The Usual Suspects
The inciting incident for this week’s ADHD redirection was a comment on a Substack essay about declining romance quality. The comment itself is representative of a particular problem in online discourse about romance—one that isn’t called out enough and has repercussions beyond mere subjective enjoyment of romance novels. It touches on all aspects of the romance novel, from trope to covers. This post is about that pattern, not the original essay.
This is not my first time
I read my first romance around 6th grade, when Sister Mary Louise found Shanna by Kathleen Woodiwiss in my desk and called my mother, who pretended that didn’t happen. I’ve been reading romance ever since—over decades and across subgenres. I know romance as a reader and an author, and it’s the subject of my master’s thesis.
I also come from a family of alcoholic golfers and salesmen, and I came of age in the 80s and 90s, when you had to learn how to fend off bullshit in real time. I was raised on it. BS is, in fact, one of the few things I can still smell. But it’s not like you need a degree.
The Pattern
I see this type of post daily on social media in romance discourse, and it’s almost always made in bad faith. It surfaces in the form of innocent-sounding questions or blanket statements that, upon closer inspection, reveal a distinct agenda:
Just a Few Common Examples:
- Questioning Genre Boundaries: “Is X (definite non-genre conforming trope or theme) romance? It’s so confusing!”
- Moral Panics: “Do you agree that there’s too much smut in romance now? What about the children?” (Honest to god, that one is immortal like cockroaches)
- Defining Away Core Elements: “Romance quality is so bad because there’s no ‘yearning’ anymore” (yearning as code for “clean” romance). Or the more extreme: “The main couple can die in the end and have their HEA in the afterlife” (Romeo and Juliet is still not a romance)
- Love Triangle Confusion: “Can a romance with competing male leads both sleep with the heroine? I feel like this used to be a big no-no, but have we moved on?” (It is still so, because love triangles violate the guaranteed HEA with a specific pairing. Polyamory is different—committed relationships can involve more than two partners)
- The “Spoiler” Weapon: “Knowing there is an HEA is NOT a spoiler. That’s like saying knowing there’s a murder in a murder mystery is a spoiler”
- The Marketing Blame Game: “I felt punked. Books being marketed as romance when it doesn’t have an HEA or they overplay the romance in the synopsis and it’s like 30% romance. Why can’t they just market it as romantic [other genre]?”
This last one is a Threads defense of romance in response to the interloper problem: trying to use the romance label without fulfilling its promises.
Genre Definition and the Reader-Writer Contract
You can’t honestly profess to love a genre if you want to fundamentally redefine it. And if you don’t love it, there’s no ethical reason to interfere with it. Genre conventions aren’t arbitrary limitations—they’re constitutive features. They define what the thing is. Romance has two non-negotiable core pillars:
- The romance IS the plot (not a subplot, not secondary to another narrative)
- The story ends in an HEA or HFN (Happily Ever After or Happy For Now)
These aren’t decorative tropes like enemies-to-lovers or forced proximity. These are load-bearing walls. Remove them and you have a different genre—which is fine. Write tragedy, write literary fiction, write erotic horror. Just don’t call it romance.
This is fundamentally about the reader-writer contract. When a book is marketed as romance, readers expect these core elements. Delivering something else isn’t a “sophisticated subgenre,” per the original comment’s argument, it’s an entirely different genre.
Organic evolution within the genre looks like:
- LGBT romance gaining mainstream prominence
- Diverse protagonists and settings
- New subgenres (romantasy, dark romance, romantic suspense)
- Different heat levels
- Contemporary issues and conflicts
What’s NOT evolution but more like elimination via colonization:
- Removing the HEA requirement
- Making the romance secondary to other plot elements
- “Surprise endings” where they don’t end up together, or one or more MCs die
- Positioning ambiguous endings as “more realistic” or “sophisticated”
When someone asks, “Hey, I’m looking for romance novels with X or Y, can anyone recommend?” that’s legitimate. When the question is phrased as if there’s something fundamentally wrong with the genre that must be changed for everyone, that’s a tactic. Romance is beloved by millions and drives significant publishing revenue, yet it constantly faces calls for fundamental change from:
- Interlopers who want the romance label and market share without adhering to its rules
- Authors and readers with financial and political agendas (from both Left and Right)
The exchange that prompted this post cited romantasy’s success to argue that romance needs to become “more sophisticated”—that there’s a latent unfulfilled need for romance without traditional HEAs, and more depth of plot and character development that is “less formulaic” that the next breakout hit will satisfy. But romantasy succeeded because of the romance, not despite it. The secret sauce in that portmanteau is the romance element, not the fantasy replacing it. Romantasy kept the HEA. It kept the central love story. It added world-building—it didn’t subtract genre requirements.
“Sophisticated romance” as used here doesn’t mean good romance. It means not romance.
When someone advocates for a “subgenre of sophisticated romance” without the HEA requirement, they’re not proposing evolution within the genre—they’re proposing elimination of what makes it romance. They want to redefine the genre to make it palatable to non-romance fans, to make it easier for authors who don’t write romance to sell more books.
Delineating the reasons romance quality has declined is a main part of my thesis, and a flaw with the HEA requirement or genre boundaries are not among them. The reasons do need to be addressed and I’ll elaborate in another post. But allowing the romance label on non-qualifying books won’t fix those problems—it will defraud and annoy readers who came for what romance promises, and it has implications for women’s rights, artistic freedom, and consumer rights.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/uSLscJ2cY04?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
The pattern has deep roots. One reason for the trend of targeting romance probably comes to mind immediately, especially if you’re familiar with Johanna Russ. The genre is a target with multiple contenders, including political actors from both the Left and Right in addition to the usual capitalist fortune hunters, whose prominence now overshadows the disdain of literary gatekeepers by leagues and miles. Romance faces constant pressure for fundamental change in part because it’s:
- Commercially successful
- Women-dominated (both readers and writers)
- Explicitly about women’s desires
- Formulaic by design (the formula IS the promise)
Romance readers don’t appreciate efforts to save them from their own preferences. The genre is thriving commercially precisely because it delivers on its promises and fails when it doesn’t.
