why are romance books 'cringe'?

despite what the title may make you believe I actually love romance books or at least in theory I do then why is it that nine out of 10 romances make me roll my eyes back into my skull so far that I can see my own gag reflex I have a LoveHate relationship with Romance Books my own little enemies to lover storyline if you will I hate you do you or do you just want to kiss me because I love the swooning but then I also just really hated when there's another tall handsome billionaire treating the main female character very very poorly and it being played off as romance so with this video I want to explore why so many romance books are considered cringe what makes a romance book cringe and I of course also want to recommend some romance books that I consider to be not cringe I need a cup of tea there we go okay that is much better now even though the romance genre gets a lot of flack for being cringe or stupid did you know that it is actually the biggest book genre out there a 2022 MPD group study showed that romance was the biggest growing genre in terms of Book Sales and in that year the sales of Romance Books doubled in compared to the figures of 2021 not only is it growing super fast as a genre it is at least as of 2022 the biggest fiction genre when it comes to Book Sales they didn't specify if this was worldwide or us only I'm going to guess that it's us only but still that is it's a huge genre and the people who did this study contribute the immense growth of this genre to book talk when we looked at romance author sales earlier this year it was clear that book talk is contributing to the most romance gains and helping to create a new romance fan base among young readers because they saw in the data that this growth in Romance sales was mostly caused by like a new demographic entry the group of people that buy romance books and this was mostly young readers the kind of people that are on book talk and get their recommendations from book talk now who is reading all of these Romance Books a few years back in 2017 the Romance Writers of America commissioned the same group of people MPD group to do a study on who was doing these romance sales and they found that 82% of romance buyers are female and fun fact that that means that this channel like you guys this audience that always watches my channel has a higher ratio of female viewers than romance book buyers I actually think that's interesting but of course buying the book and reading the book is not the same and I wouldn't be surprised if those like 18% of men that are buying romance books like a big portion of them might be buying them for a woman in their life Maybe or maybe I'm just stereotyping here the point that I'm trying to make is that although romance May kind of seem like a hated on genre probably depends on where on the internet you spend your time it is also kind of the most loved genre at least the most bought genre um and it is mostly women who like it wow are we surprised that a thing that women are like almost exclusively into gets hated on no we're not but that will not stop us from critically analyzing the romance shamra so let's start with that why do so many people cringe at it why do I cringe at it a lot more than I want to hello it is I Your Love Doctor it turns out that having a degree in biom medicine did pay off in some way because now I can use my lab code as a prop a lot of people seem to be suffering from this Affliction called romance C where they are physically repulsed by the idea of love stories and romance fiction symptoms seem to include having feminist ideas about love weird really need to get that checked out feeling better than everyone else and only being able to intellectualize your feelings and not being able to actually feel your feelings now what is causing this Affliction this cringe At Romance Books well lucky for you I have a PhD in Romance cringe and with PhD I mean I've read a lot of cringy romances in my life and I've also read a bunch of blogs on the internet of people complaining about romance books so um I would say that is about um the deepest you can go when it comes to research in anything really and in my research I have distilled five reasons for why people tend to cringe at a romance and we're going to be discussing them talking about whether I personally agree with them or not of course cringe is a very personal thing some people cringe At Romance a lot other people don't at all and that's all fine I just think it would be interesting to kind of discuss these ideas the first reason why a lot of people cringe At Romance is stereotypes the idea that romance books are just too too full of stereotypical characters and I cannot disagree with this it is one of the major reasons that I tend to find a romance book cringe and if I really like a romance book like the romance books that I will be recommending at the end of this video it's usually because the characters are not as stereotypical I have come to the conclusion that the two main characters usually the man and the woman fall into a particular hpe for example the man our male love interest is almost always this kind of surly Stern man he only wears plain shirts and black and white colors because colors are for girls and this man is very masculine and what is more masculine than only wearing black and white there's a scowl on his face always because the only emotion he ever portrays is the manly emotion of anger he's also lowkey mean against pretty much everyone except sometimes to our female main character absolute bonus points if he is Rich preferably a billionaire never just a millionaire like he has to be the billionaire oh and then of course how could I almost forget the most important trait of our stereotypical male lead in a romance novel is he needs to be very very tall and we need to be reminded of this pretty much every single page lest we forget that he is towering over our female main character which brings us to our typical romance female main character she is very bubbly kind of the opposite of our male character she wears colors because she's a woman and that means that she is cheerful and quirky she makes the man experien joy for the first time since birth she probably has some kind of quirky habit or like a catchphrase to show us how quirky and interesting she is and of course very very important detail she is so tiny and frail and almost disappears in comparison to our meal lead almost every single Ali Hazel wood kind of falls into these stereotypes I've seen it in the very popular the Spanish love deception it seems to be that these kind of stereotypical characters are