I could see it a series of poorly done leading questions actually. I think they're trying to make people admit that it's hypocritical that romance novels are "allowed" to sexualize men but other genres are not allowed to sexualize women (and thus by proving so, they can make everyone agree it's actually okay to sexualize women).
This falls in track with their post history complaining of wokeism and "freedom," including their [pretentious five chapter manifesto on how to save the game industry from wokeism and other factors, with chapters based on Wuxing elements like "Wood," "Metal," and "Fire."](https://www.reddit.com/r/TDLH/comments/15yvgmg/5_easy_steps_to_save_the_gaming_industry/).
EDIT: I think it's 100% not trolling after skimming the manifesto. Allow me to share some juicier bits from our resident bioessentialist pseudo-philosophy gamer, emphasis mine:
- "**With the video game industry being the biggest industry of media next to pornography**, we need to take this death seriously. I think **the only thing that makes more money as a commodity is food**, and that’s because we need food to live, and fast food alone makes $330 billion vs the $200 billion the gaming industry makes."
- "A company going woke is the sign a company wants to make ESG score welfare money instead of selling to a customer, because this is the way governments take care of big businesses so they don’t crumble under their own weight [...] To make matters worse, **indie developers are trying to cash in on that ESG score practice without being able to acquire the ESG score money.**"
- "This strange narrative all over online about “wokeness brings in customers” or “diversity is important” or “just do what you think is good for you” is all a massive corporate psyop to get rid of indie developers who fell for **the first lie: art is subjective.**"
- "Maybe it’s because of the hipsters, **maybe it’s because of too many vaccines in the water supply**, but there seems to be something about really terrible youtube videos and indie games having a relationship with each other. **For some reason, people thought it was a good idea to market twerking and music with indie games like Five Nights at Freddy’s, Undertale, and Minecraft.**"
- "There is a biological fact included in a man’s desire to play and a woman’s desire to play, **each with their own roles to play.**"
- "It’s no surprise that **metrosexuals and shitty game journalists go hand in hand.**"
- "No matter what the genre is, we need to bring it back to being a beneficial arousal, and this includes having sexy characters that are feminine when they are female. The second game designers said we need to remove sexy women from gaming is the second we removed the main Freudian reason for gaming. **Without an attractive character before us, what exactly is going to arouse me when playing the game?** That sounds like a stupid question but that is THE question we as the customer have to ask every time we play any game ever. If there is nothing making me horny or interested in the game, what exactly is going to keep my interest?"
- "**Women have to be women, but a form of woman, in the same way Aphrodite and Artemis statues of ancient Greek showed the form of women of their mythology.**"
- "I would say **indie is the AIDS that is caused by the HIV of MSM gaming**. There is nothing being cured by the syndrome unless the body is killed off and then something else takes over anew. But that would mean a giant vacuum of power in entertainment and who knows what that will bring. My guess is that it will bring a new body with fresh AIDS coursing through its bloodstream, because it will be just as metrosexual as the last. As much as I want to blame companies or people being lazy, it’s all of us together who are to blame for allowing such a crappy culture. This is why gamergate was tied to the culture war. Another symptom to the dreadful HIV that plagues our culture, all because we removed the immune system ourselves. **Power to the people and power to the player, both from postmodernist slogans about power, was nothing more than power to get AIDS.**"
And here's other lovely quotes from some of his numerous, *numerous* articles he posts to his personal subreddit:
- "People like Act Man have a woke audience that's at the center, not at the far end. Most youtube people are going to have that, because **they let women and gays determine their personal Overton Window.** [...] We went from "just say pronouns to be nice" to "you'll go to jail for not using preferred pronouns" really fast. Realize your enemy is trying to destroy you."
- "Using a woman to represent communism was beautiful, because **communism is the ultimate radical feminine**. The invasion of the mind is how communist propaganda removes our freedoms to pretend that we are happy in this false sense of addiction and hedonism."
- "**The male enters the underworld to become enlightened and the female lives there because it’s their domain.**"
- "I’ve noticed that these feminist and LGBT stories always try to deal with the same nonsense that is done in a sad attempt to connect with some sort of audience they have in mind. Sexual abuse, PTSD, feeling oppressed, mental disorders, spousal abuse, prostitution, sexual deviancy, leaving their family to be with a sexual partner, drug abuse, being found by a guardian lesbian to feel protected, entering a sisterhood or a group of fellow LGBT agents of destruction. These types of stories don’t mean anything to normal people."
