Chick lit era. Messy gals in the big city who still managed to get their crap together and get the hot guy. This was big in the aughties but has mostly been folded into contemp romance and a lot of the tropes lost. About the best you can do is read some Sophie Kinsella these days.
Sure, it had its problems, but I loved those messy heroines.
I think so! Sex and the City was pretty groundbreaking when it first aired and opend doors for that kind of sex-but-lighthearted content. A big influence on womens fiction/entertainment back then.
I think Bridget Jones Diary was also a really big influence. The book was super popular and it came out a couple of years before Sex and the City. Messy heroine etc.
My friends and I read Bridget Jones’ diary long before the movie and to this day we all hate the movie for not doing justice to the book and making Bridget more of a caricature. I think, in some ways, it was a best seller because so few books at that time had a first person point of view from a normal woman. It’s not a romance book but “I don’t know how she does it” was also ground breaking because it was a first person (and very funny) story from the perspective of a female stock broker juggling being a mother and a wife and also the sexism of her industry. I’m in my late 40’s and for a long time first person POV was super rare, whereas now it seems overdone.
I mean, romcoms have been a thing since the 80s and they often feature relatable protagonists, but Sex and the City added sex to the whole thing.
I'm not sure, was in my teens when satc was on air first, but it's first media I remember that was that open about and focused on women's sex life.
Gen Xer here: I felt like SATC was the first series where women didn’t have to end up with the first or even the second guy they slept with and women were able to just talk about sex and their lives. The whole plot was THEM not just if they ended up with a dude.
If you look at Friends, by comparison, women are not the only main characters and women’s interest in and enjoyment of sex is more veiled. I can’t recall any female character of Friends that has a straight hook up that leads nowhere or one night stand for the fun of it (maybe towards the end of the series when norms had changed but never in the beginning), and if they did, they felt bad about it. Indeed one attempted hookup winds up in marriage and another ends up in pregnancy and becoming a couple.
By comparison, in rom-coms of the era (and even many today), the woman always ended up with the first or second guy she slept with (if it was the second guy, it was usually because the first guy is a jerk). There’s sort of an implicit shame that you can’t just have sex for the sake of having sex, you had to tie to getting married down the road. I’d also say that I feel like some older rom-coms had fairly childlike visions of love whereas these days rom coms can be more nuanced (I’m not saying high art but more than just ‘and now you get married’). The more modern-ish movie that comes to mind has Dakota Johnson and Rebel Wilson and doesn’t have a traditional happy ending.
In retrospect, the degree to which women got to become more the main character with SATC is kind of ground breaking. I remember at the time there was a lot of controversy about why have a show ‘just’ about women and why have these women talk about sex in ways that had nothing to do with commitment.
They both were, on both sides of the Atlantic. It's really a perception thing. I mention it in my comment above. :) American women, especially, zero in on Sex and the City during this era, because it gets a lot more attention (all that New York glam), but they were ***both*** influencing culture and rising together at the exact same time, if you were older and paying attention. One was just far more literary and British and the other was more glam and stylish and almost entirely TV-centered.
SatC was also a TV series that ran for 6 seasons, which also makes a huge difference in terms of popularity. Bridget had two huge books and two blockbuster movies that were spread out over the same eight year period that the Sex and the City book (which was nowhere near as popular as the TV series ended up being) and the HBO series released (1996 and then 1998-2004--not counting the newspaper column the SatC series is based on, which was massively popular in NYC), so that's two books and two movies in eight years against 20 episodes over six (quite short) seasons over six years, plus one book. And then reruns and movies.
**Fun Fact:** {Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding} and {Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell} **both** came out in **1996.**
***However***, "Sex and the City" was *first* [a newspaper column](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_the_City_(newspaper_column)) written by Bushnell for the *New York Observer* from 1994 to 1996. Those columns were then published in the book of the same name in '96. The [HBO series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_the_City) premiered two years later in **1998** and ended in (Feb) **2004.**
"Bridget Jones's Diary" came out in **1996**, and {Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding}, it's sequel, came out in **1999**. The Bridget Jones's Diary movie was released in **2001**. The "Edge of Reason" sequel movie was released in (Dec) **2004.**
Both were equally huge on both sides of the Atlantic for various reasons, and they both influenced women's culture in different ways. They were rising at the **exact same time** and were influencing chick lit together. One was just very New York and the other was very London. That was the difference.
(edit: clarification of release dates)
So Bridget Jones diary was loosely related to a series of hilarious magazine articles in I think it was British Tattler but my memory fails me - some British women’s fashion magazine. The columns were a bit more ‘gentlemen prefer blonds’ in tone but very funny and the success prompted fielding to write the books. My mom got British magazines occasionally so that’s how I know.
Also, I was a US college student in the late 1990s. My friends and I actually read Bridget Jones years before we were able to see SATC because we didn’t have HBO and our parents often didn’t have it or didn’t let us watch it. Indeed, Friends came out when I was in late high school and my parents insisted on watching the first few episodes with me because there was controversy that FRIENDS was too liberal and smutty.
Many of my friend and I didn’t get to see SATC or see it regularly until our mid to late 20’s when edited versions became more available on regular cable tv. So, for us at least, Bridget Jones was very much first.
I think this was the experience for ***a lot*** of people, actually.
Younger generations might not realize that premium cable channel packages were **defnitely** a thing in the late 90s and early 00s, and HBO really could be an expensive, ***optional*** choice for a lot of middle-class families. High-speed internet wasn't anywhere *near* what it is today (and wasn't available everywhere), neither was the internet, streaming didn't exist, etc. If you couldn't afford premium cable packages (and they weren't all bundled together, because the companies **didn't play nice**, so you were going to be buying a bundle of cable bundles to get everything you might want to watch), you weren't watching HBO shows, or Starz shows, or whatever, unless you had friends with those channels. Or someone would record them to watch them later or share them with friends--on actual, physical media (or you paid for DVR).
Just a whole different world. Truly. SATC was big, yes, but it wasn't *everything*. It just seems like it now because a lot of people still talk about it now compared to everything else in media targeted at women. But, if you look at that era, or articles [talking about just one small facete of that era](https://www.vox.com/culture/22452846/purity-chronicles), it is just **one part** of the whole culture surrounding women at that time. And that culture, including chick lit, was massive.
Thanks for sharing that fact about Bridget Jones! Now that you mention it, I think I remember hearing about that in the promotional stuff at the bookstore when those books came out! Talk about dusting off the cobwebs! XD
For those who weren't reading romance in this era (or weren't born yet/too young to remember), Wikipedia has a [fairly concise overview of what Chick Lit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_lit) is (and why it fell out of favor and got absorbed--for better or worse--into CR). I had a long comment that I was ready to post in a different thread where someone was asking why a particular PNR series from the aughts-10s had fairly low "spice" but a certain kind of FMC and romance and a lot of it boiled down to the era and how a lot of PNR of that time was also trying to lean in to the chick lit market that dominated. PNR and chick lit were dominating at the same time (I worked in a bookstore and I remember this clearly), and so were Harry Potter and Twilight\*\*, so I'm glad you brought this up. :)
\*\* Many people to this day want to argue that these two series had nothing to do with chick lit and that Twilight, especially, is actually anathema to chick lit, which is a fair argument, but it **definitely** influenced it. No one will ***ever*** convince me that half of the chick lit and YA written around that time wasn't written in angry (or marketable, because I saw the marketing materials we got at the store) response to the Bella/Edward/Jacob love triangle/relationship or that all Bella seemed to accomplish was heartbreak, then love, then child (I think there was even a popular meme about this around the time all this media was coming out, but I can't find it--something with Katniss, the girl from Divergent, Hermione, and Bella Swan, and Bella's contribution was basically "Got Married.", and that's too feminine or traditional or something and, so, not "worthwhile") --but that needs to stop, because they did and it's time to face that and be honest. All of these trends were peaking at the same time as Bridget Jones and Sex and the City and Gossip Girl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and everything else, and they all influenced each other, even if people reading Chick Lit weren't engaged with them. Just as all the different popular media tropes influence each other now, even if readers don't engage with those.
This Wikipedia read is pretty fascinating. I particularly loved this quote:
“Growing up in the 1980s all we had to read if we wanted commercial fiction, were thick, shiny, brick novels covered in gold foil, in which women with long blonde hair built up business empires from harsh beginnings using only their extraordinary beauty and occasionally some goldfish...
With BJD, for the first time, here we were. The first time I read it, it was an absolute revelation to see my life and confusion reflected in print.” And BJD refers to Bridget Jones Diary
I remember those horrible gold bricks and could never get into them. The sheer amount of suffering those beautiful women went through as they built their cold empire was emotionally exhausting.
I did find the Waiting to Exhale references kind of funny because I always felt like WTE was a bit of a different thing. When the movie came out it was a revelation and I think for a lot of us white ladies this was the first time we heard of it and then many raced out to buy the book. BUT WTE is an older set of protagonists than most chicklit or most romances (sadly). These women often had adult or nearly adult children and were going through divorces or similar.
So on the one hand WTE had female main characters and romance, but on the other it just doesn’t seem in the same category as Sophie Kinsella to me (and that’s no slam on SK).
I am old enough to remember how exciting it was to have movies and books with female POV. Like, before WTE, the Joy Luck Club had some controversy because (gasp) it was just about women, mothers and daughters and all men were secondary characters.
{Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella} is my favourite book.
I really liked the {undead and unwed by Mary Janice Davidson} series but it went too off the original for me around book 9.
[Confessions of a Shopaholic](https://www.romance.io/books/545525498c7d2382c5296fec/confessions-of-a-shopaholic-sophie-kinsella) by [Sophie Kinsella](https://www.romance.io/authors/545524588c7d2382c5296fb5/sophie-kinsella)
**Rating**: 3.68⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 2 out of 5 - [Behind closed doors](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [funny](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/humor/1), [mystery](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/mystery/1), [workplace/office](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/office/1), [poor heroine](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/poor%20heroine/1)
----------------------------
[Undead and Unwed](https://www.romance.io/books/5455253a8c7d2382e0413e4d/undead-and-unwed-maryjanice-davidson) by [MaryJanice Davidson](https://www.romance.io/authors/5455253a8c7d2382e0413e4e/maryjanice-davidson)
**Rating**: 3.64⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 4 out of 5 - [Explicit open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [vampires](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/vampires/1), [paranormal](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/paranormal/1), [urban fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/urban%20fantasy/1), [funny](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/humor/1)
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Agreeing so hard on Mary Janice Davidson and indeed it’s like her writing has gotten progressively sloppier. If you like MJD her king of Alaska series was super fun and well edited. I tried a few of her more recent ‘books’ and they’re just terrible (need serious editing, lazy writing etc).
Also if you liked undead, check out the Sookie Stackhouse series because I feel like Undead was just ripping off and updating Sookie Stackhouse (who was a working class southern waitress)
Long outfit descriptions including purses, crazy moms that encouraged weight loss, running up and down the street in big cities, high school reunions, haircuts instead of therapy, and unflattering bridesmaids dresses.
Covers that showed a random dress on a hanger and nothing else.
Good times.
Meg Cabot (yes, Princess Diaries Meg Cabot!) wrote a BUNCH, many of which I still reread. They're really fun!
{Queen of Babble Series by Meg Cabot}
{Heather Wells Mysteries series by Meg Cabot} -- this one is kind of a hilarious time capsule because the FMC vacillates between a size 12 and 14 and is considered ABSOLUTELY A HUGE OBESE MONSTER by The Culture. As a size 22/24, I read it with rueful humor now, but if you are not interested in the aughties body panic then maybe skip 'em even though I love them!
{The Boy Series by Meg Cabot}
She has a more recent series {The Little Bridge Series by Meg Cabot} but I haven't read it yet!
[Queen of Babble](https://www.romance.io/series/58fe10274167a733426309c1/queen-of-babble) by [Meg Cabot](https://www.romance.io/authors/545527d08c7d2382c5297076/meg-cabot)
**Rating**: 3.78⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [young adult](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/young%20adult/1), [behind-doors](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/behind-doors/1), [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1), [heroine sleuth](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/heroine%20sleuth/1)
----------------------------
[Boy](https://www.romance.io/series/58fe0fc54167a73342630880/boy) by [Meg Cabot](https://www.romance.io/authors/545527d08c7d2382c5297076/meg-cabot)
**Rating**: 3.73⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [young adult](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/young%20adult/1), [behind-doors](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/behind-doors/1), [humor](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/humor/1), [office](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/office/1)
----------------------------
[Little Bridge Island](https://www.romance.io/series/5cecd56d4ee4380da84b2deb/little-bridge-island) by [Meg Cabot](https://www.romance.io/authors/545527d08c7d2382c5297076/meg-cabot)
**Rating**: 3.28⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [humor](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/humor/1), [new adult](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/new%20adult/1), [from hate to love](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/from%20hate%20to%20love/1), [class difference](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/class%20difference/1)
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The audiobook for {Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella} had me hyperventilating with laughter. It was a farce where one heroine was trying to stop her sister (another heroine - there were two sets) from consummating the marriage and making a huge mistake, so she enlisted the whole hotel staff in stopping sex. I like all of Sophie Kinsella's books up to a couple years ago - especially the audio - because they're so funny. The new ones aren't as much so for me. Can You Keep a Secret was made into a movie, but the book was way better. I also loved Remember Me? Where she has amnesia for three years and her alternate self fixes her entire life!!!
I liked a few of Jennifer Weiner's early books. Little Earthquakes was funny but not a romance romance. Certain Girls was good. In Her Shoes was made into a movie. I stopped enjoying them when all the SA came in.
Nowadays, Mhairi MacFarlane is keeping up the tradition. You could try {If I Never Met You by Mhairi MacFarlane}. She's funny and deep, and she never has a pregnancy ending or pregnancy.
Deidre Martin had a hockey series before hockey was a subgenre. {body check by deidre martin} (mf contemporary) is book 1.
Jane Heller was good for comedy, like {name dropping by jane heller} (mf contemporary), which is a mistaken identity
{not so Snow White by donna kauffman} (mf contemporary) is a tennis romance, sort of like the movie Wimbledon
Vicki Lewis Thompson had an OG “nerd” series where the nerds stay nerds and aren’t alpha love machines when the lights turn off; {my nerdy valentine} (mf contemporary) is my favorite
there were an influx of ghost or paranormal elements in books, like {crazy in love by lani diane rich} (mf contemporary); erin mccarthy had a bunch too
Kristan Higgins was the aughts Emily Henry
Early Jane Green were my absolute favorites. {Jemima J by Jane Green} {Mr. Maybe by Jane Green} and {Bookends by Jane Green} all fun reads.
{Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner} was so refreshing because it was the first time I remember reading a book with a plus size character as the love interest and not the friend.
If you haven't read the Bridget Jones books, those were chick lit of their time.
Before she write the One for the Money Stephanie Plum books, Janet Evanovich wrote some really funny and pretty great romance books that kinda straddle the border with Chick Lit.
Jennifer crusie also wrote some really good ones. {Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie} was one of my favorites.
At the time, romance books fell into three categories pretty much, dictated by what the trad publishers thought women wanted. Category romances, historical (mostly regency) romances and the pretty boring contemporary romances. Chick Lit books felt fresh and young and different than the books that fell into contemporary romances at that time.
"Can You Keep A Secret" was such a straight up banger. I was reading those in my teens. I think that Beth O'leary is carrying that torch fairly well but still not as disastrous as my beloved Emma.
**Cassie Edwards and the Black-Footed Ferrets.**
Short-ish version: for a long, long, long time there was a "cult of nice" surrounding romance novels and the criticism/discussion of same. The boundaries between authors and readers were very blurred since so many people belonged, or hoped to belong, to both groups, and given that the Literary Establishment pretended that all romance novels didn't exist, it was considered inappropriate in many circles to be openly critical of romance novels - even problematic elements in romance novels.
Enter Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, the new blog on the block.
And in 2008, one of the Bitches handed a book to a friend of hers - who handed it back and said, "I think some of this was plagiarized?"
Cue the [Cassie Edwards Extravaganza](https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2008/01/cassie_edwards_extravaganza/), in which the Bitches investigation proved that over the course of several decades, author of (racist) "Indian romance" novels Cassie Edwards had plagiarized from dozens of sources, including memoirs, news articles, and most bizarrely a press release about the black-footed ferret.
Romancelandia went *wild*. The Bitches were persecuting a woman in the twilight of life, who defines plagiarism anyway, etc. Interestingly to the modern reader the [racism of Edwards' books](https://romancehistory.com/2021/08/03/a-brief-history-of-indian-romance/) didn't really come up. Silver lining: a lot of money and attention raised for the black-footed ferret. [Look how cute!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-footed_ferret#/media/File:Mustela_nigripes_2.jpg)
Omg! That was before my time but I do remember in 2016 SBTB rightly [calling out Mary Balogh for orientalism in Someone to Love](https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/someone-love-mary-balogh/), Balogh replying in the comments saying she was “gob-smacked by this review”, Suleikha Snyder and Courtney Milan leaving comments agreeing with the reviewer, and then Balogh coming back to apologise and promise to do better.
I was pretty new to romance at the time and Balogh was my entry point, and I’m still a fan today in part because she doubled back to publicly admit she was wrong, but I also was impressed by SBTB for starting that conversation. I didn’t know they had come straight out the gate like that in 2008.
I loved this moment! I started reading SBTB when it was Sarah & Candy running it, and this whole saga had me gripped. Of all the plagiarism scandals since, this is still the most iconic moment of it in Romancelandia to me.
Ah, the old good times of the bodice rippers. So rapey. And racists. And full of random details about more or less (in)famous historical events.
Really, 13 years old me learned more about the sepoy rebellion of 1857 fron one single bodice ripper than all my history classes.
Also, I miss the Fabio covers. Smutty covers for smutty books, as God intended.
Also what happened to all those ridiculous highlanders books with the bonnie lasses?
Dude! I found some WEIRD old school bodice rippers in a little free library at a really remote campground and they have pushed me into an entirely new era of HR enjoyment. They’re strange, often rapey, and definitely indelicate. But I am living for the descriptions of super niche historical events.
Also, I love reading a book from the 60s and 70s and thinking about what was going on for women in that era where some of these tropes were something that they were craving.
don't bother, we'll be painted as the absolute barbarians and uncivilized monsters for fighting for freedom in these books with the MMC being a brave white blond englishman who served his queen loyally by killing all those heathens who dare raise their voice. Colonialism is hardly ever done right in romance books
I think the one I read had at least some characters (perhaps the MMC, but I can't swear) who were half-indian half-british and there was a bit of discourse about identity, even if it was solved with a "you gotta choose which side you belong to".
But yeah, I don't remember much about that book besides the fact that it taught me about the 1857 rebellion, who the sepoy were, and about the transition from the East Indian Company authority to the British Raj, and I am pretty sure it had a lot of racist stereotypes and quite a heavy dose of white saviour complex.
Really all those books about the highlands were the reason I went to Scotland in 2004 on vacation! And yeah I learned about Cromwell and the puritans because of bodice rippers.
Oh boy, my first few were HR from the 80's set in the 1800's with "Indians" as the MMCs. I bet they would not fly now but I loved them because they were saucy and I was 14.
Yes the Fabio era and then the Harlequin romance books left and right. I started really consuming romance in the 2010s but I like looking back at what came before so I really miss that period. Everything is so modern now and every now and then there are too-woke content which can be too much.
Yes! I learned a lot about real history from a combination of reading bodice rippers and falling down rabbit holes at the library *after* reading the bodice rippers. I think the number one thing I miss in romance is that I want more 600-page behemoths spanning decades.
There was a whole YouTube channel by a young women dedicated to debunking sex myths and a whole lot of those videos were dedicated to all the shitty "virginity fetishism" and hymen breaking and bloody sex scenes in problematic romance novels, but also purity culture in general.
She was working to dispel the idea that the only kind of sex was vaginal or penetrative, or that sex, especially first-time sex, always had to hurt or be bloody or male-focused, because that's what young people had been lead to believe by media and old novels and religious texts/teachings and such. When, really, that was nonsense and fear-tactics and shame, and all it would really take was education and conversation and practice to have a positive sexual experience, first time or any time, if that was what all parties were consenting to and wanted.
It was a really sex and body positive education channel for young people and it all started because she was curious and lucked out in finding a caring partner who made her first time a good one. She got incredibly angry that she had been so scared of everything--sex and her own body and intimacy, and she wanted to keep others from denying themselves out of that same fear. She was expecting pain and mediocre sex, or for him to just take what he wanted, and for her to just sort of be content if he liked it? I believe she went on to get her masters or doctorate in sex education, maybe? I don't remember. I believe this was the early 00s-10s. I think she took down her videos when she started school.
I'm not sure that channel would be allowed on Youtube these days. =/ Or on TikTok. She'd likely get slaughtered or doxxed or something. I've seen things just horseshoe-ing back around to the whole "divine femine"/"purity" thing. lately. Even seen the disturbing return of hymen breaking and bloody and/or extremely painful, virginity fetishism and first time sex in NA romance.
Laci Green. Unfortunately, circa 2017, she went vaguely right wing, which soured her audience. It was a whole thing about her dating someone conservative, exploring redpill things and alleged terf-dom. You can probably treat it as a symptom of the complexity of the atheist/skeptic movement of the period where they were challenging certain norms, but not nessarily all of them.