very very popular among romance readers I hope you liked my uh my silly little illustration time lapse here if you're wondering how I make those illustrations and time lapses I do them in procreate I've been doing this by taking a class in an intro into procreate and if it wasn't for that class by Brook Glazer I for example wouldn't have known how that time lapse feature works exactly and I can't wait to learn more more and make more silly little visuals for you guys if you also want to take creative classes like me they can be found on the sponsor of today's video which is skillshare they are the largest online learning community with thousands of creative classes from illustration to photography to sewing and if you're not really sure where to start skillshare has perfectly curated learning paths with sequential classes that take you from beginner all the way to Advanced for example I found this class of the intro into procreate in the learning path for procreate Basics if you have any creative goals for the new year I highly recommend investing in yourself and starting your Learning Journey on skillshare and the great thing is that the first 500 people who will click on my link in the description will get a one month free trial of skillshare so you can get started today so click the link in the description and thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video okay back to the stereotypes the reason I personally don't like these stereotypes is because I find that they fall into very typical roles for men and women like the man always has to be you know the cerebral one the efficient one the one that doesn't really show any emotions those are the prejudices that we have about men and on the other side it is the woman whose job it often is to make this meale character happy like she's the cheerful one she's kind of the chaotic one that doesn't really know how to do things which again I think is just a very typical stereotype that exists about woman so that is why I tend to really not like these stereotypes because I do think that Unfortunately they really reflect the prejudices that we already have about what a man should be like and what a woman should be like okay the second reason that people tend to cringe At Romance is when there is no buildup in the love now of course nobody likes an insta love story and most stories don't really have insta love anymore but a lot of people mentioned that they really don't like how Romance Books Focus too much on hotness of the characters and it's only characters kind of like fawning over each other and how attractive that they are and I think you know a romance book really falls apart when there's not enough buildup most of the time that I find a romance book cringe is because I don't see the Chemistry Between the characters like sometimes it's just so clear that the author just made the characters hot and that's why they fall for each other and we're just kind of as a reader supposed to go along with that but a good romance book will show us that there is you know banter there's flirting there is actual chemistry and tension between these characters because they just match and it's not just because they're hot and I guess my kind of hot take is that I think a lot of Romance Books kind of rely on making the male character really attractive and hot so that the reader will find this male character attractive and hot and then that is kind of supposed to carry the romance but personally for a good romance it doesn't matter what I think of the characters I don't need to find these characters attractive as long as I can believe that they specifically are into each other but I think way too many romance books focus on making the reader love the male hero and the problem with not properly setting up the tension between the characters is that moments that are supposed to be filled with romantic tension become super awkward if you don't buy it for example in the love hypothesis I personally really did not feel the Chemistry Between the characters so all of their fake dating moments weren't like cute and flirty to me they were just really awkward like if you have a scene where the two characters have to put sunscreen on each other that could be like a Moment full of tension if you're feeling it but if you're not feeling it that suddenly becomes an extremely awkward scene third reason is something I would summarize with the term romance logic so a lot of people met mentioned that oh the things in romance novels would simply never happen you know fake dating it's so prevalent in romance novels but it would never happen in real life hate to love enemies to lovers if you actually had someone you hated you probably wouldn't then fall in love with them the only one betra would probably be very awkward in real life and not necessarily lead to any romantic moments a lot of people mentioned how being in love with a werewolf or a vampire or a demon is just really weird like how could something like that ever happen in real life all of these things can be put under the umbrella of people not liking romance logic there's a kind of logic to romance books right and to the people criticizing this I think I'm actually going to say guys suspension of disbelief I think this is the first cause for romance cringe where I'm going to have to disagree to read any kind of book honestly but also if you're reading Romans books you need a certain kind of suspension of disbelief otherwise it would be like saying fantasy books are bad because um magic doesn't exist a book about dragons sweetie you know dragons don't actually exist right you see what I mean like there are just certain tropes certain conventions in Romance Books that yeah would be a little bit weird in real life but that's that's kind of partially why they're fun to read about in a fictional setting because they make for interesting fictional scenarios that wouldn't happen in real life and this kind of is similar to the fourth reason that people tend to dislike romance books and that is that they are unrealistic specifically that they give women an unrealistic ideal of Love uh first of all I just want to say I just find it so funny when men are like um romance books where a man treats the woman nicely and makes her happy um I think these women are getting kind of unrealistic expectations honey uh but that besides yeah of course you know Romance Books always have a happily ever after the characters always seem to know exactly what the other person wants until the third act breakup when everything suddenly goes wrong but to be honest I think think it's a little bit condescending towards romance readers