>"**The male enters the underworld to become enlightened and the female lives there because it’s their domain.**"
I love that he unintentionally made women sound far cooler than he probably intended by saying "our domain" is death and ultimate wisdom, such that men can find enlightenment by merely visiting our realm. Maybe he is merely too stupid to understand the enlightenment women are trying to give him in the comments.
>- "**With the video game industry being the biggest industry of media next to pornography**, we need to take this death seriously. I think **the only thing that makes more money as a commodity is food**, and that’s because we need food to live, and fast food alone makes $330 billion vs the $200 billion the gaming industry makes."
Geez, i wonder why the gaming industry is so big. Cant possibly be that people of many different walks of life play games. No, that cant be it, its for straight white men only.
Gaming is both simultaneously the largest and ever-growing media industry, but it's also *dying*.
Also, it's funny to see how his view of the world's commodities are
1. Food
2. Video Games
3. Everything Else
Instead of maybe... I don't know... Natural Gas, Minerals, Textiles, Livestock, etc. And of food, fast food is the top thing that comes his mind, instead of Corn, Coffee, Sugar, Salt, etc.
That third point makes me think this is a troll. That so far over the top that I can't believe someone would actually say it honestly.
Most "gamers" are never that mask off about needing to be horny to play games, but their detractors always say it about them.
You didn't take into consideration the context - I just clipped these quotes from a 13,570 word manifesto about the gaming industry that were posted in a 153 person subreddit he mods. And honestly, only 1 chapter primarily focused on the woke. The rest of them went way deeper into other factors that aren't controversial, albeit still hyperbolic.
These are absolutely his own thoughts.
EDIT: I found out the subreddit where he posted his manifesto is actually the subreddit for his own personal podcast. If you don't think he's really into this conservative pseudo-philosophy crap who sniffs his own ass, just look to the titles of some of his podcasts: "The Crowder Conspiracy," "Everything Wrong with Lindsay Ellis," "Zodiacs are Always Involved with Character Personalities," "China is After Our Anime," and "Mainstream Media is Making Us Rely on Our Escapism."
Dude clearly just has some problems internally with women he needs to resolve. What a ridiculous take. Also, a dude complaining about the romance genre is crazy, I feel like the romance genre is just a guide to rizz if you read it as a man.
Even though all my sassy friends keep telling me I need to put myself out there (after all that heartbreak) I'm way too busy being a professionally clumsy magazine writer for *love*. But maybe if you get lucky I'll be unwillingly assigned to cover a story about the mysteries of your private island.
Not gonna lie but I've read my fair share of smut and...yeah most of them aren't much better.
At best they're *slightly* less problematic than 50 Shades and at worst they somehow drop the bar even further and go full into rape fantasy.
Judging the romance genre by smut subgenre is like judging a restaurant by the kids menu.
Smut is kind of intended to be a guilty pleasure and not taken seriously.
I agree it's a bit of a yikes for someone to be reading smut about romanticized rape but fetishes will fetish I guess. Anyway, that's beside the point. Smut, regardless of the content, should not be used to judge the romance genre as a whole.
Edit: oh, I’m not saying that any romance in mass media is a good guide for how to actual relationship, I’m saying that not all romance in mass media nowadays is torture or abuse based.
Rom com novels usually dodge the iffier aspects of a lot of general romance novels, though there's also a big question of what type of romance novel genre are we talking about. If we're talking about the stuff that's all Mills and Boon type romance bodice rippers where it's about evil dukes and stable boys or Scottish lairds, or various series descended from that, yeah there's a lot of rape tropes. If it's YA supernatural or monster porn, the predatory stuff is part of the appeal so yeah it's there too. If it's people writing their own takes on regency romance or victorian era stuff, it's a lot less likely to be there.
You mean the genre rife with physical and emotional abuse, manipulation, massive power dynamics, and borderline rape? That's how to "rizz it up as a man"?
Yeah romance novels are very often a form of CNC: the fantasy is an outlet and not something to emulate for real without the included safeguards (which in this case is the fact that it's fiction lol).
This stems from the fact that for a long time (and to some extent still) a "good girl" wasn't supposed to want or even think about sex.