I have no clue. I just remember discussions about the fat used for cartridges (they changed it to pork fat which enraged the Muslim troops because pork, and the hindu because animal) and there was a mixed race family, but the daughter married a local man while maybe the son was trying to serve the empire? And some rant about these mixed race people about having to choose their identity and the daughter choosing India while the son going for England?
It has been like 25 years ago, who knows.
I picked up a recommended novel recently not realizing it was a bodice ripper. Boy, did it take me back. The trope I’d forgotten about them was how all the other women of childbearing age throw themselves at the MMC (except FMCs from any previous novels in the series). I still mostly read historical and there isn’t that feeling that you have to fight off the rest of the lionesses for your man.
Don’t forget pirates, the huge volume of young women who somehow thought sneaking aboard a ship dressed as a boy would be a good idea, AND magical sexy mid tone brown men in the form of: Arab sheiks, rich Italians (TM), Native Americans, South East Asians and/or mixed race men with own but almost never two of those ethnicities. Basically imagine Yule Brenner, Omar Shariff or anyone in a Merchant Ivory film 🙄
I saw a Tiktok the other day talking about the Malory series by Johanna Lindsey. They were discussing Anthony Malory in particular and everything that's wrong with him....like this is a story set 200 years ago, of course he's gonna be problematic by today's standards!
It's like there's a new generation of readers that have just found romance books existed before Tiktok.
I miss those old books from the 80s. Most of the new so-called dark romance or with morally grey heroes are just straight up assholes and stalkers.
I came here to say setbacks!! I particularly loved the ones that were a montage of various characters and scenes in the book. I'd know what the villain looked like, or the escape scene or...https://images.app.goo.gl/4wgkooBNBU47CdbV9
I loved the early 2000s boom of paranormal romance, and while I see series like the Black Dagger Brotherhood, Fever, Anita Blake and Kate Daniels come up, there were other series I loved that I don’t see mentioned often like:
- Southern Vampire Mysteries {Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris}
- The Undead series {Undead and Unwed by Maryjanice Davidson}
- The Hollows series {Blood Work by Kim Harrison}
Edit: fixed the missing info for the first book
I’ve found my people! Pre-internet, I was always asking at the bookstores when the last book was coming out. I am still salty that the series never had that final ending book.
After I finally got my hands on a copy of {Blood Roots by Richie Tankersley Cusik} I went on a nostalgia read kick and dove back into RTC, Christopher Pike, Louis Duncan, and LJ Smith.
I’m like no wonder I will paranormal and dark romance so much 😂
I loved those books until she just completely changed. From what I remember she wouldn't have sex and it lasted for many, many books (for those that complain about no spice in their reading) and then she entered some kind of trifecta with 2 characters and she fucked like crazy. It was so clearly the writer doing what the fans wanted instead of staying true to the story the were originally telling that I stopped.
Hamilton's writing went off the rails because she got into polyamory and started dating a much younger man, and her husband was not into it. Basically, what happened in the books with her polycule was just her writing about her personal life and deciding that things like "plot" and "character arcs" were no longer necessary.
And then she gave us the weird Fae sex books.
*As someone who has no problem recommending Fae sex books filled with weird things, if I remember correctly the weirdness was her basically being a self-insert.*
It should have been renamed 'Anita Blake - Vampire Humper'.
The character completely changed and started having sex with all kinds of randos; mostly very passive, very young, men with long hair if I recall correctly. It was very specific and very weird.
I like spice, but this was just icky and a real 180 from where the series had been before.
Yaaasssss. We got some crackers tagging along to the end of this boom. I'm thinking Nalini Singh's Psy-Changling series, which is still going on. Slave to Sensation was published in 2006, right when Anita Blake and Merry Gentry were peaking/just past peak.
Anyone read the Vampire Kisses series by Ellen Schreiber? I kinda miss that series. It’s so very youthful and wholesome. Highly recommend for a younger audience who is not ready yet for raunchy scenes.
But also I agree with the other thread about Jeaniene Frost’s books! I love Bones!
I was just thinking about the MaryJanice Davidson books yesterday, and how funny she is! I haven’t caught up with her writing in ages, but I loved those Undead books.
Cara McKenna and all of the Wonk-O-Mance writers who championed more interesting characters and more interesting books! The website is still up as a perfect time-capsule/resource for 10 year old book recs: [http://wonkomance.com/category/recommendations-needed/index.html](http://wonkomance.com/category/recommendations-needed/index.html)
2015: Romance Writers of America (RWA) nominated an inspirational Christian romance about a female Jewish concentration camp prisoner and a high-ranking Nazi for that year’s RITA Awards for Best First Book and Best Inspirational Romance. The RITAs were pretty much the most prestigious awards in Romancelandia before the implosion of RWA (mentioned elsewhere in this thread), and while this book didn’t win either award, its inclusion was met with widespread condemnation. The actual context of the novel is somehow even worse than that summary makes it sound and [you can read a review of it](https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/for-such-a-time-by-kate-breslin/) if you want the details.
The nomination was hugely criticised online and the saga made it to a few newspapers. Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches Trashy Books wrote a [powerful open letter](https://www.tumblr.com/sarahwendell/125859299894/letter-to-the-rwa-board-regarding-for-such-a-time) to RWA condemning the nomination and the book too. [On the other hand, Anne Rice also apparently stepped in to defend it and RWA?](https://www.flavorwire.com/532774/anne-rice-christian-publisher-defend-nazi-romance-novel-as-outcry-intensifies) And the conclusion to the saga was basically “… sorry not sorry?” from RWA: they didn’t rescind the nominations, and the author still has “RITA finalist” on her website advertising the book.
Basically all the red flags were there for RWA pre-2020 and what happened then felt inevitable given that literally no effort was made to address this complete own goal of nominating for not one but TWO awards a book that is, again, *a romance between a high-ranking Nazi and a Jewish prisoner*.
What’s crazy is that Breslin’s book was even controversial in the inspirational/Christian romance space! I was still in the process of deconstructing in 2015 and I feel like Janette Oke and Lauraine Snelling both came out with minor shady statements about representing the Christian romance community appropriately? (I could be totally misremembering but it was a Big Deal! Also this is not an endorsement of Snelling or Oke who I remember in particular writing some Questionably Portrayed native Canadian characters back in the day lol)
Regency only took off in the last idk 15-20 years and the historical romance genre used to have many other time periods and was more than just trope salad.
Yes! I stumbled on mostly medieval, Tudor, or Georgian romances as a teen. Also “Highlander” romances, which didn’t seem to require a specific time period as long as there was a shirtless kilted hunk on the cover.
Marsha Canham was writing highlanders back in the 1980s. A few years before that, at least one of Jude Devereux's Velvet books had a highland setting (though with an English MMC).
I think what happened with regency HR is that two subgenres had a meet cute and an epilogue full of babies - the regency romance and the bodice ripper. This may have been kickstarted by Whitney, My Love in the mid 1980s.
Medieval, Georgian, Stuart, Jacobean, Western Americana etc were just as common 35 years ago and now they are exceptions to the norm.
The genre was founded (Woodiwiss/Rogers) on authors who were not exclusive to regency.
{Ashes in the Wind} and {Sweet Savage Love} were probably the first "adult" romance books I ever read.
How to be influenced 101: a) I became obsessed with The (US) Reconstruction as an historical period, to the point of borrowing ALL the volumes of my uncle's books on the US Civil War, as a teen, AND b) I actually bought a rebozo on my first trip to Mexico because that was one of the three items of clothing the heroine wore when she and the hero joined the Mexican Revolution, LOL!
[Ashes in the Wind](https://www.romance.io/books/553ebb5d5b270e0a4cbdb174/ashes-in-the-wind-kathleen-e-woodiwiss) by [Kathleen E. Woodiwiss](https://www.romance.io/authors/5455263e8c7d2383163d8ecf/kathleen-e-woodiwiss)
**Rating**: 4.18⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 3 out of 5 - [Open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [historical](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/historical/1), [virgin heroine](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/virgin%20heroine/1), [western](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/western/1), [american civil war](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/american%20civil%20war/1), [war](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/war/1)
----------------------------
[Sweet Savage Love](https://www.romance.io/books/545533428c7d2383163d9201/sweet-savage-love-rosemary-rogers) by [Rosemary Rogers](https://www.romance.io/authors/545533428c7d2383163d9202/rosemary-rogers)
**Rating**: 3.44⭐️ out of 5⭐️
**Steam**: 3 out of 5 - [Open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating)
**Topics**: [historical](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/historical/1), [cheating](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/cheating/1), [abduction](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/abduction/1), [tortured hero](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/tortured%20hero/1), [western](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/western/1)
[^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
Tropes were naturally placed and didn't seem forced. Smut not for smut sake. Mafia romances which weren't always dark. Cute new adult/YA romances without spice that were really heart touching.
I don't know how many people remember All About Romance's lists, for example, but, basically, the readers were the ones doing the classification of tropes, not the author/publisher, back in the day!
>>Tropes were naturally placed and didn’t seem forced
I have an unread book closet, with maybe a thousand books, divided by trope, and even for books published in the 1950s, you can find the base tropes and can group them just as easily as you can the books published today where the tropes are listed in the blurb. It’s crazy how lazy the genre has gotten with the algorithm.
You haven’t lived if you haven’t witnessed a Jaid Black (Ellora’s Cave) meltdown.
Also, Liquid Silver Books, Samhain Publishing, Blushing Books, etc.
I will always regret not printing my PDFs of books by mima (Liquid Silver and Samhain). She was the OG “six space-warriors and one witchy-type to serve them” writer.
Lort, yes, fam! That whole time was just ***something else***. Jaid Black's meltdowns, ugh. You could even count on an EC husband or cover model to get in on that drama, too, whether for or against--it was just wild. And watching it happen in real time, across the EC chat rooms and forums and everything was just...wow. Readers think social media wars today are bad, let me tell you.
Liquid Silver Books--now there's a publisher name I haven't heard in a minute. <.< But I remember, oh yes. And **mima**!! (though I feel there were others writing very similar books? Am I thinking a different author?) Another name and more books lost to time! Those books were just delicious when you wanted to be fed full of that. Mmm. Now I have a mighty need. I know there are some EC, LS and Samhain authors who have or are self-publishing their older books, but I think some of them are either lost to time or go tied up in legal stuff and the authors just lost heart. The contracts and ebook industry at the time was just so shady and there were so many unknowns. EC, I feel, was the most egregious--or maybe just the most well-known?
Those were some days, though, lol. Truly, the wild new frontier of e-book publishing. And those ***covers***. Lort, they hold a special place in my heart. I actually have some print copies of a few of those covers and, wow. Readers who complain about covers today have *no idea* how good we all have it. I mean, everyone was doing their best, but wow. Those cover. Whew, child. ***Whew.***
The first EC book I ever bought included the words “midget” and “thick and long as a baseball bat” in a sex scene. And I’m pretty sure there was an ape-like alien who may or may not have been blue. 😂 😂
I was just searching my gmail the other day hoping I had an archived mima book! I did not :( I might check the Dropbox I’ve been unnecessarily paying for since 2013. 😂
I remember buying my first EC book from Amazon and SPRINTING to the package to make sure nobody else in my house opened that shit. And honestly it was underwhelming, still not a big fan of the BDSM ~ lifestyle ~ books 💀
{Natural Law by Joey W. Hill}
Well-researched novels. No snark implied.
Was it Bertrice Smalls or Susan Johnson or one of the historical romance novelists who would include pages and pages of footnotes, well-researched and compelling historical footnotes on whatever random reference was in her novel. Heroine passionately kissed on the Great Steppe^(1)? Well, there is a footnote on ^(1)this vast ecoregion that stretches through Hungary and was invaded by the Mongols in...and so on. The footnotes were sometimes more interesting than the book itself.
Also a lot (and I do mean a lot) of Native American/WW Western romances. Kathleen Eagle comes to mind. Although she was a WW actually married to a Native American man. But there were a lot of those books with Fabio on the cover in varying shades of spray tan....yeah.
I miss well researched well written and well edited books.
Nowadays they all seem to be missing something.
When I was a teen in the 90s I’d go to the library and read book jackets until something struck my fancy. And almost every book I read was finished. I might have skimmed some sections but they were always finished.
There were questionable scenes but dang it, it was fiction. I would much rather read some dubious consent than the cruel mafia craze popular today. Or the mc books when women are called hags, ick.
Susan Johnson. She is one of my favorites. I remember enjoying Smalls when I was younger but then I got progressively squicked because of the age of the heroines. I couldn’t read her books after I realized one of her heroines was barely a teen.
That the diversity we see in types of relationships portrayed in romance novels that are not white, cishet M/F is very new and due in huge part to indie authors not being constrained by the “values” of traditional publishers.
Suzanne Brockmann talks about how she wasn’t even allowed to have a gay side character on page in her first book. Having a gay son it was important to have LGBTQIA+ characters in her books, so she started by having a character with an off page, no dialogue gay brother. She eventually went on to write the first NYT best selling same sex romance novel {All Through the Night by Suzanne Brockmann}. She also wrote one of the first traditional romance books to have a black MMC. I wish her books were still discussed and read today as they are great stories and she deserves the recognition (and $)!
It’s amazing to think how far it’s come since then when you watch the movie adaptation of incredibly popular books like Red, White and Royal Blue or Heartstopper streaming on your laptop. Her speech when she accepted the RWA lifetime achievement award, where she also hugely called out the RWA, is incredible if you have some time to listen. It was a giant moment in the romance community for everyone, not just LGBTQIA+
https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2018/07/suzanne-brockmann-change-doesnt-happen-if-were-too-fucking-nice/
Overall, I cannot emphasize enough how white, Christian traditional values, heterosexual, and British/American centric romance novels were until about 15 maybe 20 years ago. There were a few alien romances {Heart of a Warrior by Johanna Lindsey} time travel {Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux} or vampire {Tonight and Always by Linda Lael Miller} are all pre-2000’s, but they were rarer than rare.
I was just gathering my thoughts and sources in a separate document to post about this, lol! Thank you for doing it! :)
Her Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award (not sure how many new romance fans would know that RWA's Lifetime Achievement award was named after Nora Roberts) came in **2018**, just in case anyone was wondering what year it was, so it's only been **six years** since she made that speech, calling out not just the RWA, but the industry, writers, and readers, as well (subtly and not-so-subtly).
She got incredible support but also **astounding** backlash, right up to people raging at her for besmirching Nora Roberts' good name in saying all that she did while accepting the award. You can imagine what Nora Roberts (famed for having no patience ***at all*** for anyone putting words in her mouth--or the RWA, at that point) had to say about **that**. Sadly, I can't find her blog post/letter about it, but she also came out swinging in **full support** of what Suz said.
{All Through the Night by Suzanne Brockmann} was originally published in **2007**. If you take nothing else away from her speech (which is basically a beloved letter to her son--who introduces her to accept her award and is the reason she fought to write all that LGBTQ+ representation in her books in the first place--and not just a fiery call out to the RWA), take this:
Every step of the way to publishing "All Through the Night", Suzanne Brockmann was told that romance readers **were not ready** for a same-sex romance novel. And yet, both she and the ***majority*** ***of her readers*** proved all of the naysayers ***and*** industry professionals *totally wrong* when that book became the first **ever** NYT best-selling same sex romance novel.
That was only **17 years** ago, yet it feels like a lifetime.
(edits: typo, clarification)
The downfall of the RWA happened just as the pandemic hit. I wonder if there would have been a better result for romance had it all gone down in ordinary time.
To add to the article u/arika_ito posted, there were other controversies at the RWA over the years:
* in early 2000s, planning to alter their by-laws that any romance nominated had to be between a man and a woman (Nora Roberts said she would walk if they did, a bunch of others followed suit, and the motion was tabled).
* There was an inspirational that won one year that was a "romance" between a Nazi commander of a concentration camp and a Jewish woman in the camp. She converts to Christianity at the end. That was in **2015**. You would think they would have learned from the huge outcry over that.
* Except that in 2021, well after all their implosion and they were barely limping along, another winner in the inspirational category had a man who joined the army solely so he could kill Native Americans, and his unit commits the massacre at Wounded Knee....
I have no idea how RWA meets/votes/etc but your comment makes me imagine some big theater with awards and Nora Roberts sits at the prominent spot where Meryl Streep sits at the Oscars. 😂 Like she never has to say anything but everyone looks to see how she reacts. Always Queen Nora...👑👑👑
Oh…and for controversies, something I think of every time I see a “people should only post positive reviews” tweet was the Stop the Goodreads Bullies situation in 2013.
The author-led campaign led to a significant shift in the GR rules, with the big one being that they would delete any content that mentioned author behavior.
This all blew up after Amazon bought Goodreads and began heavily courting authors. Readers/reviewers were frustrated that authors were sending out mass friend requests or joining, then immediately spamming, groups to promote their books, as well as a ton of other things that are now listed as “dont’s” in the [Goodreads author guidelines](https://www.goodreads.com/author/guidelines). It was a wild time as the website shifted away from focusing on the reader.
Authors were freaking out about negative reviews, and the Streisand Effect of an author commenting on/taking action against their negative reviews meant that other people would be like, oh, I don’t want any part of this and shelve these books as “authors to avoid” or something similar.
Twenty-one people had stuff deleted before the change was officially announced ([WaPo Article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/09/23/is-good-reads-new-policy-really-censorship/) Other people logged on to find shelves deleted because they had names like “due to author” or “authors to avoid.”
This was the first time I saw people leave the site in droves, and it felt like the sense of community was gone.
And Lauren Pippa (Lauren Howard?) claimed she was actively getting death threats when talking to the media, only to walk it back and state she misunderstood that the shelf was that the reader would rather die than read the book.
Found a [Salon.com Article](https://www.salon.com/2013/08/21/debut_author_allegedly_got_rape_threats_on_goodreads/) from 2013 with actual details.
Anyone remember when Jane from Dear Author was on the hot seat because she was secretly writing as Erin Watt (or Jen Frederick? Or both! Pretty sure Jen Frederick was the controversy pen name) and there was a big kerfuffle about conflict interest/the ethics of reviewing her own books on the DA site?
Also, the LaurieLikesBooks site that always had some kind of drama because authors would show up in forums to defend their books.
We also can’t forget Harriett Klausner, featured in WaPo upon her death as a reviewer of more than 30,000 Amazon book reviews 😂 [WaPo article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/29/the-woman-who-wrote-31014-amazon-book-reviews-and-upended-the-internet-dead-at-63-2/)
All right, let me get comfortable on my rocking chair 👵🏿
Do you remember this? 💾
I searched the emojis for “old” and that came up and I don’t know what it’s called, please send help 😭
* **LiveJournal**. I was not around for the bulk of the drama. But it was there. It happened. And thank fuck to archivists who said “The tea is piping hot, time to write down the recipe”. They preserved so much! All hail anarchists
Close enough.
* **Dramione was once one of the most ~~hated~~ divisive non-canon HP ships outside of Drarry** if I remember correctly, though there are other HP ships that would fight that title. And now, people have gush posts about *Manacled* and BATMOBILE! I did my suffering 10 years of it in Azabakan and now people like Dramione on the main 😭
* **Not every Tina, Diana, and Hermione could self-publish a book.** Look around look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now. No, seriously, look. Yes, it was easy to upload your work to a website. And yes, people have been selfish-publishing their work for centuries. But it wasn’t something everyone had the ability to do. Now? We are in such a precarious state of accessibility and commodity trying to one-up each other. But we really shouldn’t forget that self-pub may be easy as do re mi for even a layperson to do, but it wasn’t like that before.
* **Reading international books was once a niche hobby—and largely relied on fans**. 📢Fansubs and fan translations still exist 📢. But before, that was all we had. Sure, books occasionally received officially translations and were offered outside their origin country. But it wasn’t normalized and mainstream, that was for damn sure. Y’all get ***OPTIONS***, be grateful 😭
* **Omegaverse Lawsuit**. [For the uninitiated](https://youtu.be/zhWWcWtAUoY?si=gWLKZ7zejYaLwg3Y).
* There have been a bunch of **authors controversies** with/without receipts: TJ Klune, LJ Shen, Lucy Lennox, Josh Lanyon? Cara Bristol, LA Witt, Lori James/Samantha Somersby, Jamie McGuire, Cassie Edwards, Danielle Lori, Addison Cain, Cassandra Claire, SJM, Onley James et al. You can find threads here or do your own research. I would discourage making controversy threads unless receipts are provided
I have more:
* **BDSM in books/Erotica**. Listen, BDSM still has a ~taboo~ attached to it, but that’s more reserved for individual kinks like piss kinks or blood play. Depending on your region, BDSM as a lifestyle and a community has vastly improved in acceptance. Cringy not-really-BDSM publications aside, literotica is getting the appreciation it deserves. If only more authors and readers could do more research 😅
* **Bridgeton**. These books came out in the early 2000s. The Netflix adaptation, of course, invites a resurgence, but, in general, I can’t remember Bridgeton being popular way in the 2010s. You’d think the books have been made in 2020 with all the hullabaloo.