to assume that they believe that everything that's happening in Romance Books is going to happen in real life I think people aren't giving romance readers enough credit if they assume that they just can differentiate between real life and fiction I think a lot of romance readers know that the things that are happening in Romance Books aren't the way it goes in real life but yet again that is why they are fun to read and then our final reason and this is one yet again where I do kind of agree and that is that a lot of Romance Books just romanticize toxic love and toxic Behavior now I want to preface this by saying that a lot of Romance Books just don't do this there are so many romance books out there and there are plenty of them that are not toxic let's focus a lot on healthy communication between between characters that are always very good at establishing clear consent between characters I think it's just that it happens to be that the most famous romance novels can be criticized for this thing some very popular romance authors that are very often criticized for romanticizing toxic behavior in their novels are Colleen Hoover and Anna Hong and those two are just extremely popular on line so I think people who don't really read a lot of romance think of romance and then immediately think of Colleen Hoover I do want to say by the way I read this statistic that absolutely blew my mind so apparently I knew Colleen Hoover was popular but apparently her book sales account for more than 48% of all the print sales in the United States that means that about half of the romance books that are being sold in the US are Colleen Hoover and then second best is Emily Henry who is responsible for about 30% of all romance book sales meaning that both Colleen Hoover and Emily Henry alone dominat the romance Market with over 80% of all Book Sales my God so yeah the romance Market is actually kind of a singular market so I understand that people who don't really read a lot of romance tend to think that it's just colen Hoover now you could talk for a very very long time about in what way romance books are kind of perpetuating toxic Behavior it's not something I want to get into right now because there's a lot lot of nuance to it on the one hand it can give people very wrong ideas when you portray possessiveness and jealousy as being very caring it can be kind of problematic when the characters don't really ever establish clear consent with each other because you know it's a fictional novel so they can practically always do the right thing to each other on the other hand I also understand the argument that fictional books are a safe space for women to kind of explore all all kinds of aspects of their wants and needs and that we should also understand that a lot of romance readers can definitely differentiate between real life and fiction often times on this channel when I criticize romance books I go into this topic but I don't want to go into it too much in this video I think the bottom line for me is that it's always good to kind of analyze how the things that happen in Romance Books reflect our our society's ideas of how women should behave and what is okay in a romance what is okay for men to do so here we have five reasons for why a lot of people suffer from romance cringe but there is kind of one final reason that I haven't really touched upon and that is that generally romance is just seen as badly written shallow not good and as opposed to all of the reasons that we've given here those reasons kind of have nothing to do with um romance itself all of these reasons specifically refer to the romance in the romance books but a lot of people just hate on Romance Books not because they're about romance but because there's this idea that you know they're just lesser than other books they're just more poorly written they're just lacking in depth and therefore you shouldn't be wasting your time on them a lot of people who like romance kind of express it as a guilty pleasure I found this blog by Kaye walel where she expresses her grievances with this idea of romance being a guilty pleasure whenever someone asks what kind of books do you like to read a tiny bit of Shame always Creeps in when I answer that question with a squeaked out romance I tend to add rushed but also fantasy and historical fiction and literary fiction to the end because I always feel the need to clarify that while romance is probably my go-to genre I read more conventionally accepted genres as well and I don't think she's the only one that considers her romance love a guilty pleasure it is simply not a book genre with the same status as literary fiction or historical fiction because there's this idea that romance books are just worse than other books and of course it really doesn't help that Romans books are often delegated to chicklet or women's fiction and we all know that things that are primarily loved by women are very very quickly looked down upon or painted as something that is shallow and not worth looking at but I don't think we should judge romance books by the same standards As we judge literary fiction like wouldn't it be super weird if you judge a literary book by saying that it just doesn't have enough interesting magic systems or if you started to judge a fantasy book by saying that it just doesn't have enough romance no different genres have different expectations Kaye walel says it very well she says it's unfair to treat the romance genre like literary fiction you will rarely find the nuanced metaphors and almost melodic language customary to literary fiction in romance novels because it doesn't fit the genre conventions however what you will find is crafted dialogue and banter between characters Vivid and familiar imagery that you feel you can actually be a part of and comforting cliches with a new twist every time who's to say one genres conventions are better than another and I think I really agree with that it's just such a shame that the genre conventions of romance like happy endings and a Feelgood Vibe are things that we tend to look down on when we cringe At Romance we often also cringe at the idea of a happy Love Story a cheerful novel why do we look down on pieces of media that are written to make us feel good that are written to be a little silly and funny because for me that is the main reason why I continue to read romance why I still love romance books even though there are so many that I just don't really like because a romance book can make you feel good it's funny it's cheerful we all want love it's such a fundamental part of being a human being and living a life on this Earth most of us crave a