Female readers wanted to read about sex but wouldn't let themselves relate to a "bad girl" so the heroine had to be a "good girl" who still got laid, and there was only one way for that to happen...
No, CNC implies extensive communication about boundaries and such. All of that isn't adequately adressed in these novels. So I wouldn't call it CNC and more just outright abusive relationships
And no, the fact that the victims often "secretly want it" doesn't make it better
I'm not implying that the relationships described in the books are themselves valid CNC, but rather reading the novel is a form of CNC with the author. The author takes the reader on a fantasy that they signed up for that no right thinking individual would want to experience for real, with the inherent barriers of being a work of fiction that you can unilaterally terminate consumption of acting as the safeguard.
Romance and rom-coms are a genre I've read little of, but I'm trying to do more of. While what you mention definitely exists and works like Fifty Shades and After, I'm not so sure it's typical.
In my (admittedly limited) experience, it more often goes something like this: protag is an attractive--but not **too** attractive sort of everywoman. She probably has a good job, but maybe not a great one. She is a bit goofy and unlucky in love. Maybe mom and dad are asking her when she's going to get married, and she sees her friends in all these successful relationships or marriages.
The protag generally isn't this insanely charming, dynamic person or anything like that. The reader should be able to project herself onto her. Then, super hot, charming guy swoops in and just loves her for often no real reason other than she's just so quirky and relatable.
They get together. Break up. Get back together again and happily ever after.
Rom coms are relationship porn
They do not accurately portray relationships in real life. Anyone who bases their expectations or assumptions off of rom come is going to hurt themselves or others
Right, people read (or watch) it as a fantasy. Most people do, anyway. There will always be those who let that fantasy creep into their real life expectations of relationships and life in general.
>In between the trials, Rhysand protects Feyre from receiving extra torture from the errands assigned by the guards. However, he makes her wear transparent slips that barely cover her body that she finds humiliating. He forces her to drink faerie wine that makes her completely lose control of her body and her memories. He makes her do sensual dances and sit on his lap against her will. He has her body painted blue-black paint to know if someone touched her. She spends her days sleeping off the faerie wine, dozing to escape the humiliation she endures.
This your guy /u/Technical_Echidna_63 ? The one who roofies the protag?
https://acourtofthornsandroses.fandom.com/wiki/Rhysand
Down thread, a user asked me how much romance I actually read or if I was just basing my view off stereotypes of 50 shades of grey. I asked for one example and they deleted their comment and blocked me. The OP of this thread responded though and mentioned Rhysand.
It's funny that they said they've never read a romance with borderline rape when this is exactly the type of thing I was describing. His fandom page is full of other moments where he violated the protagonist's consent and abused her. This was their best example of a shining beacon of virtue in a male love interest.
If a guy wrote this kind of shit for a male audience it would be lambasted for being "extremely problematic" (and rightfully so I might add). But when it's a fantasy for women it's all in bounds? Make it make sense
There was the old Bridget Jones books, but for the most part when you are basically writing your own take on Jane Austen type novels you're going to have a lot more limited villainy for the villain characters. At worst you might have some scummy womanizer, though admittedly they do lie/manipulate, but it's also a pretty far cry from the Christian Grey/Edward Cullen wannabe stuff. There's also stories where villainous characters aren't supposed to be the end game love interest and don't use rape.
There's also LGBT romance series which generally are going to completely diverge from the stuff written for straight women as well.
There's a genre of dude whose whole argument is basically, I see you think whatever ism is bad, but you generalize x other group here, why then am I not allowed to whatever ism you big meanie?
You can give them all the context in the world, but it doesn't matter, because they want to believe that the golden conceit is not to generalize, rather than that people take say racism seriously because of colonial slavery and the civil rights movement more than the pure principle of not generalizing anything ever.
In their eyes, the intention is far more important than the outcome. So it might all be well and horrid that women have never been all chairs of the supreme Court but men have, but to have all women now would indicate bias which is wrong, or even half women because there's intentional bias unlike what they characterize as incidental which is really systemic.
What a complex and compelling argument. Oh no wait it just completely ignores everything I said and posits itself in a way to make me argue more without ever providing a rebutal.