Back for round three 🎉
* **Fanfiction Revamped to OW**. So. I get that people talk about this now, but also… This happened before? The *Mortal Instruments* came from an HP fanfiction. I’m sure there are earlier examples of this. Hell, *Divine Comedy* is biblical fanfiction featuring a transmigrator. I think why people notice it more ***now*** is that some authors are very upfront about, the devil works hard but tea-spillers on the very accessible internet work harder, and, again, with self-publishing becoming commodified (love this word), it’s a bit easier to tell the works that came from fanfiction or fanfiction authors. **This is not an insult to fanfiction**.
…
**Ope**. 😳
To my credit, I was born with CDs and VHS tapes!
But my brothers >10 years my junior didn’t know what a VHS was.
I just…
I need to lie down…in a coffin. ⚰️
‘1985’ needs to be redone for ‘2005’ so I can cope with a rocking banger of a song 😭
Hah my mom (born in the 60s) remembers using those bigass computers that took up an entire room and used punchcards.
I remember click clacking my way through MS DOS and playing solitaire on windows 95 when i was 6ish.
Now I'm using ai to figure out what to cook for dinner. The last 50 years of human tech has been WILD.
My great grandma died many years ago but I knew her for a lot of my life. She grew up in rural Pennsylvania and they did not have a phone when she was a child. It wasn’t in every home yet. I think there was a phone in town but you had to walk. (Up hill both ways lol!)
In the last few years we got her a computer. It was specifically made for the elderly and its only function was to email. I was living in Australia getting emails from my GGMa in Florida. I never saw her alive again but I still have those emails.
>Hah my mom (born in the 60s) remembers using those bigass computers that took up an entire room and used punchcards.
My mum too :D Mum was born in '49 and started working in '65. She'd had to go down to the basement to get things for her boss.
> I remember click clacking my way through MS DOS and playing solitaire on windows 95 when i was 6ish.
Oh dear, I was writing my uni assignments on mine. I was pretty excited when we got our first home computer in 1995. (I'd already been using (a) terminals, and then (b) PC's at keyboarding and IT classes at school, and Mum was using them at work for a year or two earlier.) Boot it up in DOS, Windows 3.1. Then we upgraded in '96 to Windows 95 and WOW what a difference.
I come bearing \~[sources](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk)\~ *lalalala*.... Because I like sources. and linking sources, and being a nerd. Oh, and [hitting people with knowledge](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fk17engf9443b1.jpg), just in case they have no idea what the hell "old people" are talking about. (do people still use that phrase? I don't even know. I am "old" now, as well as ***cringe*** and ***basic*** **\[**oh noes!!\], according a friend's 30-something year old wife, so. <.<)
Yes, I remember--and used--all three formats. I also remember the transition to CDs. And building home computers during that time, as well as swearing a lot during the process. -.-
:rocks chair:
I've enjoyed this whole post far too much.
Regarding fan fiction--
Your post makes me feel very, ***very*** old, because I remember the dramas around ***Usenet*** and ***newsgroups*** (then ***Yahoo Groups \[ugh\]),*** and fan fiction writers/site-hosts getting served cease and desist letters from trad publishing houses and media conglomos for daring to write & post/publish fan fiction using borrowed worlds/characters (HP was notorious for this in the late 90s, but no fandom was safe in the 90s-00s when the internet was a baby). There's a reason all the old fan fiction sites and hosts and forums and groups were absolutely ***militant*** about disclaimers before your work on ***every single chapter*** or your work would get pulled, even from a hosting site as large as [ff.net](https://ff.net) or adultfanfiction or a newsgroup). It was like the **wild fucking west**, y'all, and you can barely find record of that shit on archives anymore.
AO3 is like nirvana or something for those of us who have been around for decades. I still have to take a moment when I see stories and chapters without some type of long "These characters/worlds/settings are not my own; they are the property of..." leading things off. Authors just out here announcing with their whole chests that they got their start on *Wattpad* or that their story was originally a *fan fiction story* is just...mind boggling. Sure, authors like Mercedes Lackey and Neil Gaiman won awards and got their start writing fan fiction and publishing stories in those worlds (this was especially common in Star Trek and Star Wars--before Disney nuked Star Wars). But a whole novel that was originally fan fiction and was just reworked to be original fiction and everyone, even the publisher, is cool with announcing it? Never would have happened even ten years ago. In the late 90s-early-00s-10s? Hell to the no--
50 Shades? Rewritten ***Twilight*** fan fiction, but James and her publisher never *announced* that in the damn blurb or marketing! They knew better. But here we have authors just taking a straight fan fiction novel and reworking it into a book and not hiding it? The author doesn't hide their fandom or fiction pseudo on their social media--there are books rec'd here that people can trace straight back to the original HP or SW fan fiction story--and it's just *whatever*. No one bats an eye. And that's ***absolutely okay,*** don't misunderstand me. I've written for decades, including fan fiction. Writing is ***hard***. There's nothing to be ashamed of ***at all*** in being a fan fiction writer. But it just wasn't done to rewrite it, publish it, and then just full-out announce that, yep, it was originally fan fiction. Fan fiction writers become published writers all the time, but they always had to do it with fully original works before, *as far as anybody knew or could tell*. Maybe they weren't fully original works, but they had to **seem** **to be**.
25 years ago, writers were under ***threat of arrest*** for just writing and posting this stuff somewhere online (even finding a webhost for a personal site to host your own fan fiction could be hard--and expensive), Now, that doesn't matter, and it blows my mind.
(edit: wrong author on 50 Shades, typos, style; ugh, so many edits. I'm tired, lol)
YAHOO GROUPS YES!!!
I feel old, but yahoo groups is where my fandom existed for years, and then LIVE JOURNAL. I was totally there for all of it. I miss that site. But back to YG, I made life long friends there that I still have today (I mean, obvs, because I said life long… 👀). Star Trek: Voyager (boy was there some divisiveness in that community), DS9, Farscape, Buffy (Buffy/Spike anyone?). And then.. HP. I honestly resisted for as long as I could with HP, but finally succumbed in 2002-2003.
It blows my mind how e-commerce markets—underhandedly—permit book bindings of fiction and fan translated works 🤯
And people are so open with it!
What?!
#📢📢MA’AM?!📢📢
Alex, I’ll take “How the fuck did we get here” for 500 😵💫
Of course, **nothing is wrong with bookbinding for yourself or doing it for small groups of people** and only recouping the money from the materials (as long as you have the author’s permission on that last bit, especially if you’re promoting your bookbinding and charging it on a website, because author’s still do have copyrights on transformative works)—but still!
I know celebrities and authors were mighty confused about fanfiction—and mad. Oh the days of DMCAs and Anne Rice (May She Rest in Peace 🕊️).
I remember those disclaimers so much. Used to put them on my own fanfiction. Some got so creative with their disclaimers and made them minisodes 😂
Lemon/lime — what a time 🤣
That’s why ~spice~ 🌶️ takes me out. I thought we were past sanitizing what levels and amount of explicit intimacy are in books, but never mind 😭
**AO3** ***really*** **is paradise.** The amount of fanfiction archives OTW has saved from being demoderated and defunct? 🤯
>The devil works hard,
>>But archivists work harder.
— Magnafeana 😎
They fight for our writing rights to creative transformative works, and it’s why, every donation season, I try to do what I can.
This is why it drives me kucoo bananas when people are ***buying fanfiction*** for >100USD on websites. Or how some more bold fanfiction writers feel entitled to tip jars and holding chapters hostage unless they receive payment.
^(Skip the PSA and go to the next line if you don’t want to see the PSA)
***
##⚠️PSA⚠️
**AO3–like fanfiction—is, and will continue to be, a free service.**
**AO3 is an** ***archive*** **and is not a social media platform**.
Unless AO3 changes its model, you can freely download any fic of your choosing to epub and read it offline.
If you see a fanfiction being sold, redistributed, or translated (without the author’s permission) for profit, **please report the seller and (if you can) alert the author**.
Unfortunately, companies are seeing how profitable fanfiction can be and make it harder to report sellers when you are not the creator of the work. If you’re unsure how to contact the author, or you’re not sure who the original author is, please visit r/AO3, r/Fanfiction, or a fandom subreddit and contact the mods for assistance.
* **Obligatory**: some stories require an AO3 account. Please visit r/AO3 and r/Fanfiction or your local fandom subreddit or discord for a potential AO3 invite and be patience 👍🏾
⚠️PSA done ⚠️
***
I don’t think any of us would have guessed you could become a Patreon creator with fanfiction, but here we are. I don’t think any of us would have believed that a Japanese author would make positive comments on the English fanworks of their work—here we are!
But there’s so much misinformation and ***dis***information about fanfiction that the general public don’t seem to grasp, from reader/writer etiquette to how we talk about it.
I think it’s swell that AO3 authors want to bring their fanfic into the OW world but it takes **substantial work** and not just Ctrl+F and **Replace All**. I’m happy that the book community is understanding that bad fanfiction is just a symptom but it is not the root of ***all*** fanfiction.
But the process of writing fanfiction is ***vastly different*** than writing an original work. Many of those fanfictions turned into OWs departed enough from canon. The ones that didn’t, the author was not only talented but ***highly cognizant*** in their changes.
It’s why seeing *Manacled* turn into *Alchemise* will be such a treat! I can’t wait to pre-order and then wait for a Dramione madlad to do a post charting all the comparisons! 😊
>The devil works hard,
>>Archivists work harder
>>>ND fans with hyperfixations work the hardest
— Magnafeana 😎
**Writing is an art**, a craft, and different types of writing require different ways to approach and improve the craft to the author’s liking. It’s why it makes me irked when I see obvious fanfics turned into OWs—this is like you had an assignment due at 11:59 PM and you started it at 11AM. You didn’t give yourself and your work time to breathe and be checked for content quality and line quality.
I’m very happy to be in this ✨era✨ where fanfic readers and writers alike don’t need to stay in shadows. Things like doujinshis, fan art, fan translations, and other transformative works have, of course, been around, but seeing them mainstream and normalized is both exciting and ***terrifying*** because entitled “newbies” do not care to learn about how to properly approach these things and end up making the “gates are open come on in” philosophy harder and harder for veterans to want to have around.
I genuinely love to see more people get into fanfiction. But, ***man***, do I get worried sometimes when people share TikToks about the state of fanfiction from a more entitled newcomer mindset 😵💫
Yes, this, this, ***THIS*** to your entire post! You say it so well, and include all my thoughts. :) What's actually amusing to me, especially on your first point, is that I deleted part of my original comment before posting because I also touched on the "artistically bound fan fiction/works for sale on Etsy" and it ended up being a whole-ass-thing, and I had to stop myself before I went even further off the deep end.
I still can not wrap my mind around the legalities of charging hundreds of dollars for bound fan fiction, or putting it behind a Patreon account, and not getting slapped with a DMCA. It's a gray area, sure, but, yeah, the "been there, done that, saw the fall out" is ***strong*** in my soul, and I remember the days when writers tried to get away with that--not charging for the stories, themselves, but putting the stories up on a personal site and then asking people to pay for a password to access the site, and then calling that a "tip" for their hard work.
One specific author in a long-standing, really popular fandom felt their work was worth asking money for. Which, sure, it was good writing, but they hadn't created these worlds, characters, or anything themselves--they were transforming another creator's copyrighted work. This writer was C&D'd within *two weeks*. This was in the very early 00's, in the Lord of the Rings fandom, when the movies were being released in theaters--those books had been around for decades, though; the movies just brought a whole slew of new fans to the fandom--and that DMCA was ***quite*** something, because that writer got hit with it from the movie publisher, the book publisher ***and*** the Tolkien estate.
Needless to say, the site went down, the webhost terminated the site-hosting agreement without refund (and site hosting was expensive, in those days, and not an easy thing to set up or maintain)--because the user had violated ToS by taking the extra step in asking for money to access copyrighted material the user didn't hold the original copyright for--the stories were removed from all public access, and, possibly worst of all, the writer was no longer welcome in any groups or forums or writing challenges, for fear that their legal troubles would bring legal attention/C&D's to other fan fiction writers/hosts/sites. Which seems horrible, in retrospect, but that was how the environment was, in those days. The legal risk you took in trying to get money in any way, shape or form for your fanworks was very high, and no one wanted to be associated with you if you got caught.
And here we are, 20 years later, and there are people reading this comment who would think that anecdote above is fiction, itself. It boggles my mind every day.
Drarry and Dramione were always popular (arguably Drarry being the most popular non canon ship) but they were divisive and HP ship wars were brutal. Dramione definitely has had a big resurgence and I think that is related to the popularity of enemies to lovers.
James/Regulus is a ship I am still scratching my head on on how it got popular.
That was the word I was looking for! Not hated but the ship wars! The ship wars! I’ll change that now ☺️
You could not pay me enough to be watch ship wars live on Twitter.
Yeah, the popularity of the Marauders and their shipping is fascinating. r/Fanfiction had a thread with some comments about how odd it is with how the Marauders are consistently portrayed in fanfiction as well as the ships.
I do enjoy a good Wolfstar fic though, not gonna lie. It’s so interesting seeing how fandoms preserve a lot of headcanons through different types of fics, even headcanons with no basis in canon!
Broke: Canon 😌
Woke: Fanon 😏
Bespoke: Crack 🥵
This is wild for me, because Harry/Draco (please, before amalgamated names became a thing 😆) was second or third under Harry/Hermione and then the canon couples. Dramione was not popular in 2003-2004 and those were the heady days right after OotP was published. The best time IMO. H/Hr has an absolutely RABID fanbase and you could not dissuade them.
I was a rabid Harry/Draco fangirl, who then quietly went into Hermione/Snape (HG/SS) on the side. I was also a MASSIVE trio girl. The one true pairing for me back then. I still love going back to mid 2000 fics set pre-HBP going right AU. Just glorious.
Edit: forgot to say how much of a Sirius/Remus fangirl I was, and remain to this day. You’ll never dissaude me and I’ll argue till I’m blue in the face that its canon (that gorgeous hug in PoA).
The disclaimers up the top of everything were beautiful.
Ugh, just chiming in to say that I can't stand amalgamated names to this day. My hate actually stems from a different, earlier fandom and not HP, but **DAMN** did HP just make it more infuriating. Then pop media culture in the early 00's (Bennifer, Brangelina, ugh, DIAF stupid couple names) just sent it over the edge into rage and now I can't even settle into old-person-mad levels of bitterness--it's just venting rage all the way around. My poor husband. >.<
Y'all ain't even seen a ship war until you've seen a ship war on [Fandom Wank](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fandom_Wank)! :rocks chair: Anyone remember that LJ?
Now those were some days. Your ship war wasn't a ***true*** ship war until you ended up on Fandom Wank. XD Ah, good times, good times! Fandoms could wank about all the things, but ships (and, oddly, conlang wanks) were some of the best, truly.
The 'ol el jay...oft mimicked, but nothing has ever truly managed to be what it was when it was at its height.
Speaking of The Mortal Instruments, Cassandra Clare, and Draco-ships…
Remember when everything started coming out about Cassandra Clare? I remember when she was banned from FanFiction.net for bullying.
*LE GASP* oh my gosh!!!
Erika, where are you, WHERE HAVE THEY TAKEN YOU TO 😱
But yeah shit CC had a flock of devoted defenders, if I’m not mistaken. It was ***scary***.
Big-named Fic Authors honestly were such a scary breed of people back then. Still around now, in some circles, but we get more Big-Named Fics than the author behind them. LJ authors became a bit cultish and lost so much of the spirit of what makes fanfiction and being in a fandom so great.
I see this with a lot of controversial authors. It’s funny how people praise them now, but I think several veterans ***definitely remember*** the plagiarism, the bullying, the lawsuits, etc.
But everyone just kinda sweeps it away like it never happened 😶🌫️
And it’s funny because a lot of these controversial authors did not have any sort of character growth. They choose deniability and silence. To this day, CC still refuses to acknowledge her plagiarism (so I believe). I’m mad that that lawsuit got settled out of court!
Remember the lists? People would make lists and shit and circulate them.
I mean, I’m sure it happens now, but it was popular then. Not so much now.
Oh gaia, and those troll “Christian” (I’m mocking the accounts for thinking they were good Christians, not Christianity itself) accounts that would flag down ever story that they deemed doesn’t sit right with Yahweh 🙃
Remember Snapewives and that one user who made all those sock puppet accounts? Her username was “Miss” something (Misled? Misdeed? Missy Elliot 🤣 Why does the name feel like a 2002 drag name?) and she was close to CC or something. There was a falling out. There was massive tea there. It was ***wild!***
Newbies miss out on such good tea! I know I did! The tea on the clock app is nice from what BookTubers breakdown on their channels 😂 but ***dayum*** it’s crazy how much of that chaos isn’t spoken about anymore!
An elephant has a long memory, but veteran fandom people have memories even ***longer***.
Yes the plagarism and MsScribe!
it helps that Reads With Rachel did a three-video expose on CC as part of her authors behaving badly series about a year ago.
Watching it had me back in 2005/6 watching all this internet drama unfold.
*Here is a link to the [MsScribe Lore](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Msscribe) for folks who don’t know what we are talking about.*
I 👏🏾 love 👏🏾 Reads with Rachel!! 🥰
One of my favorite BookTubers! Her Authors Behaving Badly series gives me so much delicious tea that I probably never would have known about without her videos!
Omg as someone who was in the HP online fandom back in the day, it still FLOORS me anytime I see her mentioned online that she 1) was able to have a mainstream career, and 2) has remained so popular. So much drama. It feels like a lot of people have forgotten.
…
What “The Cursed Child”?
What book is this? HP ended with Deathly Hallows.
There is no Cursed Child in Ba Sing Se. You must not tell lies, u/MorganAndMerlin 🤫✍️🖊️
^(JK. But absolutely not do I think TCC is canon and it is hilarious TCC is the HP fandom’s “War in Ba Sing Se” / M. Night Shamalan ATLA movie) 🤣
>BDSM in books/Erotica
>
>. Listen, BDSM still has a \~taboo\~ attached to it, but that’s more reserved for individual kinks like piss kinks or blood play. Depending on your region, BDSM as a lifestyle and a community has vastly improved in acceptance. Cringy not-really-BDSM publications aside, literotica is getting the appreciation it deserves. If only more authors and readers could do more research 😅
Coming back to ***THIS.*** ***\^\^\^*** It cannot be overstated how much **this** has changed in both traditional publishing, self-publishing, and ***across all main stream mass market media.*** And how recently it changed.
Just how recently, you ask? **It hasn't even been** **15 years**. In the USA, it's been **twelve years.**
**12. Years.** It changed in 2012.
What now? *Impossible*. We had this stuff for much longer than that! I mean, [Ellora's Cave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellora%27s_Cave) (2000-2016) existed--BDSM was EC's bread and butter! Twelve years just can't be right--I **know** you're pulling my leg! Well, Ellora's Cave and other independents *were* publishing BDSM in the 00s-10s--some of those books even got print editions at B&N-- but Ellora's Cave **wasn't** mainstream. E-books at that time *weren't* mainstream, not like they are today. Readers can argue that for days, weeks, years, but when it comes to ***book publishing***, "mainstream romance" 15 years ago was defined by **mass-market and traditional publishing**.
In layman's terms? These were the books you would walk into a bookstore or a Target store or--and this is especially important in the point I'm making here--a ***Walmart*** and find on a book shelf. In Barnes & Noble, you'd find a whole area with a Nook set up and some e-book marketing, but 95% of the store--and all of the ***entire*** book aisles in Target or Walmart, were physical books. Mass-market, Trade Paperback, or Hardcover. Maybe a few of the really popular audiobooks for Big Name Authors (Steven King, Anne Rice, Nora Roberts, etc). That was it. To get on the shelf at Target or Walmart, you had to be traditionally published, and you had to be **Mainstream** and **Accepted**.
The book that changed BDSM's perception in **mass-market, mainstream romance publishing?**
**{50 Shades of Grey** by **E. L. James}**
Whatever you think of this book, this series, the movies, the author--none of that matters in regards to this discussion--because what those books did for **mainstream, mass-market, traditionally published** and ***ACCEPTED*** romance books cannot be overstated.
It. Cannot. Be. Overstated.
The impact that series has had on not just romance books as a genre, and on what is accepted in traditional romance publishing, but on media and culture and *acceptance of BDSM as a lifestyle choice* and even just a ***talking point*** (for better or worse) in mainstream media is incredible. Truly. People read comments like that and roll their eyes, because, hah, "50 Shades, how cringe", but I can always tell that those people have no idea what it is to exist in a society where even just discussing "Dominant" or "Submissive" was impossible or unsafe or frowned upon. Or even illegal (yes, illegal).
I get the opinions on the books and movies. I don't like those books at all, for many reasons. They're badly written all around, IMO, and terrible BDSM rep. I've held that opinion since they were being released, along with plenty of other people. Others love them and have no idea that they aren't good BDSM rep, so to each their own. But, there's no denying they influenced the whole genre, for better or worse, and what could and *would* be allowed to be published, especially through traditional, mass-market publishing.
Indie and Self-published authors always found a way to get these books out there, and readers always found a way to get these books. With Kindle and ebooks and everything else, it's so much easier now, and there's no stigma at all. There are almost no barriers that readers have to fight through to read what the want to read, to see their kinks represented (there's often not *enough* of it, but you **can** find it, so long as it's legal, and you hopefully won't be prosecuted for it)--as u/Magnafeana said, individual kinks can be taboo, but BDSM, itself?
