A friend recently sent me a YouTube series of a reader/reviewer absolutely sending up one of Colleen Hoover’s books. I highly enjoyed the series, and it further cemented my decision to never, ever, ever touch a book by Hoover.At the tale end of the series, the reviewer made jokes about how the novel’s heroine seemed to be running away from the male lead. Our intrepid protagonist left her...
The idea that people are really into getting freaky with eldritch horrors is not news to me. I’ve been kicking around in anime fandoms, and we all know that tentacles are going to come up at some point. There’s also, of course, Rule 34, which means that if it exists, there will be porn of it on the internet.It just seems that lately, that kind of fantasy is maybe a bit more … mainstream. You know...
Payment processors are trying to dictate what's available for sale on certain platforms. That should worry us.
The surprise pregnancy trope gets a lot of hate from romance readers. What is it about this trope that sets us off?
Recently, a social media site tried to entice me to buy a cishet OV romance novel. It was ... unhinged, to say the least.
“Oh, here we go again …” (Liza Summer / Pexels.com) Recently, I was reminded of a screencap of a conversation that supposedly happened. When I saw it, all I could think was ah, the straights got a hold of the omegaverse. In this screencap, the texter was discussing their partner’s admission that they liked and read omegaverse fiction. The texter was sending a lengthy rumination...
Or Are They? I recently saw a post that commented on trends in the publishing industry. One of them was that readers seem to be shifting away from so-called spicy reads. (Tom Swinnen / Pexels.com) The post gave some good reasons that this shift might be happening—but I think there’s likely more to the story than meets the eye. TikTok Ramped Up and Ruined “Spice” The major reason this post gave...
Or, Why Respectability Won’t Save You I think we can all agree we’ve entered a rather conservative era. It’s been a while coming, the first rumblings of it emerging fifteen years ago now. It gained momentum after the 2016 US election and snowballed from there. The pandemic threw fuel on the fire, and, well, here we are. Neo-fascists and alt-right parties are gaining support across the globe. We...
Some recent discussions got me thinking about something I’ve known to be true for quite some time. A lot of the m/m romance readers out there are … pretty problematic people, when it comes down to it. Don’t mind me, just reading this m/m fic and posting homophobic takes on social media, like you do. (Andrea Piacquadio / Pexels.com) That got me to thinking: how is it that there is so much...
We’re clearly in a hyper-conservative backlash against what has been billed progressive politics. In the US, we’ve seen attacks against trans people and queer people more broadly, against mixed-race couples, against women’s rights—and it’s getting worse. We’re seeing people pushing to get rid of not only abortion but access to birth control. We’re seeing the curtailing of internet access to not...
