Actually, this peculiar subgenre has been around for quite a while: (it was alive and well when I was shoving nuns and small kids out of the 15 years ago to grab one of the unclaimed Borders lifeboats) and in point of record, Sarah J. Maas is actually pretty good- give her a try. Most of the rest of all this kind of boils down to the idea that "escapist" reading is widely scorned and sniffed at by Serious Literati, who think that reading for fun is a dangerous and subversive idea society needs to be protected from. So, if you enjoy a grim recital of life's tragic woes to go with your kaopectate and buttermilk latte, by all means stick with "serious" reading material....But if the rest of us want to hang out in a castle and pretend we're quasi-medieval heroes and heroines, don't get in our way-those two-handed broadswords are mighty sharp...
Essentially a romantasy is a romance with a lot of fantasy tropes that if it was marketed as a straight genre fantasy would have a very niche audience or be laughed to scorn.
After some experience with the romance audience Lois McMaster Bujold noticed that they were picky about the relationships and if they felt real as opposed to the SF audience who was picky about the worldbuilding which meant in space operas like the ones she writes how power works as opposed to whether she got the science right. In theory there could be a romantasy that gets both of them right and equally right but my bias is that if the worldbuilding is the primary reason the book is written it's a straight fantasy.
Complains about the deep insult to the Scholomance series that it was lumped in with these books. I am not sure if the excerpts from Sarah J. Maas, who I have never read at all and who is scorned by the people of actual good taste who nominate for the Lodestars, were picked out to make them sound as much like porn as possible but sex is described in the Scholomance in a way perfectly appropriate for the YA which it half is. ("The Last Graduate" did win a Lodestar given that the main characters are all literally in high school but Novik said that the ideal audience for these books is about 30.) The love story in the Scholomance is between two straight people and the author wholeheartedly believes in it but this is only one element of a story about a sarcastic loner who found that the world she was born into had much deeper evil and much more possibility of connection than she would have ever thought when we met her. There is also a prophecy which El fulfills but she and almost everyone around her interpreted it as meaning that she will eventually have to become a villain in the first book so this is not a story of inevitable fate or about being a Chosen One which the sophisticated fantasy audience is pretty sick of by now.
Actually, this peculiar subgenre has been around for quite a while: (it was alive and well when I was shoving nuns and small kids out of the 15 years ago to grab one of the unclaimed Borders lifeboats) and in point of record, Sarah J. Maas is actually pretty good- give her a try. Most of the rest of all this kind of boils down to the idea that "escapist" reading is widely scorned and sniffed at by Serious Literati, who think that reading for fun is a dangerous and subversive idea society needs to be protected from. So, if you enjoy a grim recital of life's tragic woes to go with your kaopectate and buttermilk latte, by all means stick with "serious" reading material....But if the rest of us want to hang out in a castle and pretend we're quasi-medieval heroes and heroines, don't get in our way-those two-handed broadswords are mighty sharp...
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Essentially a romantasy is a romance with a lot of fantasy tropes that if it was marketed as a straight genre fantasy would have a very niche audience or be laughed to scorn.
After some experience with the romance audience Lois McMaster Bujold noticed that they were picky about the relationships and if they felt real as opposed to the SF audience who was picky about the worldbuilding which meant in space operas like the ones she writes how power works as opposed to whether she got the science right. In theory there could be a romantasy that gets both of them right and equally right but my bias is that if the worldbuilding is the primary reason the book is written it's a straight fantasy.
Cliched fantasy tropes that the genre audience may enjoy but has seen 500 times
Complains about the deep insult to the Scholomance series that it was lumped in with these books. I am not sure if the excerpts from Sarah J. Maas, who I have never read at all and who is scorned by the people of actual good taste who nominate for the Lodestars, were picked out to make them sound as much like porn as possible but sex is described in the Scholomance in a way perfectly appropriate for the YA which it half is. ("The Last Graduate" did win a Lodestar given that the main characters are all literally in high school but Novik said that the ideal audience for these books is about 30.) The love story in the Scholomance is between two straight people and the author wholeheartedly believes in it but this is only one element of a story about a sarcastic loner who found that the world she was born into had much deeper evil and much more possibility of connection than she would have ever thought when we met her. There is also a prophecy which El fulfills but she and almost everyone around her interpreted it as meaning that she will eventually have to become a villain in the first book so this is not a story of inevitable fate or about being a Chosen One which the sophisticated fantasy audience is pretty sick of by now.