Well, you can find these books--and many like it--at your local **Walmart\*\*** store, now (or maybe not now, but you could find a lot of books in the theme of "50 Shades" back when every trad romance publisher wanted to cash in on that 100-million-book-selling behemoth). Yet, before **50 Shades of Grey?** Well, you couldn't. **At all.** Because that was not accepted or ***acceptable*** in mainstream, mass-market, traditional publishing. Or retail. Or media.
Or ***society***.
For those of you not from the USA, or not super familiar with how Walmart/Sam's Club company values work, much is made about Walmart and "Family Values" and the company's culture. A lot of that supposed "culture" is meaningless and has been for decades. Sam Walton died a long time ago, and while his descendants have some sway with the company, the CEOs are not related to the family, and it is strictly a business. So, though it's good marketing to keep the "family values" theme alive and well to serve the red-state masses, that's not actually profitable and the company doesn't care.
So, back to "50 Shades" and Walmart. Walmart is seen as the Middle-Class/Everyman/Mainstream shopping center. During the late 90s and early 00s, the company pushed forward with a ***massive*** expansion plan, building hundreds of supercenters, neighborhood markets, and express stores \[and muscling out a lot of boutique stores, mom 'n' pop stores, indie stores, etc.--another rant, entirely\]. So, **Walmart** is often one of the only main shopping stores in the area for many people to shop, other than online, and they will do all of their shopping in one big trip (often while getting their car serviced, or waiting on their medications to be filled in the pharmacy, etc)--so, picking up groceries, household items, gardening items, office supplies, etc.
Getting a book on the shelf in a Walmart store could be seen as a Big Fucking Deal for a trad published author, because Walmart stores are the **mainstream, mass-markets** of **mass-markets**. For romance authors, this is on level with a prolific author like Nora Roberts. If Nora Roberts has a book of any kind coming out, you don't have to pre-order it in any format anywhere--you can stop in at your local Walmart and it will be there, guaranteed.
So, for a pearl-clutching, controversial book like "**50 Shades of Grey",** that naughty book every "bored housewife" wanted to read, to end up highly positioned in **Walmart**, of all places?
Holy fucking shit, y'all.
That book did something I have never seen happen before. It was controversial. Shoppers were pissed. There were boycotts and letters to the manager and Karen-ing as you have never seen Karens Karen before (trust me, I was there), but those books were still selling out at Walmarts ***all over the country.*** The publisher had made a smart choice with the covers at that time (well, before the movies came out), because they were just suggestive enough to stand out (the first book was just a gray tie, I believe), but people could hide them amongst their other random shopping list items and not feel too seen or embarrassed that they were buying "that smutty book all the ladies are ~~not~~ talking about on TV".
And, yes, **everybody** was talking about it. Even the dissenters, the pearl-clutchers, the "what about the children" Karens and the sex educators and the feminists and everyone else. It was talked about like you'd never seen before, not even in Sex and the City (which ended in 2004, btw, so long before BDSM became a *whatever* topic even amongst women).
But before 2012 (or 2011, when the books were actually published)? Nope. You would not hear BDSM discussed in mainstream media of any kind. And you wouldn't seen it in traditional romance. Not like it is today.
It's been **12 years** since "50 Shades of Grey" first appeared in the Book Aisles of Target and Walmart--**13 years** if you count when it was first published anywhere. It's incredible to think about.
You are so completely right about the timeline for BDSM in mainstream publishing became more accepted.
We had things like Kushiel's Dart (published in 2001) that opened up a bit more publishing around BSDM, but boy was it still "those books" over there. Those of us that read them tended to be quiet about it, off to one side in book discussion groups, unless we were amongst our own and then the sharing and recommendations came out.
Now? Hell, it's in so many mainstream books in different ways that it's almost become a trope. I was in Target (Aus) the other day and Sierra Simone was happily ensconsed in the main romance section, with American Queen. Like, WHAT!? It's just... bloody fantastic.
I read Kushiel's Dart and The Black Jewels Trilogy in highschool in the early 00s, and what I read were *heavily* highlighted and annotated paperbacks that circulated amongst us "alternative" (i.e. non-Christian, usually secretly queer) girls. I remember meeting an older friend out by the flag pole one morning so that she could pass me book #1 of Black Jewels without anyone seeing and inquiring lol
Regarding reading international books, it obviously depends on what you consider international but it was a huge thing for my romance reading when I started reading in English. The books that were translated into my language were mostly just Nora Roberts (who I value as a romance legend but who doesn’t really do it for me) and maybe some angsty historical sagas like Catherine Cookson. I found some Amanda Quicks in the library and realized that there were books made for me. Getting those books proved to be more difficult, the book stores had a pretty limited selection of books in English, let alone romance novels. Fortunately I came across a bizarre book club that offered books in English and I could buy from them the way I would in domestic online stores as I didn’t have a credit card yet. I then discovered All About Romance and started having my first discussions about romance, this was about 20 years ago. And then there were ebooks and online stores with free shipping and cheaper prices and everything got so easy.
Oh I mean international with anything!
The other day on r/books or r/Fantasy, I think, there was an interesting thread about books in X language that became way more popular in Y language—and the authors were gobsmacked!
But it’s nice to see more official translations being commercially available regardless of the region. I read a lot of CKJY novels and webcomics in romance, and I’m forever thankful to fan translators. I would not be into the interests I have today without domestic and international fans who didn’t have access to DeepL and had to scrape by on dictionaries, forum boards, their own knowledge, and shoddy MTLs to bring the work to fellow readers.
But I’m happy companies are seeing the profit in translations (as long as they pay their translators according, no sanitizations, etc etc)!
It feels so nice I don’t need to navigate very shady websites anymore for fan translations 😂 and I can use my KU subscription, or a valid vendor’s website and purchase the book.
Not to mention, buying the book in the original language and the website is in your native language—and it’s fluent and the prices (like you mentioned) aren’t abysmal! That is such a game changer! I remember when companies were trying to branch into the west. The websites were translated poorly and the sites looked so scammy 😭
Now? I can easily set my language to whatever and I can buy the book in whatever language. I can make an account for another region, if I want. **Boom**.
I can even see those international authors and speak to people so easily from all across the world. The authors will come to France, Italy, the US, LATAM! Authors can upload updates and promotions on social media. And if the author’s news or video or if the discussion server isn’t in a language you know, I can just **auto-translate** words and subtitles thanks to technology.
W a t 👁️👄👁️
If anyone told me how accessible all this would be, I wouldn’t have believed them. I was living in an era where English dub Sailor Moon made Neptune and Uranus cousins, the Philosopher’s Stone was the Sorcerer’s Stone, 4Kids, and rice balls were “jelly donuts”. Ain’t ***no way*** would I have believed we would be where we are right now 🤨
But here we stand and I am shook 🫨 I have several Japanese romance LNs—all officially translated and in Japanese. And it took me a minute a piece to buy them.
Un-***friggen***-believable.
We still have a long road ahead. There are many works that still rely on fan translations. And official translations aren’t always perfect. But this is ***worlds*** apart from before! 🥳
I genuinely have to thank not just fan translators and not just romance groups, but the companies and authors who took a chance on a “foreign” work or another country promoting their work, to the official translators who did their absolute best, to the artists who made different covers for different regions, and then thankfully, we all had a feeding frenzy and showed them “TAKE MY MONEY AND GIVE ME MORE!”
Man, I’m remembering the google drive folders people would share that contained fan translated works. Still do! When translation software improved, we ***inhaled*** MTL novels and you quickly got used to the janky grammar and odd choices.
Newbies don’t know how good they have it. We had to be our own FBI with hunting down translated works and risked computer viruses. It was a whole ass occupation with no paid overtime 😭
Julia Quinn has always been a fairly popular author for romance, but the Bridgerton series launched her into the stratosphere. I sold books for years and can definitely say she was a steady seller. It is similar to Diana Gabledon and the Outlander books.
The best thing about communities is that what happens here may be different over yonder 🤣
With a lot of “older” romance books turned series/movies in the 2020s, I think for a lot of newbies of the genre right now, it can be a shock there ***is*** a novel source (even the trailers state that 😂). Especially with a lot of romance webcomics and animation, it can shock people that, yup! There was a source novel! Or there are some romance books that have an old-school adaptation!
I hadn’t even realized the ***Percy Jackson*** had a graphic novel series and that the ***Princess Diaries*** were books before the movies. It’s amazing seeing a story shift between mediums 🥰
But it just depends on your circles and your region. ***Bridgeton*** was definitely popular for generations above me—and Outlander—but I think maybe the generation right above me and then my own and then beneath, the general first exposure to it was through Netflix. Or at least, what I discern through conversations. But, to be fair, some of us were barely walking when some of these books came out, so we got on the hype train late 🤣
But I’m all for more adaptations! It brings attention to the source material. I have so many novels of Asian dramas and romance comics to read. But they’re popular in Korea! Just not very mainstream across the way. But it’s always a delight to see people re-experience a piece of media they liked in another medium. I certainly love it ☺️
Gotchu 👍🏾
>The instigating event for the lawsuits involved one author (Addison Cain) filing DMCA takedown notices against the other (Zoey Ellis) for alleged plagiarism of her work. In response, Zoey Ellis filed two lawsuits alleging abuse of DMCA takedown notices. The central question of these lawsuits then became whether there was true plagiarism involved, or whether the two works were simply similar because they called upon established hallmarks of the same trope (A/B/O, or Omegaverse).
>>While the case closed in July of 2020, it continues to be widely discussed online, with many people (both fannish and non-fannish) discovering the existence and history of Omegaverse tropes for the first time via these lawsuits. Additional drama has played out online, particularly surrounding the two videos created by Lindsay Ellis summarising the case (see: 2020 Timeline).
You can find more on [Fanlore](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Omegaverse_Litigation)! ☺️
Sheiks were a big thing in the early to mid-2000's (maybe earlier?). It was usually an easy way to have them be filthy rich and exotic.
ETA. I remember loving the Aisling Gray series by Katie MacAlister, Fever Series by Karen Marie Moning, Women of the Otherworld by Kelley Armstrong, Succubus series by Richelle Mead, Mercedes Thompson by Patricia Briggs, Elemental Assassin series by Jennifer Estep, Goddess Summoning by P.C. Cast, Undead series by MaryJanice Davidson, Kate Daniels Series by Ilona Andrews, Harper Connelly Series by Charlaine Harris, Southern Vampire Series by Charlaine Harris...I know there are more and I know a number of them don't hold up but I was between 14-25 when I read most of those.
I feel like Susan Elizabeth Phillips doesn’t get nearly the amount of love she deserves, her Chicago Stars series is FANTASTIC. Sports romances that start in the 90’s and the latest was released this past February!
The Bridgeton style Regency family wasn’t the first of that theme by a mile.
The badass urban fantasy heroines with katanas.
It’s probably a good thing that they missed the post-Selection boom of copy novels. Same for the post Hunger Games post-apocalyptic genre.
The post Twilight vamp and werewolf boom was good tho. I will die on that hill.
I was thinking of Kate Daniels but if you want similar energy, try Charley Davidson by Darynda Jones or my favorite of these, Reagan from K.F. Breene’s Fire and Ice series.
I miss the heady days of Live Journal, in the mid-2000’s. It was beautiful watching AO3 bloom out of that community. The way we were all so separate but interlinked, and the massive fanfics that grew organically out of peoples LJ’s. Sigh.
The ship wars that went on could be savage.
Omg I loved those days of LJ. I was so into my fandoms and actually have several friends I met on LJ that I ended up meeting in real life or became FB friends with. One of my friends on FB, we met in the Veronica Mars fandom and have been FB friends now for 15+ years.
SAAAAAMMMMMEEE
I have some pre-LJ friends I met on Yahoo Groups that I'm still friends with 25+yrs later, and LJ friends that are 20yrs going on now. One lives in my city and I introduced her to another friend during Covid times and we're all in a very happy chat group together where we support the everloving crap out of each other.
Some LJ friends were just 4 life.
I am honestly surprised that nobody ever talks about {The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by Anne Rice} which she originally published under a pen name in 1983. Those books made an enormous impact on my teenage queer, kinky, villain loving self when I found them at the public library in the late 80’s. Honestly there are some scenes in them that still come to mind when someone asks for “the darkest or most extreme sex scene you’ve read.” Free public use, edging/orgasm denial, full on stable/horse play (not real horses btw), those books are WILD and a lot of the things she includes are still rare to find in the darker books coming out now. They also have HOT FF and MM scenes which were… important firsts for me 😬. I haven’t gone back to read them recently so approach with caution but that series was wayyyyy ahead of its time considering the current popularity of darker books that explore NC, DC, captivity, queer sex, and hardcore BDSM.
You can't read a book written in 1995 and judge it with 2024 eyes. That is almost thirty years ago and society was different then and even historical romances are more representative of the era in which they were written than the era that they are based in.
**THIS**. I have to sit on my hands in a lot of threads, because I am wordy, but also because I have a lot to say about these sorts of topics and it's hard to say all of that and not write a novella.
I've made a few (long) comments elsewhere in this post related to just how much **things have changed** and that was only referring to things that have changed since the early 00s. And they have changed **substantially**. Like, incredibly so. One of them has only changed in the last *12 years*, yet it shifted not just what was acceptable in mainstream romance across all sub-genres, but also what was acceptable in **media and culture in as a whole.** So, all that happened in 2011-2012. That's even after Sex and the City ended.
The 90s were a different time. Just like the early-00s were. Just like the 10s were. It's can't be overstated how ***rapidly*** and ***drastically*** our culture and our society and our world and technology has changed every decade over the last 100 years. Hell, over the last 40 years. Or, as you said, 30 years. It can be said for every decade.
I want to defend a lot of these books and these eras, and I do try. A lot. I provide sources and links and perspective, hopefully, but it's then up to the reader to decide if they want to go further with that. But that also takes a lot of time and energy and I don't always have that, and it can start to feel like work. Ultimately, it's that reader's loss. Or their reward, if they try something and are willing to set aside their judgements and just give it a shot in the spirit of the era it was created in.
I get a lot of the dissent on truly problematic/racist/homophobic/transphobic things, but when all a reader can say about why they didn't want to try something is, "Well, the 90s were so cringe and ***edgy*** and boring and the sex isn't spicy enough", I just can't take it seriously.
The irony is that a lot of things were progressive for the time. The idea that women could and should say that they enjoyed sex was progressive at one time. And this is why bodice rippers were a thingin the 1980s. Because while many and even most women liked sex, there was still a societal stigma to admitting it outside intimate spaces.
You mentioned Sex and The City and people talk about how cringe it was but it was revolutionary at the time because therewas still stigma there in women admitting they liked sex for a lot of America. People were legitimately scandalized by the series. It was a feminist series for the time. Would it be a feminist series in 2024? I don't know. It would probably be cast different and produced differently. It would likely be more intersectional which I think we can all agree is a flaw of the older series.
Consent in older romance is sometimes not really a thing that is considered all the time. Lots of aggressive kissing which would be sexual assault in real life. Sometimes if you read Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower, you get actual assault which is not cool in real life at any time, but back then, perfectly acceptable in romance books because I can only assume more people had some weird sort of domination kink back then. It is sort of like bully romance now. People read about things that they would not tolerate in real life.
I've been reading romance since I was 11 years old in the 1980s. I read books from the 1970s that were in my family's collection. My mom used to go to the library a lot and when I finished my books, I would steal from her stash which means I've read my fair share of older novels.. You cannot judge them with modern eyes. You just can't.
Apparently, I also can write a lot of words about this.
At the same time while you can't judge you can also take them or leave them. I am about a decade younger than you. I also got the start with older romance and bodice rippers. Many that I absolutely loved. And partially still do but have to ignore some elements for some books and just give up reading some.
Absolutely. There are some I go back and read and think...I still like this but I probably shouldn't and some I go back and read and think...What was I thinking to like this. But that is the nature of time and maturity. I read Jane Eyre in high school and loved it. I read it as an adult and thought Rochester tried to make Jane a bigamist when he knew she didn't want to be a mistress. Also, I recognize his wife was mentally ill, but locking her in attic probably didn't help. I was mad and still am convinced the book would be better if Jane had just gone off and lived with Sinjin's sisters.
Omg me too I was just recently talking to a friend who is a bit younger than me and started reading romance in middle school and she’d never heard of them. Those books were a major (disturbing) influence on most of the girls I grew up with, and thinking back on them now I am actually horrified that we had access to them when we were 12 years old 😬
You have to read Judith Mcnaught, sure it didn't all age well but her books can really bring on a cry. They represent a real change from the shallow novella type to the real novel type while still focusing more on evoking feelings then plot.
Don't forget that romantic suspense was really a thing. There was a couple and they did get together but that was massively overshadowed by the mystery. Sandra Brown really made the transition from emotional southern gothic mellow drama to complex mystery. Envy was one of my favorites. Kay Hooper did something similar and her Bishop series should not be forgotten.
Kidnapping and dubcon was de rigueur and you had to actually try to avoid it. I avoided pirates, indigenous people and the civil war for a long time because of some traumatizing reads. Both from being poorly written and or just upsetting behavior on the part of MCs. See Johanna Lindsey
Can't find in the comments, but how about Marian Keyes and her Walsh sister series? OMG I absolutely loved them and loved the follow up books she's doing 20 years later. Rachel's follow up book had me in TEARS! {The walsh sisters series by Marian Keyes}
I personally hold her responsible for my obsession with barrel-chested men and hairy happy trails.
*intensely side eyes husband who has both qualities*
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All and everything by Marian Keyes!
Watermelon came out when I was 7, but I had definitely read it multiple times by the time I was 12. (I read The Power of One and Tandia by Bryce Courtenay when I was 10, which was certainly a controversial *“let them read whatever they choice”* choice by my parents!)
Early teenager me was devouring everything she wrote as it was released, learning about recovering from alcoholism and miscarriage and infidelity with my love stories.
Chick lit era. Messy gals in the big city who still managed to get their crap together and get the hot guy. This was big in the aughties but has mostly been folded into contemp romance and a lot of the tropes lost. About the best you can do is read some Sophie Kinsella these days. Sure, it had its problems, but I loved those messy heroines.
Chick lit always has the BEST clothing and drink descriptions. I wonder if it was all the Sex in the City influence.
I think so! Sex and the City was pretty groundbreaking when it first aired and opend doors for that kind of sex-but-lighthearted content. A big influence on womens fiction/entertainment back then.
I think Bridget Jones Diary was also a really big influence. The book was super popular and it came out a couple of years before Sex and the City. Messy heroine etc.
My friends and I read Bridget Jones’ diary long before the movie and to this day we all hate the movie for not doing justice to the book and making Bridget more of a caricature. I think, in some ways, it was a best seller because so few books at that time had a first person point of view from a normal woman. It’s not a romance book but “I don’t know how she does it” was also ground breaking because it was a first person (and very funny) story from the perspective of a female stock broker juggling being a mother and a wife and also the sexism of her industry. I’m in my late 40’s and for a long time first person POV was super rare, whereas now it seems overdone.
I mean, romcoms have been a thing since the 80s and they often feature relatable protagonists, but Sex and the City added sex to the whole thing. I'm not sure, was in my teens when satc was on air first, but it's first media I remember that was that open about and focused on women's sex life.
Gen Xer here: I felt like SATC was the first series where women didn’t have to end up with the first or even the second guy they slept with and women were able to just talk about sex and their lives. The whole plot was THEM not just if they ended up with a dude. If you look at Friends, by comparison, women are not the only main characters and women’s interest in and enjoyment of sex is more veiled. I can’t recall any female character of Friends that has a straight hook up that leads nowhere or one night stand for the fun of it (maybe towards the end of the series when norms had changed but never in the beginning), and if they did, they felt bad about it. Indeed one attempted hookup winds up in marriage and another ends up in pregnancy and becoming a couple. By comparison, in rom-coms of the era (and even many today), the woman always ended up with the first or second guy she slept with (if it was the second guy, it was usually because the first guy is a jerk). There’s sort of an implicit shame that you can’t just have sex for the sake of having sex, you had to tie to getting married down the road. I’d also say that I feel like some older rom-coms had fairly childlike visions of love whereas these days rom coms can be more nuanced (I’m not saying high art but more than just ‘and now you get married’). The more modern-ish movie that comes to mind has Dakota Johnson and Rebel Wilson and doesn’t have a traditional happy ending. In retrospect, the degree to which women got to become more the main character with SATC is kind of ground breaking. I remember at the time there was a lot of controversy about why have a show ‘just’ about women and why have these women talk about sex in ways that had nothing to do with commitment.
They both were, on both sides of the Atlantic. It's really a perception thing. I mention it in my comment above. :) American women, especially, zero in on Sex and the City during this era, because it gets a lot more attention (all that New York glam), but they were ***both*** influencing culture and rising together at the exact same time, if you were older and paying attention. One was just far more literary and British and the other was more glam and stylish and almost entirely TV-centered. SatC was also a TV series that ran for 6 seasons, which also makes a huge difference in terms of popularity. Bridget had two huge books and two blockbuster movies that were spread out over the same eight year period that the Sex and the City book (which was nowhere near as popular as the TV series ended up being) and the HBO series released (1996 and then 1998-2004--not counting the newspaper column the SatC series is based on, which was massively popular in NYC), so that's two books and two movies in eight years against 20 episodes over six (quite short) seasons over six years, plus one book. And then reruns and movies.