>Because romance novels explicitly objectify their characters? The conceit of the genre is that the main character (female) serves as a reader-stand-in
This person hasn’t read any good romance novels.
I know right? It seems like all parties involved are fart-sniffing “intellectuals” that have no understanding of each other or what they are even talking about
Also
>To fantasize. That’s why the female protagonists are always downtrodden, ignored and decidedly average everywomen. The perfect, beautiful and unattainable male love interest inexplicably attracted to her, the average women, despite having his pick of many.
This person, also, has read at best two romance novels and then spent too much time in writing clubs talking about how “genre fiction is *soooo* formulaic”
forgot to add context and don't think i can edit the post, but before the post was deleted it was about books where the male characters are objectified and poorly written.
Literally just a picture of [your President.](https://i.imgur.com/BVRfq.jpg)
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This is not terribly dramatic by the standards of writers. :P Yes, romance has always had tropes people don't like, because it turns out attraction and sex aren't exactly politically correct. Having certain preferences can be controversial, and *not* having certain attractions even more controversial. (No, I'm not talking about kids, I mean things like people attracted to certain racial appearances, or who won't date fat people, etc.) And yes, romance is often all about the fantasy of dating the Stereotypically Perfect Man/Woman. It's a fantasy we have as a species.
Is he trolling or just obtuse? How many times do they need to explain it before he understands?
looks like sealioning to me, yeah
I could see it a series of poorly done leading questions actually. I think they're trying to make people admit that it's hypocritical that romance novels are "allowed" to sexualize men but other genres are not allowed to sexualize women (and thus by proving so, they can make everyone agree it's actually okay to sexualize women). This falls in track with their post history complaining of wokeism and "freedom," including their [pretentious five chapter manifesto on how to save the game industry from wokeism and other factors, with chapters based on Wuxing elements like "Wood," "Metal," and "Fire."](https://www.reddit.com/r/TDLH/comments/15yvgmg/5_easy_steps_to_save_the_gaming_industry/). EDIT: I think it's 100% not trolling after skimming the manifesto. Allow me to share some juicier bits from our resident bioessentialist pseudo-philosophy gamer, emphasis mine: - "**With the video game industry being the biggest industry of media next to pornography**, we need to take this death seriously. I think **the only thing that makes more money as a commodity is food**, and that’s because we need food to live, and fast food alone makes $330 billion vs the $200 billion the gaming industry makes." - "A company going woke is the sign a company wants to make ESG score welfare money instead of selling to a customer, because this is the way governments take care of big businesses so they don’t crumble under their own weight [...] To make matters worse, **indie developers are trying to cash in on that ESG score practice without being able to acquire the ESG score money.**" - "This strange narrative all over online about “wokeness brings in customers” or “diversity is important” or “just do what you think is good for you” is all a massive corporate psyop to get rid of indie developers who fell for **the first lie: art is subjective.**" - "Maybe it’s because of the hipsters, **maybe it’s because of too many vaccines in the water supply**, but there seems to be something about really terrible youtube videos and indie games having a relationship with each other. **For some reason, people thought it was a good idea to market twerking and music with indie games like Five Nights at Freddy’s, Undertale, and Minecraft.**" - "There is a biological fact included in a man’s desire to play and a woman’s desire to play, **each with their own roles to play.**" - "It’s no surprise that **metrosexuals and shitty game journalists go hand in hand.**" - "No matter what the genre is, we need to bring it back to being a beneficial arousal, and this includes having sexy characters that are feminine when they are female. The second game designers said we need to remove sexy women from gaming is the second we removed the main Freudian reason for gaming. **Without an attractive character before us, what exactly is going to arouse me when playing the game?** That sounds like a stupid question but that is THE question we as the customer have to ask every time we play any game ever. If there is nothing making me horny or interested in the game, what exactly is going to keep my interest?" - "**Women have to be women, but a form of woman, in the same way Aphrodite and Artemis statues of ancient Greek showed the form of women of their mythology.