It’s February, which means it’s time for me to write another article about my favorite (or least favorite, depending on the day) topic: trash romance novels. This time, however, instead of focusing solely on my burning hatred for Colleen Hoover, I’d like to address a pressing issue with romance novels at large. Namely, the impending death of the genre.

Now, this is not to say that good romance novels don’t still exist, because they certainly do, but the romance market has become so oversaturated with bad books that the genre is becoming an echo chamber of unoriginal, lazy ideas. It doesn’t help that these “fast fashion” novels are the ones getting the most attention while better works with real effort put into them are buried. There are several phenomena at fault for the slow rot of the romance genre. To start, let’s discuss the biggest contributor: BookTok…Or Bookstagram. Not Booktube, though. They’re actually okay.

The biggest issue with BookTok lies first and foremost in the mechanics of TikTok itself. Videos must be short and to the point. However, proper book reviewing requires nuance and detail that can’t be crammed into a thirty second clip. Because of this, BookTok influencers reduce novels to their framework, a brief description based mostly on the tropes the story contains. The platform makes it seem as though tropes are the core of every novel and ignores important factors such as character development, writing quality, and the writer’s unique style. Books become popular because of their tropes, so other authors write books based on those same tropes to make a quick buck. They don’t put their own twist on the storylines because BookTok won’t market the novel based on originality anyway. Then, BookTokers make more reviews, the demand for the tropes increases, and the cycle continues on forever. Because of this BookTok phenomena, romance novels are becoming increasingly unoriginal and increasingly low effort. It has essentially created a formula for a romance novel that, while guaranteed to sell, has no soul. Writers aren’t empowered to add their own creative ideas to their stories because those unique aspects are widely ignored in favor of simple, trope based explanations. BookTok enables lazy writing in the pursuit of profit as opposed to art.

BookTok has created a generation of romance authors who put minimal effort into the quality of their writing. Still, the book needs something interesting to make it sell. Tropes are one way to accomplish this, but another widely used tactic by romance authors is shock value. It’s like the saying: you can’t look away from a car crash. When authors write about something shocking, sad, and horrible, it draws readers in. Slap on a half-baked moral drawn from the tragic event, and a writer can easily convince their readers that they’ve written something profound with little to no effort.

The issue isn’t necessarily authors writing about tragic things, but rather the lack of tact and care with which they handle these topics. Common perpetrators are topics such as suicide or sexual assault. Romance authors will throw these into their stories, normally to paint the love interest as some type of savior, then fail to properly explore the mental, emotional, and physical impacts of going through such traumatic events. They gloss over the issues, using them as plot devices rather than the sensitive topics they are. To give an example, I’ll reference, of course, Colleen Hoover. In It Ends With Us, Atlas confesses that he was planning to commit suicide after enduring abuse and homelessness. But he’s miraculously saved when he sees Lily (his love interest) through her window. This occurrence is hardly ever mentioned again and given no real development as a plotline (not to mention it’s really stalkery). To make it even better (by which I mean worse), the novel opens with an “insightful” monologue from Lily about suicide, which holds zero relevance to the plot. And for those who are going to say IEWU isn’t a romance novel (even though it’s marketed like one, and that’s the important thing), I have another example. In CoHo’s Maybe Someday, she uses disabilities as a shock factor. The male lead, Ridge, is deaf and another character, Maggie, has cystic fibrosis. In both cases, it is clear that CoHo did very little research in order to represent these conditions properly. They exist solely to add more conflict and tragedy to the plot. It is shock value at its finest. Romance authors use shocking topics to build an illusion of plot and generate interest in the story without having to put in the effort of actually developing a story. They play on readers’ emotions so that they’ll conveniently ignore the fact that the plot is poorly constructed or unoriginal. Why write something well thought out when you can just write the first horribly tragic thing that comes to mind?