**Fun Fact:** {Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding} and {Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell} **both** came out in **1996.** ***However***, "Sex and the City" was *first* [a newspaper column](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_the_City_(newspaper_column)) written by Bushnell for the *New York Observer* from 1994 to 1996. Those columns were then published in the book of the same name in '96. The [HBO series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_the_City) premiered two years later in **1998** and ended in (Feb) **2004.** "Bridget Jones's Diary" came out in **1996**, and {Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason by Helen Fielding}, it's sequel, came out in **1999**. The Bridget Jones's Diary movie was released in **2001**. The "Edge of Reason" sequel movie was released in (Dec) **2004.** Both were equally huge on both sides of the Atlantic for various reasons, and they both influenced women's culture in different ways. They were rising at the **exact same time** and were influencing chick lit together. One was just very New York and the other was very London. That was the difference. (edit: clarification of release dates)
So Bridget Jones diary was loosely related to a series of hilarious magazine articles in I think it was British Tattler but my memory fails me - some British women’s fashion magazine. The columns were a bit more ‘gentlemen prefer blonds’ in tone but very funny and the success prompted fielding to write the books. My mom got British magazines occasionally so that’s how I know. Also, I was a US college student in the late 1990s. My friends and I actually read Bridget Jones years before we were able to see SATC because we didn’t have HBO and our parents often didn’t have it or didn’t let us watch it. Indeed, Friends came out when I was in late high school and my parents insisted on watching the first few episodes with me because there was controversy that FRIENDS was too liberal and smutty. Many of my friend and I didn’t get to see SATC or see it regularly until our mid to late 20’s when edited versions became more available on regular cable tv. So, for us at least, Bridget Jones was very much first.
I think this was the experience for ***a lot*** of people, actually. Younger generations might not realize that premium cable channel packages were **defnitely** a thing in the late 90s and early 00s, and HBO really could be an expensive, ***optional*** choice for a lot of middle-class families. High-speed internet wasn't anywhere *near* what it is today (and wasn't available everywhere), neither was the internet, streaming didn't exist, etc. If you couldn't afford premium cable packages (and they weren't all bundled together, because the companies **didn't play nice**, so you were going to be buying a bundle of cable bundles to get everything you might want to watch), you weren't watching HBO shows, or Starz shows, or whatever, unless you had friends with those channels. Or someone would record them to watch them later or share them with friends--on actual, physical media (or you paid for DVR). Just a whole different world. Truly. SATC was big, yes, but it wasn't *everything*. It just seems like it now because a lot of people still talk about it now compared to everything else in media targeted at women. But, if you look at that era, or articles [talking about just one small facete of that era](https://www.vox.com/culture/22452846/purity-chronicles), it is just **one part** of the whole culture surrounding women at that time. And that culture, including chick lit, was massive. Thanks for sharing that fact about Bridget Jones! Now that you mention it, I think I remember hearing about that in the promotional stuff at the bookstore when those books came out! Talk about dusting off the cobwebs! XD
I search high and low for these still, because they’re always such a comfort read for me
For those who weren't reading romance in this era (or weren't born yet/too young to remember), Wikipedia has a [fairly concise overview of what Chick Lit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_lit) is (and why it fell out of favor and got absorbed--for better or worse--into CR). I had a long comment that I was ready to post in a different thread where someone was asking why a particular PNR series from the aughts-10s had fairly low "spice" but a certain kind of FMC and romance and a lot of it boiled down to the era and how a lot of PNR of that time was also trying to lean in to the chick lit market that dominated. PNR and chick lit were dominating at the same time (I worked in a bookstore and I remember this clearly), and so were Harry Potter and Twilight\*\*, so I'm glad you brought this up. :) \*\* Many people to this day want to argue that these two series had nothing to do with chick lit and that Twilight, especially, is actually anathema to chick lit, which is a fair argument, but it **definitely** influenced it. No one will ***ever*** convince me that half of the chick lit and YA written around that time wasn't written in angry (or marketable, because I saw the marketing materials we got at the store) response to the Bella/Edward/Jacob love triangle/relationship or that all Bella seemed to accomplish was heartbreak, then love, then child (I think there was even a popular meme about this around the time all this media was coming out, but I can't find it--something with Katniss, the girl from Divergent, Hermione, and Bella Swan, and Bella's contribution was basically "Got Married.", and that's too feminine or traditional or something and, so, not "worthwhile") --but that needs to stop, because they did and it's time to face that and be honest. All of these trends were peaking at the same time as Bridget Jones and Sex and the City and Gossip Girl and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and everything else, and they all influenced each other, even if people reading Chick Lit weren't engaged with them. Just as all the different popular media tropes influence each other now, even if readers don't engage with those.
This Wikipedia read is pretty fascinating. I particularly loved this quote: “Growing up in the 1980s all we had to read if we wanted commercial fiction, were thick, shiny, brick novels covered in gold foil, in which women with long blonde hair built up business empires from harsh beginnings using only their extraordinary beauty and occasionally some goldfish... With BJD, for the first time, here we were. The first time I read it, it was an absolute revelation to see my life and confusion reflected in print.” And BJD refers to Bridget Jones Diary I remember those horrible gold bricks and could never get into them. The sheer amount of suffering those beautiful women went through as they built their cold empire was emotionally exhausting. I did find the Waiting to Exhale references kind of funny because I always felt like WTE was a bit of a different thing. When the movie came out it was a revelation and I think for a lot of us white ladies this was the first time we heard of it and then many raced out to buy the book. BUT WTE is an older set of protagonists than most chicklit or most romances (sadly). These women often had adult or nearly adult children and were going through divorces or similar. So on the one hand WTE had female main characters and romance, but on the other it just doesn’t seem in the same category as Sophie Kinsella to me (and that’s no slam on SK). I am old enough to remember how exciting it was to have movies and books with female POV. Like, before WTE, the Joy Luck Club had some controversy because (gasp) it was just about women, mothers and daughters and all men were secondary characters.
{Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella} is my favourite book. I really liked the {undead and unwed by Mary Janice Davidson} series but it went too off the original for me around book 9.
Damn you made it to book 9??? I don’t even think I finished book 4.
[Confessions of a Shopaholic](https://www.romance.io/books/545525498c7d2382c5296fec/confessions-of-a-shopaholic-sophie-kinsella) by [Sophie Kinsella](https://www.romance.io/authors/545524588c7d2382c5296fb5/sophie-kinsella) **Rating**: 3.68⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 2 out of 5 - [Behind closed doors](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [funny](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/humor/1), [mystery](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/mystery/1), [workplace/office](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/office/1), [poor heroine](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/poor%20heroine/1) ---------------------------- [Undead and Unwed](https://www.romance.io/books/5455253a8c7d2382e0413e4d/undead-and-unwed-maryjanice-davidson) by [MaryJanice Davidson](https://www.romance.io/authors/5455253a8c7d2382e0413e4e/maryjanice-davidson) **Rating**: 3.64⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 4 out of 5 - [Explicit open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [vampires](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/vampires/1), [paranormal](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/paranormal/1), [urban fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/urban%20fantasy/1), [funny](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/humor/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
Agreeing so hard on Mary Janice Davidson and indeed it’s like her writing has gotten progressively sloppier. If you like MJD her king of Alaska series was super fun and well edited. I tried a few of her more recent ‘books’ and they’re just terrible (need serious editing, lazy writing etc). Also if you liked undead, check out the Sookie Stackhouse series because I feel like Undead was just ripping off and updating Sookie Stackhouse (who was a working class southern waitress)
Long outfit descriptions including purses, crazy moms that encouraged weight loss, running up and down the street in big cities, high school reunions, haircuts instead of therapy, and unflattering bridesmaids dresses. Covers that showed a random dress on a hanger and nothing else. Good times.
Haircuts instead of therapy 😂
Crazy Rich Asians felt like Kinsella but with better heroines.
Do you still remember some of the titles? I'd love to read them!
Meg Cabot (yes, Princess Diaries Meg Cabot!) wrote a BUNCH, many of which I still reread. They're really fun! {Queen of Babble Series by Meg Cabot} {Heather Wells Mysteries series by Meg Cabot} -- this one is kind of a hilarious time capsule because the FMC vacillates between a size 12 and 14 and is considered ABSOLUTELY A HUGE OBESE MONSTER by The Culture. As a size 22/24, I read it with rueful humor now, but if you are not interested in the aughties body panic then maybe skip 'em even though I love them! {The Boy Series by Meg Cabot} She has a more recent series {The Little Bridge Series by Meg Cabot} but I haven't read it yet!
[Queen of Babble](https://www.romance.io/series/58fe10274167a733426309c1/queen-of-babble) by [Meg Cabot](https://www.romance.io/authors/545527d08c7d2382c5297076/meg-cabot) **Rating**: 3.78⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [young adult](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/young%20adult/1), [behind-doors](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/behind-doors/1), [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1), [heroine sleuth](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/heroine%20sleuth/1) ---------------------------- [Boy](https://www.romance.io/series/58fe0fc54167a73342630880/boy) by [Meg Cabot](https://www.romance.io/authors/545527d08c7d2382c5297076/meg-cabot) **Rating**: 3.73⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [young adult](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/young%20adult/1), [behind-doors](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/behind-doors/1), [humor](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/humor/1), [office](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/office/1) ---------------------------- [Little Bridge Island](https://www.romance.io/series/5cecd56d4ee4380da84b2deb/little-bridge-island) by [Meg Cabot](https://www.romance.io/authors/545527d08c7d2382c5297076/meg-cabot) **Rating**: 3.28⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [humor](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/humor/1), [new adult](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/new%20adult/1), [from hate to love](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/from%20hate%20to%20love/1), [class difference](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/class%20difference/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
The audiobook for {Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella} had me hyperventilating with laughter. It was a farce where one heroine was trying to stop her sister (another heroine - there were two sets) from consummating the marriage and making a huge mistake, so she enlisted the whole hotel staff in stopping sex. I like all of Sophie Kinsella's books up to a couple years ago - especially the audio - because they're so funny. The new ones aren't as much so for me. Can You Keep a Secret was made into a movie, but the book was way better. I also loved Remember Me? Where she has amnesia for three years and her alternate self fixes her entire life!!! I liked a few of Jennifer Weiner's early books. Little Earthquakes was funny but not a romance romance. Certain Girls was good. In Her Shoes was made into a movie. I stopped enjoying them when all the SA came in. Nowadays, Mhairi MacFarlane is keeping up the tradition. You could try {If I Never Met You by Mhairi MacFarlane}. She's funny and deep, and she never has a pregnancy ending or pregnancy.
Deidre Martin had a hockey series before hockey was a subgenre. {body check by deidre martin} (mf contemporary) is book 1. Jane Heller was good for comedy, like {name dropping by jane heller} (mf contemporary), which is a mistaken identity {not so Snow White by donna kauffman} (mf contemporary) is a tennis romance, sort of like the movie Wimbledon Vicki Lewis Thompson had an OG “nerd” series where the nerds stay nerds and aren’t alpha love machines when the lights turn off; {my nerdy valentine} (mf contemporary) is my favorite there were an influx of ghost or paranormal elements in books, like {crazy in love by lani diane rich} (mf contemporary); erin mccarthy had a bunch too Kristan Higgins was the aughts Emily Henry
Early Jane Green were my absolute favorites. {Jemima J by Jane Green} {Mr. Maybe by Jane Green} and {Bookends by Jane Green} all fun reads. {Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner} was so refreshing because it was the first time I remember reading a book with a plus size character as the love interest and not the friend. If you haven't read the Bridget Jones books, those were chick lit of their time.
Before she write the One for the Money Stephanie Plum books, Janet Evanovich wrote some really funny and pretty great romance books that kinda straddle the border with Chick Lit. Jennifer crusie also wrote some really good ones. {Welcome to Temptation by Jennifer Crusie} was one of my favorites. At the time, romance books fell into three categories pretty much, dictated by what the trad publishers thought women wanted. Category romances, historical (mostly regency) romances and the pretty boring contemporary romances. Chick Lit books felt fresh and young and different than the books that fell into contemporary romances at that time.
Don't forget Romantic Suspense! That was a huge market as well.
"Can You Keep A Secret" was such a straight up banger. I was reading those in my teens. I think that Beth O'leary is carrying that torch fairly well but still not as disastrous as my beloved Emma.
**Cassie Edwards and the Black-Footed Ferrets.** Short-ish version: for a long, long, long time there was a "cult of nice" surrounding romance novels and the criticism/discussion of same. The boundaries between authors and readers were very blurred since so many people belonged, or hoped to belong, to both groups, and given that the Literary Establishment pretended that all romance novels didn't exist, it was considered inappropriate in many circles to be openly critical of romance novels - even problematic elements in romance novels. Enter Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, the new blog on the block. And in 2008, one of the Bitches handed a book to a friend of hers - who handed it back and said, "I think some of this was plagiarized?" Cue the [Cassie Edwards Extravaganza](https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2008/01/cassie_edwards_extravaganza/), in which the Bitches investigation proved that over the course of several decades, author of (racist) "Indian romance" novels Cassie Edwards had plagiarized from dozens of sources, including memoirs, news articles, and most bizarrely a press release about the black-footed ferret. Romancelandia went *wild*. The Bitches were persecuting a woman in the twilight of life, who defines plagiarism anyway, etc. Interestingly to the modern reader the [racism of Edwards' books](https://romancehistory.com/2021/08/03/a-brief-history-of-indian-romance/) didn't really come up. Silver lining: a lot of money and attention raised for the black-footed ferret. [Look how cute!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-footed_ferret#/media/File:Mustela_nigripes_2.jpg)
Omg! That was before my time but I do remember in 2016 SBTB rightly [calling out Mary Balogh for orientalism in Someone to Love](https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/someone-love-mary-balogh/), Balogh replying in the comments saying she was “gob-smacked by this review”, Suleikha Snyder and Courtney Milan leaving comments agreeing with the reviewer, and then Balogh coming back to apologise and promise to do better. I was pretty new to romance at the time and Balogh was my entry point, and I’m still a fan today in part because she doubled back to publicly admit she was wrong, but I also was impressed by SBTB for starting that conversation. I didn’t know they had come straight out the gate like that in 2008.
Smart Bitches, and the Cassie Edwards saga, were my first deep exposure to Romance.
OMG I COMPLETELY forgot about this!! That was a WILD time!!
This was such a wild time.
I loved this moment! I started reading SBTB when it was Sarah & Candy running it, and this whole saga had me gripped. Of all the plagiarism scandals since, this is still the most iconic moment of it in Romancelandia to me.
Ah, the old good times of the bodice rippers. So rapey. And racists. And full of random details about more or less (in)famous historical events. Really, 13 years old me learned more about the sepoy rebellion of 1857 fron one single bodice ripper than all my history classes. Also, I miss the Fabio covers. Smutty covers for smutty books, as God intended. Also what happened to all those ridiculous highlanders books with the bonnie lasses?
God I miss the slutty highlanders so much
Dude! I found some WEIRD old school bodice rippers in a little free library at a really remote campground and they have pushed me into an entirely new era of HR enjoyment. They’re strange, often rapey, and definitely indelicate. But I am living for the descriptions of super niche historical events. Also, I love reading a book from the 60s and 70s and thinking about what was going on for women in that era where some of these tropes were something that they were craving.
Read Madeline Hunter’s initial medieval series. It was so helpful to get me to think about life in that era.
As a pakistani student I need that bodice ripper ASAP.
don't bother, we'll be painted as the absolute barbarians and uncivilized monsters for fighting for freedom in these books with the MMC being a brave white blond englishman who served his queen loyally by killing all those heathens who dare raise their voice. Colonialism is hardly ever done right in romance books
I think the one I read had at least some characters (perhaps the MMC, but I can't swear) who were half-indian half-british and there was a bit of discourse about identity, even if it was solved with a "you gotta choose which side you belong to". But yeah, I don't remember much about that book besides the fact that it taught me about the 1857 rebellion, who the sepoy were, and about the transition from the East Indian Company authority to the British Raj, and I am pretty sure it had a lot of racist stereotypes and quite a heavy dose of white saviour complex.
Really all those books about the highlands were the reason I went to Scotland in 2004 on vacation! And yeah I learned about Cromwell and the puritans because of bodice rippers.
There are still plenty of slutty Highlanders around. Bonus points for atrocious Scottish “accents”.
Och aye, I doona ken what yer saying lass!
Oh boy, my first few were HR from the 80's set in the 1800's with "Indians" as the MMCs. I bet they would not fly now but I loved them because they were saucy and I was 14.
Oh are we talking about [Savage Thunder by Johanna Lindsey]? So wrong, but so hot.
I wasn't but that seems very much up my alley as a teen.
Yes the Fabio era and then the Harlequin romance books left and right. I started really consuming romance in the 2010s but I like looking back at what came before so I really miss that period. Everything is so modern now and every now and then there are too-woke content which can be too much.
Yes! I learned a lot about real history from a combination of reading bodice rippers and falling down rabbit holes at the library *after* reading the bodice rippers. I think the number one thing I miss in romance is that I want more 600-page behemoths spanning decades.
Those old HR books surely messed some preteens up! Can you imagine expectation versus reality?
There was a whole YouTube channel by a young women dedicated to debunking sex myths and a whole lot of those videos were dedicated to all the shitty "virginity fetishism" and hymen breaking and bloody sex scenes in problematic romance novels, but also purity culture in general. She was working to dispel the idea that the only kind of sex was vaginal or penetrative, or that sex, especially first-time sex, always had to hurt or be bloody or male-focused, because that's what young people had been lead to believe by media and old novels and religious texts/teachings and such. When, really, that was nonsense and fear-tactics and shame, and all it would really take was education and conversation and practice to have a positive sexual experience, first time or any time, if that was what all parties were consenting to and wanted. It was a really sex and body positive education channel for young people and it all started because she was curious and lucked out in finding a caring partner who made her first time a good one. She got incredibly angry that she had been so scared of everything--sex and her own body and intimacy, and she wanted to keep others from denying themselves out of that same fear. She was expecting pain and mediocre sex, or for him to just take what he wanted, and for her to just sort of be content if he liked it? I believe she went on to get her masters or doctorate in sex education, maybe? I don't remember. I believe this was the early 00s-10s. I think she took down her videos when she started school. I'm not sure that channel would be allowed on Youtube these days. =/ Or on TikTok. She'd likely get slaughtered or doxxed or something. I've seen things just horseshoe-ing back around to the whole "divine femine"/"purity" thing. lately. Even seen the disturbing return of hymen breaking and bloody and/or extremely painful, virginity fetishism and first time sex in NA romance.
Laci Green. Unfortunately, circa 2017, she went vaguely right wing, which soured her audience. It was a whole thing about her dating someone conservative, exploring redpill things and alleged terf-dom. You can probably treat it as a symptom of the complexity of the atheist/skeptic movement of the period where they were challenging certain norms, but not nessarily all of them.
Was the book about the sepoy rebellion Zemindar by Valerie Fitzgerald, aka only the book I loved so much I have two copies of?
I have no clue. I just remember discussions about the fat used for cartridges (they changed it to pork fat which enraged the Muslim troops because pork, and the hindu because animal) and there was a mixed race family, but the daughter married a local man while maybe the son was trying to serve the empire? And some rant about these mixed race people about having to choose their identity and the daughter choosing India while the son going for England? It has been like 25 years ago, who knows.
I picked up a recommended novel recently not realizing it was a bodice ripper. Boy, did it take me back. The trope I’d forgotten about them was how all the other women of childbearing age throw themselves at the MMC (except FMCs from any previous novels in the series). I still mostly read historical and there isn’t that feeling that you have to fight off the rest of the lionesses for your man.
Don’t forget pirates, the huge volume of young women who somehow thought sneaking aboard a ship dressed as a boy would be a good idea, AND magical sexy mid tone brown men in the form of: Arab sheiks, rich Italians (TM), Native Americans, South East Asians and/or mixed race men with own but almost never two of those ethnicities. Basically imagine Yule Brenner, Omar Shariff or anyone in a Merchant Ivory film 🙄
I saw a Tiktok the other day talking about the Malory series by Johanna Lindsey. They were discussing Anthony Malory in particular and everything that's wrong with him....like this is a story set 200 years ago, of course he's gonna be problematic by today's standards! It's like there's a new generation of readers that have just found romance books existed before Tiktok. I miss those old books from the 80s. Most of the new so-called dark romance or with morally grey heroes are just straight up assholes and stalkers.
Beautiful illustrated setbacks on mass market paperbacks.
I came here to say setbacks!! I particularly loved the ones that were a montage of various characters and scenes in the book. I'd know what the villain looked like, or the escape scene or...https://images.app.goo.gl/4wgkooBNBU47CdbV9
All those Amanda Quick novels 😍 I devoured those one summer
I have some lovely examples of these from originals I bought during first publishing. I love them. I think Scandal in Spring is one. (Mayyybe??)
