There is a moment in Howl’s Moving Castle when Howl, one of the most powerful wizards in Ingary, discovers that his hair has gone the wrong colour and reacts to this domestic inconvenience by filling the castle with green slime. He is twenty-seven years old, by the way.

It is worth dwelling upon this. Here is a man who catches falling stars, bargains with fire demons, walks through doors into other countries and is sufficiently formidable that kings require his services and witches wish to destroy him. And he is lying upstairs in a darkened room because Sophie has interfered with his hair potions. Shortly afterward the slime begins. It drips down the stairs. It gets into things. Calcifer complains. Sophie, who has already had quite enough of Howl by this point, is obliged to deal with the consequences.

There are contemporary fantasy heroes who would raze cities for the women they love, men who have slaughtered armies, broken ancient curses, survived torture and stood bleeding beneath various moons while refusing to discuss their feelings. I cannot think of many who would be allowed to have a nervous breakdown over accidentally becoming a redhead. This seems a pity.

Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle turned forty this year, and Howl, despite having spent a substantial portion of those forty years behaving in ways that ought to disqualify him from serious romantic consideration, has aged remarkably well. The book has never really gone away, of course, and Hayao Miyazaki’s 2004 film ensured that Howl acquired an entirely separate afterlife involving earrings, feathers, enormous quantities of fan art and Christian Bale murmuring in a low voice, which was frankly stacking the deck a bit. Yet the Howl of Jones’s novel remains particularly difficult to shake off. He is less melancholy than his film counterpart, less noble, rather more slippery and infinitely more annoying.

He is also, somehow, still terribly attractive.

This is curious because Howl ought to fail almost every contemporary test of the desirable fantasy man. He is vain to an extent that would embarrass Narcissus. He spends hours in the bathroom. He owns extravagant clothes and knows perfectly well that he looks good in them. He lies with ease, fluency and occasionally artistic ambition. He falls in love often and with poor judgement, particularly when a woman does not appear immediately interested in him; and once she is, matters become less urgent. He dislikes being summoned by the King and, rather than doing anything so tiresome as refusing the King himself, sends Sophie along to explain what a thoroughly unsuitable person he is. Sophie calls him a “slitherer-outer”, and there really is no improving upon that.

Howl is cowardly, too, although he is perfectly capable of courage when courage becomes necessary. What he dislikes is the period beforehand, when one can still reasonably avoid the unpleasant thing altogether.

Most fantasy heroes are given a darkness to wrestle with. Howl would prefer to wriggle out through a side door. When I look at the great parade of men currently stalking through fantasy romance, all broad shoulders, old wounds and ominous powers, Howl’s idiosyncrasy begins to look quite attractive.

You know the other man by now. We all do. He is very tall, almost aggressively so. He has black hair, unless the author has become adventurous and given him silver hair. He has scars. He possesses either shadows, wings, knives or some especially marketable combination of the three. Entire kingdoms are afraid of him, though the heroine will eventually discover that he is unexpectedly tender with injured animals or younger sisters. He has been emotionally constipated for approximately four hundred years. His moral alignment is grey, although usually a rather accommodating grey which permits murder while leaving his views on female autonomy impeccably modern. He may be a faerie prince, dragon rider, assassin, warlord, vampire, cursed king or immortal general. He is, nevertheless, beginning to feel suspiciously like the same man changing coats backstage.

The inevitable word here is “shadow daddy”, which began as an affectionate joke and has somehow become a perfectly functional classification system. None of this means that the archetype itself is bad. Rhysand did not personally break fantasy. Nor did Xaden Riorson, Cardan Greenbriar or whichever enormous black-clad man is currently leaning against a doorway somewhere in romantasy, watching the heroine with an unreadable expression. Power is attractive. Danger can be attractive. The fantasy of a terrifying man who is gentle only with you has survived for centuries because, evidently, women quite like it. Rochester managed very well out of being difficult long before anybody thought of giving him shadow magic.

But repetition does strange things to desire. What begins as fantasy becomes furniture. This is especially odd because romantasy is so frequently discussed in terms of the female gaze, female pleasure and the liberation of female fantasy. Women read these books in enormous numbers, women write them, women recommend them to one another with evangelical intensity. There is something genuinely cheerful in that, particularly after a literary history in which women’s romantic appetites have so often been treated either as frivolous or vaguely embarrassing.

Only, having at last constructed this enormous playground for female desire, publishing appears to have ordered several thousand copies of the same man.

