This will propably be a long post, and I apologize in advance! Also, be not scared by my (propably) many spelling mistakes, as I am not a native english speaker, and when I get really into a topic, I will type as fast as it gets. So, feel free to comment on my spelling in the comments if it's a huge bother. (Or even a small one!)
So, this is based on my expirience around the book community for some months now, as I have been keeping an eye on this specific topic.
People bash romance as a genre.
And by bash, I don't mean critizise. Critizism is fine, amazing even, as long as it's not simply hating on the book for no reason, other than to hate.
Excample:
Haunting Adeline, a book I despise, but why?
I don't despise it because it's romance, not because it's dark romanec, not because it's unrealistic (as many books are.) These are in my opinion, bad arguments for not liking/despising a book.
So I dig deeper.
I don't like Haunting Adeline, because it covers topics like rape and stalking in a (to my personal feelings), glorifying and romantazising way. I also do not like the way the ML behaves.
This wont stop me from acknowledging, that to someone else, this book can be a very entertaining and amazing read.
Now what I'm saying with this example isn't that books can't be critiqued, as I believe I have shown, but that they should be critiqued well.
Now this doesnt mean people can't comment on the quality of writing. That is fair game, and not subjective. It is purely an existance which can't be debated. I am sure all would agree, that the writing in LOTR is better than in The Spanish Love Deception.
But I have seen so many people say/claim that it's pure fact, not subjective, that all romance books are trash not worth anyones time. This is my expirience, and I undestand if yours is different, dear reader.
But I do think, that people seem to be heavily pouring critique into the romance basket, without even trying romance. Not all romance is contemporary, if that's whats turning people off. Historical, fantasy, sci-fi, anything that is a genre has romance books written within it. And it's completly undestandable if someone still doesn't like romance, as I, for example, never really got into some genres, for example, detective fiction like Sherlock Holmes.
Maybe a lot of this hate stems from the fact that most of booktok/bookstagram and booktube are filled with romace books that they may not like. And it's fine to not like those popular books. I myself do not like most of them.
This has been a long and quite incoherent rambeling, given that it is late and I am tired, but I do hope that this still resonates with some people.
I would love to see people having civil discussions in the comments, and welcome any thoughts on my opinions, as long as they are not aggressive.
So, what do you think, dear reader?
by shengogol
34 Comments
Because it’s largely women who read it and therefor it’s not taken seriously even though it single-handedly keeps publishing afloat.
I don’t hate romance as a genre. I just think it has an over abundance of bad books especially for the amount of attention it gets.
I think it’s easy to bash because there’s so much of it and it’s so popular. People who don’t read it, enjoy turning their noses up at it while feeling superior about their own literary choices and men especially enjoy bashing it because they think it’s for lonely middle aged women.
Women of all ages enjoy it and if you look it up you’ll find that the largest group of readers is between the ages of 18-54 which is a huge population!
We all find enjoyment in whatever we find enjoyment in and that applies to men and women. No one thing is more or less valid than another, it’s just that some are easier to make fun of. ;o)
In the 80s and 90s at least, Harlequin was pumping out more novels than you could read. They were covering up every used book store.
They are primarily seen as porn for women for some.
The ridiculous cover art with six-packs and ripped bodices. If you’ve noticed, romance novels have been given cartoonish covers over the past few years.
I do think romance as a genre gets bashed a lot, but in my experience that isn’t as much from the book reading community but more from popular culture. There is a tendency in popular culture to trash silly things women are more prone to like than men. I always fall back on sports versus soap operas as an example. I think both forms of entertainment are seen as fun escapism that are fine and neither deserve ridicule.
Although I will say, the popular book tube romances that you mention are imo often pure trash. It doesn’t seem like a lot of high quality romantic literature is what’s popular, and when it is, I don’t think it’s ridiculed. Now every genre has plenty of trash, including popular trash, but romance probably gets a lot of heat for its trash because it’s so so so so popular lol. I can’t even hear a romance trope referenced in a book description without cringing anymore, because it feels like it’s everywhere and it’s often so shallow (like “enemies-to-lovers” omg I will never again touch a book with this trope).
