i hate romantasy, sorry not sorry

stop do not pass go now don't click off the video just yet let me just explain to you what we are getting into today I have something to say and I'm not going to be nice is going to be Petty and rude and pretty much all of the things that you probably think it is from the title this isn't clickbait I'm basically going to break every rule in the rule book when it comes to being a book content creator where I'm not going to be conscientious of other people's feelings and I'm just going to express my opinion this is something I usually do pretty regularly anyway but like this video especially is going to be one people should not watch if you cannot handle other people having opinions that are in complete disagreement of your own so basically I'm going to be just like an absolute hater for x amount of minutes so if you want to watch that cool hang out with me but bit if you can't handle someone being salty as [ __ ] for several minutes get the [ __ ] out now all right so now that we're all on the same page let's chat if you're new here my name's Maddie welcome to my channel I hope your day is going well and today we're going to talk about the sub genre of a romance Romany now some of you might be thinking that the sub genre should be a fantasy because it's Romany um but no I I fully believe this is a romance genre and I don't have anything against the romance genre but I'm a fantasy reader and as you will come to find out the influx of this sub genre is causing me frustration what is romantic Let's Ask Google romantic is a portanto of romance and fantasy and it's used to refer to the fantasy romance genre you might also hear writers call the genre romantic fantasy Romany can take place in either a high fantasy world or a low fantasy setting I just think that the word portmanto is funny so I wanted to include that from my understanding of this like overhyped personally sub genre is that it's a story with romance at the center set in a fantasy world which considering I describe myself as a fantasy reviewer I don't particularly like that Focus being not on the World building but just on the Romantic tension causes me a lot of frustrations when I'm reading a book that I thought would have a interesting fantasy setting as well as a romance do not get me wrong I have read a [ __ ] ton of romantices over the course of my reading life especially uh being on YouTube I can almost Chronicle the exact moment this genre was created and I will be talking about that in this video look I am aware that I am the demographic for this genre I'm an almost 30 white lady with 2.5 cats in a sex life that could be like better let's be real uh I know why this genre exists and I know why I've read a lot of it I have not always been a hater of this sub genre I have been around the block I have seen this sub genre become what it is today now feel free to disagree with me but I think that the modern romantasy fad originated with a little known series called a court of thorns and Roses it's like super Niche you probably never even heard of it now I've made several videos on the acatar series at this point I actually read the first book relatively quickly after it came out and um it was a book that I gave I think five stars too which shocks everyone I'm sure uh but this is actually very similar story-wise to everyone else I think is this book got me back into reading ya I had kind of started really only reading High fantasy didn't really click with reading as much anymore and when I read at court of thorns and Roses it was so easily digestible that I just devoured it in like one sitting and yes you did just hear me correctly a court of Thrones and Roses was published in ya I mention that people tend to get a little confused I don't know if you've read this super Niche series or not but like there is a crap ton of space in this series it's [ __ ] erotica like it's just there's smut in this series that doesn't mean that it's a bad series it's just mostly what this series is known for at this point which is something I actually mentioned about this first book Accord of thorns and Roses even though the muddiness doesn't actually pick up until the second book but I mentioned that this was like more sexually charged for a ya book than I initially expected and I also referred to farra as a interestingly flawed heroine which was a plaw Twist that I didn't expect because she is probably my most hated main character except for maybe Violet from Darkwing fourth wi which with the wing Book for a little bit more context this series even though it's like very little known and no one really has ever heard about it um when I worked for a a little known chain bookstore chain called Barnes bernes and noé um I had to sell this book series quite a bit to people who had teenagers and or younger because it was in the ya section so I had to have a lot of conversations with parents about hey have you had the conversation with about the birds and bees because about to if you buy this series for your child which the topic of like smut NY books or like young readers finding erotica before a certain point is not the topic of this video um but just bear in mind this series was written for a audience of younger readers so the way that it's written is incredibly youthful and done so on purpose for the audience it was originally sold to such a cultural shift for me because when I went back and reread Twilight a a couple of years ago I had forgotten that in Breaking Dawn there is not a onpage sex scene like there wasn't a plethora of YA books with on page sex scenes until 2015 like that was not something that was happening as extensively as it is now like for real I thought we got a description of Edward's icicle penis but apparently that did not happen speaking of Twilight the Paranormal craze in why was huge and it was only like unseeded by the dystopian craze that came quickly after it um and then after the dystopian craze died out from around 2012 2013 up until 2016 there was kind of this like slow decline in young adult where after all of these huge series that it like really boosted the publishing World there wasn't really something that was driving people back into into reading anymore around this time Cassandra CLA and Lee bardugo started announcing a lot of like adult titles and there was a big push for new adult to become a thing and if you're not familiar with what new adult is it's what basically people were trying to do with the ya section just adding smut scenes like it kind of makes sense on paper but at the same time it became very difficult to get that to be a recognizable like audience Market because there there just isn't a easy transition between young adult and like adult books personally my thing is is if you are an adult and you are reading either a young adult book or an adult book you should be able to know the difference of what the content is Right romance heavy plot lines