You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can’t Tuna Fish
on dark romance and why evolution ≠ redefinition
What is genre romance?
It’s actually more flexible than it gets credit for. It blends well with other genres, and it only has a few, core, non-negotiable pillars: an HEA (happily ever after ending) or HFN (happy for now – although I think readers who accept HFN in adult romance do so with the expectation that a future HEA is implied) and a central romance. If any of these pillars are missing, it’s not a romance. The enduring appeal of the HEA comes from a double resonance: it speaks to universal human needs – emotional connection, love, and sexual fulfillment. And it reflects culturally specific ideals – about gender roles, morality, and relational power.
This is not to say that every HEA must look the same; romance makes space for queer love stories, polyamorous dynamics, and endings that challenge patriarchal scripts so long as the emotional payoff remains intact. The point isn’t to defend a narrow vision of love, but to protect the scaffolding that makes the genre coherent. Without that, it’s not reinvention, it’s erasure.
That’s the third core pillar that isn’t discussed as often: the positive emotional payoff. In the broadest sense, most people come to romance for the uplifting emotional reward, and while they may tolerate a limited level of emotional pain en route, the ending must still offer resolution and hope in the form of an HEA. Trauma and tragedy may be there as scaffolding, but they don’t forefront as distinct threads in the plot.
Dark romance, as a subgenre of romance, isn’t exempt. It has more license to play with taboo, kink, and dark themes such as trauma, but it’s all in service of the romance plot. Almost everyone who’s ever read more than one romance novel knows this. And, like many points of contention in romance discourse, the question of what counts as genre, qualifying dark romance is not a new argument. But it came on my radar again in the form of a particularly hostile and presumptuous Reddit poster, so once again, I ask:
Why is it so important for people who dislike the defining elements of romance and by their own words, crave the antithesis of romance, to have tragic, open-ended, or non-HEA books categorized as romance?
This isn’t a frivolous or consequence-free question, and it’s not asked enough. I recently presented a paper at the 2025 Popular Culture Convention in New Orleans about how tropes evolve and sustain romance. The research I presented is part of my master’s thesis, which is also the foundation of my forthcoming book on genre romance. Because of this, I spend more time than I’d like to reading social media posts.
One thing to note is that familiar tropes can, and often do, cross subgenres. Regarding the foundational question of what qualifies dark romance, I’m not so much responding to one individual here, but rather, the way this poster represents a common list of justifications presented in online forums for a stance they vehemently defend. Some of their complaints are shared by many long-time readers about contemporary romance and it applies across subgenres: it’s too homogeneous, too superficial, too badly written. They’re tired of reading the same book over and over, and they want “more depth and layers to the plot” and less sex as the entire plot. These are valid issues that deserve discussion.
But from there it gets murkier; when you see the phrase “dark romance” online, it can mean two different things – one is genre conforming and one isn’t. When proponents of this alternate dark romance articulate what type of story they want, they mention things like sadness, trauma, and brutality that moves them to tears. When they state what they are tired of and can’t stand to read anymore, they describe the core pillars of contemporary romance, in addition to complaints of writing and plot quality.
In these posts, when people reference layers of angst, they mean tragedy and even brutality on levels that are more like a crime drama. While it is true that some romance categorized as dark romance annoys readers by not being dark at all, a romance story still can’t go too far in the other direction without disappointing fans of romance. Despite the heavier themes that readers look for in dark romance, there is still a ceiling on trauma and tragedy before a story breaks the romance contract the genre has with them. Proponents of what I’ll call the alternate dark romance tend to respond to push back from readers who defend traditional conventions with a bad faith argument: their views are old-fashioned, they are ignorant of the romance genre, and intolerant of progress and inclusion.
Genre is a classification system
It’s an organizational method. That means it draws boundaries by definition. These boundaries are what help fans find what they are looking for, make informed purchases, and join like-minded communities. Genre is a whole field in academia, with fiercely debated claims, and I don’t attempt to encapsulate that here, but a few basic principles can be noted.
Genre can and should evolve over time, but it must still have constants, or else the word loses all meaning. For example, one social media poster insisted that “dark romance has completely different rules,” and supported that claim by citing the existence of forums of other people who think so too. But if that were true, then dark romance wouldn’t be a subgenre of romance, it would be a different genre.
Here’s a whimsical analogy: Genetics can explain all sorts of differences between parents and their kids—skin tone, eye color, height, hair texture. A brunette and a redhead can have a blond baby. A tall mother and a short father might produce a child of average height, or one with dwarfism, or an NBA star. But what two human mammals cannot reproduce is a zebra.
This matters because romance is a feminine genre and there are political implications. There are artistic implications. Practically speaking, readers shouldn’t have to scour Goodreads just to find out whether a book calling itself romance has an actual romance arc. It can’t be stressed enough that readers read romance in any subgenre first and foremost for…the romance. You can’t, for instance, market The Godfather as a romance just because it contains toxic relationships. I would argue this is also a matter of ethics, particularly when authors don’t make it clear in the marketing that their book deviates from expected romance novel conventions in important ways.
There’s much to say about dark romance itself, but right now I’m simply noting definitions and posing a question. If you’d like to respond, I would greatly appreciate it if you would comment here or send me an email so we could chat.
Robert McKee said genre evolves as a reflection of current societal conditions. Currently, conditions are grim – there’s probably fascinating insights available from sociology regarding the rise of anti-happiness as a factor in choice of reading material. There’s also a generational element in romance that requires the young to disavow the old. McKee offers a craft perspective. The point I reference is from Story, his book about screenwriting, but what he says about genre is useful here. He uses the word reinvention to describe how we craft stories for successive generations, often through a blending of genres – but he still stands by genre conventions and its limitations as a boon to creativity.
The mislabeling of dark fiction as dark romance can be thought of as a form of literary appropriation: where the idea of evolution functions as a cover for Trojan horsing elements into the genre that the majority doesn’t want. We’ve already witnessed a version of this in the Rom-com, which now often lacks both romance and comedy in its textual and visual forms, and now the term lacks meaning for people who still want it. Meanwhile, any serious erotica writer will tell you that popular culture has completely redefined the term – so much that erotica writers don’t want to be associated with it.
Romance, if given the freedom, holds the potential for a degree of layered depth, and the factors contributing to the state of current romance are complex. I would argue that it had this freedom to a much greater degree in the era I grew up in compared to now. But if we’re going to interrogate genre and conventions, we must consider who has the power to define meaning. Evolution isn’t organic if defined solely by new audiences, especially when so many older and long-time readers are still here. And the genre can be hollowed out completely if it’s shaped by social media mobs which are highly susceptible to patriarchal and authoritarian forces. Social media has made it easier to mount disingenuous critiques that are typically moralistic – attacking romance’s conventions under the guise of progress.
This erosion of meaning isn’t just about taste or preference. It fits into a long-standing pattern of how women’s creative work is dismissed, diluted, or redefined, and some of that pressure is coming from inside the house. Joanna Russ catalogued these tactics decades ago in How to Suppress Women’s Writing; one of them is to shift definitions until they no longer count. Of course, romance must evolve, but its integrity depends on those who came before still having a voice in what it becomes.
About the author
I’m a romance reader, writer, and academic who came of age in the 1980s—when the genre was bolder, sharper, and more narratively complex than it’s often given credit for. My work bridges generations of romance, from the bodice ripper era to today’s BookTok climate.
