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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9850367" data-attributes="member: 18">That's a bit like saying "dark fantasy is awful" or "epic fantasy is awful" or whatever though, because it's such a broad sweeping claim about an extremely diverse genre that it just shows you're basically unfamiliar with the genre.There's certainly a lot of romantasy that is both trashy and tropey, just bodice-rippers or wish-fulfilment with fantasy settings instead of historical ones, but there's also stuff which certainly gets categorized as "romantasy", like, say, some of T. Kingfisher's fantasy novels, which is a great deal better written and frankly more mature in the true sense (not "lol boobies" as "mature" means to a lot of people), as in emotionally complex, involving serious relationships, complex issues, and so on than the vast bulk of well-regarded non-romantasy SF/F. Like I guarantee you've read and enjoyed fantasy novels which were way trope-ier and dumber than hers.Also for the sake of clarity to people reading this, there's no relationship between "romantic fantasy" and "romantasy", and basically no overlap in terms of authors or subject matter. Romantic fantasy was just a somewhat sexist term for a subgenre of fantasy largely written by women, that had some other genre characteristics (magic was often more like psionics, for example, they tended to be a bit more LGBT-friendly, they were often about a specific organisation who were good guys, etc.) that really didn't even need a genre term, and romantic was certainly the wrong one, given they had more in common with Star Trek than romanticism as a movement - indeed, they often roundly rejected the principles of romanticism, and also frankly didn't feature any more romance-qua-romance than other fantasy!So like, if you generally dislike romantasy, I totally get that - a lot of has a very specific deal which is not necessarily interesting in the exact same way a lot of power-trip fantasy (which is less common these days but not unheard-of) is basically uninteresting to a lot of people. But there's good stuff in there too because the term is very broad.(There's also a lot of stuff which escaped that categorization solely by when it was published. I don't doubt that Shadow and Bone would get called "romantasy" by a lot of people if it came out today, because the first book was basically "1700s fantasy Twilight", though perhaps the sheer lack of sex might hold the categorization off -it'd be the only thing though! And anyway, the books after that went in a very different direction, basically totally abandoning the Twilight angle and going "Nah that guy is actually definitely 100% bad, not a hottie".)</blockquote>

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