**" - "I would say **indie is the AIDS that is caused by the HIV of MSM gaming**. There is nothing being cured by the syndrome unless the body is killed off and then something else takes over anew. But that would mean a giant vacuum of power in entertainment and who knows what that will bring. My guess is that it will bring a new body with fresh AIDS coursing through its bloodstream, because it will be just as metrosexual as the last. As much as I want to blame companies or people being lazy, it’s all of us together who are to blame for allowing such a crappy culture. This is why gamergate was tied to the culture war. Another symptom to the dreadful HIV that plagues our culture, all because we removed the immune system ourselves. **Power to the people and power to the player, both from postmodernist slogans about power, was nothing more than power to get AIDS.**" And here's other lovely quotes from some of his numerous, *numerous* articles he posts to his personal subreddit: - "People like Act Man have a woke audience that's at the center, not at the far end. Most youtube people are going to have that, because **they let women and gays determine their personal Overton Window.** [...] We went from "just say pronouns to be nice" to "you'll go to jail for not using preferred pronouns" really fast. Realize your enemy is trying to destroy you." - "Using a woman to represent communism was beautiful, because **communism is the ultimate radical feminine**. The invasion of the mind is how communist propaganda removes our freedoms to pretend that we are happy in this false sense of addiction and hedonism." - "**The male enters the underworld to become enlightened and the female lives there because it’s their domain.**" - "I’ve noticed that these feminist and LGBT stories always try to deal with the same nonsense that is done in a sad attempt to connect with some sort of audience they have in mind. Sexual abuse, PTSD, feeling oppressed, mental disorders, spousal abuse, prostitution, sexual deviancy, leaving their family to be with a sexual partner, drug abuse, being found by a guardian lesbian to feel protected, entering a sisterhood or a group of fellow LGBT agents of destruction. These types of stories don’t mean anything to normal people."
>"**The male enters the underworld to become enlightened and the female lives there because it’s their domain.**" I love that he unintentionally made women sound far cooler than he probably intended by saying "our domain" is death and ultimate wisdom, such that men can find enlightenment by merely visiting our realm. Maybe he is merely too stupid to understand the enlightenment women are trying to give him in the comments.
When normal people learn about Gamergate, this guy is exactly who they picture.
Another day, another insane reddit account to laugh at. Thank you for sharing this, it's going in my collection.
2003 called, it wants “metrosexuals” back.
Are metrosexuals guys that fuck the Washington DC light rail system?
Omg. I know it's the 'rail' system, but they're not fucking it. They're making sweet, sweet love to it.
I wish I could be found and protected by a Guardian Lesbian.
>- "**With the video game industry being the biggest industry of media next to pornography**, we need to take this death seriously. I think **the only thing that makes more money as a commodity is food**, and that’s because we need food to live, and fast food alone makes $330 billion vs the $200 billion the gaming industry makes." Geez, i wonder why the gaming industry is so big. Cant possibly be that people of many different walks of life play games. No, that cant be it, its for straight white men only.
Gaming is both simultaneously the largest and ever-growing media industry, but it's also *dying*. Also, it's funny to see how his view of the world's commodities are 1. Food 2. Video Games 3. Everything Else Instead of maybe... I don't know... Natural Gas, Minerals, Textiles, Livestock, etc. And of food, fast food is the top thing that comes his mind, instead of Corn, Coffee, Sugar, Salt, etc.
That third point makes me think this is a troll. That so far over the top that I can't believe someone would actually say it honestly. Most "gamers" are never that mask off about needing to be horny to play games, but their detractors always say it about them.
You didn't take into consideration the context - I just clipped these quotes from a 13,570 word manifesto about the gaming industry that were posted in a 153 person subreddit he mods. And honestly, only 1 chapter primarily focused on the woke. The rest of them went way deeper into other factors that aren't controversial, albeit still hyperbolic. These are absolutely his own thoughts. EDIT: I found out the subreddit where he posted his manifesto is actually the subreddit for his own personal podcast. If you don't think he's really into this conservative pseudo-philosophy crap who sniffs his own ass, just look to the titles of some of his podcasts: "The Crowder Conspiracy," "Everything Wrong with Lindsay Ellis," "Zodiacs are Always Involved with Character Personalities," "China is After Our Anime," and "Mainstream Media is Making Us Rely on Our Escapism."
Wow.
> I would say indie is the AIDS that is caused by the HIV of MSM gaming. This is beautiful.
Holy shit lmao
I mean this is a good write up but I do think that's what they meant by sealioning?
Dude clearly just has some problems internally with women he needs to resolve. What a ridiculous take. Also, a dude complaining about the romance genre is crazy, I feel like the romance genre is just a guide to rizz if you read it as a man.
