I have been a a romance reader since almost 2 years ago. A thing that I’ve noticed is for the past six or seven months especially after crack my back drama most of the new sports romance books have been bad. It may just be me running into a problem or a slump a piece of my guess is over saturation. The tall hockey player ,the amazing F1 driver ,champion football player ,or extraordinary basketball player archetypes have become lackluster to me. I feel like authors have stopped actually caring about the complexity of the character and decided to focus on what a massively white woman erotica romance reader cares about which is mostly the body of the male lead and how petite the female lead is. Especially in the NFL or NBA romances almost every single popular romance book of this kind is white men or white woman when a good percent of these leagues are black or Hispanic. I don’t think it would be hard to incorporate maybe a Polynesian or Indian character into a book but time and time again authors fail . Even when going to office romances I run into the same problem does every female you have to be a five six white girl who wears red lipstick and heels but with nothing more to them I wouldn’t mind the whole thing if it had complexity but it doesn’t. For instance if the female lead wore red lipstick because her grandma always wore it and her grandma was her inspiration it would be awesome. I’m so tired of only white leads in these books where the girl has to be as pale as porcelain no taller than five six or five seven or were the male lead has nothing more to him than a somewhat nice body and a team backing him . How is it romance when there’s no love is in it most of these influencers promoting the book don’t even like the books. It’s all erotica what’s the point of it being a romance section of sports romance section an office romance section a medical romance section if its all just porn made for one audience? I have it related to a female lead and almost a year and that’s solely because she was over 5’7 as a 5’9 girl I enjoyed that they acknowledge that not every female lead was 5’6 or 5’2.
This is mostly a rant but the book community has an awful white supremacy problem along with no character complexity become a norm . It’s horrendous
by adelivz
5 Comments
The short answer is you need to find some new authors.
As you’re no doubt aware there are a TON of books published every day. And the quality varies WILDLY.
But there are good authors out there, and many of them are writing about a wide diversity of FMCs (slightly less so with the MMCs lol.)
The problem is simply finding what it is you’re looking for. There’s SO MUCH being published that the stuff you’re looking for is harder to find—it’s definitely out there though.
I detest Facebook, but I suspect it’s the best place to find reader groups that really drill down into specific tropes, sub genres, FMC and MMC types etc.
I don’t have any specific recs I’m afraid. I never read sports romance! Good luck finding some good books though… they’re out there… somewhere…
If you like SFR then Ruby Dixon writes really diverse characters of all races and body types, some with various disabilities etc.
I don’t really remember the last time I read a romance about solely thin white people – decently written diversity is out there if you know where to look! Have you tried the Brown Sisters series? If you like sports based romance, Take A Hint Dani Brown has a Pakistani ex-rugby player MLI.
read books by authors of colour? There are loads. Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute, Partners In Crime, Fumbled, The Hookup Plan, Fake It Till You Bake It etc
That should take care of most of these issues. Look for clean romance if you’re not into sex stuff.
Maybe you’ve read so many romances that you’re beginning to notice how tropey and repetitive they tend to be.
Please give an example of a good “sports romance”
I had no idea this sub-genre existed.
I personally couldn’t give a little rat’s ass about representation (and I am from a couple of minority groups myself so trust me, I am allowed to say that) So that argument doesn’t hold much water for me. But moving on, I’ve given romance books many chances, and time and time again found that the writing is bad, the characters are underwhelming, and everything is very shallow. I have nothing against incorporating romance into a novel, but the genre is a giant cringefest. And I don’t think my not enjoying romance has anything to do with me being male. It’s genuinely a very lazy, surface level genre.