Let Them Eat Tropes: Why Romantasy Needs to Grow Beyond Trends

My friend is considering a writing project about women in multiverses. Because my primary function is book recommendations and everything else about me is ancillary to that, I’ve been messaging them book titles any time it occurs to me—Diana Wynne Jones’s Charmed Life; Micaiah Johnson’s The Space Between Worlds; Joanna Russ’s The Female Man; Aimee Pokwatka’s Self-Portrait with Nothing (spoilers, sorry); and Mirror in the Sky, by Aditi Khorana.

I’ve been enjoying this partly because fulfilling my primary function allows me to experience a sense of self-worth but also because I’ve been struck by how wildly, thrillingly different these books are. Those authors aren’t writing to some pre-established idea of what a “women traveling the multiverse” story is supposed to look like. They’re writing the weird, specific, personal stuff that they need to write, and it happens that a commonality exists among them: women! Traveling the multiverse! It’s notably a commonality, and not the kind of trope that’s managed to harden into a trend, much less the sort of trend that’s so hot right now.

One cannot be an SFF romance reviewer in 2025 without having trope thoughts. In the last few years, we’ve seen more authors and publishers using tropes as a marketing tool, which seems to have begun as a meme (describe your book using AO3-style tags!) before catching on like algorithmic wildfire. Your book isn’t its actual plot anymore; it’s Slow Burn Enemies to Lovers with Dragons. It’s been especially prominent in romance and—to a lesser extent—SFF spaces, I suspect because a lot of currently working professional writers in those spaces came up on fanfiction. The trend has gotten so intense that when I was googling around looking for other folks who’ve written about this evolution, every search result was advice on how to use tropes to market your book.

The sweet spot for a trope—for me—is somewhere in between the moment when it gets a catchy name, and the moment when it abruptly slams into oversaturation. Like “sword lesbian.” That is a good trope with a good name, and it is bang in the sweet spot of its lifecycle right now. I don’t have enough sword lesbian books in my life! In order to add more sword lesbian books into my life, I need to have a name for the thing I’m asking for, so that other people can give it to me. Right now, as I write this, I am hoping that some of you will drop into the comments with your sword lesbian romance recs. That is what tropes can do for us. Thanks, tropes.

At some point in the lifecycle, though, you stop getting books written by authors whose dream has always been to write this one sword lesbian book, acquired by editors who thought what they were doing was really neat. Instead you get books where the main thing they have going for them is “sword lesbian” and everything else—writing style, plot and character development—is kinda beside the point, because the point was to hit the trend while it’s hot.

I’ve come to believe that this oversaturation can’t not happen, once a trope becomes a trend. And we’re certainly seeing it in the SFF romance space, particularly among pro-pubbed books that are being marketed as romantasy. Everyone wants to replicate the success of Fourth Wing, and the only three tools in their arsenals are tropes, smut, and sprayed edges. At worst, we end up in the grimly dystopic world of Red Tower Books, as described in Katy Waldman’s recent article about a lawsuit between two romantasy authors, where books are conceived from the jump as products for TikTok, then created collaboratively by author and editor to meet the marketing needs of the publisher. I admit this lawsuit feels irresistibly similar to that influencer lawsuit where the one beige influencer is mad that the other beige influencer is hawking all the same beige-ass products as her. The trend is beige. They’re both doing the trend. How could it possibly be argued that one of them is plagiarizing the other one?

Contributing to this relentless sameness is the way these tropes can calcify into prescription—not just the presence of the tropes on which the whole book hangs, but the way you get recurring trope clusters that are understood to all go together. I can’t throw a rock in a bookstore these days without hitting five sprayed-edged romantasies where the girl has to reluctantly team up with a dangerous, sexy enemy in order to save her family / reclaim her throne / overthrow the oppressive ruling class. Fine, I don’t have any objection to a girl getting it on with her dark and deadly enemy. (Au contraire!) But it becomes immensely tedious when every book starts hitting the same exact beats, with slightly different set dressing. She’s different from the rest; she fears she’s worthless and unlovable; she has a slightly boring best guy friend who she’s going to be very surprised to find out is in love with her. The dark and dangerous enemy appears to hate her but that’s just his way of hiding how much he wants to bone and marry her; he’s the only one who sees how special she is; she’s his moral polestar; if it’s a trilogy, he’ll betray her at the end of book one so they can have angry sex in book two and makeup sex in book three.

I’m reading these books because I am dedicated to my beat, but my God, it’s been a lot of beige.

Make no mistake, I love to read tropily. I wouldn’t be a romance reader if I didn’t. It’s brilliant to be an experienced enough genre reader to appreciate when the author’s doing a specific trope a specific way because they know what the trope is, and you know what the trope is, and you’re both having some fun with it. There’s a particular weirdness to it when the hot new trend is something you liked in the first place. What if tropes, but too much? Part of me feels like I willed these cookie-cutter romantasy novels into existence by writing this column while liking romance tropes, and now the universe is standing over me like Miss Trunchbull force-feeding an entire chocolate cake to poor hapless Bruce Bogtrotter. I don’t want the whole cake! I wanted a single slice as part of this complete breakfast! Man shall not live by chocolate cake alone!

The solution to all this lies in understanding why tropes felt good to us in the first place. Porting them straight over from fanfiction ignores what made them work in fanfiction—our preexisting love for the characters the tropes are happening to. When a trope befalls a character I don’t care about, it’s like holding a blank slate up to a mirror to see a second blank slate reflected back at me. When we ask tropes to carry the full weight of the book they appear in, we de-incentivize the deep work of building meaningful characters, textured worlds, and emotionally honest relationships. Enemies to Lovers is marketing copy, but the book has to be more. The book is the process of making me care why these two exact, specific people in this exact, specific circumstance changed their minds about each other; what qualities in each other made them feel curiosity, attraction, and respect. The tropes, ultimately, are window dressing. It’s the characters that matter.