I'm starting to figure this out.

[julian_griffith]

 If you take the world of romance as being like the entire world of fanfiction, then the sub-genres are the individual fandoms.

So there are paranormals with their subdivisions: vampire, werewolf, psychics, faeries, witches. And there are Westerns, both historical and contemporary. And police stuff, and military, and the ones about billionaires, and historicals of various periods... you get the idea. And of course they come in slash and het variations, as well as other stuff.

I have never had a whole lot of fandoms. I tend to stick to a few. And even in those, I don't often read widely, unless it's a tiny little fandom.

So it's not an actual failing that entire subgenres of romance hold no appeal for me.

They're just not my fandoms.

Comments

[ankaret]

Hee! Yes, I think you've got it exactly. One of the things that makes me annoyed and sad is that while SF romance is what my brain generates if I leave it in park and I'd really like to read more of it, the stuff I find on Amazon keeps being full of 'predestined mate' stories which leave me not so much cold as shivering by the fire at the other end of the room snarling 'Pass me a HOT coffee for the LOVE of GOD'. It's like being someone who really wants post-apocalyptic coffeeshop AUs in a fandom that's all about the A/B/O dubcon.

The id-stuff in romances mostly seems to map over fairly neatly to the id-stuff in fandom - there are the people who really want to give their OTP lots of kids and name them all, for example, and the people with a thing about extreme size differentials between partners, and the people who like reading about the characters accumulating lots of branded stuff, and heck, there's even wingfic - but it does feel like it's about twenty years behind fandom because there's so much more het than anything else. I have a private bet with myself that the first person to write a breakout m/m novel with mpreg will sell in the unexpected thousands.