When I watched the movie, I turned every line spoken by a vampire into a pickup line and it became fun again, but you shouldn't have to play games like that with your literature. Or cinema.

The whole "imprinting on a baby" thing I heard about, that really skeezed me out

I worked at borders when the last book in the 4 part series came out. Manager told me to read it. So I speed read the first two

The only part I liked was the use of blank chapters to represent the passage of time during depression

The rest was so dullllll

I don't know if xmen in the 4th book would have saved me

that's fair. i'm not in the target demo. most of my making fun of it over the years has been because she had a bad editor, frankly. there's a lot of stuff that slipped through that should not have.

I worked at a library when I was a teen and I just remember all the romance novels looked the same, same storyline, same character types, just all the same stuff. Which is totally fine if that’s your thing, but it definitely is not my thing. When I first read Hunt the Stars, it showed me that romance isn’t all the same, that you can get good science fiction within a love story. I don’t read exclusively scifi romance, but it gets it my rotation fairly often now. I still do read primarily scifi though.

The backlash is real and feels misogynistic, but also real is the slop and ravenous fan bases

I totally get this. I’ve heard the Fourth Wing fan base gets crazy and the romantasy fan base in general is bad. I’ve heard of the drama in BookTok spaces and I want nothing to do with it. This is why I avoid pretty much all big fan bases of anything I truly enjoy, there’s always someone who will ruin it for me.

And beyond that, I've seen pulp readers judge romantasy and that's funny. For all my criticisms of romantasy, pulp is worse

I never got why people get so judgy on what a person reads, criticism is ok, but some folks can get nasty. I’ve had people make snarky remarks on my love of scifi I’ve heard someone refer to superhero stuff as “stupid nerd shit”. I’ve even heard someone criticize people who don’t enjoy romance because “those people have no heart or soul”. Idgaf what someone reads as long as they read. It may not be for me, but just pick up a damn book!

I will say, mixing in some books with more depth outside the romance genre every few books can be good for you and very enjoyable. Just like something like a Hugo winner (A Memory Called Empire was great) or something widely acclaimed (I'll always recommend Tamsyn Muir and Brandon Sanderson) or even a classic (LeGuinn is awesome).

Yeah the classic sci fi authors absolutely wrote women terribly, I'm dreading starting Dune despite knowing I'll like it for that reason.

That said, yeah reading at all is better than not

You’re welcome for the recs! Jessie Mihalik is one of my favorite authors now, I loved the Consortium Rebellion trilogy. I picked up Of Monsters and Mayhem at the last local book crawl, I may have to read it sooner now!

Classic scifi can be hit or miss. I actually haven’t read much of the classic authors, although I have some in my collection to get through eventually. I read Stowaway to Mars by John Wyndham as a blind book date and it wasn’t a bad book, but man the woman was very very poorly written.

It sucks you get a side eye for reading books you enjoy. I don’t think anyone should be shamed for reading anything. Even if it’s a genre I don’t like, I still ask questions when someone does enjoy something. One of my colleagues is a big biography reader, which I am most certainly not, but I still enjoy chatting about who she is reading about and she likes hearing about my dorky scifi books lol

I’m going to add all your books to my library list! Thanks again!