#i know it doesn't matter that much and was a throwaway gag but

[robertdownerjunior]

since it's almost mothers day, im going to admit something

i dont like it when fanders call logan mom.

[yarns-and-d20s]

Fantasy, Fantasy Romance, and Language

This has been on my mind for a good long while, and I finally had the opportunity to post it as a comment on reddit. It, uh, is extremely long, probably better suited to a blog post, but with the death of LJ and birth of "socmed brevity", that's the only place for this sort of comment.

However, that doesn't mean it shouldn't also be a blog post, so here we are, with additional context/intro.

I know that fantasy romance fans, especially fans of the very popular writers/books (ie, the booktok famous stuff) can be very touchy. I may be yucking a yum. I feel no regrets about this. I love romance, I love fantasy, and you take those two things and smash them together, and I should love it. I don't always, and there are some reasons: much of it is targeted to an audience younger than I, and I as I age, I get increasingly uninterested in the trials and tribulations and especially love lives of people half my age. There's too many "Not Like Other Girls" FMCs and too many "Shadow Daddy 1000-Year-Old Vampire Werewolf Merman Asshole" MMCs. The worldbuilding isn't always stellar. There's so much first-person and that's not my jam—and I recognise that's very much a "me" problem with the entirety of romance, never mind fantasy romance.

But I DNF'd Fourth Wing very specifically because I read the words "for the win". Someone brought those three words up in a discussion about the book. I said that was when I DNF'd it. I was told it happened two more times.

I typed out the following:

If I can take this way too seriously for a moment: I am not a detractor of making the language, especially dialogue, in fantasy more casual/modern. The way that fantasy video games like Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, Baldur's Gate III, etc, make the characters sound less formal, stilted, and uptight than Papa Tolkien did is good, in my opinion, even if it's just the simple trick of making them use contractions. It makes the genre more accessible and less dense. Sure, I've read all of A Song of Ice and Fire*, too, which on the scale of "For the Win" to "Papa Tolkien" is closer to Papa Tolkien, almost certainly because GRRM is older, and that's fine. Those books are doorstoppers, they take everything extremely seriously, and I still enjoy and read that end of fantasy. I also genuinely think that the genre could open itself up a lot more by taking a page (sorry) from fantasy video games, and I never think "more people like thing that I like" is bad. It's good, actually! (All that said, every time I read/hear the word "okay" come out of the mouth of a dwarf or a wizard I'm like, oh, I don't know about this. Also the word "jeez" is used in Fire Emblem: Three Houses and I struggled with that one even more, because "jeez" it's from "Jesus" and, um, [Fódlan] doesn't have one of those.)

HOWEVER.

Unless this fantastical setting is actually here, Earth, whether it be now or in a far-flung future (eg, urban fantasy or something like Gideon the Ninth, which, yes, is more the "SF" of "SFF"), I strongly, massively object to fucking memes being in this genre, set on other worlds, just once, let alone THRICE. And, okay.

Small allusions for "I understood that reference" points in perhaps description or very throwaway gags are one thing, and I'll accept those on a case-by-case basis. But a—or worse the—main character saying an internet meme like "for the win" aloud THREE TIMES is just... no. No thank you.

Genres have conventions. They do that for a reason, that's what makes them a genre. The romance genre has the the romance as the A-plot and that HEA (no matter how much people on twitter want to argue with me that despite what the RWA says, romance doesn't need an HEA and thus Wuthering Heights is a romance novel). Fantasy, except in particular circumstances, takes place on secondary worlds and bringing in something that is blatantly and drastically from 21st-century Earth, and marking the writer as probably a Millennial, is immersion-breaking to its foundations, and for SFF, immersion is foundational to the genre. I do not care if you're slapping "romance" after the word fantasy.

Fantasy romance is a tightrope walk over a pit of alligator-filled lava. I need the writers to pull off the romance A-plot and the HEA, but to also respect the conventions of the fantasy genre or I'm out.

For fantasy romance, T Kingfisher actually pulls off this balance masterfully in her Saint of Steel series.

*I need whoever reads this to know that I initially typo'd that as "A Snog of Ice and Fire" and, hey, free self-pubbed fantasy romance title right there.