mfred likes the internet

on deciding not to read a book

Everyone go and read this and then come back, because I have a lot of feelings:

Guest Post | Stina Leicht on ‘Writing Urban Fantasy without Vampires, detectives and tramp-stamped chicks’

It’s perfectly fine to not like the Romance genre. It’s perfectly fine to be the kind of girl who grew up reading Tolkien and not La Nora. It’s perfectly fine to be a woman and write a male protagonist in an urban fantasy novel.

This article would also be perfectly fine if Leicht didn’t conflate these issues into a sort of weird mishmash of apology and defiance:

But Romance (the literary genre) just isn’t my thing. No big deal. I’m repeating myself here, I know. Because for some reason, a female stating that she doesn’t like Romance as a genre is often treated as gender betrayal. Hell, I’ve seen men take abuse in public for not wanting Romance in their SciFi/Fantasy. When did not liking a genre become so… politically charged?

Anyone who bags on you for being a woman and not liking romance is one of two things:

An idiot
Probably operating out of the same frustration, same sense of being constantly judged as you, except for liking romance, and being judged for it, by you, right now, in this moment.

Romance is an easy target. When it is mentioned, if at all, it is often snidely. The most lucrative genre in publishing? Millions of readers worldwide? Constantly getting the short end of the stick? And you don’t get why romance readers are so vocal?

I’ve also seen men take abuse for their opinions about romance in sci-fi/fantasy. This is often because their opinions go something like,

“blah blah misogyny blah blah bodice ripper blah blah worst book ever blah blah lasers”.

Leicht continues:

When I first started writing Of Blood and Honey the main character was an American female. The character that eventually evolved into Liam was her love interest. I had it in my head that I’d write something in the tradition of Emma Bull and Charles de Lint with some Fahrenheit 451 thrown in for good measure — only it wouldn’t be about censorship. It’d be about terrorism, revenge, and war. And then Romance entered the Urban Fantasy scene. It seemed like everyone forgot what Urban Fantasy was. Definitions got changed. The rules were altered. And I knew right then and there that I couldn’t write a female main character — with or without a tramp stamp — and get any degree of respect. It’s sad, isn’t it? But that’s the truth.

Listen, I am not crazy about the current world of paranormal romance/ urban fantasy either. A lot of those books, and their heroines, suck. And I also totally agree, that in some circles, a woman writing female-centered urban fantasy will get no respect at all.

Fuck those circles.

Oddly enough, if Leicht had written a kick-ass heroine in an urban fantasy, she might very well have gotten quite a bit of love from the Romance community.

Leicht doesn’t seem to realize that not all romance books are badly written. This is what romance readers have been trying to say, over and over, to every snide remark and cheap joke thrown their way.

Which leads me to the part where I do start to feel a little bit of a gender betrayal— Leicht, wanting to both write a good novel and to be perceived as a good writer, changed her character to male and makes sure to emphasize how it’s not a romance?

Fuck you, too, then.