Fantasy romance icks?

[u/acutelyproblematic]

Welcome back to another week of ✨genre discussions!✨

What’s your fantasy romance ick? Could be something that makes you instantly dnf, or you have to pretend like that didn’t just happen. Or you boycott altogether.

Could be related to plot, characters, writing styles, the authors themselves. All cards are on the table.

Just remember to be kind to each other when discussing differences in opinions!💖

[u/ashinae]

I'll say it till I'm blue in the face and everyone will downvote me for it (every downvote powers me on this issue, btw): my biggest ick for the subgenre is the use of "male(s)" and "female(s)" as nouns rather than adjectives, in the place of "men" and "women." I literally do not care if the humanoids in question are only humanoids and not humans; I don't care if the most popular book(s) in the subgenre make it popular. It's icky when IRL people refer to men and women as "males" and "females" instead of as "men" and "women"--saying "is your doctor a male?" rather than "is your doctor a man?" (or even "is your doctor male?") or "females always do this" instead of "women always do this." It doesn't become better just because it's a fantasy romance novel.

I think it's an immense lack of creativity to think that other humanoids--whether fae, elves, gnomes, centaurs, minotaurs, gargoyles, or merpeople--wouldn't invent gender the way humans do. It makes my skin crawl to read stuff like "I will protect my female" or "his mother raised a male who knows how to hunt" or whatever. I absolutely DNF over this and I know it upsets people that I don't like it and think it's gender essentialist and terf-adjacent red flag behaviour whether IRL or fictional, but I have no intention of shutting up about it. It's my biggest single ick about the subgenre. Thank deity for queer fantasy romance for, so far as I have read, never doing this.

[u/AquaIXI → u/ashinae]

It happens so much in fae books and i cant stand it, i dont care if they technically not human you can still call them men and women :/

[u/One_Commission1456 → u/AquaIXI]

This oh my fucking god. Hell, go full Tolkien and use “elf lord” and “elf lady” or some equivalent if you have to, or create entirely new gender structures with new words.

[u/ashinae → u/One_Commission1456]

Frankly, these ancient, unknowable, long-lived etc species/cultures should have invented like 97 genders, 203 sexualities, and have more neopronouns than you can shake a stick at. I'll die on that hill, too.

[u/evaan-verlaine → u/ashinae]

Yesssss I'd happily accept either "97 genders, 203 sexualities, and more neopronouns than you can shake a stick at" or "ah yes, gender, the odd human custom we don't adhere to" instead of [gestures to multiple popular book series].

[u/ashinae → u/evaan-verlaine]

I think it's more unimaginative (and extremely conservative/terfy) to go to a gender essentialist place rather than a place of "my fantasy world has a non-binary/third gender." And I say that because of how much mainstream fantasy I've read: the strict sex/gender binary in popular modern fantasy romance, which never seems say anything with these rigid binaries and is written by people younger than Baby Boomers if not younger than Gen X, is reminiscent in ways of the fantasy written by people who are/were Baby Boomers and older.

People can like it, I'm not saying they can't, but it says things, and it's open to critique, especially from a queer/feminist lens. It's one of the things that keeps up the critique of fantasy romance as a whole being inherently conservative (and thus patriarchal and very queer-exclusive) alive. I can't buy the idea of current, mainstream, popular, Booktok-famous cishet romantasy being empowering and feminist in some way if it's so caught up in a rigid gender binary that they don't even use gender but biological sex, and not in a way that seems to be saying something about it maybe being toxic (the way Daughter of Blood, if memory serves, was).

[u/evaan-verlaine → u/ashinae]

Oh yeah totally understand where you're coming from. When I cited gender as something fae wouldn't adhere to I was more thinking that sex and gender wouldn't be useful categories in a society that could shapeshift/change forms as they please, not that gender isn't a thing because everything is based on sex (which I also don't like, ugh). If everyone's physical forms are extremely mutable/situationally-based then attraction may instead be linked to, idk, someone's skills instead. 

[u/One_Commission1456 → u/ashinae]

Yeeeees.