How often does this happen to you? You are immersed in a new world, you love the characters you’ve found there and you can’t wait to find out how they will get out of their current predicament and then you spot ‘it’ lumbering down the road towards you and you really wish ‘it’ would veer off in another direction. You try to ignore ‘it’, you hope ‘it’ won’t happen, or, at least, if ‘it’ does that ‘it’ will be over soon, but you turn the page and then ‘it’ hits you…
POW!
…ten pages lingering on the first kiss, five pages of breathless summary about how marvellous the male protagonist’s body is, another five pages describing how much the male protagonist is affected by the female protagonist’s body, four pages describing how much the heroine enjoys the sex, another page or two describing the first climax (yep, there’s bound to be more than one!) and it just goes on and on and on…
Is anyone else as bored of the romantasy genre as I am? The first time I came across it in ‘Serpent and Dove‘ by Shelby Mahurin, I thought it was an interesting new twist, but now it seems as if every author who writes with a young female protagonist has to follow suit.
I’m not against a good sex scene – far from it, but I just don’t want it mixed into every fantasy book I pick up. I know where to go if I want to read about sex. If I want straight sex I’ll read some Kresley Cole. If I want sapphic sex then I’ll read some Harper Bliss. If I want kinky sex I’ll read ‘Fifty Shade of Grey‘. I don’t need unnecessary sex interrupting the flow of a perfectly good story.
Why?! Honestly, the sex scenes are no longer surprising and it’s hard to find one that stands out from the crowd. You might get the odd mild bondage scene or they try out a different position, but the sex scenes in romantasy novels really don’t have much to differentiate them. I just skip over them these days, the same as I would the boring details of exactly what kind of gun a character carries in a thriller novel.
It’s time to bury this overwrought genre, so dear authors please stop writing them and just give us great stories instead!
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