Author Larry Correia Bizarrely Defends The Romantasy Smut Genre After Failing To Hit #1 In Fantasy: "More Power To You"
Many in the science fiction and fantasy community have been calling out Amazon for allowing women’s pornography into the top charts of the genre, cluttering what readers legitimately want out of genre fiction with product that belongs at the very least in its own category, but probably should also be removed on the grounds of it being porn to begin with.
Romantasy slop has overtaken everything in fantasy. Posts regularly go viral on X of people going to bookstores and taking videos of the fantasy section, showing it completely overrun by the likes of Rebecca Yarros or Sarah J. Maas’s, with very little traditional fantasy at all. The only books outside of romantasy that seem to get stocked are by George R.R. Martin and Brandon Sanderson.
It’s a real problem, though it doesn’t, by itself, impact any tangible sales of books otherwise.
Larry Correia has pivoted away from Baen Books in recent years to other publishers, including Aethon Books, a publisher known for its LitRPGs. With this, Correia put out his own LitRPG series to capitalize on the trend, something Baen Books no doubt wishes it had, sales-wise, in its catalog.
There is one catch, however, in that Correia was not able to propel his book to #1 bestseller in the fantasy category, something he took exception to in a long Facebook rant. At first, it looked like he would be joining in rightly criticizing Romantasy, but then he took a strange pivot and defended them:
My new book is 220 on all of the zon.
31 in fantasy, which it turns out is now utterly dominated by romance. I just went through the top 100 and it’s probably 80% housewife sexy time.
Out of the top 100 I saw my new one, Jim Butcher’s new one, Matt Dinniman’s DCC (which is a mega hit right now) and a handful of other things that are regular fantasy. All the usual stuff you’d identify as fantasy have been pushed out of the rankings by romantasy. There wasn’t even any big name continual sellers like Sanderson or GRRM. There wasn’t even any Tolkien I don’t think. Just books with generic covers written by a lady I’ve never heard of with a title like A (something) of (something) and (something).
On the generic covers (lots or flowers and birds) I noticed only a handful showed an actual character. And I listed most of those up top.
I’m not even bagging on the mommy pr0n with dragons. They make bank. More power to you, ladies.
But (the other site I can’t name on this one) really should tweak its subgenres so if a customer is looking for something that’s traditional fantasy the lists aren’t dominated by stuff that isn’t that. Hell, Sword & Sorcery is dominated by romance even.
Dudes who are shopping for something new in the style of Conan should get pointed at Howard Andrew Jones’ Chronicles of Hanuvar (seriously, it’s bad ass), not Lobelia Troutswallow’s A Kingdom of Angst and Boning.
Not that there is anything wrong with angsty boning, if that’s what you like to read ladies. But when (another site I can’t name here!) does its semiannual Why Don’t Men Read freak out, men do read, it’s just that the industry crowds us out because there is a lot more money in mommy pr0n so in comparison it seems like we don’t. That would be like counting Pr0nhub views as TV and then having a bunch of pundits freak out about how women don’t watch TV anymore.
The head-turning points here are that he says he’s “not bagging on the mommy porn,” saying “more power to you, ladies.” And also “Not that there’s anything wrong with angsty boning, if that’s what you like to read, ladies.”
Why would he defend a smut genre when it has no place in a trade marketplace like Amazon? Selling well does not equate value, and Romantasy has objectively destroyed the fantasy genre, and pushed male readers out of bookstores, as Correia has noted in his complaint that he’s not #1.
One can tell it’s not about the values of what books have quality or anything, but simply about what sells with Correia, as he posits making his own romantasy series in a passive-aggressive response afterward:
While it’s a funny idea, it’s likely one that wouldn’t go well for Correia if he did decide to write these.
#1 Bestselling Military Sci-Fi, Political Philosophy, and Genetic Sciences author Vox Day commented on whether this tack would work, “Anyone who’s ever read Larry’s books knows that he doesn’t know the first thing about the realities of male-female relations.”
It’s true that romantasy readers would not likely enjoy Larry Correia’s self-insert Gary Stu beta male character “getting the girl” over the slick alpha as he wrote in his Monster Hunter International series. If anything, they probably would be disappointed that the female character didn’t end up with the monsters he hunts.
He followed up one more time, just to let it be known it’s about the bitterness of not getting that #1 bestselling orange tag and not much else:
Meanwhile, the problem of romantasy smut is real. It is clogging up Amazon and the charts, and it is warping women’s brains with the pornography they consume, which is causing a lot of cultural problems in America. If we want to transform the culture, it starts with the literature changing back to focusing on real values. It’s not something we should pull a Seinfeld and say “not that there’s anything wrong with that!” in response to.
What do you think of this?
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