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Originally Posted by Anke Wehner
He said they'd laugh about him, if I remember correctly.
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Sounds like he needs to get a different set of friends.
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With fantasy in particular sometimes I get the impression there are people who think each and every fantasy story must be a cookie-cutter copy of LotR, so anything which is not a quest to save the world with a magic artifact at the centre must be something that is not fantasy.
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SF got criticized as "Crazy Buck Rogers Stuff" because of similar misplaced notions. It reflects a rather tragic ignorance of the subject matter.
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I don't know, some people just try to redefine reality rather than change their assummptions. People start with the idea of "Genre X is stupid. This book is not stupid, so it can't be genre X, because it is inconceivable that my assumption is wrong." (I see that in other fields, too. "All women are stupid about maths/tech. If a woman is good in those fields, she is not a counter-example. She must have some hormone imbalance that gave her a male brain.")
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An awful lot of things like that become Religious Arguments. They have nothing to do with religion per se, but the underlying impulses are gut level things that tend to live in the same place as religious beliefs, and are just as touchy to question. Questions of the beliefs tend to be interpreted as personal attacks on the holder of the beliefs, and responded to accordingly.
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I gravitate to fantasy and science fiction for various reasons, including that I like fanciful escapism. And I avoid romance because I assume that the stories are about how a woman's life revolves around hooking up with a man, which just doesn't interest me.
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Romance is of little interest to me, either, but I'm male and not part of the target audience. It
is the fastest growing genre, and I'm increasingly convinced that the majority of the reading market in the US is female.
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Dennis