611 – Romantasy Hate

Fantasy and romance. It’s an intuitive pairing that’s been around for quite some time, but you wouldn’t know it from the discourse. People are raging about Romantasy as if it’s the end of literature, but why is this market trend given so much weight? This week, we unpack why this popular genre mashup sparks so much controversy, and why it’s being held to a higher standard than other fantasy works (spoiler: it’s misogyny). ## Show Notes - Feminists and Romance Fans: Let’s Fight Our Common Enemy - How Should I Critique Controversial Stories? - The Name of the Wind - Why Bad Books Are Popular - Taste vs Quality - How to Write Fantasy That Delights Genre Fans - Wheel of Time - Uprooted - Fourth Wing - How Much Worldbuilding is Needed? - The Jasad Heir - Dungeon Crawler Carl - AO3 Tagging System - Five Important Ways Romances Engage Readers - Why Rigid Genre Divisions Are Pointless - Seven Signs of Bad Media Analysis - LitRPG Reactor Article ## Transcript **Generously transcribed by Elizabeth.** Volunteer to transcribe a podcast. **Chris**: Welcome to the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Chris.  **Oren**: And I’m Oren.  **Chris**: Oren, did you know our podcast isn’t really a podcast?  **Oren**: Oh, really?  **Chris**: Because it’s bad and people don’t like it, therefore it apparently just doesn’t deserve to be listed with other podcasts.  **Oren**: I mean, it being bad and people not liking it is the first trait of a podcast. Like, if it was good, it would be something else.  **Chris:** I’m altering the definition of podcast to mean podcasts I like, so pray I don’t alter it further.  **Oren:** Ah, yeah, I see. We’re changing the genre definition to be books that I think are good. This is the Oren core or Mythcreantspunk, or I forget whatever we called this last time. **Chris:** So this time we’re talking about the backlash to romantasy. First, I just wanna be very clear, you don’t have to like romantasy. It’s okay if you hate romantasy books and don’t wanna read them. That’s perfectly fine. There are things that I find tiresome in many of them, too. However, how you respond to stories you don’t enjoy matters. It sends certain signals to other people about what is legitimate fiction and, and what’s not, and other things. And so when we notice odd patterns, it’s worth talking about, because you may not like many books, but are you arguing that all of those books you don’t like aren’t part of a specific genre, for instance? **Oren:** Just trying to be normal about disliking romantasy books. There are dozens of us. Dozens. \[laughter] **Chris:** You don’t like something, you don’t have to write a think piece about how it’s destroying democracy or something like that. **Oren:** Before you’re motivated to write a, a think piece about romantasy, I would ask, do you write think pieces about any other genre of fiction? Like, I’m not saying it’ll be good if you do, but, like, that would be my first thought. This is a thing that I see a lot where someone’s like, “Oh, man, I have to share my thoughts about this particular moral panic that’s sweeping around.” It’s like, okay, but do you have any expertise in that area other than that you’re upset about this thing that’s happening? Because if not, maybe you don’t really have much to contribute. **Chris:** I think it’s helpful to notice when dislike of something starts to take a performative edge. It takes some self-awareness to realize it, but the difference is are you privately disliking this, or do you want everybody to know you dislike it? And that doesn’t mean performative dislike is always bad. I hate AI and I will also performatively hate it. I’m fine with that. I will perform my hatred of AI.  **Oren:** Yeah. We’re doing a little dance over here about it. **Chris:** You know, that’s punching up. It’s a little weird when a specific genre, you’re performatively hating on it. You should just ask yourself why. Why is this the thing that I’m performatively hating, and is it a good reason? **Oren:** \[fake-astonished] Is it misogyny? Shh. It is. It is. That’s the reason. That’s not the only reason someone might dislike a romantasy book, but that is the reason why people are so weird about romantasy. I’ve been talking to my law school classmates, and I’ve had several people, almost the identical conversation, where I’ll tell them I’m a fiction editor and they will very carefully bring up that they either read or write romantasy, like they are expecting me to attack them over it. This has happened three times now.  **Chris:** It’s sad. So sad.  **Oren:** It’s because they get such bizarre reactions from people, despite romantasy being hugely successful. That’s a fun little contradiction.  **Chris:** And hugely popular, so lots of people feel the way they do. You know, we have people in our community, plenty of people in our community who write romantasy. We have editing clients who write romantasy. I have students who write romantasy. They are not on the fringes. They are part of our community But it does feel very much like pumpkin spice lattes in the performativeness, or like Twilight hate. These aren’t perfect books, just like Twilight isn’t a perfect book. There are many problems with Twilight. But Twilight also isn’t especially bad either. I’ve looked at lots of best-selling books. They all have problems. Twilight, among best-selling books, is not particularly flawed. It has its issues, but so do other books. Twilight has always been the book where people boldly criticize it without worrying about people getting mad at them, whereas any other popular book, people would get mad at them. And so there’s tons of Twilight hate out there.  **Oren:** On the bright side, the popularity of romantasy has more or less erased people telling us that our critiques of a certain book must be wrong because it’s popular.  **Chris:** I had hoped that we had made a dent, which maybe among our regular readers we have, criticizing popular books for so many years. But I will admit the argument that I would have against this that would just silence everybody was just pointing out that Fifty Shades of Grey sold 250 million books. If you think that, I don’t know, Name of the Wind with its, like, 10 million or something must be perfect, then that means Fifty Shades of Grey is 25 times better than Name of the Wind. **Oren:** Beyond our comment section, when I look at other places discussing books, it’s not like I don’t see anybody make that argument anymore. I just tend to find that now the feeling has shifted in some of these places with this idea that actually, if a book is popular, that probably means it’s bad, which is equally wrong and silly, but people are gonna do that. Romantasy being visibly really popular – because romance has always been really popular, but in our section of internet and literary discourse, it wasn’t as visible because we just don’t have a huge amount of overlap with the romance writing and reading community normally. But now we’ve got romantasy, which is a fantasy subgenre and a romance subgenre, and it’s very visible, and it’s everywhere in bookstores with these big splashy covers. So you can’t ignore it anymore, which has led to this attitude that a lot of people have that books are worse now than they used to be, which, to be fair, has always existed, but I find it very common now. And when people say, “Why are books bad now?” They almost always mean romantasy. **Chris:** One thing I do think is worth explaining to people, if you’re picking up romantasy and being like, “Oh, this book is just, like, terribly written. It has grammar mistakes everywhere,” or something, whatever genre is trending, what happens is that the number of writers writing it compared to the number of readers reading it works in the writer’s favor. And so publishers do get less picky about what they publish because it’s a less competitive category because so many people are reading it. And at some point in time, that wave crests. More people start writing it, demand often goes down somewhat. I think romantasy is here to stay, but it doesn’t necessarily mean it will stay at its current level of popularity. At some point in time, that trend is always gonna peak. But, like, whatever is just most popular, we’re gonna find traditionally published works that are particularly rough because it just takes less to break in. But that doesn’t mean that they’re all rough. Some of them are good too, and very competitive with other bestsellers. When I do my lessons posts, my lessons from bad writing posts where I critique the beginning of bestsellers, they’re usually ones that are pretty rough. It was interesting because I used to do a lot of YA because that was the books that were trending and really popular, and the floodgates were open. Now it’s really easy to find romantasy. There’s just so many popular books. A book that is not written as well has a better chance of becoming a bestseller. But that doesn’t actually say anything inherently about the genre, just the current state of our trends. **Oren:** It’s wild to me the people who have been reading for a while talk about this like it’s a new thing. It’s like, were you not paying attention during the YA dystopian boom or the Tolkien-like boom or the Game of Thrones-like boom? Like, this always happens. It’s normal. It’s just a thing that goes on. But there is sometimes an issue of quality mismatch because, for example, ideally, a romantasy book would be good in all aspects, but maybe the author is particularly knowledgeable about romance and not very knowledgeable about other aspects of the story. That could happen. In that case, if you aren’t big into the romance, then you are missing out on the thing the author is best at because you’re not gonna like that no matter what. In the same way that if I write a book that’s all about airships and I give it to someone who doesn’t like airships, we might be in trouble. Maybe the rest of the book’s not as good as the airships, and then the main enjoyment factor is just not landing for that reader.  **Chris:** I do think with a lot of romantasy it is written by mainstream romance authors who are coming into fantasy for the first time, and I try to be a little bit more lenient because it’s like, hey, they’re new to fantasy writing. Let’s keep that in mind. It doesn’t mean that they’re not a skilled writer. I also think that, you know, some of the romantasy audience, but certainly not all of them, may be mainstream romance readers that have become interested in fantasy partly because speculative fiction has been mainstreaming. It has been getting more and more popular. I still remember the old days when there was \[grumpy old woman voice] only one movie in the theaters at a time that was speculative fiction, and you had to go see it because it was the only thing available. \[normal] Or back when people thought consuming fantasy and science fiction was, like, really weird, and it’s not true anymore. And with the big Lord of the Rings movies and Game of Thrones and all of these things, it’s just, like, opened up the door for a lot more people to become speculative fiction fans, and I think that’s great. But sometimes there may be kind of a transition period where we have some romantasy works. They don’t use the wordcraft conventions that a typical fantasy would. They’re more likely to have anachronistic words in them and things like that. Certainly not all of them. That happens, but it’s good. It’s good for speculative fiction to get bigger and more popular. And some of those mainstream romance readers may start picking up fantasy books that aren’t primarily featuring romance because now they’re more open to fantasy in general. **Oren:** One of the things I occasionally see people argue when they try to argue that romantasy isn’t fantasy is this idea that there’s no crossover between the readerships. **Chris:** To me that feels very much like somebody when they think of fantasy readers is only thinking of men. And I’m not saying, like, men can read romance too, and some men do absolutely read romantasy. But at the same time, like, there has always been romantasy, we just didn’t call it romantasy before. There has always been books that were romantasy as we would call it today before the label happened. They have always been included in fantasy, and there’s always been people who liked them, more likely women than men, but again, people have all sorts of different tastes. This idea of a fantasy reader who won’t read romantasy just feels like we’re only thinking about men, and we’ve kind of edited women out of the picture. **Oren:** It’s just weird for me to imagine someone being like, “Okay, so you like romantasy because you really like fantasy and you like romance in it.” Well, I mean, Wheel of Time has lots of fantasy and lots of romance. Neither of it is very good, but you know, that hasn’t stopped a lot of people. It’s hard for me to imagine that if your tastes are calibrated to like romantasy that there is a super low chance you might like The Wheel of Time. There’s a lot of interest overlap there. **Chris:** And there’s been some, again, Naomi Novik has done Uprooted, for instance. It has a strange detour where the protagonist goes where the love interest isn’t, which you wouldn’t normally do in a romance, but otherwise it just feels like straight up romantasy. Novik is a fantasy writer. She’s not known for mainstream romance. She’s known for writing fantasy. **Oren:** The whole it’s not fantasy claims are just so funny. I hear people say, like, it barely has any fantasy in it. What does that mean? **Chris:** What books have you been reading? **Oren:** Explain. Explain what that means. **Chris:** The story is full of dragons. How is that not having fantasy in it? I don’t understand. Romantasy has tons of fantasy tropes everywhere, all the time.  **Oren:** Sometimes if I press, I can get them to retreat back to, okay, it has fantasy elements, but, like, the world-building’s not very good. Either it doesn’t make sense or it’s too complicated or, in the case of something like Fourth Wing, it, like, feels like a modern setting with a very thin fantasy veneer over it. But again, that has happened with every genre. That’s not a romantasy-only problem. It’s really weird to act like that is a reason to say it’s not fantasy. It just logically doesn’t make sense. **Chris:** I’m sure there are plenty of non-romance fantasies that also have fairly surface-level world-building. It varies. I mean, there are some romantasy books that, you know, their focus is just not on the world, and they have world-building that is just meant up to set up the fantasy conceits of the plot and the romance and just do what’s necessary. And that just keeps the cognitive load of the story from being too high and lets the writer focus where they want. And a non-romantasy fantasy could absolutely do that too, and it’s a fine trade-off. The story is still heavily dependent on fantasy tropes. Again, not every story has to be, like, max world-building. There’s room for all kinds. **Oren:** To invoke a common frenemy of the pod, Ursula K. Le Guin, she had an essay like a billion years ago complaining about how a lot of fantasy books she was reading didn’t sound like fantasy. They sounded too modern. So, like, this has always been a problem. This is not a new thing. Romantasy didn’t invent it, nor is it universal across romantasy. Whatever you might think of it otherwise, if you go read The Jasad Heir, which I read recently, you