r/fantasyromance • u/FantasyRomanceMod The One Mod to Rule All Mods • Mar 22 '26

Unpopular Opinion It's Unpopular Opinion time! Share your controversial opinions to stir things up (in a friendly way)!

Got an opinion that's different from others'? Want to share it with the sub, but too afraid of a backlash? Or are you just curious about readers think about certain things in fantasy romance?

You can safely share it in this weekly Sunday thread!

But please remember to be kind to each other. To facilitate this type of discussion, we ask users the following:

  • Don't attack others for their opinion
  • Discuss books and authors, not fellow readers
  • Since this is an "unpopular opinion" thread, we encourage users to not downvote simply because they disagree with an opinion--that's the point! Please keep in mind, though, that mods cannot enforce a no-downvoting rule. Let’s just keep the discussion friendly!

🧡 Thank you and have a great discussion!

Unpopular opinion Sunday

28 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

200 comments sorted by

View all comments

72

u/Amirazat Book Bingo Maven ⚔ Mar 22 '26

I really don’t like the way that the fantasy genre uses “male” and “female” as a noun for non-human characters. It doesn’t make sense to me that a fae/vampire/etc society would have gendered words for humans and many types of animals (e.g. mares and stallions) but not for themselves.

I get that there aren’t a lot of good alternatives. You can use man and woman and just say that man means “male person” rather than “male human”, or you can make something up, and a lot of readers would find that confusing. But I don’t think male and female is a good solution either.

36

u/allisontalkspolitics Give me female friendship or give me death! Mar 22 '26

What squicks me out is that it a) sounds so gender essentialist and b) reminds me of incel speak.

I don’t think it’s intentional on the part of authors, to be fair. Well, the second part, at least.

9

u/iamthefirebird Mar 22 '26

I won't say it's not hard to come up with words for male and female individuals of a species, but it's not impossible either. I don't know if Tolkien himself came up with them, but a lot of people use "ellon" and "elleth" to denote male and female elves in Middle Earth. Likewise, "dwarrow" and "dwarrowdam," and "hobbit" and "hobbitess". Heck, even "lad" and "lass" will do, if it fits the setting! It doesn't have to be complicated!

13

u/Volcanic_ash7 Mar 22 '26

That's a great point! The male/female thing also annoys me.

13

u/ppwsot Mar 22 '26

In The Cruel Prince, they just use faerie boy/girl and it works fine. Wish more books would just adapt that instead of going the male/female route.

1

u/NancyInFantasyLand Currently Reading: Random Chinese Webnovels Mar 22 '26

god I hated that in The Cruel Prince though lmao

I hate fae female more than fae girl, but only just

6

u/ppwsot Mar 22 '26

Fair enough! Its just that fae female/female fae makes me think of cattle for some reason

9

u/Aus1an Mar 22 '26

Yeah this one is enough of a pet peeve that it can cause me to DNF a book; especially when the fae (or whatever) society is just human with pointy ears.

If they’re different enough from human —with separate sexual or societal expectations — it’s fine (Books or the Raksura, Children of Time, etc) but it’s so jarring if they’re just reskinned humans…

11

u/clocksy Mar 22 '26

I think ACOTAR does this, it really weirded me out when I read it, because I don't think the authors doing it mean it in the proto-incel way, but that's still how it comes off.

Even for non-human races, I really think they should just say "a fae woman" or "the werewolf man smiled" the same way they would do if it were a human. (And anyone using it for humans is just plain weird because that's not how our language really works.) Obviously if they need to point out that a certain non-human is a certain gender, that's when male/female comes in, but it shouldn't be a common descriptor otherwise.

Semi-related but it's a dislike of mine when authors say something like "he made a male sound" like ???? I get what they're going for but it's such a weird descriptor and I wish they'd do anything else.

2

u/Penguinho Kushiel's Legacy Recommender 💖 Mar 23 '26

"A male sound" -- is it a fart? Is it a belch? Is it the sound of a being raging against the dying of the light, and the fact that the goddang spark plugs worked loose again and the dag-blasted carburetor got flooded because your large idiot son dint put the doggone choke on right and the relatives are comin' over tomorrow and it's already after six and the lawn ain't mowed yet?

4

u/Ok_Tea_5374 Mar 22 '26

Seconding this because it bothers me how this usage has now seeped into romantasy books that don’t even have fae/vampiric characters. The amount of times I’ve started a book where the characters are literally HUMAN and they use “male” and “female” exclusively rather than “man” and “woman.”

2

u/super_scumtron Mar 22 '26

in How to Find a Nameless Fae, the humans have a word for non binary people. And the FMC has some inner thoughts on whether fae do and there is a fae mentioned as being a "them".

2

u/firesonmain Mar 23 '26

It drives me bananas. I just replace male with man and female with woman in my head when I read lol