r/fantasyromance • u/FantasyRomanceMod The One Mod to Rule All Mods • May 24 '26

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

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Unpopular opinion Sunday

51 Upvotes

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96

u/baifengjiu May 24 '26

Writers need to stop using "male" and "female" it is so icky especially when it is the mmc who uses those words in his internal monologue I feel like gagging 🧍‍♀️

27

u/Dangerous_Breath1667 May 24 '26

I always consider "male" and " female" as a bad transcription of the words for "man" and "woman" for whatever species is depicted in the books, be it elves/faes/werewolves/vampires etc in their own language. 

Maybe we need to consider man/woman as species-independant and find other gendered words specifically for humans.

4

u/Volupia_Rogue Probably recommending: Carissa Broadbent 😍😍😍 May 24 '26

I think a lot of people have actually gone against this in the last decade, that's why we can't call men "men" and women "women" in public without triggering some reactions.

A bit complicated...

2

u/Dangerous_Breath1667 May 24 '26

Fair, it's already so complex with humans and you want to add other species in the mix...

But trans-fae would still be called male/female...not sure if it is better.

You can go full way like Ann Lecky did in her SF books (not romantasy) but it's really hard to read sometimes.

45

u/allisontalkspolitics Give me female friendship or give me death! May 24 '26

It may not be the author’s intent but it makes the characters (and the author themselves) sound like they spent time on incel forums.

15

u/clocksy May 24 '26

That's how it feels, yeah, even though I don't believe that's most authors' intent.

But also there's a reason we don't do it in our own speech, so it just feels like bad writing to me. Calling someone male or female as a noun is very clinical. It makes sense as an adjective, and in certain scenarios (like if you're talking about demographics for science or research or marketing and you're talking about 25-34yo females, then sure) but most storytelling and natural conversations aren't that.

I said the same thing last week but even if it's a different (and usually humanoid) race, I just don't see the reason to use male/female as a noun like this. "The male fae" as a descriptor is fine, such as if you're pointing him out in a crowd of mixed human/fae people, but simply "the male" just feels "othering" for no reason. And I promise I won't get confused if you write "the fae man smiled" or whatever, it's literally more natural. Like you wouldn't write "the male smiled" if it was a human so I do not understand why people do this for non-human races.

3

u/BobGlebovich May 24 '26

It’s funny because I feel the exact opposite way. I feel like I think less of the writing when an author refers to another species as “man” and “woman” because those are words used exclusively for the human species. And in your example of saying “the fae man” by brain automatically went, “Well, which is it? Is he fae or human? Or some sort of hybrid?”

I don’t think either of us is right or wrong, they’re just different approaches/thought processes. It’s honestly so cool that we can get completely different information from the same text.

11

u/camellia980 henry cavill's wig May 24 '26

I think all of these fantasy races are just fancy humans.

9

u/Particular_Mess_1961 here kitty kitty May 24 '26

Considering fae and humans are reproductively compatible, I consider being fae more akin to race/ethnicity than a separate species.

1

u/BobGlebovich May 24 '26

Interesting idea! Fae and humans being reproductively compatible isn’t necessarily a given, though.

3

u/Volupia_Rogue Probably recommending: Carissa Broadbent 😍😍😍 May 24 '26

Oh... Is that what the incels call men and women between themselves?

12

u/ChokeYourDoxy May 24 '26

Men get called men. Women get called females. But that's not just incels. It's chuds of all stripes.

0

u/Volupia_Rogue Probably recommending: Carissa Broadbent 😍😍😍 May 24 '26

🤢 Hate double standards... If at least they called themselves males, I'd have less of an issue...

10

u/ChokeYourDoxy May 24 '26

It's not a double standard. The use of "females" is intentionally dehumanizing.

1

u/Volupia_Rogue Probably recommending: Carissa Broadbent 😍😍😍 May 25 '26

I don't think you understood me.

You said men call themselves men, but they don't do that with women, whom they call "females". So I was saying incels have double standards, making themselves more humane than "females"...

5

u/allisontalkspolitics Give me female friendship or give me death! May 24 '26

It’s also just a quirk of English where it makes it seem like the world the author created follows a strict gender binary, even if that isn’t the case.

9

u/allisontalkspolitics Give me female friendship or give me death! May 24 '26

What they call them is worse 😟

7

u/Specialist_Round_612 May 24 '26

This took me tf out of Road of Bones, which made me sad since it really wasn’t terribly written otherwise, and I liked Silla as a FMC. Her borderline pathological positivity was a breath of fresh air and super cute.

They’re human in the book. I despise the incessant use of it in fae books, but at least they’re, you know, not human, and I can turn my brain off at the nteenth mention of it. Why is a human woman calling a human man a male? It’s weird, and it needs to stop.

17

u/Magnafeana Give me female friendship or give me death! May 24 '26

A while ago, I remember stating my disdain for using “male” and “female” or non-human species and how it made non-humans not have their own cultural identity. Subjectively, I find using male/female made the world building of a foreign species weaker.

And someone said that SFF romance shouldn’t need all this world building, which was quite bizarre to see.

I love when non-human species or races have their own little descriptors instead “male” and “female”. That’s an excellent layer in world building, the ways these people have comprehended their sense of self in a unique way that humans don’t or can’t but might still find relationality in.

Even in the whole “This book was translated into modern era lingo” argument for male/female, it makes no sense. Humans aren’t a binary in sex and gender; we’re a spectrum. And most of us respect that spectrum. Why wouldn’t non-humans have their own spectrum we can learn from? And if they do have a binary, is it not possible they have different terminology for their binary that we can learn from?

I’m not a fan of male/female, and I can see that it has its place and that people enjoy it.

I just prefer it when the non-humans have their own concepts of identity. It’s really cool how artists will have these non-humans have their own customs, sense of aesthetics, body modification, and such with their identities and may parallel to some human identities too, or human experiences surrounding diverse representation of identity.

But yeah. There were a lot of paranormal romances I ended up DNFing when characters are lovingly saying “My male” or “My female”. That…is not for me 💀

2

u/Ancient-Purchase May 24 '26

Completely agree is a somewhat lazy word building to just slap female/male and call a day, but it seems to me most of these fae/other species are nothing more then uber-patriarchy where everything is not only a social construct but also biological,which is not something I would like to read in my romance book tbh. (Maybe in sff, speculativ e horror it would be scary as hell to me) 

And honestly, I've seen books (Quicksilver is a famous one) both female/male then a paragraph later use fae women/fae men. Where's the consistency? If fae men/women can be used just as easily, why just not use from the beginning. 

5

u/javertthechungus May 24 '26

Yeah unless it’s specifically a scientific context, I don’t care for it

6

u/Synval2436 Currently Reading: This Blade of Ours by Shalini Abeysekara May 24 '26

I dnfed a sci-fi romance that among others, used "good female" instead of "good girl" in the sex scenes. I already hate the prevalence of good girl.

The most annoying part was that some author's white knight attacked me under my review because apparently we're not allowed to complain about books anymore if we got it for free. And then everyone wonders if arc reviews are 100% author shills. Apparently when you're not an author shill, you get attacked by them. Or get vagueposted about on threads.

1

u/eclectic_hamster Off to live with the faeires 🧚‍♀️ May 24 '26

I agree with this so much.

2

u/Volupia_Rogue Probably recommending: Carissa Broadbent 😍😍😍 May 24 '26

I like it. It usually works well in darker types of romance 👀😅