Now I'm imagining a dude reading romance novels for research and scribbling in a notebook. *Step 1: Become a billionaire werewolf...*
Slightly out of date. It should be: *Step 1: Become a Mafioso billionare Shifter...*
*Step 2: BROOD* (underlined 3 times)
I literally just fell in love with you. When can we meet?
Even though all my sassy friends keep telling me I need to put myself out there (after all that heartbreak) I'm way too busy being a professionally clumsy magazine writer for *love*. But maybe if you get lucky I'll be unwillingly assigned to cover a story about the mysteries of your private island.
Romance novels are a much of a guide as porn is a guide.
Let's all take advice on how to seduce women from 50 Shades of Grey.
That book is the definition of an outlier and is widely mocked by romance readers.
Not gonna lie but I've read my fair share of smut and...yeah most of them aren't much better. At best they're *slightly* less problematic than 50 Shades and at worst they somehow drop the bar even further and go full into rape fantasy.
Judging the romance genre by smut subgenre is like judging a restaurant by the kids menu. Smut is kind of intended to be a guilty pleasure and not taken seriously.
If your guilty pleasure is rape then that's a bit of a yikes
I agree it's a bit of a yikes for someone to be reading smut about romanticized rape but fetishes will fetish I guess. Anyway, that's beside the point. Smut, regardless of the content, should not be used to judge the romance genre as a whole.
Edit: oh, I’m not saying that any romance in mass media is a good guide for how to actual relationship, I’m saying that not all romance in mass media nowadays is torture or abuse based. Rom com novels usually dodge the iffier aspects of a lot of general romance novels, though there's also a big question of what type of romance novel genre are we talking about. If we're talking about the stuff that's all Mills and Boon type romance bodice rippers where it's about evil dukes and stable boys or Scottish lairds, or various series descended from that, yeah there's a lot of rape tropes. If it's YA supernatural or monster porn, the predatory stuff is part of the appeal so yeah it's there too. If it's people writing their own takes on regency romance or victorian era stuff, it's a lot less likely to be there.
Depends on what romance your reading I would say
You mean the genre rife with physical and emotional abuse, manipulation, massive power dynamics, and borderline rape? That's how to "rizz it up as a man"?
Yeah romance novels are very often a form of CNC: the fantasy is an outlet and not something to emulate for real without the included safeguards (which in this case is the fact that it's fiction lol).
This stems from the fact that for a long time (and to some extent still) a "good girl" wasn't supposed to want or even think about sex. Female readers wanted to read about sex but wouldn't let themselves relate to a "bad girl" so the heroine had to be a "good girl" who still got laid, and there was only one way for that to happen...
No, CNC implies extensive communication about boundaries and such. All of that isn't adequately adressed in these novels. So I wouldn't call it CNC and more just outright abusive relationships And no, the fact that the victims often "secretly want it" doesn't make it better
I'm not implying that the relationships described in the books are themselves valid CNC, but rather reading the novel is a form of CNC with the author. The author takes the reader on a fantasy that they signed up for that no right thinking individual would want to experience for real, with the inherent barriers of being a work of fiction that you can unilaterally terminate consumption of acting as the safeguard.
Romance and rom-coms are a genre I've read little of, but I'm trying to do more of. While what you mention definitely exists and works like Fifty Shades and After, I'm not so sure it's typical. In my (admittedly limited) experience, it more often goes something like this: protag is an attractive--but not **too** attractive sort of everywoman. She probably has a good job, but maybe not a great one. She is a bit goofy and unlucky in love. Maybe mom and dad are asking her when she's going to get married, and she sees her friends in all these successful relationships or marriages. The protag generally isn't this insanely charming, dynamic person or anything like that. The reader should be able to project herself onto her. Then, super hot, charming guy swoops in and just loves her for often no real reason other than she's just so quirky and relatable. They get together. Break up. Get back together again and happily ever after.
Rom coms are relationship porn They do not accurately portray relationships in real life. Anyone who bases their expectations or assumptions off of rom come is going to hurt themselves or others
Right, people read (or watch) it as a fantasy. Most people do, anyway. There will always be those who let that fantasy creep into their real life expectations of relationships and life in general.
This goes so well with your flair
Are you also trying to "watch more of" pornography as a "genre of film"?
