from finding or harming him.

One of the things that Tim makes Mercy do is to fall in love with him. It's a very disturbing scene, and it's emotionally wrenching to watch Mercy fight with the compulsion to maintain a sense of self. In the end, though, Mercy is able to beat Tim--precisely because she loves him. She wasn't his enemy because he told her not to be, she says after she attacks and kills him.

This is not, however, a review of IRON KISSED.

It should seem obvious that it is easier to love a good person than a bad one. I'm not speaking of romantic love here, but rather platonic love--the love you have for a friend or relative. However, in my experience, friendships don't grow up because of admiration between two people about the strength of their consciences or the saintliness of their decisions. Most people don't pick their friends based on how much they donate to charity or how many puppies they've saved from the pound. It more usually has to do with things such as time spent together in a school or work environment or compatibility of interests, i.e. liking similar music, movies, sports, etc.

Most of my close friends are people that I've known for over five years. "The girls" I met in high school, and we were in the same extracurricular group. For 9th and 10th grades, we had all of the same classes together, and every year, after school we would stay after for at least an hour every day, and there were days when we were at school until five or ten o'clock at night working on sets, practicing lines. Some years, when we won State competition, we met on weekends to work on fundraising to pay for our trips to Globals in Tennessee. Other people I'm close to, I met in middle school and have been friends with--despite occasional blips where we fell out of touch, like when I went to college--ever since.

Around the time when I went to college, though, my mother got sick, and my college was about 2 hours from home. So I came home on weekends to do housework and spend time with my family, which meant that while I was attending classes, I didn't spend a lot of time socializing. I was friendly with people, but now that I've come back home for law school, there isn't anyone from college who I talk to, other than the occasional e-mail to or from a professor. The same is true of law school; I have acquaintances here, but there are only a handful of people here who I would invite to a party or out to the bar, and of them, I doubt I'll still talk to them after the bar exam.

What does this have to do with the topic?

Some of the people I'm close to are, quite frankly, awful human beings. I won't name names (they wouldn't mean anything to you anyway), but I have friends who are manipulative, irresponsible, borderline sociopathic, dangerous. I know people who can't stand to be anything but the center of attention, people who are so boring and sad that they make parties not-fun to be at. I have friends who I call whores to their face, who are alcoholics, who are on probation for assault. They have redeeming qualities, of course--all people do--but for the most part, I'm comfortable admitting that I am friends with people who elicit such (justifiable--I don't deny it) distaste in others I know that group events almost always end in tears, and have occasionally broken out in violence.

Yes, I love these people, but I am comfortable in stating that I have friends whom I also detest on a moral level, where I hate everything they stand for.

I don't love them because they're good people--I love them because they're my friends. They're my friends because we share history, because they've gone out of their way to do sweet things for me, because I can sit and talk and laugh for hours with them about a movie or life, because when they're in town I want to drop everything to be with them. I may disapprove of things they do, and I'm not afraid to tell them, but in most ways, I don't love them despite their character flaws, I love them because of their character flaws. They wouldn't be the same people they are, without them. The same character traits that make them horrible people also give them the opportunity to be great--to land them good jobs in the medical field, to send them into a Ph.D. program at 21, to let them stand on their own two feet despite horrible childhoods.

To be a friend, you have to understand and accept who your friends are. You have to be ok with the fact that they aren't perfect people--you can't pretend that because they're your friend, because you love them, they don't have flaws. It's okay to hate something about a person--even to hate that person--if you love them.

That's life, and frankly I think more damage is done when people try to pretend that the people they care about are good people, than when they accept that some people have glaring character flaws and work those flaws into their relationships so that they stop being hurtful or infuriating, so that they simply are.

This is a community for those of you that enjoy creative writing. Every one - two weeks a new challenge will be posted. As an example, we might give you a title, an opening sentence, a picture, or something completely different. It is then up to you to write a story of up to 5000 words that links to the prompt we gave you. You do not have to enter every single challenge, it's up to you which ones you feel like doing.

and while I can't come up with something for every challenge, I usually try. It's a good community, and the prompts help keep me inspired to write, and I enjoy the practice of having to actually finish pieces every week; endings are much harder to practice than beginnings, after all.

I bring this up because this week's (week 33!) challenge is to write a film noir piece that takes place in an unusual location. While I often describe myself as an urban fantasy reader primarily, the truth is that my absolute favorite niche of the sci-fi/fantasy genre is what I like to call "noir fantasy." The Dresden Files (beginning with STORM FRONT) by Jim Butcher are a good example of this, as are Glen Cook's Garrett, P.I. books (beginning with SWEET SILVER BLUES), the Cal Leandros (NIGHTLIFE) books by Rob Thurman, The Vampire Files (BLOODLIST) by P.N. Elrod, and the Nightside (WELCOME TO THE NIGHTSIDE) books by Simon R. Green.

I admit I'm a little young for true film noir, but even though I've never seen THE MALTESE FALCON or even had much luck sitting through BLADE RUNNER, I love the concept of the hardboiled, down-on-his-luck private detective, I love the femme fatales, and I love the conventions of the genre that have become established. I love how it has its own language, its own tropes. Even if film noir is difficult to define precisely, the mood of fantasy noir is a wonderful blend of dark idealism and gritty hopefulness that I really love. One of my favorite episodes of Charmed was CHARMED NOIR (episode 7.08), where Paige and Kyle end up sucked into a 1930s film noir written by former Magic School students.

I tend to think of such noir fantasy as a subset of the urban fantasy genre, though urban fantasy is growing up, acquiring its own identity and standards, separate from its roots, and the Garrett books, for instance, don't take place in the "real world" (or a recognizable analog), but rather in a true fantasy setting, so there's some clear differentiation. Much of urban fantasy now has a female protagonist who kicks ass, takes names, and the underlying messages tend to have to do with being a strong woman, what that means and the difficulties that arise. Urban fantasy is also blending into the paranormal romance genre a bit.

What I call noir fantasy, however, while sharing many of the same elements of setting, has much more in common with the mystery genre than romance. Protagonists are often male, although this isn't a necessary feature of the genre. Narration is still usually in first person, but there is usually a lessened focus on relationships and a stronger focus on solving a problem. Both genres deal with tough choices, and broad-impact, saving-the-world type plots aren't the distinctive domain of either, and the tone of both genres is often quite dark, with characters who toe the line between good and evil, but I personally enjoy the noir-ish subsection of urban fantasy more than the more romance-driven works.