It’s sort of like when a franchise goes popular, and suddenly internet “shippers” discover it and almost all discussion is reduced to romances, even if they’re secondary to non-existent in the story. It’s annoying.
Since you mentioned sci-fi as a genre that you can find romance within, I’ll just say sci-fi is my genre and the popular science fiction romances I’ve had recommended to me were pretty bad. Meaning I can easily critique their quality. There are decent ones too, especially historically. But right now, the ones being published like hotcakes are pretty trash.
All of that said, romance as a genre is fine. We all have our preferences of course.
I think part of it is that many people view reading as a more “elevated” form of artistic consumption. “Reading books is for smart people,” that sort of thinking. And for these people, the popularity of romance fiction cheapens the whole concept of reading. They want to be distinguished from these “other” readers, who aren’t as serious as they are.
I think a lot of the hate of romance has to do with the fact that women like it. Pretty much anything associated with women or that is known as being primarily liked by women gets hate in our culture.
Romance has been the punching bag of literary genres since *long* before TikTok and Instagram existed, and it’s that way because romance is an easy target; it’s a genre made for (and often by) women in a male-dominated industry where until very, very recently female authors weren’t taken seriously as people who write “real” books and since men don’t read romance (or at least claim not to) it’s an easy scapegoat for misogynists who want to put up a facade of being critics. For a *long* time the non-romance works of female authors had to be published under pseudonyms or they’d bomb too; for instance, Mary Shelly had to publish *Frankenstein* under her husband’s at first because despite being a pretty good writer herself nobody would’ve bought it if they knew she was the author.
With that said, romance books are also the only reason book publishing was ever able to become as big as it did; you don’t hear as much about really successful romance novels for the above reasons (although maybe you do on TikTok, I’m not on there). I have a friend who’s a moderately successful romance author and still gets royalties from books she wrote a decade or more ago that I’d never heard of, and gets swarmed by fans of those books when she goes to writer conventions.
I’m not saying this is the main reason, but romance has a primarily female based demographic, especially teens and middle aged women, two demographics society really likes to shit on. This definitely plays into it
There have been a lot of comments claiming it’s hated because it’s a “women’s” genre but I think the real ridicule comes from the ridiculous scenarios and tropes.
He killed his whole family but on the inside he’s really a sweet guy. I can fix him.
He treats everyone but me like literal gutter trash because I’m special.
I’d say the toxic dynamics showed in romance shows/books are easy to ridicule.
Also men commonly get made fun of all the time for their hobbies. Gaming, Comic Books, etc. Just recently became a mainstream pop culture thing. Even still some of those sub cultures are ridiculed.
What’s funny is It’s the most popular book genre in terms of sales.
Romance is part of “Genre fiction”, which in general gets hate.
Romance is the biggest part, therefore it gets the most hate.
I am not so sure it is bashed because women like it, fantasy is also bashed and more male oriented.
Romance get’s a bit of additional hate, because it sometimes infiltrates other genres. For example if I am looking for a fantasy book, and then find out it is a romantasy, usually the fantasy writing suffers for me. The parts I like about fantasy get overshadowed by the tropes of romances.
Also romance get’s lumped in with smut (sometimes correctly), and sadly society in general looks down on anything sexual.
Genre fiction in general gets hate from people who want to appear “smart”, by only “reading” (or pretending to read) “smart” books.
I just think people can predict the Romance endings or the feelings so it’s seen as too easy to grasp. The tropes are annoying too, like love triangle or miscommunication. Honestly, I love the romance novels where there is a deeper connection between the characters.