can’t accuse it of not having a lot of really intricate fantasy world-building. You might not like it for other reasons, but you can’t say that it’s got the Fourth Wing problem. Are we gonna say that one counts but Fourth Wing doesn’t? Come on. **Chris:** And of course, the other thing we see is a bunch of fantasy readers who don’t read romantasy being annoyed that because romantasy is popular, it’s like filling up all the listings and getting on all the shelves, and they feel like it’s in the way of the books they like to read. That’s reasonable. That’s just a problem with, like, filtering on a website or categorization, or shelving. I feel like for any other genre, we wouldn’t take that and then leap to romantasy isn’t fantasy. You know, if LitRPG gets really popular and starts filling up all of the listings and shelves, are we gonna say that LitRPG isn’t speculative fiction because, like, we’re annoyed that it’s there? **Oren:** I’m gonna do that. I’m already prepared. I’m prepared to go complete 180 and be like, “I, I know I said that you can’t disqualify a genre ’cause it’s bad or whatever, but I’ve changed my mind.” **Chris:** With the exception of Dungeon Crawler Carl, LitRPG is terrible. I’m not saying it’s inherently terrible, it’s just the fact that a bunch of generally young men that don’t have a lot of storytelling skills are writing it and self-publishing it, and so just because of where it’s coming from, a lot of it is really terrible. There’s nothing inherently terrible about this genre, as Dungeon Crawler Carl shows. Those books can be good, but if you look at the average popular LitRPG book, it’s pretty bad. I would not say that it doesn’t belong in speculative fiction because of how rough most of those stories are. **Oren:** Well, everyone’s allowed to be hypocritical about one thing, and this is mine, actually. If you think about it, it, it just makes sense. **Chris:** So yeah, I can understand the annoyance of, okay, I don’t like these books, and every time I try to look up for books I do like, these books get in the way, and it’s fine. It’s natural to feel annoyed. The natural conclusion from that isn’t, this isn’t fantasy. It’s, I wish the booksellers would help me find the books that I actually want to read. **Oren:** I mean, when it comes to online storefronts, that’s, like, a sorting problem, right? Like, AO3 has fixed this. Go ask AO3 how they do their tagging system, and you’ll be fine. **Chris:** And it’s not a particularly hard problem to solve online either. **Oren:** I don’t- I haven’t been to every bookstore, shocking admission, but the bookstores I have been to, I have not noticed this romantasy takeover. I have noticed that there are big central displays of books that have romantasies on them, but it’s not like romantasy took those spots from more conventional fantasy stories. The conventional fantasy stories were never there to begin with, except for the occasional super popular breakout hit, which is still the case now. If I go to the fantasy and sci-fi section, it’s the same books I always see, with a couple of romantasy books in there now. It’s not that many. It’s just not a problem, at least not in the bookstores I go to.  **Chris**: I feel like if you browse, you can come upon plenty of books. Also, like, romantasy does have its own cover conventions, right? You can kind of recognize them from the covers. Again, any other sub-genre of speculative fiction, generally looking at the cover often indicates whether it’s fantasy or science fiction or all of these other categories, tells you whether it’s dark, right? There’s lots of information that happens, and it’s just one of those many things when we judge books. We’re usually not looking for every single book in fantasy and sci-fi anyway. We’re looking for some signal that it’s the type of story that we personally like. **Oren:** Another one that has been brought up that I feel like people have to have read our blog to see is the fact that a story that has enough romance in it for us to call it a romance often has different engagement factors than a more traditional tension plot. That’s where they wanna draw the line. Touché for using our blog posts against us. Well done. But also, no, doesn’t work because other types of plots also have different engagement factors. Mysteries, for example, depend heavily on curiosity in a way that other plots don’t, but I’ve never seen anyone seriously suggest that a mystery story full of dragons and elves isn’t fantasy. Like, nobody ever says that, or at least no one I’ve ever encountered.  **Chris:** We’ve always said that generally speculative fiction genres are about setting details. The traits that they are associated with are almost always traits related to the setting. You can pretty much place any plot in them and it’s still speculative fiction, and romance is a plot-dependent genre, just like a mystery is, so there’s just nothing incompatible there. They can be both. **Oren:** What if I told you that romantasy was problematic? **Chris:** Bause fantasy isn’t problematic. Fantasy has never been problematic. **Oren:** It’s never happened, okay? It never happened. We all got together and agreed that the Sword of Truth series isn’t fantasy, so that’s actually fine then.  **Chris**: Right, and you also just told me that Wheel of Time is apparently romantasy, and it’s problematic, so that makes sense. **Oren:** Yeah, it does make sense, actually. Wheel of Time also not fantasy. That’s the thing, of course, like, we talk about romantasy, and not just romantasy, but that comes up a lot ’cause it’s popular, books being problematic. It’s a thing we talk about a fair amount. For other people who do, I just need you to show me that you care about problematic books in any other context. I need to know that that’s something you care about when it’s not a romantasy book. Because if you don’t, then I don’t really think you have much to say. **Chris:** It’s all very silly. Again, you don’t have to like romantasy. It’s okay if you don’t wanna read it. It’s okay if you hate it. **Oren:** Actually, I’ve changed my mind. You do have to like romantasy. I’m tired of this reasonable, enlightened third path we’re doing. It’s actually you do have to like romantasy. You’re actually a bad person if you don’t. **Chris:** If you contact us and tell us and complain about how we’re covering romantasy and say that it doesn’t belong on our site, I don’t know what to tell you. There’s no logical defense for your position, okay? All of the arguments saying that it’s not fantasy, they just don’t hold up. They’re very silly. Also, again, we have community members that write these books, right? You want me to go to them and be like, “Sorry, you’re not a legitimate part of our community. I’m not gonna edit your book because it’s romantasy”? No. I like to read romantasy in addition to fantasy, and I’m not the only person. There is, in fact, overlap. **Oren:** Wow, Chris. Why do you not care about causing the death of literacy? You’re doing that right now. **Chris:** Yeah, just the degradation of literature. It’s downhill from here. **Oren:** It’s so funny to me when people say that ’cause it’s like, bro, this is the only demographic that still reads. Everyone else just stopped reading. Maybe go yell at them. **Chris:** It is good for people who weren’t reading fantasy to come into fantasy. We want our genre to be big. We wanna have lots of books and lots of readers buying our books. Those are all good things, and some of those romance readers may decide first they’ll start reading fantasy with a romantic subplot, and then they may decide to read some fantasy without romantic subplot even. It’ll just make our works more popular. There’s nothing bad about that. The tide will crest, and then will, there’ll be some other really popular genre, subgenre that everybody will be complaining about instead. **Oren:** You just gotta stick around long enough. I mean, the romantasy tide is longer than most, but it hasn’t been going that much longer than the YA tide did, and I’ve seen some signs that it might be cresting as we speak, but I’m not gonna predict that. I don’t predict the market, except that you should totally go buy stocks in whatever company is about to produce the next literary RPG book, obviously. Go do that. That’s my prediction. **Chris:** Oh, man, I hope we’re not due for a litRPG tide. I think that one is gonna be a little harder for it to mainstream because it’s so weird. **Oren:** It’s extremely weird, and unlike romantasy, it doesn’t have an existing huge readership to bring over. ‘Cause as you pointed out, romantasy can bring over all these romance readers who now also read romantasy, whereas, like, who is LitRPG bringing over? Like, someone presumably. I mean, everyone’s reading Dungeon Crawler Carl, so maybe that’ll do it. I read an article on Reactor/tor.com allegedly that claimed that this was it. We were seeing LitRPG’s big breakout because of Dungeon Crawler Carl, and then The Wandering Inn is now popular enough to get a print book. And then supposedly LitRPG books do really well on audiobook rankings, but the article didn’t say which ones or how to look at those, so I don’t know what they’re talking about. That’s pretty thin evidence, man. That’s like one and a half books as your evidence. Maybe it is. I’m not saying it’s not. I just think that’s not a lot to make a big market prediction on. **Chris:** Yeah, who knows? Since apparently we need more books for men!™, traditional publishers will start picking up LitRPG to attract the boys and get them reading. **Oren:** It would be a little weird if they didn’t with how popular Dungeon Crawler Carl is. Something would have to be going on for them to not chase that success. I haven’t really seen them do it yet, but that doesn’t mean they’re not. **Chris:** I mean, honestly, they probably should. It’s worth trying. **Oren:** All right, and with that, in which I absolutely predicted the market. Whatever the result ends up being, I predicted it. Everyone remember that. We’re gonna go ahead and call this episode to a close. **Chris:** All right. Whether you write romantasy or you hate it, you are totally welcome in our Patreon community. To join us, just go to patreon.com/mythcreants. **Oren:** And before we go, I wanna thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.