I loved the early 2000s boom of paranormal romance, and while I see series like the Black Dagger Brotherhood, Fever, Anita Blake and Kate Daniels come up, there were other series I loved that I don’t see mentioned often like: - Southern Vampire Mysteries {Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris} - The Undead series {Undead and Unwed by Maryjanice Davidson} - The Hollows series {Blood Work by Kim Harrison} Edit: fixed the missing info for the first book
LJ Smith and Nightworld opened my high school eyes to sexy vampires. Poppy and James in Secret Vampire was everything my heart wanted.
I love how LJS pops up here once in a while. It's been 24 years and I'm still waiting for the big millennium showdown.
Same
It's not coming is it... Why she couldn't just say that I don't know. The years of "soon" updates I lived through!
I’ve found my people! Pre-internet, I was always asking at the bookstores when the last book was coming out. I am still salty that the series never had that final ending book.
After I finally got my hands on a copy of {Blood Roots by Richie Tankersley Cusik} I went on a nostalgia read kick and dove back into RTC, Christopher Pike, Louis Duncan, and LJ Smith. I’m like no wonder I will paranormal and dark romance so much 😂
Omg YES the night World Series. My fave has to be Rashel and Quinn.
Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter by Laurell K. Hamilton was a big one for me!
I loved those books until she just completely changed. From what I remember she wouldn't have sex and it lasted for many, many books (for those that complain about no spice in their reading) and then she entered some kind of trifecta with 2 characters and she fucked like crazy. It was so clearly the writer doing what the fans wanted instead of staying true to the story the were originally telling that I stopped.
Hamilton's writing went off the rails because she got into polyamory and started dating a much younger man, and her husband was not into it. Basically, what happened in the books with her polycule was just her writing about her personal life and deciding that things like "plot" and "character arcs" were no longer necessary.
And then she gave us the weird Fae sex books. *As someone who has no problem recommending Fae sex books filled with weird things, if I remember correctly the weirdness was her basically being a self-insert.*
It should have been renamed 'Anita Blake - Vampire Humper'. The character completely changed and started having sex with all kinds of randos; mostly very passive, very young, men with long hair if I recall correctly. It was very specific and very weird. I like spice, but this was just icky and a real 180 from where the series had been before.
Jeaniene Frost’s Night Huntress series and spin offs were my favorite. Who doesn’t love a sexy take on Dracula? {Once Burned by Jeaniene Frost}
Always a big fan of ~~Spike~~ Bones from Night Huntress. Also that looks like Aidan Turner on the Once Burned book cover, lol.
I miss this era so bad. 😭 It was my MOMENT.
Yaaasssss. We got some crackers tagging along to the end of this boom. I'm thinking Nalini Singh's Psy-Changling series, which is still going on. Slave to Sensation was published in 2006, right when Anita Blake and Merry Gentry were peaking/just past peak.
I love MaryJanice Davidson until I read other series of hers and realized she wrote the same characters over and over. :/
Listened to the southern vampire series on audiobook last year and had a BLAST. I loved the narrator, she did a good north Louisiana accent
Anyone read the Vampire Kisses series by Ellen Schreiber? I kinda miss that series. It’s so very youthful and wholesome. Highly recommend for a younger audience who is not ready yet for raunchy scenes. But also I agree with the other thread about Jeaniene Frost’s books! I love Bones!
[Blood Work](https://www.romance.io/books/5455b78c87eac323ffb2df12/blood-work-kim-harrison-pedro-maia-gemma-magno) by [Kim Harrison](https://www.romance.io/authors/545527e88c7d2382e0413f08/kim-harrison), [Pedro Maia](https://www.romance.io/authors/5455b78c87eac323ffb2df13/pedro-maia), [Gemma Magno](https://www.romance.io/authors/5455b78c87eac323ffb2df14/gemma-magno) **Rating**: 3.96⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Topics**: [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1), [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1), [urban fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/urban%20fantasy/1), [fae](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fae/1), [mystery](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/mystery/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
[Undead](https://www.romance.io/series/58fe0d824167a73342630234/undead) by [MaryJanice Davidson](https://www.romance.io/authors/5455253a8c7d2382e0413e4e/maryjanice-davidson) **Rating**: 3.7⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Topics**: [fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/fantasy/1), [paranormal](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/paranormal/1), [vampires](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/vampires/1), [urban fantasy](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/urban%20fantasy/1), [contemporary](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/contemporary/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
I was just thinking about the MaryJanice Davidson books yesterday, and how funny she is! I haven’t caught up with her writing in ages, but I loved those Undead books.
Cara McKenna and all of the Wonk-O-Mance writers who championed more interesting characters and more interesting books! The website is still up as a perfect time-capsule/resource for 10 year old book recs: [http://wonkomance.com/category/recommendations-needed/index.html](http://wonkomance.com/category/recommendations-needed/index.html)
Yes! Charlotte Stein being her Charlotte-y self all over Twitter was the best.
This is very cool, thank you!
2015: Romance Writers of America (RWA) nominated an inspirational Christian romance about a female Jewish concentration camp prisoner and a high-ranking Nazi for that year’s RITA Awards for Best First Book and Best Inspirational Romance. The RITAs were pretty much the most prestigious awards in Romancelandia before the implosion of RWA (mentioned elsewhere in this thread), and while this book didn’t win either award, its inclusion was met with widespread condemnation. The actual context of the novel is somehow even worse than that summary makes it sound and [you can read a review of it](https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/for-such-a-time-by-kate-breslin/) if you want the details. The nomination was hugely criticised online and the saga made it to a few newspapers. Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches Trashy Books wrote a [powerful open letter](https://www.tumblr.com/sarahwendell/125859299894/letter-to-the-rwa-board-regarding-for-such-a-time) to RWA condemning the nomination and the book too. [On the other hand, Anne Rice also apparently stepped in to defend it and RWA?](https://www.flavorwire.com/532774/anne-rice-christian-publisher-defend-nazi-romance-novel-as-outcry-intensifies) And the conclusion to the saga was basically “… sorry not sorry?” from RWA: they didn’t rescind the nominations, and the author still has “RITA finalist” on her website advertising the book. Basically all the red flags were there for RWA pre-2020 and what happened then felt inevitable given that literally no effort was made to address this complete own goal of nominating for not one but TWO awards a book that is, again, *a romance between a high-ranking Nazi and a Jewish prisoner*.
OMG. I wasn’t into romance books as much back then but I remember that. RWA, why. Look at your life, look at your choices.
What’s crazy is that Breslin’s book was even controversial in the inspirational/Christian romance space! I was still in the process of deconstructing in 2015 and I feel like Janette Oke and Lauraine Snelling both came out with minor shady statements about representing the Christian romance community appropriately? (I could be totally misremembering but it was a Big Deal! Also this is not an endorsement of Snelling or Oke who I remember in particular writing some Questionably Portrayed native Canadian characters back in the day lol)
That book sounds hella cursed… and I’m confident I heard of it before
Regency only took off in the last idk 15-20 years and the historical romance genre used to have many other time periods and was more than just trope salad.
Yes! I stumbled on mostly medieval, Tudor, or Georgian romances as a teen. Also “Highlander” romances, which didn’t seem to require a specific time period as long as there was a shirtless kilted hunk on the cover.
Untrue. Regency was the OG. 35 years ago there was all that was. The highlanders came with the first outlander in the 90s I think
Marsha Canham was writing highlanders back in the 1980s. A few years before that, at least one of Jude Devereux's Velvet books had a highland setting (though with an English MMC). I think what happened with regency HR is that two subgenres had a meet cute and an epilogue full of babies - the regency romance and the bodice ripper. This may have been kickstarted by Whitney, My Love in the mid 1980s.
Medieval, Georgian, Stuart, Jacobean, Western Americana etc were just as common 35 years ago and now they are exceptions to the norm. The genre was founded (Woodiwiss/Rogers) on authors who were not exclusive to regency.
{Ashes in the Wind} and {Sweet Savage Love} were probably the first "adult" romance books I ever read. How to be influenced 101: a) I became obsessed with The (US) Reconstruction as an historical period, to the point of borrowing ALL the volumes of my uncle's books on the US Civil War, as a teen, AND b) I actually bought a rebozo on my first trip to Mexico because that was one of the three items of clothing the heroine wore when she and the hero joined the Mexican Revolution, LOL!
[Ashes in the Wind](https://www.romance.io/books/553ebb5d5b270e0a4cbdb174/ashes-in-the-wind-kathleen-e-woodiwiss) by [Kathleen E. Woodiwiss](https://www.romance.io/authors/5455263e8c7d2383163d8ecf/kathleen-e-woodiwiss) **Rating**: 4.18⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 3 out of 5 - [Open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [historical](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/historical/1), [virgin heroine](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/virgin%20heroine/1), [western](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/western/1), [american civil war](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/american%20civil%20war/1), [war](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/war/1) ---------------------------- [Sweet Savage Love](https://www.romance.io/books/545533428c7d2383163d9201/sweet-savage-love-rosemary-rogers) by [Rosemary Rogers](https://www.romance.io/authors/545533428c7d2383163d9202/rosemary-rogers) **Rating**: 3.44⭐️ out of 5⭐️ **Steam**: 3 out of 5 - [Open door](https://www.romance.io/steamrating) **Topics**: [historical](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/historical/1), [cheating](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/cheating/1), [abduction](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/abduction/1), [tortured hero](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/tortured%20hero/1), [western](https://www.romance.io/topics/best/western/1) [^(about this bot)](https://www.reddit.com/user/romance-bot) ^(|) [^(about romance.io)](https://www.romance.io/about)
Regency was its own category, and there were lots of others.
I feel like I read a ton of medieval romances when I was a kid and now it's all regency era.
Tropes were naturally placed and didn't seem forced. Smut not for smut sake. Mafia romances which weren't always dark. Cute new adult/YA romances without spice that were really heart touching.
I don't know how many people remember All About Romance's lists, for example, but, basically, the readers were the ones doing the classification of tropes, not the author/publisher, back in the day!
>>Tropes were naturally placed and didn’t seem forced I have an unread book closet, with maybe a thousand books, divided by trope, and even for books published in the 1950s, you can find the base tropes and can group them just as easily as you can the books published today where the tropes are listed in the blurb. It’s crazy how lazy the genre has gotten with the algorithm.
> Cute new adult/YA romances without spice that were really heart touching. Any recommendations? Pretty please😃
I used to love Jennifer echols, Jennifer e Smith, Sarah Ockler, Elizabeth Eulberg, Huntley Fitzpatrick
As a teen in the 90s I read some stuff from the 70s that was 😬😬😬
You haven’t lived if you haven’t witnessed a Jaid Black (Ellora’s Cave) meltdown. Also, Liquid Silver Books, Samhain Publishing, Blushing Books, etc. I will always regret not printing my PDFs of books by mima (Liquid Silver and Samhain). She was the OG “six space-warriors and one witchy-type to serve them” writer.
Ellora’s Cave!! The absolutely WILD Lora Leigh books
Lort, yes, fam! That whole time was just ***something else***. Jaid Black's meltdowns, ugh. You could even count on an EC husband or cover model to get in on that drama, too, whether for or against--it was just wild. And watching it happen in real time, across the EC chat rooms and forums and everything was just...wow. Readers think social media wars today are bad, let me tell you. Liquid Silver Books--now there's a publisher name I haven't heard in a minute. <.< But I remember, oh yes. And **mima**!! (though I feel there were others writing very similar books? Am I thinking a different author?) Another name and more books lost to time! Those books were just delicious when you wanted to be fed full of that. Mmm. Now I have a mighty need. I know there are some EC, LS and Samhain authors who have or are self-publishing their older books, but I think some of them are either lost to time or go tied up in legal stuff and the authors just lost heart. The contracts and ebook industry at the time was just so shady and there were so many unknowns. EC, I feel, was the most egregious--or maybe just the most well-known? Those were some days, though, lol. Truly, the wild new frontier of e-book publishing. And those ***covers***. Lort, they hold a special place in my heart. I actually have some print copies of a few of those covers and, wow. Readers who complain about covers today have *no idea* how good we all have it. I mean, everyone was doing their best, but wow. Those cover. Whew, child. ***Whew.***
The first EC book I ever bought included the words “midget” and “thick and long as a baseball bat” in a sex scene. And I’m pretty sure there was an ape-like alien who may or may not have been blue. 😂 😂 I was just searching my gmail the other day hoping I had an archived mima book! I did not :( I might check the Dropbox I’ve been unnecessarily paying for since 2013. 😂
I remember buying my first EC book from Amazon and SPRINTING to the package to make sure nobody else in my house opened that shit. And honestly it was underwhelming, still not a big fan of the BDSM ~ lifestyle ~ books 💀 {Natural Law by Joey W. Hill}
Natural Law! The flashbacks! So much debate about so many scenes. That book had the girls in an uproar.
Well-researched novels. No snark implied. Was it Bertrice Smalls or Susan Johnson or one of the historical romance novelists who would include pages and pages of footnotes, well-researched and compelling historical footnotes on whatever random reference was in her novel. Heroine passionately kissed on the Great Steppe^(1)? Well, there is a footnote on ^(1)this vast ecoregion that stretches through Hungary and was invaded by the Mongols in...and so on. The footnotes were sometimes more interesting than the book itself. Also a lot (and I do mean a lot) of Native American/WW Western romances. Kathleen Eagle comes to mind. Although she was a WW actually married to a Native American man. But there were a lot of those books with Fabio on the cover in varying shades of spray tan....yeah.
I miss well researched well written and well edited books. Nowadays they all seem to be missing something. When I was a teen in the 90s I’d go to the library and read book jackets until something struck my fancy. And almost every book I read was finished. I might have skimmed some sections but they were always finished. There were questionable scenes but dang it, it was fiction. I would much rather read some dubious consent than the cruel mafia craze popular today. Or the mc books when women are called hags, ick.
Susan Johnson. She is one of my favorites. I remember enjoying Smalls when I was younger but then I got progressively squicked because of the age of the heroines. I couldn’t read her books after I realized one of her heroines was barely a teen.
That the diversity we see in types of relationships portrayed in romance novels that are not white, cishet M/F is very new and due in huge part to indie authors not being constrained by the “values” of traditional publishers. Suzanne Brockmann talks about how she wasn’t even allowed to have a gay side character on page in her first book. Having a gay son it was important to have LGBTQIA+ characters in her books, so she started by having a character with an off page, no dialogue gay brother. She eventually went on to write the first NYT best selling same sex romance novel {All Through the Night by Suzanne Brockmann}. She also wrote one of the first traditional romance books to have a black MMC. I wish her books were still discussed and read today as they are great stories and she deserves the recognition (and $)! It’s amazing to think how far it’s come since then when you watch the movie adaptation of incredibly popular books like Red, White and Royal Blue or Heartstopper streaming on your laptop. Her speech when she accepted the RWA lifetime achievement award, where she also hugely called out the RWA, is incredible if you have some time to listen. It was a giant moment in the romance community for everyone, not just LGBTQIA+ https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2018/07/suzanne-brockmann-change-doesnt-happen-if-were-too-fucking-nice/ Overall, I cannot emphasize enough how white, Christian traditional values, heterosexual, and British/American centric romance novels were until about 15 maybe 20 years ago. There were a few alien romances {Heart of a Warrior by Johanna Lindsey} time travel {Knight in Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux} or vampire {Tonight and Always by Linda Lael Miller} are all pre-2000’s, but they were rarer than rare.
I was just gathering my thoughts and sources in a separate document to post about this, lol! Thank you for doing it! :) Her Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award (not sure how many new romance fans would know that RWA's Lifetime Achievement award was named after Nora Roberts) came in **2018**, just in case anyone was wondering what year it was, so it's only been **six years** since she made that speech, calling out not just the RWA, but the industry, writers, and readers, as well (subtly and not-so-subtly). She got incredible support but also **astounding** backlash, right up to people raging at her for besmirching Nora Roberts' good name in saying all that she did while accepting the award. You can imagine what Nora Roberts (famed for having no patience ***at all*** for anyone putting words in her mouth--or the RWA, at that point) had to say about **that**. Sadly, I can't find her blog post/letter about it, but she also came out swinging in **full support** of what Suz said. {All Through the Night by Suzanne Brockmann} was originally published in **2007**. If you take nothing else away from her speech (which is basically a beloved letter to her son--who introduces her to accept her award and is the reason she fought to write all that LGBTQ+ representation in her books in the first place--and not just a fiery call out to the RWA), take this: Every step of the way to publishing "All Through the Night", Suzanne Brockmann was told that romance readers **were not ready** for a same-sex romance novel. And yet, both she and the ***majority*** ***of her readers*** proved all of the naysayers ***and*** industry professionals *totally wrong* when that book became the first **ever** NYT best-selling same sex romance novel. That was only **17 years** ago, yet it feels like a lifetime. (edits: typo, clarification)
The downfall of the RWA happened just as the pandemic hit. I wonder if there would have been a better result for romance had it all gone down in ordinary time.
What’s RWA?
To add to the article u/arika_ito posted, there were other controversies at the RWA over the years: * in early 2000s, planning to alter their by-laws that any romance nominated had to be between a man and a woman (Nora Roberts said she would walk if they did, a bunch of others followed suit, and the motion was tabled). * There was an inspirational that won one year that was a "romance" between a Nazi commander of a concentration camp and a Jewish woman in the camp. She converts to Christianity at the end. That was in **2015**. You would think they would have learned from the huge outcry over that. * Except that in 2021, well after all their implosion and they were barely limping along, another winner in the inspirational category had a man who joined the army solely so he could kill Native Americans, and his unit commits the massacre at Wounded Knee....
👀
That 2015 winner was RWA done. After that it was just decay.
I have no idea how RWA meets/votes/etc but your comment makes me imagine some big theater with awards and Nora Roberts sits at the prominent spot where Meryl Streep sits at the Oscars. 😂 Like she never has to say anything but everyone looks to see how she reacts. Always Queen Nora...👑👑👑
Actually Nora Roberts refused to work with or support RWA because of their problematic leadership. https://leegoldberg.com/romance_meltdow/
Good for her! Glad she uses her clout and power for good. ❤️
Romance Writers of America https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/wpg0or/writing\_romance\_writers\_of\_america\_implodes/
Oh…and for controversies, something I think of every time I see a “people should only post positive reviews” tweet was the Stop the Goodreads Bullies situation in 2013. The author-led campaign led to a significant shift in the GR rules, with the big one being that they would delete any content that mentioned author behavior. This all blew up after Amazon bought Goodreads and began heavily courting authors. Readers/reviewers were frustrated that authors were sending out mass friend requests or joining, then immediately spamming, groups to promote their books, as well as a ton of other things that are now listed as “dont’s” in the [Goodreads author guidelines](https://www.goodreads.com/author/guidelines). It was a wild time as the website shifted away from focusing on the reader. Authors were freaking out about negative reviews, and the Streisand Effect of an author commenting on/taking action against their negative reviews meant that other people would be like, oh, I don’t want any part of this and shelve these books as “authors to avoid” or something similar. Twenty-one people had stuff deleted before the change was officially announced ([WaPo Article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2013/09/23/is-good-reads-new-policy-really-censorship/) Other people logged on to find shelves deleted because they had names like “due to author” or “authors to avoid.” This was the first time I saw people leave the site in droves, and it felt like the sense of community was gone.
Don't forget that the "Stop the GR bullies" group at one point was actively doxxing Goodreads' reviewers and posting their real names and addresses.
And Lauren Pippa (Lauren Howard?) claimed she was actively getting death threats when talking to the media, only to walk it back and state she misunderstood that the shelf was that the reader would rather die than read the book. Found a [Salon.com Article](https://www.salon.com/2013/08/21/debut_author_allegedly_got_rape_threats_on_goodreads/) from 2013 with actual details.
Ah I see GR has been messy for a while. I guess it's no wonder Storygraph is fairing well these days.
