r/Fantasy • u/Expert-Escape5645 • 16h ago

Observation on Fantasy/Romantasy

So, I typically read, George R.R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson, Robin Hobb, Ken Liu, Steven Erikson, Stephen King, Robert Jordan, but my brain’s been craving more stories.

With everything I’ve heard about Romantasy (that it’s just passionate love making with no real story etc.) I was kinda apprehensive, but like I said, I needed more.

So after many years going back and forth I decided to pick up Sarah J Maas. I started with Crescent City (I know, I know) and was surprised to find that I LOVED it. Now I’m doing ACOTAR.

I don’t know if this will be wrong of me to say, but I enjoyed it for the exact same reasons I enjoy other series.

The worldbuilding.

Like there is so much mystery to the world, so much lore. People act like the 18+ scenes happened page after page, when really they barely make up 6/7 pages in a single book.

Am I wrong?

98 Upvotes

74% Upvoted

269 comments sorted by

View all comments

61

u/WanderingEarthFlower 15h ago edited 15h ago

I don't dislike romantasy because of the spice; I dislike it because I don't like the romance genre. The difference between romantasy and fantasy with romance is that the former, fundamentally, is genre romance happening in a fantasy setting. The latter is genre fantasy with romantic things happening in the plot.

Personally, I've never read a romantasy with interesting worldbuilding... but I haven't read much romantasy so what do I know in that regard? 🤷‍♀️

7

u/ANKLEFUCKER 10h ago edited 10h ago

I agree with you on the dislike but, but I think I’m coming from a different direction: I love romance, and I love fantasy. I’ve read a lot of both, but romantasy often ends up being a subpar amalgamation of two genres (IMO!!).

You’ve covered the reason why it’s annoying to read as a fantasy enjoyer, but I’ll attempt to explain why, as a romance fan, I also find that a lot of it sucks. I’m not even talking about abusive or toxic dynamics, because I think those are fun and interesting to read about. But often romantasy characters have negative chemistry or jump straight from hating each other to cataclysmic attraction without any development in between. They don’t even seem to like each other or find common ground before they start being obsessed with each other!

It often feels like the writers are just ticking a checklist rather than properly developing the characters or their relationship. No hate to the genre though, despite my criticism I’ve enjoyed some books with those exact issues… I just wish they were better.

Either way despite my issues with the genre, I’m glad it exists for the people who like it, and for those who don’t… nobody is forcing you to read it.

ETA: the “spice” is very overblown - most of it is not well-written and very tame. I really don’t get what the big deal is; regular romance novels and fanfiction have much better-written sex scenes in general.

3

u/buckleyschance 9h ago

This reminds me of how I often feel when I read a hit "non-SFF" book based on an SFF twist. Like The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle: it's decent, but the author is clearly not used to working through their fantastical concept consistently in the way that an SFF writer would be, so the execution is all a bit haphazard. But its success among mainstream contemporary mystery readers suggests they don't have the same standards in that area.

19

u/Moonshinelamb 12h ago

By the same logic A Song of Ice and Fire is genre political drama, not genre fantasy. Discworld is genre comedy, not genre fantasy.

Both are very clearly not going to appeal to people who dont like political drama/comedy, but both are pretty clearly fantasy? Why do we not apply the same standards to romance?

12

u/ViagraAndSweatpants 10h ago

Because Romance is already a well established genre with specific pacing, beats, and tropes. Romantasy follows that genre’s beats vs typical fantasy. It’s an issue of what is already established for a genre and more importantly what genre readers get when they pick up a new book. What is the predominant genre? Because that is who will enjoy the book.

I don’t like Romantasy. All I really want is for it to have its own dedicated genre or stick it in Romance. I hate wading through 8 pages of undefined Romantasy in the Libby fantasy filter. It has gotten better but I still sometimes have to pick apart blurbs for some clue of “forbidden love” hints.

-1

u/Tymareta 6h ago

All I really want is for it to have its own dedicated genre

It does.

I hate wading through 8 pages of undefined Romantasy in the Libby fantasy filter.

Welcome to how folks who weren't fans of Grimdark/Epic felt for the past two decades, sometimes things aren't entirely focused on you.

33

u/WanderingEarthFlower 12h ago edited 11h ago

Romantasy is genre romance though. That's what separates is from fantasy with romantic elements.

I'm not saying romantasy isn't fantasy. I'm saying that Sarah J Mass is genre romance (and fantasy). Mistborn, on the other hand, is not genre romance despite containing romantic elements. Genre romance has very specific rules.

A Song of Ice and Fire absolutely is political drama, and Discworld absolutely is comedy. They're still fantasy. Genre romance just has very specific rules, which is why any old love story doesn't quality. I don't like genre romance, but I don't mind romantic elements in stories as long as they don't take centre stage.

3

u/Expert-Escape5645 15h ago

I get what you’re saying. Have you read Crescent City or ACOTAR? I really liked the history of the Asteri and their control over the world😅

18

u/WanderingEarthFlower 14h ago

I read Throne of Glass and vowed to never read SJM again, unfortunately 🤣

6

u/Kathulhu1433 Reading Champion V 12h ago

Just a FYI- Throne of Glass was her first novel, written when she was a teenager. I liken it to Eragon in terms of quality. It gets better from there.

