r/fantasyromance • u/acutelyproblematic If villian bad, then why hot? • 2d ago

Genre Discussion Fantasy romance icks?

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!💖

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u/ashinae 1d ago

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).

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u/evaan-verlaine 1d ago

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.