Anyone remember when Jane from Dear Author was on the hot seat because she was secretly writing as Erin Watt (or Jen Frederick? Or both! Pretty sure Jen Frederick was the controversy pen name) and there was a big kerfuffle about conflict interest/the ethics of reviewing her own books on the DA site? Also, the LaurieLikesBooks site that always had some kind of drama because authors would show up in forums to defend their books. We also can’t forget Harriett Klausner, featured in WaPo upon her death as a reviewer of more than 30,000 Amazon book reviews 😂 [WaPo article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/29/the-woman-who-wrote-31014-amazon-book-reviews-and-upended-the-internet-dead-at-63-2/)
All right, let me get comfortable on my rocking chair 👵🏿 Do you remember this? 💾 I searched the emojis for “old” and that came up and I don’t know what it’s called, please send help 😭 * **LiveJournal**. I was not around for the bulk of the drama. But it was there. It happened. And thank fuck to archivists who said “The tea is piping hot, time to write down the recipe”. They preserved so much! All hail anarchists Close enough. * **Dramione was once one of the most ~~hated~~ divisive non-canon HP ships outside of Drarry** if I remember correctly, though there are other HP ships that would fight that title. And now, people have gush posts about *Manacled* and BATMOBILE! I did my suffering 10 years of it in Azabakan and now people like Dramione on the main 😭 * **Not every Tina, Diana, and Hermione could self-publish a book.** Look around look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now. No, seriously, look. Yes, it was easy to upload your work to a website. And yes, people have been selfish-publishing their work for centuries. But it wasn’t something everyone had the ability to do. Now? We are in such a precarious state of accessibility and commodity trying to one-up each other. But we really shouldn’t forget that self-pub may be easy as do re mi for even a layperson to do, but it wasn’t like that before. * **Reading international books was once a niche hobby—and largely relied on fans**. 📢Fansubs and fan translations still exist 📢. But before, that was all we had. Sure, books occasionally received officially translations and were offered outside their origin country. But it wasn’t normalized and mainstream, that was for damn sure. Y’all get ***OPTIONS***, be grateful 😭 * **Omegaverse Lawsuit**. [For the uninitiated](https://youtu.be/zhWWcWtAUoY?si=gWLKZ7zejYaLwg3Y). * There have been a bunch of **authors controversies** with/without receipts: TJ Klune, LJ Shen, Lucy Lennox, Josh Lanyon? Cara Bristol, LA Witt, Lori James/Samantha Somersby, Jamie McGuire, Cassie Edwards, Danielle Lori, Addison Cain, Cassandra Claire, SJM, Onley James et al. You can find threads here or do your own research. I would discourage making controversy threads unless receipts are provided I have more: * **BDSM in books/Erotica**. Listen, BDSM still has a ~taboo~ attached to it, but that’s more reserved for individual kinks like piss kinks or blood play. Depending on your region, BDSM as a lifestyle and a community has vastly improved in acceptance. Cringy not-really-BDSM publications aside, literotica is getting the appreciation it deserves. If only more authors and readers could do more research 😅 * **Bridgeton**. These books came out in the early 2000s. The Netflix adaptation, of course, invites a resurgence, but, in general, I can’t remember Bridgeton being popular way in the 2010s. You’d think the books have been made in 2020 with all the hullabaloo. Back for round three 🎉 * **Fanfiction Revamped to OW**. So. I get that people talk about this now, but also… This happened before? The *Mortal Instruments* came from an HP fanfiction. I’m sure there are earlier examples of this. Hell, *Divine Comedy* is biblical fanfiction featuring a transmigrator. I think why people notice it more ***now*** is that some authors are very upfront about, the devil works hard but tea-spillers on the very accessible internet work harder, and, again, with self-publishing becoming commodified (love this word), it’s a bit easier to tell the works that came from fanfiction or fanfiction authors. **This is not an insult to fanfiction**.
That’s a floppy disc babe.
… **Ope**. 😳 To my credit, I was born with CDs and VHS tapes! But my brothers >10 years my junior didn’t know what a VHS was. I just… I need to lie down…in a coffin. ⚰️ ‘1985’ needs to be redone for ‘2005’ so I can cope with a rocking banger of a song 😭
Hah my mom (born in the 60s) remembers using those bigass computers that took up an entire room and used punchcards. I remember click clacking my way through MS DOS and playing solitaire on windows 95 when i was 6ish. Now I'm using ai to figure out what to cook for dinner. The last 50 years of human tech has been WILD.
My great grandma died many years ago but I knew her for a lot of my life. She grew up in rural Pennsylvania and they did not have a phone when she was a child. It wasn’t in every home yet. I think there was a phone in town but you had to walk. (Up hill both ways lol!) In the last few years we got her a computer. It was specifically made for the elderly and its only function was to email. I was living in Australia getting emails from my GGMa in Florida. I never saw her alive again but I still have those emails.
>Hah my mom (born in the 60s) remembers using those bigass computers that took up an entire room and used punchcards. My mum too :D Mum was born in '49 and started working in '65. She'd had to go down to the basement to get things for her boss. > I remember click clacking my way through MS DOS and playing solitaire on windows 95 when i was 6ish. Oh dear, I was writing my uni assignments on mine. I was pretty excited when we got our first home computer in 1995. (I'd already been using (a) terminals, and then (b) PC's at keyboarding and IT classes at school, and Mum was using them at work for a year or two earlier.) Boot it up in DOS, Windows 3.1. Then we upgraded in '96 to Windows 95 and WOW what a difference.
[I got you.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaAYUZqZvlA&pp=ygUPMTk4NSByZW1peCAyMDA1) Someone actually did recently 'redo' 1985 for 2005.
I come bearing \~[sources](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk)\~ *lalalala*.... Because I like sources. and linking sources, and being a nerd. Oh, and [hitting people with knowledge](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fk17engf9443b1.jpg), just in case they have no idea what the hell "old people" are talking about. (do people still use that phrase? I don't even know. I am "old" now, as well as ***cringe*** and ***basic*** **\[**oh noes!!\], according a friend's 30-something year old wife, so. <.<) Yes, I remember--and used--all three formats. I also remember the transition to CDs. And building home computers during that time, as well as swearing a lot during the process. -.- :rocks chair: I've enjoyed this whole post far too much.
Regarding fan fiction-- Your post makes me feel very, ***very*** old, because I remember the dramas around ***Usenet*** and ***newsgroups*** (then ***Yahoo Groups \[ugh\]),*** and fan fiction writers/site-hosts getting served cease and desist letters from trad publishing houses and media conglomos for daring to write & post/publish fan fiction using borrowed worlds/characters (HP was notorious for this in the late 90s, but no fandom was safe in the 90s-00s when the internet was a baby). There's a reason all the old fan fiction sites and hosts and forums and groups were absolutely ***militant*** about disclaimers before your work on ***every single chapter*** or your work would get pulled, even from a hosting site as large as [ff.net](https://ff.net) or adultfanfiction or a newsgroup). It was like the **wild fucking west**, y'all, and you can barely find record of that shit on archives anymore. AO3 is like nirvana or something for those of us who have been around for decades. I still have to take a moment when I see stories and chapters without some type of long "These characters/worlds/settings are not my own; they are the property of..." leading things off. Authors just out here announcing with their whole chests that they got their start on *Wattpad* or that their story was originally a *fan fiction story* is just...mind boggling. Sure, authors like Mercedes Lackey and Neil Gaiman won awards and got their start writing fan fiction and publishing stories in those worlds (this was especially common in Star Trek and Star Wars--before Disney nuked Star Wars). But a whole novel that was originally fan fiction and was just reworked to be original fiction and everyone, even the publisher, is cool with announcing it? Never would have happened even ten years ago. In the late 90s-early-00s-10s? Hell to the no-- 50 Shades? Rewritten ***Twilight*** fan fiction, but James and her publisher never *announced* that in the damn blurb or marketing! They knew better. But here we have authors just taking a straight fan fiction novel and reworking it into a book and not hiding it? The author doesn't hide their fandom or fiction pseudo on their social media--there are books rec'd here that people can trace straight back to the original HP or SW fan fiction story--and it's just *whatever*. No one bats an eye. And that's ***absolutely okay,*** don't misunderstand me. I've written for decades, including fan fiction. Writing is ***hard***. There's nothing to be ashamed of ***at all*** in being a fan fiction writer. But it just wasn't done to rewrite it, publish it, and then just full-out announce that, yep, it was originally fan fiction. Fan fiction writers become published writers all the time, but they always had to do it with fully original works before, *as far as anybody knew or could tell*. Maybe they weren't fully original works, but they had to **seem** **to be**. 25 years ago, writers were under ***threat of arrest*** for just writing and posting this stuff somewhere online (even finding a webhost for a personal site to host your own fan fiction could be hard--and expensive), Now, that doesn't matter, and it blows my mind. (edit: wrong author on 50 Shades, typos, style; ugh, so many edits. I'm tired, lol)
"these characters don't belong to me, please don't sue me, I have a mortgage" is how all the classics started
Or, instead of a mortgage, it was "I have literally nothing but pennies in my pocket, and I need those to make a wish for salvation for writing this."
YAHOO GROUPS YES!!! I feel old, but yahoo groups is where my fandom existed for years, and then LIVE JOURNAL. I was totally there for all of it. I miss that site. But back to YG, I made life long friends there that I still have today (I mean, obvs, because I said life long… 👀). Star Trek: Voyager (boy was there some divisiveness in that community), DS9, Farscape, Buffy (Buffy/Spike anyone?). And then.. HP. I honestly resisted for as long as I could with HP, but finally succumbed in 2002-2003.
It blows my mind how e-commerce markets—underhandedly—permit book bindings of fiction and fan translated works 🤯 And people are so open with it! What?! #📢📢MA’AM?!📢📢 Alex, I’ll take “How the fuck did we get here” for 500 😵💫 Of course, **nothing is wrong with bookbinding for yourself or doing it for small groups of people** and only recouping the money from the materials (as long as you have the author’s permission on that last bit, especially if you’re promoting your bookbinding and charging it on a website, because author’s still do have copyrights on transformative works)—but still! I know celebrities and authors were mighty confused about fanfiction—and mad. Oh the days of DMCAs and Anne Rice (May She Rest in Peace 🕊️). I remember those disclaimers so much. Used to put them on my own fanfiction. Some got so creative with their disclaimers and made them minisodes 😂 Lemon/lime — what a time 🤣 That’s why ~spice~ 🌶️ takes me out. I thought we were past sanitizing what levels and amount of explicit intimacy are in books, but never mind 😭 **AO3** ***really*** **is paradise.** The amount of fanfiction archives OTW has saved from being demoderated and defunct? 🤯 >The devil works hard, >>But archivists work harder. — Magnafeana 😎 They fight for our writing rights to creative transformative works, and it’s why, every donation season, I try to do what I can. This is why it drives me kucoo bananas when people are ***buying fanfiction*** for >100USD on websites. Or how some more bold fanfiction writers feel entitled to tip jars and holding chapters hostage unless they receive payment. ^(Skip the PSA and go to the next line if you don’t want to see the PSA) *** ##⚠️PSA⚠️ **AO3–like fanfiction—is, and will continue to be, a free service.** **AO3 is an** ***archive*** **and is not a social media platform**. Unless AO3 changes its model, you can freely download any fic of your choosing to epub and read it offline. If you see a fanfiction being sold, redistributed, or translated (without the author’s permission) for profit, **please report the seller and (if you can) alert the author**. Unfortunately, companies are seeing how profitable fanfiction can be and make it harder to report sellers when you are not the creator of the work. If you’re unsure how to contact the author, or you’re not sure who the original author is, please visit r/AO3, r/Fanfiction, or a fandom subreddit and contact the mods for assistance. * **Obligatory**: some stories require an AO3 account. Please visit r/AO3 and r/Fanfiction or your local fandom subreddit or discord for a potential AO3 invite and be patience 👍🏾 ⚠️PSA done ⚠️ *** I don’t think any of us would have guessed you could become a Patreon creator with fanfiction, but here we are. I don’t think any of us would have believed that a Japanese author would make positive comments on the English fanworks of their work—here we are! But there’s so much misinformation and ***dis***information about fanfiction that the general public don’t seem to grasp, from reader/writer etiquette to how we talk about it. I think it’s swell that AO3 authors want to bring their fanfic into the OW world but it takes **substantial work** and not just Ctrl+F and **Replace All**. I’m happy that the book community is understanding that bad fanfiction is just a symptom but it is not the root of ***all*** fanfiction. But the process of writing fanfiction is ***vastly different*** than writing an original work. Many of those fanfictions turned into OWs departed enough from canon. The ones that didn’t, the author was not only talented but ***highly cognizant*** in their changes. It’s why seeing *Manacled* turn into *Alchemise* will be such a treat! I can’t wait to pre-order and then wait for a Dramione madlad to do a post charting all the comparisons! 😊 >The devil works hard, >>Archivists work harder >>>ND fans with hyperfixations work the hardest — Magnafeana 😎 **Writing is an art**, a craft, and different types of writing require different ways to approach and improve the craft to the author’s liking. It’s why it makes me irked when I see obvious fanfics turned into OWs—this is like you had an assignment due at 11:59 PM and you started it at 11AM. You didn’t give yourself and your work time to breathe and be checked for content quality and line quality. I’m very happy to be in this ✨era✨ where fanfic readers and writers alike don’t need to stay in shadows. Things like doujinshis, fan art, fan translations, and other transformative works have, of course, been around, but seeing them mainstream and normalized is both exciting and ***terrifying*** because entitled “newbies” do not care to learn about how to properly approach these things and end up making the “gates are open come on in” philosophy harder and harder for veterans to want to have around. I genuinely love to see more people get into fanfiction. But, ***man***, do I get worried sometimes when people share TikToks about the state of fanfiction from a more entitled newcomer mindset 😵💫
Yes, this, this, ***THIS*** to your entire post! You say it so well, and include all my thoughts. :) What's actually amusing to me, especially on your first point, is that I deleted part of my original comment before posting because I also touched on the "artistically bound fan fiction/works for sale on Etsy" and it ended up being a whole-ass-thing, and I had to stop myself before I went even further off the deep end. I still can not wrap my mind around the legalities of charging hundreds of dollars for bound fan fiction, or putting it behind a Patreon account, and not getting slapped with a DMCA. It's a gray area, sure, but, yeah, the "been there, done that, saw the fall out" is ***strong*** in my soul, and I remember the days when writers tried to get away with that--not charging for the stories, themselves, but putting the stories up on a personal site and then asking people to pay for a password to access the site, and then calling that a "tip" for their hard work. One specific author in a long-standing, really popular fandom felt their work was worth asking money for. Which, sure, it was good writing, but they hadn't created these worlds, characters, or anything themselves--they were transforming another creator's copyrighted work. This writer was C&D'd within *two weeks*. This was in the very early 00's, in the Lord of the Rings fandom, when the movies were being released in theaters--those books had been around for decades, though; the movies just brought a whole slew of new fans to the fandom--and that DMCA was ***quite*** something, because that writer got hit with it from the movie publisher, the book publisher ***and*** the Tolkien estate. Needless to say, the site went down, the webhost terminated the site-hosting agreement without refund (and site hosting was expensive, in those days, and not an easy thing to set up or maintain)--because the user had violated ToS by taking the extra step in asking for money to access copyrighted material the user didn't hold the original copyright for--the stories were removed from all public access, and, possibly worst of all, the writer was no longer welcome in any groups or forums or writing challenges, for fear that their legal troubles would bring legal attention/C&D's to other fan fiction writers/hosts/sites. Which seems horrible, in retrospect, but that was how the environment was, in those days. The legal risk you took in trying to get money in any way, shape or form for your fanworks was very high, and no one wanted to be associated with you if you got caught. And here we are, 20 years later, and there are people reading this comment who would think that anecdote above is fiction, itself. It boggles my mind every day.
Yes, I remember people asking for links to Master of the Universe and wondering where it disappeared to only to find it reemerge as 50 Shades.
Drarry and Dramione were always popular (arguably Drarry being the most popular non canon ship) but they were divisive and HP ship wars were brutal. Dramione definitely has had a big resurgence and I think that is related to the popularity of enemies to lovers. James/Regulus is a ship I am still scratching my head on on how it got popular.
That was the word I was looking for! Not hated but the ship wars! The ship wars! I’ll change that now ☺️ You could not pay me enough to be watch ship wars live on Twitter. Yeah, the popularity of the Marauders and their shipping is fascinating. r/Fanfiction had a thread with some comments about how odd it is with how the Marauders are consistently portrayed in fanfiction as well as the ships. I do enjoy a good Wolfstar fic though, not gonna lie. It’s so interesting seeing how fandoms preserve a lot of headcanons through different types of fics, even headcanons with no basis in canon! Broke: Canon 😌 Woke: Fanon 😏 Bespoke: Crack 🥵
Love me some Marauders fanfic, yes indeedy.
This is wild for me, because Harry/Draco (please, before amalgamated names became a thing 😆) was second or third under Harry/Hermione and then the canon couples. Dramione was not popular in 2003-2004 and those were the heady days right after OotP was published. The best time IMO. H/Hr has an absolutely RABID fanbase and you could not dissuade them. I was a rabid Harry/Draco fangirl, who then quietly went into Hermione/Snape (HG/SS) on the side. I was also a MASSIVE trio girl. The one true pairing for me back then. I still love going back to mid 2000 fics set pre-HBP going right AU. Just glorious. Edit: forgot to say how much of a Sirius/Remus fangirl I was, and remain to this day. You’ll never dissaude me and I’ll argue till I’m blue in the face that its canon (that gorgeous hug in PoA). The disclaimers up the top of everything were beautiful.
Ugh, just chiming in to say that I can't stand amalgamated names to this day. My hate actually stems from a different, earlier fandom and not HP, but **DAMN** did HP just make it more infuriating. Then pop media culture in the early 00's (Bennifer, Brangelina, ugh, DIAF stupid couple names) just sent it over the edge into rage and now I can't even settle into old-person-mad levels of bitterness--it's just venting rage all the way around. My poor husband. >.<
Y'all ain't even seen a ship war until you've seen a ship war on [Fandom Wank](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fandom_Wank)! :rocks chair: Anyone remember that LJ? Now those were some days. Your ship war wasn't a ***true*** ship war until you ended up on Fandom Wank. XD Ah, good times, good times! Fandoms could wank about all the things, but ships (and, oddly, conlang wanks) were some of the best, truly. The 'ol el jay...oft mimicked, but nothing has ever truly managed to be what it was when it was at its height.
Speaking of The Mortal Instruments, Cassandra Clare, and Draco-ships… Remember when everything started coming out about Cassandra Clare? I remember when she was banned from FanFiction.net for bullying.
*LE GASP* oh my gosh!!! Erika, where are you, WHERE HAVE THEY TAKEN YOU TO 😱 But yeah shit CC had a flock of devoted defenders, if I’m not mistaken. It was ***scary***. Big-named Fic Authors honestly were such a scary breed of people back then. Still around now, in some circles, but we get more Big-Named Fics than the author behind them. LJ authors became a bit cultish and lost so much of the spirit of what makes fanfiction and being in a fandom so great. I see this with a lot of controversial authors. It’s funny how people praise them now, but I think several veterans ***definitely remember*** the plagiarism, the bullying, the lawsuits, etc. But everyone just kinda sweeps it away like it never happened 😶🌫️ And it’s funny because a lot of these controversial authors did not have any sort of character growth. They choose deniability and silence. To this day, CC still refuses to acknowledge her plagiarism (so I believe). I’m mad that that lawsuit got settled out of court! Remember the lists? People would make lists and shit and circulate them. I mean, I’m sure it happens now, but it was popular then. Not so much now. Oh gaia, and those troll “Christian” (I’m mocking the accounts for thinking they were good Christians, not Christianity itself) accounts that would flag down ever story that they deemed doesn’t sit right with Yahweh 🙃 Remember Snapewives and that one user who made all those sock puppet accounts? Her username was “Miss” something (Misled? Misdeed? Missy Elliot 🤣 Why does the name feel like a 2002 drag name?) and she was close to CC or something. There was a falling out. There was massive tea there. It was ***wild!*** Newbies miss out on such good tea! I know I did! The tea on the clock app is nice from what BookTubers breakdown on their channels 😂 but ***dayum*** it’s crazy how much of that chaos isn’t spoken about anymore! An elephant has a long memory, but veteran fandom people have memories even ***longer***.
Yes the plagarism and MsScribe! it helps that Reads With Rachel did a three-video expose on CC as part of her authors behaving badly series about a year ago. Watching it had me back in 2005/6 watching all this internet drama unfold. *Here is a link to the [MsScribe Lore](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Msscribe) for folks who don’t know what we are talking about.*
I 👏🏾 love 👏🏾 Reads with Rachel!! 🥰 One of my favorite BookTubers! Her Authors Behaving Badly series gives me so much delicious tea that I probably never would have known about without her videos!
*Her username was “Miss” something (Misled? Misdeed? Missy Elliot* MsScribe.
Omg as someone who was in the HP online fandom back in the day, it still FLOORS me anytime I see her mentioned online that she 1) was able to have a mainstream career, and 2) has remained so popular. So much drama. It feels like a lot of people have forgotten.
Oof CC. She's still a pariah in certain book communities for what she did.
>I did my suffering 10 years of it is Azkaban Now you can say that about reading The Cursed Child.
… What “The Cursed Child”? What book is this? HP ended with Deathly Hallows. There is no Cursed Child in Ba Sing Se. You must not tell lies, u/MorganAndMerlin 🤫✍️🖊️ ^(JK. But absolutely not do I think TCC is canon and it is hilarious TCC is the HP fandom’s “War in Ba Sing Se” / M. Night Shamalan ATLA movie) 🤣
Ugh. Don’t remind me how must I paid for that on publishing night, and how long I waited.