I’m a guy who was catfished into reading Romantasy by T. Kingfisher. I primarily read horror but now use romance as a palette cleanser. Romance novels like fantasy and westerns have their origin in pulp novels and while other publishers have moved away from that model Harlequin still releases 140-170 titles each month. This floods the market with cheap, low quality and poorly written romance novels. They rely heavily on the same plot devices, structure and tropes to produce so many. These books use smut to cover the poor writing. They sell well, especially at Walmart, so people see more of them than anything else.
There is also the fact that literary snobs like sad stories. So “well written” romantic novels like The Fault in Our Stars are thought to be good. The ones with happy endings are viewed as cheap. People also get really excited and enthusiastic about the romance novels they love. Think of the Twilight craze or Fourth Wing. People who take themselves too seriously assume if someone gets that excited about something it must be for kids.
Personally I read romance for the happy endings. I like a nice safe feel good book after reading something horrifying. That said I wouldn’t be caught reading a physical romance book in person, my friends would never let me live it down. My wife makes fun of me enough for having them on my kindle but still let’s me excitedly tell her about them, so I tolerate it.
Edit: changed my description of The Fault in Our Stars from romance to romantic
“the book community” implies there’s just the one. There are millions.
Romance as a genre has as many flaws as any other genre or category. But it is huge, and the hype (money) machine means what you see on grocery store shelves is not often the best Romance has to offer.
So, a few things:
1. I love the level of introspection and analysis in this thread – very prescient insights all around.
2. I think it’s interesting that this perception could still hold water considering how gendered reading, particularly reading fiction is these days. Like, the vast majority of readers are girls and women. It’s not even close. And the criticism was usually men denigrating various women’s interests, including literature that was either fantasy in nature or escapism.
3. As I’ve gotten older (and hopefully wiser haha) – I’ve been WAAAYY less inclined to dismiss various interests and expressions. If you’re a curious person who seeks to grow and figure out what appeals to you in different contexts, you’ll find yourself liking different things that you never even thought you could like. And it makes life much more interesting and rewarding. Green Eggs and Ham FTW!
4. To that end – I have not really been able to sink my teeth into the romance genre. I’ve tried. I’ve been looking for a good love story that’s more real than fantasy. Like, there’s nothing wrong with people liking whatever, but I can’t seem to find a good love story that isn’t wish fulfillment type fantasy or hypersexual. Just two human beings falling in love in a believable way, where both are full human beings with all of the flaws and doubts and compromises that come with real love. I’d be open to any recommendations!
I could be way out of line with this so I do apologise if this is taken the wrong way – it isn’t my intent. Having worked as a book seller for several years (37M) I have noticed for the genre that the content of romance books suffers mostly due to its generalist appeal. Romance seems to only offer one very narrow style of plot line in order to be successful or popular – and as a result it can be highly predictable to read and then thought of as a bit trashy. Deviations from the few generic style plot lines then draw negative press, for things like abusive relationships and gaslighting style scenarios, or for portraying female characters as too weak or needy.
With the plots suffering from predictability (ie. people getting together at the end) only a small sales demographic enjoy reading the genre constantly. Most sales reflect people who dip in and out for something light – one of the reasons sales spike during holiday seasons.
Great stories that offer richer characters or plots tend to be either categorised as the dreaded ‘chick lit’ or ‘beach reads’, and are if not always marketed solely at women. Marian Keys is a good example of this I think.
I think the hate mostly comes from that generic marketed predictability. I have experienced this with the Bridgerton series – where we sell large numbers of the first two or three of the series, but then the final books mostly sit on the shelves. Same with Georgette Hayer (identical but astoundingly written).
It is a shame, and I don’t think I deserves the hate it gets at all, but I can see how people can form such strong opinions.
