Quote:
Originally Posted by hildea
I'm the opposite: I can't stand romances where one of the romantic pairing is an asshole unless there's some serious reason to believe they have learned and grown and done their best to make amends.
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I could swallow the groveling trope if both men and women were made follow it in straight romances. But it is almost always the man who is an asshole and has to grovel, never the heroine, while in real life women can be just as big assholes as men. Of course I'm aware of the reason for that (romances are written for women; the reader is meant to identify with the heroine and so the heroine can't be an asshole), but it's still extremely annoying for me. Possibly because I don't identify with romance heroines (I'm asexual), I read them from an outsider's viewpoint and so I find many tropes annoying that the target audience perhaps doesn't.
Granted, I don't read romances often and am probably not aware of the latest developments in the genre; perhaps there have been changes to the "the asshole is always the male half of the pairing" trope too.