Howl would last five minutes at the factory. For one thing, he wants to be beautiful. Not merely handsome. Beautiful. There is a difference, and Howl knows it. Clothes matter to him, scents matter, hair matters, rather catastrophically. His vanity is not a comic little flaw pasted over an otherwise conventionally masculine hero- it is one of the chief principles of his existence. And there is no embarrassed little gesture from the novel assuring us that all this prettiness is forgivable because he can also break someone’s neck. Howl’s masculinity is wonderfully, delightfully unfortified. He is clever, manipulative, affectionate, selfish, vain, irresponsible, tender and occasionally so ridiculous that Sophie would probably like to put him outside with the washing.

Jones does not explain these contradictions away, and that is the part I miss. So many modern fantasy heroes technically possess flaws, yet their flaws have a suspicious habit of making them hotter. Ruthlessness proves competence, jealousy proves devotion, brooding creates mystery, etc. etc. Emotional unavailability ensures that when the heroine finally gets three consecutive sentences out of him it feels like the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb. 

Howl’s defects are much less obliging. His vanity does not secretly arise from a wound which Sophie must heal. He does not spend the final third of the novel revealing that every annoying thing about him was trauma in an attractive waistcoat. Sometimes he behaves badly because he is Howl. And Sophie, satisfyingly, is not very impressed by him. And this may be the secret of the whole thing.

For much of Howl’s Moving Castle, Sophie is an old woman under a curse, stomping through Howl’s rooms, cleaning where she has been specifically instructed not to clean, bullying Calcifer, interfering with spells and gradually discovering that living with a legendary wizard involves considerably more dirt than legend generally mentions. She encounters Howl not across a moonlit battlefield but at home, which is where most grandeur eventually goes to die. She sees the bathroom and the tantrums. Their romance grows in the cracks of everything else.

This is one reason it feels so strangely fresh now. There is no clean moment in which the story announces that the romance has begun and everybody should adjust the lighting accordingly. Sophie and Howl quarrel, meddle, and become necessary to each other almost while looking elsewhere. There are curses to untangle, Calcifer making demands, the Witch of the Waste causing trouble and an entire moving castle in which basic housekeeping seems to have been regarded as an optional branch of magic. And love creeps in wearing house slippers.

“Powerful wizard” tells you almost nothing about Howl. It does not tell you that he will spend half the morning in the bathroom. It does not warn you about the green slime. It does not explain the elaborate methods by which he avoids doing things he does not want to do, nor the peculiar combination of brilliance and idiocy involved in being able to perform extraordinary magic while apparently incapable of organising ordinary life. It does not tell you why Sophie will love him, and probably could not. Howl’s unpredictability is part of his charm.

Jones allows Howl the sort of personality that does not seem to have been assembled backwards from a reader’s list of desirable traits- he’s got edges pointing in inconvenient directions. Some of them are genuinely unattractive, while some become attractive because they belong to him. And perhaps that is what has gone missing from our increasingly codified fantasy men: the possibility that desire might follow character rather than precede it.

Because the female gaze ought to be much stranger than this. Women desire beautiful men and awkward men, dangerous men, gentle men, vain men, shy men, absurd men, men who could command an army and men who would become distracted halfway through the briefing because somebody had insulted their coat. There ought to be room beside the assassins and warlords for scholars, dandies, confidence tricksters, anxious magicians, ridiculous princes, men who chatter when nervous, men who cannot brood properly, men who would look magnificent on a battlefield and then complain because blood had got on their sleeves.

Desire is embarrassing like that- sometimes particular, sometimes inexplicable. Howl himself ought to be enough proof of that.

Even the famous business of his missing heart refuses to become quite the metaphor one expects. Howl has quite literally given his heart away in his bargain with Calcifer, yet he is never emotionally heartless in the neat fairy-tale sense. He feels everything- frequently at great inconvenience to the other inhabitants of the castle. Sophie does not teach an unfeeling man to feel- if anything, one suspects everyone might have benefited had Howl occasionally felt things a little less.

Forty years after Howl’s Moving Castle, perhaps that is what fantasy should steal from him. Not the hair and not the coat, although I admit the coat is tempting. It’s this: the permission to be ridiculous.

To allow a romantic hero to be frightened, decorative, silly, cowardly in small matters and brave in important ones, irritating in ways that cannot be repackaged as trauma, and charming without requiring every room he enters to tremble before him. To trust that women may fancy a man who has not been engineered expressly to be fancied.

Keep the shadow princes. Keep the wings and knives and ancient curses. I have no wish to march through the romantasy shelves confiscating anybody’s morally grey immortal.

But after the fiftieth six-foot-five warrior has crossed his arms, narrowed his eyes and developed a muscle ticking ominously in his jaw, I do begin to long for a wizard upstairs screaming because somebody has ruined his hair.

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Written by Nishat Hossain, a writer and reader interested in classics, contemporary fiction, reading culture, and the ways through which old stories continue to shape the present.