It’s the most popular genre lol
I personally don’t like romance as a genre because I don’t find it interesting. I’m more interested in thrillers/mystery and sci-fi/fantasy. If there’s romance in a book, I’m fine with it, but when it’s the primary genre, it’s boring to me. A lot of people in the comments are stating it’s because “women read romance, so it’s hated because of sexism”, which may be part of the reason, but I’m a woman who hates romance. It has nothing to do with the demographic for me – it’s just not my cup of tea. Romance is an extremely popular genre. It’s advertised a lot. It’s recommended a lot. So it’s more of a target because of how mainstream it is. That’s my personal opinion.
Books with happy endings for women aren’t popular lol
I don’t generally read romance novels, but it was recently brought to my attention that it’s a genre in which suspension of disbelief is often expected to be higher. The accuracy of the backdrop/context in which the romance occurs often takes a back seat to the characters and their interactions.
In my experience with online communities, there’s a large contingent of (mostly men, I think) who have little or no grasp of subtext, emotional arcs, etc.. It’s a form of media illiteracy that’s extremely focused on the literal, overt text of things that happen “onscreen” as described. So they’ll nitpick things that break their suspension of disbelief while completely missing the meat of a romance narrative — an evolving relationship. It’s just one event happening after another with no through line apparent to them.
Also, of course, they’re often considered books for women. That makes them inherently embarrassing to insecure men.
I think its also the perception of modern vs classic romance
Most fiction classics are romance books and are seen as some of the best books of all time! They are complex, have multitudes of themes, interesting historical settings and norms that the women characters have to fight through, etc- they are much more than a simple “romance”
Even if this is wrong, modern romance stories are seen as not having the depth that the classics have, and as such are often seen as reductive and not worthy of reading
Not to victim blame but I (as a romance reader) have seen other romance readers defend their love of romance novels along the line of “I just want to turn my brain off.” Or “I just want something fun and silly” and I don’t think it helps. I wish people in general could dig a little deeper and examine what it is they love about reading but goes double for romance readers who feel the need to “defend” themselves with the above.
It is fun and it is a little bit of escapism but if we’re honest about what is being escaped: misogyny, mistreatment, too many demands and care tasks, patriarchy then we get into why the genre is derided so much.
Science Fiction with even a smear of on-page intimacy or romance isn’t considered Science Fiction. It’s ridiculous. Like… humans are gregarious creatures, relationships of all kinds –including sexual — are inevitable. So many authors of the “more respectable” hard scifi have these boring, flat characters that inevitably result in boring, flat plots, because they swerve around this aspect of the human psyche like a bunch of tuners on a drift course.
Someone has probably already mentioned this, but there’s also a lot of misogyny (internalised or otherwise) involved in romance bashing.
I worked in publishing across multiple genres and the way people talk, even within the industry, about fiction aimed at women versus fiction aimed at men is notable.
One more concrete example I’ve seen, is that someone will say the stats show that women read more and spend more on books, so books we target at them should be packaged as consumable products and that means more books need to be produced and faster. Creating an almost treadmill of quickly produced content to meet the needs. Whereas getting a book into a man’s hand is a miracle, so they’re more carefully produced. I’m not convinced any of that is true, but it’s a way I’ve heard it discussed.
Honestly I think a lot of it comes from a very frustrating desire that we all have to dismiss things that people enjoy, especially when they’re popular, in order to establish ourselves as more important/intelligent/cultured. And this yucking of other people’s yums is overwhelmingly aimed at women. I stand guilty of it myself.
I’m a grown adult now and I’ll proudly say I read a ton of romance as well as many other genres and I don’t really care what people think that means about me. I’m having my fun and ultimately that’s what matters.
I’ll put in my two cents. I want to say that I am not stuck in the same macho mentality where I would dismiss something solely because women or girls prefer it.
I am a giant romantic. I love love. And I despise romance novels.
My fiancé devours them and is always trying to get me to read them. So far, my experience with it has been either trauma porn or they use of cheap tactics to enthrall the reader. As someone who writes as a hobby, I can see the predictable plot points coming from a mile away. I don’t enjoy them because they try to do the bare minimum at establishing a character, before shipping them off into the arms of the love interest. They are shallow and carbon copies of each other. Romantasy just has a thin veneer of fantasy over the regular flavour of romance. I don’t feel like they respect my intelligence.
