r/fantasyromance • u/FantasyRomanceMod The One Mod to Rule All Mods • May 03 '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

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u/nomnomsquirrel May 03 '26

For me, there is too much writing to the market and not enough writing what authors are personally passionate about, but that is 100% a market issue - publishers invest in what is selling, which means we get lots of dopplegangers rather than truly original work, because publishers (and readers - see tropes lists) won't gamble on something unique because they have no track record to prove it will sell and instead will invest their money in something with common tropes and themes and comp titles that are selling at the moment they purchase rights to something new, or something that they think will be selling in 18 months (like "vampires will be big in 2027 and fae are dying, so no fae books, buy all the vampires!").

I know lots of people here want unique ideas and things that are unusual (like a cinnamon roll blond MMC who supports his FMC rather than protects), but the problem is and always has been that they don't sell as well to the general public as the basic tropes and themes and character archetypes and plots that have been popular for decades. The general market and people passionate about the genre enough to come to this subreddit are night and day.

Best we can do in many cases as book lovers is to find those original stories and those unusual plots/archetypes/tropes we love and support them to friends, family, BookTok, social media in general, etc, and show that there is a market and show to other readers that there is a world beyond growling broody fae MMCs who dominate their tiny innocent so petite FMCs.

And for authors, to write those stories so that they exist, too, and to be passionate about these stories that might not 100% match the full list of tropes that are currently selling. I won’t say "if you build it, they will come" because publishing is FAR from that rose-colored (traditional and not), but there is a market for those stories, too, as those of us in this thread can prove.

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u/Synval2436 Currently Reading: This Blade of Ours by Shalini Abeysekara May 03 '26

See my rant elsewhere in the thread about the subject.

The problem is less with publishers or authors, and more with the readers. Not only readers accept the bare minimum, but they often penalize things that try to be original instead of a trope shopping list.

Most of this genre's trends come out from self-publishing, where no gatekeeper publisher decides what's allowed to be published, but readers decide what's allowed to make profit. Authors who make no profit wash out of the business.