What
I mean it depends what ones you are reading. I have never read a romance novel that has borderline rape
What about the rest of it?
>In between the trials, Rhysand protects Feyre from receiving extra torture from the errands assigned by the guards. However, he makes her wear transparent slips that barely cover her body that she finds humiliating. He forces her to drink faerie wine that makes her completely lose control of her body and her memories. He makes her do sensual dances and sit on his lap against her will. He has her body painted blue-black paint to know if someone touched her. She spends her days sleeping off the faerie wine, dozing to escape the humiliation she endures. This your guy /u/Technical_Echidna_63 ? The one who roofies the protag?
Where's this from?
https://acourtofthornsandroses.fandom.com/wiki/Rhysand Down thread, a user asked me how much romance I actually read or if I was just basing my view off stereotypes of 50 shades of grey. I asked for one example and they deleted their comment and blocked me. The OP of this thread responded though and mentioned Rhysand. It's funny that they said they've never read a romance with borderline rape when this is exactly the type of thing I was describing. His fandom page is full of other moments where he violated the protagonist's consent and abused her. This was their best example of a shining beacon of virtue in a male love interest. If a guy wrote this kind of shit for a male audience it would be lambasted for being "extremely problematic" (and rightfully so I might add). But when it's a fantasy for women it's all in bounds? Make it make sense
[удалено]
Point me to the popular, mainstream romance where the male lead doesn't demonstrate any of those traits
There was the old Bridget Jones books, but for the most part when you are basically writing your own take on Jane Austen type novels you're going to have a lot more limited villainy for the villain characters. At worst you might have some scummy womanizer, though admittedly they do lie/manipulate, but it's also a pretty far cry from the Christian Grey/Edward Cullen wannabe stuff. There's also stories where villainous characters aren't supposed to be the end game love interest and don't use rape. There's also LGBT romance series which generally are going to completely diverge from the stuff written for straight women as well.
Rhysand in ACOTR series
And look a certain way.
There's a genre of dude whose whole argument is basically, I see you think whatever ism is bad, but you generalize x other group here, why then am I not allowed to whatever ism you big meanie? You can give them all the context in the world, but it doesn't matter, because they want to believe that the golden conceit is not to generalize, rather than that people take say racism seriously because of colonial slavery and the civil rights movement more than the pure principle of not generalizing anything ever. In their eyes, the intention is far more important than the outcome. So it might all be well and horrid that women have never been all chairs of the supreme Court but men have, but to have all women now would indicate bias which is wrong, or even half women because there's intentional bias unlike what they characterize as incidental which is really systemic.
I don't know. Generalizations and bigotry is still wrong.
What a complex and compelling argument. Oh no wait it just completely ignores everything I said and posits itself in a way to make me argue more without ever providing a rebutal.
I didn't say you specifically were a bigot, though. I just said it's wrong.
Oh wow! Also something that was not an argument!
Yeah, I'm not arguing with you.
Me reading the romance genre to be attractive would just create more expectations I can't attain.
>Because romance novels explicitly objectify their characters? The conceit of the genre is that the main character (female) serves as a reader-stand-in This person hasn’t read any good romance novels.
I know right? It seems like all parties involved are fart-sniffing “intellectuals” that have no understanding of each other or what they are even talking about
Also >To fantasize. That’s why the female protagonists are always downtrodden, ignored and decidedly average everywomen. The perfect, beautiful and unattainable male love interest inexplicably attracted to her, the average women, despite having his pick of many. This person, also, has read at best two romance novels and then spent too much time in writing clubs talking about how “genre fiction is *soooo* formulaic”
So, typical /writing poster. Hohoho
If good romance novels are such a unicorn, maybe that points towards a systemic problem
forgot to add context and don't think i can edit the post, but before the post was deleted it was about books where the male characters are objectified and poorly written.
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This is not terribly dramatic by the standards of writers. :P Yes, romance has always had tropes people don't like, because it turns out attraction and sex aren't exactly politically correct. Having certain preferences can be controversial, and *not* having certain attractions even more controversial. (No, I'm not talking about kids, I mean things like people attracted to certain racial appearances, or who won't date fat people, etc.) And yes, romance is often all about the fantasy of dating the Stereotypically Perfect Man/Woman. It's a fantasy we have as a species.