They aren’t really about love, to me, but about drama. The form has perfected the way they invoke hormones in our brains to evoke emotions, and I find that a bit manipulative, the same say how algorithms of social media today try to manipulate what we see and we think of the world. It makes me queasy and I’m not a fan.
My fiancé commonly says that she just likes to turn off her brain sometimes, and read about two people getting it on. Fair enough. But the quality, undoubtedly is below what it could be.
If you’ve ever been in more than one relationship, then you know that each is different in some ways. How we carry our previous relationships with us, how they shaped us and so on. Romance has none of that. At least none that I’ve seen. Because love and relationships, to me, are about being a supportive structure, a respite from everyday woes. A motivation and a belief to be tested, not the end goal like romance novels try to portray it.
But if you like reading them, more power to you.
Contrapoints just released a 3 hour video digging into this, using Twilight as an entry point.
I think some of the hate might also be due to the correlation of romance and erotica as well. Many people see them as the same thing since so many romance stories also contain smut. I even see books listed on Amazon in the romance category that I would most definitely put in the straight up erotica genre myself. So if businesses themselves can’t tell the difference anymore, how can readers?
A lot of my friends have also told me themselves that they think people only read them for the “steamy scenes” and that they are basically just “socially acceptable porn”.
The problem is that a lot of what I see on the market today is exactly that. Poorly written smut with hardly any decent plot. To find a well written romance with a decent plotline these days is a chore!!
If you know of any in the scifi or fantasy romance genre, please let me know!! I’m dying over here!!! Lmao
“Sturgeon’s Law” (that is, the assertion that 90% of any given category of media is terrible) hits Romance harder than *any* other genre. Especially because it’s one that writing mills love to mass-produce.
Even outside of those, the problems you gave with Haunting Adeline are… extremely, *extremely* common in Romance. Even more mainstream ones often fall into those traps.
The reason is its popularity which is huge, is allegedly disproportionate to the general quality of the output. This happens often to other popular sub-par things as a natural response. Fair game.
Guy here: Short answer – the genre is both highly popular with and to a large extent written by women and there’s a significant segment of the population that doesn’t need more than that to hate something. That and a misunderstanding that it’s all shallow and not knowing (or more caring to know) some of the more serious topics investigated in better romance books.
I usualy tend to avoid romanve books because i simply dont rnjoy reading them
I accidentally listened to one of my daughters romance books.
The story was ok, and kept my attention while driving, but fuck me. The male lead broke enough laws that the book should have come with a #metoo sticker. Female author near as I could figure out. My favorite part happened while on my bike with the book playing inside my helmet. I can just imagine how bad a male author writes female sex scenes because her description of a guy fucking his hand damn near made me fall off my bike.
(To expand on the accident. We combined our book collections into one folder on my NAS, I needed a new book on my phone but didn’t remember until I should have been out the door for work already. I grabbed a Western sounding title dumped in to my phone and booked it out the door. Now I’m in my van on a 3 hour trip to the jobsite and the only thing I haven’t listened to is the new book, 10 min in I knew I fucked up, but even Twilight is better than Toronto radio so I sucked it up. After an hour I was 100% along for the ride. I need to figure out how to get my daughter to get the rest of the books in that series without telling her I’ve listened to it… I need closure!!!)
Because authors are given bad advice to get their books into as many categories as possible.
So I look for a Fantasy book and have to wade through teenage romance with porn.
I look for historical fiction and wade through bodice rippers trying to find something with actual historical content.
I look through science fiction and find badly written porn in space.
I look for Horror ffs and find more teenage Fantasy with porn littering the category.
After a while it becomes anathema to encounter Romance in every category. Enjoy your Romance, but keep it in the Romance section where it belongs.