meaningful and flirty and emotional and steamy relationship of course it's fun to indulge in that fantasy with a romance novel love is just such a big part of living life as a human being so why should we look down on Happy love stories now with that being said I think it's time for me to recommend to you my favorite romance books that I personally do not find cringe um so I'm just going to change out of these doct our clothes to do that I personally believe that Romance Books tend to kind of fall on a spectrum from silly to emotional silly being that the books are a little bit more flirty a little bit more humorous more feel-good more sexy makes you laugh and then the emotional Romance Books tend to be a little bit more serious a little bit more indepth with the characterization uh maybe have some melancholic moments but eventually they will have happily ever after and I think every Romance Books Falls somewhere on the Spectrum and I think every person may have a preference for example this is kind of my window of preference everything that falls within this window I consider not cringe so as you can see I have a preference for kind of silly Romance Books if they get a little bit too silly and quirky I start finding them cringe and this is why I tend to not really like Ellie hazelwood's books but mostly when books try to be be like too emotional and they're like not feel good enough that's not my vibe it's just a personal preference so for each of these books that I'm going to recommend I will let you know where they fall on the emotional silly scale my absolute favorite romance author is by far Talia Hibert specifically I recommend the only series that I've read of her to be honest that is the brown sister series I'm constantly surprised that this is not more popular than it is these books definitely fall towards the more silly sign of things they are funny they are humorous they are Feelgood they are very sexy and flirty lots of banter and the concepts of the story are a little bit sillier like the first book get a life Chloe Brown is about a girl that has made like a list of everything that she needs to do to get a life like enjoy a drunken night out and ride a motorbike and then she meets a guy that's going to help her with that Take a Hint Danny Brown you should read if you want perfect fake dating where the two characters are clearly like have an attraction towards each other but the book is mostly about them really learning to love each other and the last one this one's my favorite takes place in a bed and breakfast none of these books fall into the category of just like extremely stereotypical characters this one does have your typical oh the man is like a surly strict boy and and then the main character girl is like super bubbly it doesn't feel stereotypical because all the characters are so very well fleshed out this is a perfect example of books where you can just feel why these two characters specifically are into each other and it doesn't feel like you're just looking at two hot people ogling each other the other very obvious choice is Emily Henry I love her she falls more on the emotional side I think in her books she strikes the perfect balance between an emotional story where there's like you know moments where the characters stand in the rain and they all have their own like really sad backstory and it has that melancholic feel to it but still it feels very flirty and full of chemistry as well another good example of books where you can totally feel why the characters are attracted to each other my personal favorite of hers is Book Lovers and I think the reason for that is that this one definitely Falls more towards the silly side like out of all of Emily Henry books that I've read this one is slightly more silly than the other ones I know I never shut up about sangu mandanas the very secret society of irregular witches this is a fantasy romance but it takes place in our world it's just that the main character is a witch still very silly extremely feel good sometimes maybe even too much for my liking these definitely are not your your typical romance Heroes especially since the whole theme of this book is feeling different feeling like nobody accepts you and then finding your own found family where you do feel accepted I know I said I wasn't like the biggest fan of Ellie Hazelwood but um the exception to that for me is love theoretically Ellie Hazelwood Falls very very far into the silly quirky main characters category it's a little bit too much for me her humor doesn't really work for me this one still really run true for me yes her main characters are literally this drawing that I drew but it works if you want a spin on the fake dating Trope like this is about a character who fake dates for a living that's like her job and then her love interest is a guy who sees through that also really goes into our main character's trouble with people pleasing and not really knowing who she truly is and I guess this just goes to show that if a romance book has a theme that really does it for you that you really relate to that automatically makes it more fun and again that's going to be different for everyone the last book that I want to recommend to everyone who's still like okay no but I just really don't like romance cuz it's all just poorly written and not in depth enough I raise you one of my favorite books of all time Jane air it's classic literature beautifully rich you're going to be amazed by how relatable this character from the 19th century is and how much of her thoughts and feelings our thoughts and feelings that we still may experience in the 21st century and a big part of the story is the romance between Jay air the governess and Mr Rochester who is the master of the house it's definitely not silly it fully leans towards the more emotional side if you want beautifully written passages about love about understanding each other Jan air is the book for you those were my personal favorite Romance Books I'm hoping to find more maybe there are a lot of romance books that I find cringe but I will never find romance as a genre cringe at all I really hope you enjoyed this video I want to give a special thanks to all of my patrons that support me with a special shout out to all of my Elite hidden Library members and a warm welcome to our newest Elite members which are Josie Lawson and sleeping culu welcome I really hope you enjoyed this video and I will see you soon with another one [Music] goodbye [Music]

Channel: The Book Leo

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Length: 32min 7sec (1927 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 04 2024