tales of Suchita

Over the past two and a half years, I have read a disturbing amount of fanfiction and an okay amount of romance novels. I was going through my “read” books and saw an interesting pattern: I was reading more queer romances than straight romances. 

First I thought it was a choice because I wanted to explore different forms of love. I thought this was my great awakening and I was broadening my horizons. While that was true, I also realized something else.

I have learnt more about consent, bodily agency and my right to feel pleasure through fanfiction than I have learnt from popular media. I have learnt it’s okay to ask, to pause and communicate with your partner and just how important it is to be open and honest. All of this through fanfiction.

That’s when it hit me – all the fanfiction I was reading was queer too. I was actively seeking out queer romances over straight romances. Fanfiction and queer romances have taught me more about healthy relationships and healthy bodies than any straight romance novel has! 

So as an experiment, I tried reading a couple of popular straight romance novels. A few of the differences I noticed:

1. Straight romances still use the trope of the guy coming to the girl’s rescue. I mean that in the literal sense. She’s in trouble and he comes at the nick of time. The scene’s purpose is often to save the girl from some form of bodily violence. 
2. The girl always has girlfriends but rarely communicates with them – even life changing experiences that she’s going through. The book is almost always about the guy and their story. 
3. The third act is almost always a fight because apparently a guy and a girl don’t know how to talk to each other. 
4. Their respective jobs are hardly ever explored beyond the minimum needed to establish their character outlines.
5. The emotional range of the characters is limited to anger, love and tears.

I’m not saying queer romances aren’t tropy. They almost always have a conversation around questioning roles you’re slotted into simply because you tick enough checkboxes. If you read one with trans characters, they will talk about the dysphoria they feel because of their bodies. There are support systems – either family or friends or both – for when the characters need a good clonking on the head. 

You see where I’m going with this aren’t you? 

I feel like while queer romances are more interested in talking about their characters and showing their ups and downs and how they grow from the beginning of the book to the end of the book, straight romances are still stuck in their ruts, repeating the same formulaic patterns that social media and patriarchy have embedded in our psyches. And while yes showcasing reality is necessary, shouldn’t we also show a different world that could potentially exist if we tried?

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Connecting this post to #BlogchatterA2Z. To read other posts, check Theme Reveal 2022: Without Prearrangement.

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PS: If you like how I write and would like to read more, I have 2 ebooks on Kindle – both free if you’re on Kindle Unlimited. You can read more about the ebooks here.