in fantasy books have never been a non- entity that's always been a thing but there's always been kind of a balance between the fantasy aspect and the romance aspect until something happened that Gollum could not have expected Indie publishing I want to be very very clear I do not have any issues with Indie published authors the publishing industry is Gaye keep to [ __ ] so if you find a loophole and you're able to publish your book on your own go for it that's awesome I am proud of you for that and people are reading these clearly unedited under researched Half Bake self-insert fantasies and considering them to be really well written since the world changed dramatically during Co I do think like Kendall unlimited especially helped andd authors get as much recognition as possible because people were at home they weren't going out and buying physical books and it just became an easier process to get your book published and Trends came from there around this time is also when Tik Tok became really really good at making a singular book a huge [ __ ] sensation so Flash for to now we are inated with a bunch of books all about fairies having sex which is not in itself the problem the problem that I do have with these stories is that they are written like they're intended for seventh graders and they have the cringiest [ __ ] sex scenes I've ever read in my life additionally to that a lot of these series have issues with dubious or just straight up non-consent scenes and I do believe that that's probably a trickle down effect of ya paranormal romances and then like into like the 50 Shades of Gray popularity because for some reason a lot of these romances rely on the concept that the woman doesn't have to actually speak out loud what she wants once again a whole other video topic let's keep going the reason that I wanted to do this video is because I Tried reading this book this book has a Mad Libs title that I'm not even going to try and [ __ ] say because it's confusing as hell I got about a 100 pages into this and I am I got tired I got tired cuz I knew exactly what was happening in every [ __ ] scene I knew exactly how cringy the relationship was going to be I could not understand the world because it was clear that the like care that the world was given was nil at best and additionally it just it was reading like someone had just smacked their head against a [ __ ] typewriter I know this is yucking people's yum that is I know I know that that sorry this is this is an opinion if you like this book if you made it this far like I'm sorry it just it doesn't it doesn't work for me anymore let's be clear I got tired of paranormal romances I got tired of dystopian actually really really quick I didn't really like dystopian and now I'm tired of Romany I even got tired of the ripoffs of Game of Thrones like I do I burn out on these series that are so similar to everything and now romantic for me is a genre that I would like to rip my eyeballs out before reading another one of biggest reason that I have an issue with Romany is because these books are all carbon copies of each other don't get me wrong a lot of book series have been inspired by other book series that's just a fact there's a saying that there's no new ideas Under the Sun you just make things up as you go and inspiration is the like obviously the highest form of flattery uh but for me it gets so frustrating when I'm reading a story and I know that the reason that the book is popular is because the author didn't have to do any work characterizing their own characters they just borrowed characters from other places Darkwing fourth wi I keep calling it Darkwing here's the thing if all you're doing is taking the same character and giving him a slightly different fantasy power and calling it a day it's still the same [ __ ] character and especially when every single one of these Series has like this weird fetish for East Asian men it's getting weird like that's that's not like are we are we uncomfortable I'm uncomfortable you guys should like I feel like we should be aware of this top of that sah J mass is being rightly criticized once again again um and I definitely think that there are several issues with the way that she conducts her social media presence let's just say um there was a Tik Tok that I saw where someone was saying that like oh her books are diverse so we should shut up and just deal with the way they're written which um yikes uh and also no I do not think Sarah J mass is a bad person I think that she is a writer and that she has done very well for herself but I do think that there is a worrying concept for people in my age bracket refusing to read anything other than fairy smut now my biggest thing is in this situation is that you can do whatever the [ __ ] you want you can read whatever the [ __ ] you want but if you're only reading from an author who used the death of biona Taylor to Market her book maybe you should think about diversifying your reading tastes I am going to be a huge hypocrite here because I do thoroughly plan on reading the next Cresent City book not because I enjoy it because I have a small business on the internet where I talk about fairy dicks and you guys watch like do I think the people that enjoy these books are stupid no I do not I think a lot of people read these books as escapism and I think that that is awesome I do think that anybody reading for anything is awesome what I don't want to do anymore is read any more of these books and fortunately weird enough you guys seem to be liking it when I read dark romance books which weirdly enough is something that I have not as many issues with anymore because as someone who enjoys fantasy books that are well written I don't give a [ __ ] about dark romance and any span of the imagination but I do think reading dark romance is probably worse for my health to be honest but I do have other videos planned on dark romance series that are hopefully going to be coming out soon this video was was just me ranting about the fact that I'm really tired of low effort World building and really really problematic romances being the most popular thing and being shoved down my throat every time I open Tik Tok uh but that it's just me being salty that there was really no point to this video to be honest so the person that left me a comment about how they just read for fun and they're not reading to like analyze a book good for you I don't give a [ __ ] what you read for I read to analyze things cuz I'm a [ __ ] reviewer so yeah I'm probably not going to read any fantasy romances anytime soon um but I will hit you guys up hopefully with another video about a dark romance uh inspired by maybe Criminal Minds so uh like subscribe all the good stuff [Music] bye

Channel: a lil bit mads

Views: 57,726

Keywords: books, booktube, booktuber, bookish, book reviewer, bookseller

Id: 1K4n0znlbCo

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 05 2023