Post

And the dividing line between those two things has always been blurry. In the '00s and '10s the fight was "what is Urban Fantasy and what is Paranormal Romance" and it's complex! UF is a subgenre of SFF w/ that genre's expectations. PNR is a subgenre of Romance, same thing. Simple, right? No. LOL

16/5/25, 2:04 am3 reposts53 likes

hapax

@hapaxnym.bsky.social

If the heroine on the cover is wearing a trench coat or is on stage with a rock band, it's UF. If she's wearing a black catsuit with a chunky metal belt, it's PNR.

The main hang-up for genre romance is usually: does the central relationship have a happy ending. But even that can be complex. Does it have to be a HEA in a single book? Ilona Andrews' Hidden Legacy is a fantastic romance trilogy, imo. But you don't get the happy ending until the 3rd book.

Something can meet all the genre conventions of both and function as either SFF or Romance equally. But if you sell a romance reader a book that they expect to end happily and then one of the romantic protags dies... they will run you over with their car. (Only mild hyperbole.)

So we are just fighting the PNR vs UF fight again but this time we're calling it all Romantasy and so idk, some folks are gonna get hit by cars until we figure this out. LOL

(I also think it doesn't help that ACOTAR is a series that really bends people's genre brains. I will get in fist fights with people who try to rec that series as genre romance b/c it is structurally A VERY CONFUSING GENRE SITUATION! Backwards engineering a genre definition from there is chaos!)

gochenourabout

@sjgochenour.bsky.social