Shock value also presents itself in simpler formats. By that, I mean what BookTok lovingly refers to as “spicy” scenes, or smut. Romance writers have become increasingly reliant on explicit scenes in order to market and build the popularity of their books. I’ve read novels that would have incoherent plots if you removed every explicit scene from the book. It’s used as a way to distract readers from the underdeveloped plot and the lackluster chemistry between characters. Explicit scenes give the illusion of a developed relationship without the work of actually developing it. The effect plays on the shock of reading something so risque and the common association of physical intimacy with emotional intimacy in order to make a romantic pairing look good when in reality the relationship is about as dry and boring as cardboard. The use of such scenes in making and marketing romance novels has become so widespread that many readers actually expect books to have smut and believe they will be unenjoyable if they don’t.

The issue of shock value also sheds light on another issue in the modern romance industry, which is the chronic mishandling and romanticization of complex topics. Or, as I like to call it, dark romance. The subgenre emerged originally as a way to incorporate darker themes in a romance novel. It focused on romance as the major plot, but also included elements of horror, suspense, and crime genres. However, dark romance has quickly devolved into smut filled copy paste mafia stalker stories that glorify toxic relationships. The subgenre is no longer about the artistic blend of genres, but rather about romanticizing abuse, crime, and hate. 

By labeling a novel as a romance, a writer is essentially saying that what happens in the story is romantic. They are announcing that the main relationship in the story is a healthy, romantic relationship. Emphasis on the healthy. Romances are about healthy relationships, dramas are about unhealthy ones. By portraying abusive relationships in their stories, dark romance authors are displaying that these behaviors are romantic and okay within a relationship. They set poor standards for readers to expect in their real life relationships. The label isn’t the only issue. Oftentimes, the abusers in these stories end up with their victims and all negative behaviors are forgiven, further reinforcing the belief that there is nothing wrong with the relationship when there in fact is. CoHo also provides a prime example of this in November 9, when Fallon forgives her love interest despite him repeatedly sexually harassing her. Modern romance novels are killing romance by redefining what we view romance as in the first place. Instead of picturing happy, healthy relationships when they think of romance novels, readers now view possessive, abusive relationships filled with stalking, grooming, and a disgusting lack of consent.

Dark romance also romanticizes behaviors outside the relationship itself. Tillie Cole, popular author of A Thousand Boy Kisses (which I haven’t read, for the record. I’m not talking about that particular book), is a prime example of this. She decided to write a novel in which a Mexican woman ends up with a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Let that sink in for a second. There are, of course, obvious issues with her choosing this plotline. For one, Cole is a white woman from Britain, so she is by no means qualified to properly tackle the topic of American hate groups. Her lack of knowledge was made painfully clear in just the first couple chapters of the novel (which I deeply regret reading. Wasted many minutes of my life just to write an angry review). The main issue is the blatant romanticization and simplification of the topic. Racist man meets Mexican woman, thinks she’s hot, and is automatically cured of all racism. He is forgiven for his past, despite having participated for years in an organization that kills people, on the flimsy excuse that he was raised within the KKK and thus didn’t know any better. That reasoning already isn’t enough to justify forgiveness, but Cole also adds several plot points that negate his excuse. For example, the several years he spent in the military, presumably away from the KKK, that provided him with a chance to leave or maybe the fact that he needed a corporeal reason (aka he wanted to sleep with the female lead) in order to actually leave because apparently the fact that they were racist extremists wasn’t reason enough. Did I mention also that the female lead is the daughter of a cartel leader, so the book as a whole plays into racist stereotypes? The novel was plagued by all the usual suspects of a dark romance novel: romanticization, clear lack of research, and just all around poor writing. Books like these are slowly transforming the romance genre into something more akin to psychological horror, and possibly causing irreparable damage to young readers’ view of relationships.

I’ve gone on for too long, and probably ruined the Valentine’s Day of anyone reading this. Still, my point stands. The romance genre is slowly dying from a combination of lazy writing, poor marketing, egregious sensitivity issues, and a startling shift away from what makes it romance in the first place. The responsibility falls on writers to fix these issues by putting in the care and effort their books deserve, but it also falls on readers to promote the books that still embody what romance is all about. We might have to dig through a lot of crappy novels to find the diamonds in the rough, but if we can raise up the good books and use them as examples, we might just be able to revive the romance genre.

And while we’re at it… we really ought to put Colleen Hoover books to rest.