I think he just said and sent this to a journalist! A journalist he knew he was on the record with lol! The man is so transphobic and so full of himself and his own garbage opinions he simply cannot see how bizarre this is.

Was this real? Ah yes marijuana, the drug well known for inducing immediate murderous rages.

No need to blame anything! 😘

Oh no like I say it doesn’t bother me, I assumed it was building to a gore fest lol. It’s just wild that it’s so accepted here! Almost no one complaining about it. Very successful. Film deals etc.

How do people get away with this? It’s not really a problem for me but I’ve seen people call high concept romance novels slow when the central premise kickstarting and/or the meet cute is on page five.

I feel like people are just doing it on purpose now. Just totally totally trying to conflate Romance with romantic on purpose. As if until very recently anything to do with romance was all Romeo and Juliet and then the bad times came. As if there was never previously genre and everything else.

Yep exactly so. It IS relevant. Just not to the only audience they think is worthy of bestowing relevance.

Its cultural relevance was in THOSE audiences. Was in its enormous size and appeal to them. That hasn’t changed. In fact, I would argue that its appeal and its relevance has expanded into other areas, in recent years, and any contraction in THAT is people like them trying to crush the progress.

This is the thing. It doesn’t have relevance in THEIR space—literary fiction, horror, arthouse movies etc. But then it never did. It has never had that kind of relevance. But they’re acting like it did once and then somehow commercialised or sanitised its way out of it. Nope.

😂😭😂 I find it so funny that fundamentally their position is the same as his. That by their estimation, Sparks is writing great and daring books.

The pushback to the HEA was one of the first things that ever taught me just how deranged and intense the need is in people who view themselves as superior and edgier and smarter to demolish any cultural value we place on joy, romance, happiness, fun, entertainment etc.

The wildest thing is that the romance genre is still absolutely enormous. It isn’t culturally irrelevant at all. I would argue that people like this simply don’t want it to be cultural relevant as it is and *always has been*. They wouldn’t want Harlequins anymore than they’d want Romcoms.

This person is not even any kind of romance writer. I’d best describe them as an edgelord. But they and people like them have successfully managed to mainstream a lot of these views. People within the community agreed with them many times on their way here. Now what.

Because they know that people kneejerk to “fun” or “sugary” things now are the destruction of culture and awful, and so lumping it all together means they can easily criticise the HEA without the kind of scorn and condemnation the romance community would have heaped on them years ago.

People who don’t seem to know or care if they’re talking about love stories, romantic tragedies, or Romance. Who seem to think the HEA requirement is some brand new commercial infringement. Who are happy to conflate the HEA with cheesy empty commercialism and sugariness.

And I want people to understand that this is what Romance is up against now. People spouting off about the genre as if they have some understanding of it prior to right now, acting as if the HEA is only a problem right now. That somehow, it has BECOME terrible because only now is it HEA and “sugary”