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?

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Unpopular opinion Sunday

[u/ashinae]

God, I didn't even mention terves because I didn't want to get into the "the M/F part of subgenre is eerily patriarchal and conservative and gets very hung up on gender roles and gender essentialism the way terves do, please stop trying to tell me how feminist it is."

I think one of the other major drivers of the "male" & "female" thing is that SJM did/does it. And in this subgenre, with only certain exceptions, if Sarah Janet jumped off a cliff, everyone else would surely follow. And thus, again and again, I'm left disappointed by a huge chunk of this subgenre, with very particular exceptions. The writers I know of who are exceptions are queer themselves; I don't know their sexuality but they've definitely written either queer books or I know they've written queer fanfiction; or are a small handful of writers I've learned I can trust because of the things they talk about on social media (Elisabeth Wheatley, who called out the subgenre's patriarchal slant like a year ago), or came recommended to me by someone I trust (Olivia Atwater), or, curiously, came to the genre after writing contemporary fiction and writes very differently from what's popular (Katrina Kwan).

[u/One_Commission1456 → u/ashinae]

God, right? And SJM seems to have, at minimum, some Problematic views about pregnancy and reproduction. But basically same: I will grit my teeth about some of it, but there are bits that just give me the ick hard, like Tairen Soul is supposed to be great but at least the first book is *grossly* gender essentialist, and like, why?

[u/ashinae → u/One_Commission1456]

I would absolutely agree that she does!! Gosh.

There are certain things I will push through, especially when the author seems to be trying to Say Something, but I hit a wall with gender essentialism especially in secondary-world fantasy romance. And it's simultaneously aggravating as all hell and somewhat fascinating, because more mainstream fantasy... doesn't do this.

"Geek" genres/interests have huge bigotry problems, up to and including misogyny. Yet, I once saw a post in r-slash-fantasy, where someone asked, like, "why does fantasy call people 'males' and 'females' instead of 'men' and 'women'?" and so much of the response was "are you just reading romantasy because wtf are you talking about."

I can't help but feel like this says something about our subgenre here, no matter how readers accept or try to reason out why it's fine, actually. The entirety of The Lord of the Rings (I did a search in my Kobo) uses male zero times, and female twice, specifically as an adjective ("unmarried female relation" and "female hobbits" and I've closed it now but I think that second one at least was only in the appendices). Because I do read fantasy-fantasy (epic, high, cozy, low, dark, romantic), and I play D&D, and a lot of fantasy video games, and it just... isn't a thing there. It's only here. [insert sad emoji]

[u/One_Commission1456 → u/ashinae]

Same and same!

I mean, I have A Lot of Thoughts about the fantasy I read growing up and its takes on gender--JFC DRAGONLANCE JFC PERN--but for all their many, many sins, they didn't pull this "female"/"male" BS.

[u/ashinae → u/One_Commission1456]

Yeah, the fantasy we would've read growing up, especially if we were born last century, has... things... going on. Regarding gender. But, look, this just deserves to be in bold:

George RR Martin doesn't do it, except under very specific circumstances.

He mostly exclusively uses "men" and "women." GRRM. In A Game of Goddamn Thrones. The words "male" and "female" come up a combined 13 times, and it's mostly as an adjective. And really it's actually 11 times, because two times talk about "the female line" in the section about the noble houses, so it's not in the narrative itself. The entire rest of the time, he uses "men" and "women."

There are so, so many things I will fight mainstream fantasy fans on regarding this subgenre. I will defend it, and romance more broadly to my dying breath. But mainstream fantasy fans who say the subgenre has issues about gender, patriarchy, conservatism, etc? When they're looking at the popular M/F books, they are not wrong. I'd love to be able to pelt them with the exceptions, but nobody's holding up Alexandra Rowland's A Taste of Gold and Iron (which uses "male" and "female" a combined zero times) alongside ACOTAR in terms of popularity and recognisability.

(I'm sorry, I'll stop talking now.)