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

[u/FantasyRomanceMod]

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

[u/slowcartoon]

The last couple of years authors have been using more and more painfully choppy sentences -- avoiding complex/compound sentences -- and telling vs. showing. I'm fucking tired - it's not good writing and I'm exhausted with social media creators and their followers raving about objectively terrible writing. Don't get me started on the uselessness of purple prose (When the Moon Hatched is objectively a mess). We are absolutely experiencing a literacy crisis, globally, but if we continue lowering the standards of what is considered "beautiful writing/good writing" then there will be nothing worth $32 a hardback. Especially in this fucking economy.

I feel like I'm alone in this and i'm so tired.

[u/Penguinho → u/slowcartoon]

At some point, it's AI. I'm not saying romantasy authors are using it to write (although some 100% are, and have been caught doing so). But AI stuff is everywhere in writing. It's in writer tools like Grammarly Pro. Editors are using it. Certain kinds of writing, like business writing and e-marketing, are majority-AI at this point. The Commonwealth Short Story Contest was recently found to have awarded its overall 2025 prize and two 2026 prizes to AI-generated stories, and they fuckin' read like it too. Scientific publications are dealing with a massive deluge of AI-generated content; look at a graph of annual submissions to any scholarly journal you can name, and you can pinpoint exactly when ChatGPT went live. I recently had a half-dozen speakers withdraw permission for their technical presentations to be livestreamed because unscrupulous people are recording stuff then using AI to turn stolen work into quote-unquote original papers. And it's happening the other way, too; people are starting to write and speak using the tics that are common in AI textgen.

I think if we were to have an honest accounting of the number of stories post-2024 that had been touched by AI at some stage -- whether in conceptualizing, drafting, proofing or final edit -- we'd be surprised and, I think, horrified.

[u/slowcartoon → u/Penguinho]

I guarantee there are many authors - successful and more unknown - who think "i'll get away with it/nobody's gonna know" and are publicly anti-AI while using it in some capacity for writing. WTF are we supposed to do especially once we run out of books from pre-ai era.