[hildea]

Originally Posted by issybird

I don’t think the OP in this thread was defensive in tone, but I get why romance fans can feel defensive and perhaps are secretive about their preference. Romance is viewed differently and it’s not about quality, it’s about who reads it.

Thanks - I tried to write about my enthusiasm for the genre I feel somewhat defensive, though. When I was younger I used to be embarrassed about liking romance, and when I admitted to reading it I'd quickly add that I also love science fiction and fantasy. To me it was definitively a gendered thing -- I'm a woman with a male dominated education and career (engineering and IT) and male dominated hobby (board games), so it has taken me some time to be unashamed about stereotypically female interests.

That said, I get uneasy these days when romance is described as "for women, by women". That slogan is being used to make men and nonbinary people feel unwelcome in the genre, and that's (obviously) not good. And there's a huge issue with straight women dominating gay romance to an extent where they push out gay men, and that's also problematic.

Originally Posted by Catlady

I put romance and SF in the same trash heap of generally awful. Thrillers? That category is so broad that I don't know if generalizations can be made. The easy answer to why the romance genre is mocked is that it's marketed to women, and therefore must be inferior to genres men read. Another reason might be that genre romance is so formulaic. SF seems to allow for more variation in plot.

Sigh, yes, I get annoyed when a whole genre is describe as a trash heap of generally awful. And I'm surprised that you think thrillers is a broader category than either romance of SF, no matter what criteria you measure the breadth of a category by.

Originally Posted by issybird

I think you’re right about romances being formulaic, up to a point. I think the insistence on what is called HEA, or at least HFN, does them a disservice. Why limit outcomes and in a manner which the reader expects? I assume sci-fi doesn’t do that. But then, it’s not dissimilar to mysteries in that respect; readers have every confidence that Peter Wimsey or Hercule Poirot will figure out the culprit and that someone will find Nancy Drew bound and gagged in that closet.

The way I see it, genre conventions are not a matter of limiting outcomes, it's a matter of labelling/truth in advertising. Say you sit down to read a historical novel but find that it takes place in 2022. Or midway through a historical novel the protagonist is bitten by a vampire and then abducted by aliens. Or a book marketed as a cozy mystery had several extremely explicit sex scenes with detailed descriptions of body parts in motion and exchange of bodily fluids. Or you are enjoying a crime novel with a tricky locked room mystery and are looking forward to finding out how the author is going to explain it, and then learn in the last chapter that a ghost did it. Or a book marketed as a fantasy novel is a realistic contemporary story with nothing supernatural or magical at all. All of these books may be perfectly fine in themselves, but if they don't meet a minimum of their readers' expectations many readers will be disappointed and annoyed.

Authors are, of course, free to write as many love stories with unhappy endings as they like. But they shouldn't slap a label saying "this is a hopeful, uplifting love story" on their tragedies. Just like authors are free to write stories which take place completely in the present day, but then they shouldn't call those books historical novels. And so on.

Originally Posted by Terisa de morgan

An author not writing that is the reason I read the end of the book before purchasing (when it is a paper book) it so it doesn't happen to me. I'm very glad people want realistic books, I don't. Discussion about formulaic stories, awful covers, more realistic characters, in my country, stories placed here instead of USA or UK, are common (or were, I haven't gone in a lot of time) at romance convention. I'm a traditionalist and I like my romance with a happy end and as minimum reality as it's possible (mistoric are a bit more difficult to accept but....). I will be happy for an author if she or he want to broaden their limits and write another things, but I'll be out of there.

If I'm going to read a tragic book I'm going for non-fiction, and I need to be in the mood for it. When reading Svetlana Aleksijevitj's book about Soviet women during WWII I needed frequent breaks, and each chapter of The Sixth Extinction was a depressing downer about another species going or gone. Most of my reading is for entertainment, and then I want to feel good when I finish a book.