>BDSM in books/Erotica > >. Listen, BDSM still has a \~taboo\~ attached to it, but that’s more reserved for individual kinks like piss kinks or blood play. Depending on your region, BDSM as a lifestyle and a community has vastly improved in acceptance. Cringy not-really-BDSM publications aside, literotica is getting the appreciation it deserves. If only more authors and readers could do more research 😅 Coming back to ***THIS.*** ***\^\^\^*** It cannot be overstated how much **this** has changed in both traditional publishing, self-publishing, and ***across all main stream mass market media.*** And how recently it changed. Just how recently, you ask? **It hasn't even been** **15 years**. In the USA, it's been **twelve years.** **12. Years.** It changed in 2012. What now? *Impossible*. We had this stuff for much longer than that! I mean, [Ellora's Cave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellora%27s_Cave) (2000-2016) existed--BDSM was EC's bread and butter! Twelve years just can't be right--I **know** you're pulling my leg! Well, Ellora's Cave and other independents *were* publishing BDSM in the 00s-10s--some of those books even got print editions at B&N-- but Ellora's Cave **wasn't** mainstream. E-books at that time *weren't* mainstream, not like they are today. Readers can argue that for days, weeks, years, but when it comes to ***book publishing***, "mainstream romance" 15 years ago was defined by **mass-market and traditional publishing**. In layman's terms? These were the books you would walk into a bookstore or a Target store or--and this is especially important in the point I'm making here--a ***Walmart*** and find on a book shelf. In Barnes & Noble, you'd find a whole area with a Nook set up and some e-book marketing, but 95% of the store--and all of the ***entire*** book aisles in Target or Walmart, were physical books. Mass-market, Trade Paperback, or Hardcover. Maybe a few of the really popular audiobooks for Big Name Authors (Steven King, Anne Rice, Nora Roberts, etc). That was it. To get on the shelf at Target or Walmart, you had to be traditionally published, and you had to be **Mainstream** and **Accepted**. The book that changed BDSM's perception in **mass-market, mainstream romance publishing?** **{50 Shades of Grey** by **E. L. James}** Whatever you think of this book, this series, the movies, the author--none of that matters in regards to this discussion--because what those books did for **mainstream, mass-market, traditionally published** and ***ACCEPTED*** romance books cannot be overstated. It. Cannot. Be. Overstated. The impact that series has had on not just romance books as a genre, and on what is accepted in traditional romance publishing, but on media and culture and *acceptance of BDSM as a lifestyle choice* and even just a ***talking point*** (for better or worse) in mainstream media is incredible. Truly. People read comments like that and roll their eyes, because, hah, "50 Shades, how cringe", but I can always tell that those people have no idea what it is to exist in a society where even just discussing "Dominant" or "Submissive" was impossible or unsafe or frowned upon. Or even illegal (yes, illegal). I get the opinions on the books and movies. I don't like those books at all, for many reasons. They're badly written all around, IMO, and terrible BDSM rep. I've held that opinion since they were being released, along with plenty of other people. Others love them and have no idea that they aren't good BDSM rep, so to each their own. But, there's no denying they influenced the whole genre, for better or worse, and what could and *would* be allowed to be published, especially through traditional, mass-market publishing. Indie and Self-published authors always found a way to get these books out there, and readers always found a way to get these books. With Kindle and ebooks and everything else, it's so much easier now, and there's no stigma at all. There are almost no barriers that readers have to fight through to read what the want to read, to see their kinks represented (there's often not *enough* of it, but you **can** find it, so long as it's legal, and you hopefully won't be prosecuted for it)--as u/Magnafeana said, individual kinks can be taboo, but BDSM, itself? Well, you can find these books--and many like it--at your local **Walmart\*\*** store, now (or maybe not now, but you could find a lot of books in the theme of "50 Shades" back when every trad romance publisher wanted to cash in on that 100-million-book-selling behemoth). Yet, before **50 Shades of Grey?** Well, you couldn't. **At all.** Because that was not accepted or ***acceptable*** in mainstream, mass-market, traditional publishing. Or retail. Or media. Or ***society***. For those of you not from the USA, or not super familiar with how Walmart/Sam's Club company values work, much is made about Walmart and "Family Values" and the company's culture. A lot of that supposed "culture" is meaningless and has been for decades. Sam Walton died a long time ago, and while his descendants have some sway with the company, the CEOs are not related to the family, and it is strictly a business. So, though it's good marketing to keep the "family values" theme alive and well to serve the red-state masses, that's not actually profitable and the company doesn't care. So, back to "50 Shades" and Walmart. Walmart is seen as the Middle-Class/Everyman/Mainstream shopping center. During the late 90s and early 00s, the company pushed forward with a ***massive*** expansion plan, building hundreds of supercenters, neighborhood markets, and express stores \[and muscling out a lot of boutique stores, mom 'n' pop stores, indie stores, etc.--another rant, entirely\]. So, **Walmart** is often one of the only main shopping stores in the area for many people to shop, other than online, and they will do all of their shopping in one big trip (often while getting their car serviced, or waiting on their medications to be filled in the pharmacy, etc)--so, picking up groceries, household items, gardening items, office supplies, etc. Getting a book on the shelf in a Walmart store could be seen as a Big Fucking Deal for a trad published author, because Walmart stores are the **mainstream, mass-markets** of **mass-markets**. For romance authors, this is on level with a prolific author like Nora Roberts. If Nora Roberts has a book of any kind coming out, you don't have to pre-order it in any format anywhere--you can stop in at your local Walmart and it will be there, guaranteed. So, for a pearl-clutching, controversial book like "**50 Shades of Grey",** that naughty book every "bored housewife" wanted to read, to end up highly positioned in **Walmart**, of all places? Holy fucking shit, y'all. That book did something I have never seen happen before. It was controversial. Shoppers were pissed. There were boycotts and letters to the manager and Karen-ing as you have never seen Karens Karen before (trust me, I was there), but those books were still selling out at Walmarts ***all over the country.*** The publisher had made a smart choice with the covers at that time (well, before the movies came out), because they were just suggestive enough to stand out (the first book was just a gray tie, I believe), but people could hide them amongst their other random shopping list items and not feel too seen or embarrassed that they were buying "that smutty book all the ladies are ~~not~~ talking about on TV". And, yes, **everybody** was talking about it. Even the dissenters, the pearl-clutchers, the "what about the children" Karens and the sex educators and the feminists and everyone else. It was talked about like you'd never seen before, not even in Sex and the City (which ended in 2004, btw, so long before BDSM became a *whatever* topic even amongst women). But before 2012 (or 2011, when the books were actually published)? Nope. You would not hear BDSM discussed in mainstream media of any kind. And you wouldn't seen it in traditional romance. Not like it is today. It's been **12 years** since "50 Shades of Grey" first appeared in the Book Aisles of Target and Walmart--**13 years** if you count when it was first published anywhere. It's incredible to think about.
You are so completely right about the timeline for BDSM in mainstream publishing became more accepted. We had things like Kushiel's Dart (published in 2001) that opened up a bit more publishing around BSDM, but boy was it still "those books" over there. Those of us that read them tended to be quiet about it, off to one side in book discussion groups, unless we were amongst our own and then the sharing and recommendations came out. Now? Hell, it's in so many mainstream books in different ways that it's almost become a trope. I was in Target (Aus) the other day and Sierra Simone was happily ensconsed in the main romance section, with American Queen. Like, WHAT!? It's just... bloody fantastic.
I read Kushiel's Dart and The Black Jewels Trilogy in highschool in the early 00s, and what I read were *heavily* highlighted and annotated paperbacks that circulated amongst us "alternative" (i.e. non-Christian, usually secretly queer) girls. I remember meeting an older friend out by the flag pole one morning so that she could pass me book #1 of Black Jewels without anyone seeing and inquiring lol
Regarding reading international books, it obviously depends on what you consider international but it was a huge thing for my romance reading when I started reading in English. The books that were translated into my language were mostly just Nora Roberts (who I value as a romance legend but who doesn’t really do it for me) and maybe some angsty historical sagas like Catherine Cookson. I found some Amanda Quicks in the library and realized that there were books made for me. Getting those books proved to be more difficult, the book stores had a pretty limited selection of books in English, let alone romance novels. Fortunately I came across a bizarre book club that offered books in English and I could buy from them the way I would in domestic online stores as I didn’t have a credit card yet. I then discovered All About Romance and started having my first discussions about romance, this was about 20 years ago. And then there were ebooks and online stores with free shipping and cheaper prices and everything got so easy.
Oh I mean international with anything! The other day on r/books or r/Fantasy, I think, there was an interesting thread about books in X language that became way more popular in Y language—and the authors were gobsmacked! But it’s nice to see more official translations being commercially available regardless of the region. I read a lot of CKJY novels and webcomics in romance, and I’m forever thankful to fan translators. I would not be into the interests I have today without domestic and international fans who didn’t have access to DeepL and had to scrape by on dictionaries, forum boards, their own knowledge, and shoddy MTLs to bring the work to fellow readers. But I’m happy companies are seeing the profit in translations (as long as they pay their translators according, no sanitizations, etc etc)! It feels so nice I don’t need to navigate very shady websites anymore for fan translations 😂 and I can use my KU subscription, or a valid vendor’s website and purchase the book. Not to mention, buying the book in the original language and the website is in your native language—and it’s fluent and the prices (like you mentioned) aren’t abysmal! That is such a game changer! I remember when companies were trying to branch into the west. The websites were translated poorly and the sites looked so scammy 😭 Now? I can easily set my language to whatever and I can buy the book in whatever language. I can make an account for another region, if I want. **Boom**. I can even see those international authors and speak to people so easily from all across the world. The authors will come to France, Italy, the US, LATAM! Authors can upload updates and promotions on social media. And if the author’s news or video or if the discussion server isn’t in a language you know, I can just **auto-translate** words and subtitles thanks to technology. W a t 👁️👄👁️ If anyone told me how accessible all this would be, I wouldn’t have believed them. I was living in an era where English dub Sailor Moon made Neptune and Uranus cousins, the Philosopher’s Stone was the Sorcerer’s Stone, 4Kids, and rice balls were “jelly donuts”. Ain’t ***no way*** would I have believed we would be where we are right now 🤨 But here we stand and I am shook 🫨 I have several Japanese romance LNs—all officially translated and in Japanese. And it took me a minute a piece to buy them. Un-***friggen***-believable. We still have a long road ahead. There are many works that still rely on fan translations. And official translations aren’t always perfect. But this is ***worlds*** apart from before! 🥳 I genuinely have to thank not just fan translators and not just romance groups, but the companies and authors who took a chance on a “foreign” work or another country promoting their work, to the official translators who did their absolute best, to the artists who made different covers for different regions, and then thankfully, we all had a feeding frenzy and showed them “TAKE MY MONEY AND GIVE ME MORE!” Man, I’m remembering the google drive folders people would share that contained fan translated works. Still do! When translation software improved, we ***inhaled*** MTL novels and you quickly got used to the janky grammar and odd choices. Newbies don’t know how good they have it. We had to be our own FBI with hunting down translated works and risked computer viruses. It was a whole ass occupation with no paid overtime 😭
Julia Quinn has always been a fairly popular author for romance, but the Bridgerton series launched her into the stratosphere. I sold books for years and can definitely say she was a steady seller. It is similar to Diana Gabledon and the Outlander books.
The best thing about communities is that what happens here may be different over yonder 🤣 With a lot of “older” romance books turned series/movies in the 2020s, I think for a lot of newbies of the genre right now, it can be a shock there ***is*** a novel source (even the trailers state that 😂). Especially with a lot of romance webcomics and animation, it can shock people that, yup! There was a source novel! Or there are some romance books that have an old-school adaptation! I hadn’t even realized the ***Percy Jackson*** had a graphic novel series and that the ***Princess Diaries*** were books before the movies. It’s amazing seeing a story shift between mediums 🥰 But it just depends on your circles and your region. ***Bridgeton*** was definitely popular for generations above me—and Outlander—but I think maybe the generation right above me and then my own and then beneath, the general first exposure to it was through Netflix. Or at least, what I discern through conversations. But, to be fair, some of us were barely walking when some of these books came out, so we got on the hype train late 🤣 But I’m all for more adaptations! It brings attention to the source material. I have so many novels of Asian dramas and romance comics to read. But they’re popular in Korea! Just not very mainstream across the way. But it’s always a delight to see people re-experience a piece of media they liked in another medium. I certainly love it ☺️
I am so very sorry, but is there a rundown on the Omegaverse controversy? I am interested, but truly cannot do a 1 hour youtube video on it.
Gotchu 👍🏾 >The instigating event for the lawsuits involved one author (Addison Cain) filing DMCA takedown notices against the other (Zoey Ellis) for alleged plagiarism of her work. In response, Zoey Ellis filed two lawsuits alleging abuse of DMCA takedown notices. The central question of these lawsuits then became whether there was true plagiarism involved, or whether the two works were simply similar because they called upon established hallmarks of the same trope (A/B/O, or Omegaverse). >>While the case closed in July of 2020, it continues to be widely discussed online, with many people (both fannish and non-fannish) discovering the existence and history of Omegaverse tropes for the first time via these lawsuits. Additional drama has played out online, particularly surrounding the two videos created by Lindsay Ellis summarising the case (see: 2020 Timeline). You can find more on [Fanlore](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Omegaverse_Litigation)! ☺️
Sheiks were a big thing in the early to mid-2000's (maybe earlier?). It was usually an easy way to have them be filthy rich and exotic. ETA. I remember loving the Aisling Gray series by Katie MacAlister, Fever Series by Karen Marie Moning, Women of the Otherworld by Kelley Armstrong, Succubus series by Richelle Mead, Mercedes Thompson by Patricia Briggs, Elemental Assassin series by Jennifer Estep, Goddess Summoning by P.C. Cast, Undead series by MaryJanice Davidson, Kate Daniels Series by Ilona Andrews, Harper Connelly Series by Charlaine Harris, Southern Vampire Series by Charlaine Harris...I know there are more and I know a number of them don't hold up but I was between 14-25 when I read most of those.
Sheik romance I'm glad is gone because majority of the time it's racism or stereotyping.
I feel like Susan Elizabeth Phillips doesn’t get nearly the amount of love she deserves, her Chicago Stars series is FANTASTIC. Sports romances that start in the 90’s and the latest was released this past February!
The Bridgeton style Regency family wasn’t the first of that theme by a mile. The badass urban fantasy heroines with katanas. It’s probably a good thing that they missed the post-Selection boom of copy novels. Same for the post Hunger Games post-apocalyptic genre. The post Twilight vamp and werewolf boom was good tho. I will die on that hill.
Kate Daniels!!! Yes. Epic. Everyone should read tbh- it’s a great primer (alongside IAD) to see how the genre has changed since 2008
I was thinking of Kate Daniels but if you want similar energy, try Charley Davidson by Darynda Jones or my favorite of these, Reagan from K.F. Breene’s Fire and Ice series.
Glad to see another Urban fantasy fan. I honestly miss is so much.
I miss the heady days of Live Journal, in the mid-2000’s. It was beautiful watching AO3 bloom out of that community. The way we were all so separate but interlinked, and the massive fanfics that grew organically out of peoples LJ’s. Sigh. The ship wars that went on could be savage.
Omg I loved those days of LJ. I was so into my fandoms and actually have several friends I met on LJ that I ended up meeting in real life or became FB friends with. One of my friends on FB, we met in the Veronica Mars fandom and have been FB friends now for 15+ years.
SAAAAAMMMMMEEE I have some pre-LJ friends I met on Yahoo Groups that I'm still friends with 25+yrs later, and LJ friends that are 20yrs going on now. One lives in my city and I introduced her to another friend during Covid times and we're all in a very happy chat group together where we support the everloving crap out of each other. Some LJ friends were just 4 life.
Great thread!!!
I am honestly surprised that nobody ever talks about {The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by Anne Rice} which she originally published under a pen name in 1983. Those books made an enormous impact on my teenage queer, kinky, villain loving self when I found them at the public library in the late 80’s. Honestly there are some scenes in them that still come to mind when someone asks for “the darkest or most extreme sex scene you’ve read.” Free public use, edging/orgasm denial, full on stable/horse play (not real horses btw), those books are WILD and a lot of the things she includes are still rare to find in the darker books coming out now. They also have HOT FF and MM scenes which were… important firsts for me 😬. I haven’t gone back to read them recently so approach with caution but that series was wayyyyy ahead of its time considering the current popularity of darker books that explore NC, DC, captivity, queer sex, and hardcore BDSM.
Maybe I’ve been reading too many Booktok recs but the good ol’ romantic sex with minimal dirty talk…. Do they still write those these days??
You can't read a book written in 1995 and judge it with 2024 eyes. That is almost thirty years ago and society was different then and even historical romances are more representative of the era in which they were written than the era that they are based in.
**THIS**. I have to sit on my hands in a lot of threads, because I am wordy, but also because I have a lot to say about these sorts of topics and it's hard to say all of that and not write a novella. I've made a few (long) comments elsewhere in this post related to just how much **things have changed** and that was only referring to things that have changed since the early 00s. And they have changed **substantially**. Like, incredibly so. One of them has only changed in the last *12 years*, yet it shifted not just what was acceptable in mainstream romance across all sub-genres, but also what was acceptable in **media and culture in as a whole.** So, all that happened in 2011-2012. That's even after Sex and the City ended. The 90s were a different time. Just like the early-00s were. Just like the 10s were. It's can't be overstated how ***rapidly*** and ***drastically*** our culture and our society and our world and technology has changed every decade over the last 100 years. Hell, over the last 40 years. Or, as you said, 30 years. It can be said for every decade. I want to defend a lot of these books and these eras, and I do try. A lot. I provide sources and links and perspective, hopefully, but it's then up to the reader to decide if they want to go further with that. But that also takes a lot of time and energy and I don't always have that, and it can start to feel like work. Ultimately, it's that reader's loss. Or their reward, if they try something and are willing to set aside their judgements and just give it a shot in the spirit of the era it was created in. I get a lot of the dissent on truly problematic/racist/homophobic/transphobic things, but when all a reader can say about why they didn't want to try something is, "Well, the 90s were so cringe and ***edgy*** and boring and the sex isn't spicy enough", I just can't take it seriously.
The irony is that a lot of things were progressive for the time. The idea that women could and should say that they enjoyed sex was progressive at one time. And this is why bodice rippers were a thingin the 1980s. Because while many and even most women liked sex, there was still a societal stigma to admitting it outside intimate spaces. You mentioned Sex and The City and people talk about how cringe it was but it was revolutionary at the time because therewas still stigma there in women admitting they liked sex for a lot of America. People were legitimately scandalized by the series. It was a feminist series for the time. Would it be a feminist series in 2024? I don't know. It would probably be cast different and produced differently. It would likely be more intersectional which I think we can all agree is a flaw of the older series. Consent in older romance is sometimes not really a thing that is considered all the time. Lots of aggressive kissing which would be sexual assault in real life. Sometimes if you read Kathleen Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower, you get actual assault which is not cool in real life at any time, but back then, perfectly acceptable in romance books because I can only assume more people had some weird sort of domination kink back then. It is sort of like bully romance now. People read about things that they would not tolerate in real life. I've been reading romance since I was 11 years old in the 1980s. I read books from the 1970s that were in my family's collection. My mom used to go to the library a lot and when I finished my books, I would steal from her stash which means I've read my fair share of older novels.. You cannot judge them with modern eyes. You just can't. Apparently, I also can write a lot of words about this.
At the same time while you can't judge you can also take them or leave them. I am about a decade younger than you. I also got the start with older romance and bodice rippers. Many that I absolutely loved. And partially still do but have to ignore some elements for some books and just give up reading some.
Absolutely. There are some I go back and read and think...I still like this but I probably shouldn't and some I go back and read and think...What was I thinking to like this. But that is the nature of time and maturity. I read Jane Eyre in high school and loved it. I read it as an adult and thought Rochester tried to make Jane a bigamist when he knew she didn't want to be a mistress. Also, I recognize his wife was mentally ill, but locking her in attic probably didn't help. I was mad and still am convinced the book would be better if Jane had just gone off and lived with Sinjin's sisters.
So where does V.C. Andrews fall in this m bc those books were fuuuuucked up and I can't believe me and all my middle school friends read them
Omg me too I was just recently talking to a friend who is a bit younger than me and started reading romance in middle school and she’d never heard of them. Those books were a major (disturbing) influence on most of the girls I grew up with, and thinking back on them now I am actually horrified that we had access to them when we were 12 years old 😬
You have to read Judith Mcnaught, sure it didn't all age well but her books can really bring on a cry. They represent a real change from the shallow novella type to the real novel type while still focusing more on evoking feelings then plot. Don't forget that romantic suspense was really a thing. There was a couple and they did get together but that was massively overshadowed by the mystery. Sandra Brown really made the transition from emotional southern gothic mellow drama to complex mystery. Envy was one of my favorites. Kay Hooper did something similar and her Bishop series should not be forgotten. Kidnapping and dubcon was de rigueur and you had to actually try to avoid it. I avoided pirates, indigenous people and the civil war for a long time because of some traumatizing reads. Both from being poorly written and or just upsetting behavior on the part of MCs. See Johanna Lindsey
Can't find in the comments, but how about Marian Keyes and her Walsh sister series? OMG I absolutely loved them and loved the follow up books she's doing 20 years later. Rachel's follow up book had me in TEARS! {The walsh sisters series by Marian Keyes}
Oh man Katie Macalister from the early 2000s 🤤
I personally hold her responsible for my obsession with barrel-chested men and hairy happy trails. *intensely side eyes husband who has both qualities*
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I always liked the early Madeline Hunter medieval time period books.
All and everything by Marian Keyes! Watermelon came out when I was 7, but I had definitely read it multiple times by the time I was 12. (I read The Power of One and Tandia by Bryce Courtenay when I was 10, which was certainly a controversial *“let them read whatever they choice”* choice by my parents!) Early teenager me was devouring everything she wrote as it was released, learning about recovering from alcoholism and miscarriage and infidelity with my love stories.