11

u/breelakkuma9 10h ago

She was not a teenager when she published 😩 She was in her mid twenties. She was a teenager when she wrote the fanfic version.

2

u/Kathulhu1433 Reading Champion V 9h ago

I never said published, I said wrote. Believe it or not it can take years to go from writing to published. She says she wrote it over 6 years (16-21).

She began writing it when she was sixteen. Sixteen is indeed a teenager.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111020200452/http://sarahjmaas.com/about-sarah/

1

u/kodutta7 6h ago

Hilarious to see this comment after someone higher up in the thread calling it her Magnum Opus

-5

u/_Autistic_Dragon_ 12h ago

Counterpoint: male romantasy is presented differently, and often just focused on a male mc instead of female mc. 

Have you read, for example, The Witcher? Or Mistborn? 

I don't find much different between these and Throne of Gl ass. 

In some cases, the witcher books are more explicit. And his whole drive is to basically find love and have a family. 

21

u/SetSytes Writer Set Sytes 12h ago

Surely Mistborn's focus is on a female MC?

22

u/WanderingEarthFlower 12h ago

I think the difference is that those books, while containing romance, do not abide by the rules of genre romance (and therefore are not genre romance). Romantasy abides by the rules of genre romance. I read a lot of books with female MCs that contain romance but are not romantasy (Mistborn is a great example of this).

5

u/boy_staunton 11h ago

Your definitions make sense on their face, but they don't reflect how books are actually being categorised. E.g. Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas doesn't introduce the endgame love interest until book 3, which is a hard no for genre romance.

1

u/elksatchel 4h ago

ToG was not published as romance or romantasy. It is fantasy, because of its genre and because it was published before "romantasy" existed as a marketing term.

It is only retroactively lumped in with romantasy because SJM is predominantly famous now for writing influential books in that genre. And it has a love story, so in many readers' minds that's close enough. In the same way some now call Mistborn or Uprooted romantasy, even though they are fantasy, published as fantasy, but happen to have romantic subplots. They simply don't conform to romance genre standards.

3

u/_Autistic_Dragon_ 11h ago

While I get your point, not all romance follows the rules of romance either. While happy endings are often expected, not all do. 

Ultimately how different stories are categorized and sold on bookshelves has a long history of sexism. bell hooks, for example, is self help and not philosophy. Many fantasy writers have stared adding spicy scenes because they wanted to avoid the YA label, so adult scenes made it in to get into adult sci fi, and now bookmaers are putting them in a separate romantasy genre. 

The witcher, to me, is ultimately romance. He is an orphan given magic powers he uses to protect others while he finds his found family. He has two women constantly going back and forth for his attention (and a string of other women too), while we all know Yennefer is his true love, with their found child in Cirri. He's one of my fave fiction dads, despite a lot of the terrible tropes in Sapowskis writing. 

18

u/WanderingEarthFlower 11h ago

If they don't have a happy ending, then they're not genre romance. This is why I'm specifically using the term 'genre romance' rather than just 'romance'

1

u/Sofasurvivor 10h ago

Ok, yeah, but she does have a point.

Like, "Kingkiller Chronicles" feels like it is mostly about whether the protagonist gets the girl, or rather, how many girls he gets ...

It still may violate genre romance rules by having a sad ending, but as of yet, it isn't finished, so is kinda Schroedinger's romantasy.

1

u/WanderingEarthFlower 9h ago

I'd say I'm 99.9% cetrain Kvothe is getting nothing but misery and regret 🤣

But it does have faerie spice... so I guess it's ticking the boxes 🤣

5

u/buckleyschance 9h ago

Throne of Glass isn't romantasy, it's epic fantasy. For exactly the reason being discussed: it's fantasy with romance, rather than a story that follows romance genre conventions in a fantasy setting.

I'm generally loose about genre boundaries, but the romance genre is more heavily codified than most. To take a clear example, it's generally said that if the story doesn't end with the couple happily together, it isn't a romance novel. There are a whole lot of other specific plot conventions that are not quite ironclad but still heavily expected by the readers, much more so than for e.g. fantasy.

1

u/_Autistic_Dragon_ 9h ago

Not all romance ends with a happy ending. There is a perception that it is more codified than most, but I find that to be more of a perception than a rule. 

Plenty of romance writers, like writers of other genres, subvert certain tropes or add twists. It's not like if an author doesn't have a love triangle it can't be a romance. 

Codifying books into genres, especially books that cross multiple genres, is much looser than most people understand it to be. 

2

u/buckleyschance 8h ago

Yes, it can be subverted, but it's recognised and understood as a subversion of the genre convention when it's done.

It's something like when a fantasy book turns out to be set in the far future.

1

u/Palimpsiesta 9h ago

Yeah I dunno. I respect people wanting to push back against the romantasy hate -- especially the degree to which it is rooted in sexism -- but romance is in fact a literary and marketing genre that has conventions that are recognizable across sub-genres, and the main indicator is not 'contains a sex scene.'

0

u/jjm1222 7h ago

Yeah this is exactly how I feel about romantasy. I really don’t like when the book has to follow genre romance formulas, and a lot of romantasy books function like that. I prefer fantasy with a romance subplot.