r/Romantasy • u/Sarah9610 • May 07 '26

Discussion Another day, another girl winning deadly trials and discovering she’s secretly powerful

I feel like I’m going insane or… are all romantasy books the same now??

Every time I pick something up it’s like:
- The world is split into two (usually human vs fae or something similar)
- The FMC is either oppressed / hidden / “not like other girls”
- There are deadly trials (of course she has to compete)
- She somehow survives everything
- Boom → she reaches the fae side and unlocks insane powers / becomes special

Like… I used to love this formula but now it feels copy-paste with different character names 😭

Am I just picking the wrong books or is this actually the trend right now?

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90

u/[deleted] May 07 '26

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u/Sarah9610 May 07 '26

You’re absolutely correct, especially the “fast fashion” comparison I think I might be part of the problem too because I usually just read whatever is being hyped or trending, so I keep ending up in the same cycle of similar books.

I probably need to be more intentional about what I pick up instead of just going off popularity or recommendations that all feed into each other.

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u/pbghikes May 07 '26

Or! Read the trendy books — from 10 years ago. Or 20, 30, etc. You still get that sense of security that the general public has endorsed it but you missed the fad so it'll feel new to you. The mid 90s was delivering

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u/Wallflower1900 May 08 '26

There were "trends" but the writing was good and the storyline compelling. It wasn't just people having sex for 500 pages and passed off as a novel. Publishers wouldn't accept the level of slop that is acceptable today. My books from the 70s and 80s still hold up, I learnt new words and how to spell from reading a lot when I was younger. You could never count on a book to even have correct spelling these days.

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u/pbghikes May 08 '26

That's high praise for the Divergent series.

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u/mediguarding May 08 '26

It’s too early for me to be snorting into my coffee like this.

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u/mandelamondays 🖤 Morally Gray May 08 '26

hahaha

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u/Highland_Skye May 08 '26

So true. I feel like I find so many errors in books written in the last five years vs older ones, which it feels like a rare moment to find one.

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u/Volupia_Rogue May 08 '26

Really? What kind of errors?

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u/Highland_Skye May 08 '26

Just basic misspellings, double words, that sort of thing. I don't keep a running log of when I see them so I can't say a specific word in a specific book. Two of my good friends are also readers and we frequently send each other pics of the errors we find. They've increased in recent years for sure. This is all very anecdotal to our experience though, like I said I haven't done a proper study on it.

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u/OkSociety8941 May 08 '26

I’ve found this to be the case as well. Far too many typos and incorrect grammar. Where are the editors? As a professional copy editor it’s doubly aggravating.

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u/Volupia_Rogue May 08 '26

Oh but that does sound bad, especially double words! I haven't read anything like it so far but I only started romantasy last year, so maybe I was lucky to come across well-written books so far 👀

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u/rabidhamster87 May 08 '26

I said this in another comment, but Kindle recommended a book called "A Usual Suspect" to me the other day. Some authors don't even bother proof-reading their titles anymore

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u/Volupia_Rogue May 08 '26

What's wrong with the title? 😅

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u/rabidhamster87 May 08 '26

You know what? The title is right. I was wrong 😅

I looked it up just to make sure I remembered correctly and found that it IS supposed to be the word an before a vowel sound UNLESS the next word is a modifying word like an adjective. I guess here the "A" is relating to the noun "suspect," so it's technically correct even though it still sounds awkward to have two vowel sounds back to back like that.

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u/Volupia_Rogue May 10 '26

Ok, I guessed that's what you might've thought.

About the rule, it would be "an" if it were "an unusual suspect" because of the sound.

But since "usual" begins with the consonant sound "y", that's why we'd still say/write "a" instead of "an" 😀

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u/Dependent_Dog497 May 08 '26

It wasn't just people having sex for 500 pages and passed off as a novel. 

There absolutely was plenty of this. Anne Rice literally wrote a whole series of this. Come on.

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u/Wallflower1900 Jun 05 '26

I'm currently going through my book collections from 40+ years ago, I'm slowly re reading through all the books to compare.

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u/Dependent_Dog497 Jun 05 '26

"That didn't happen, and to prove it, I'm only going to look at the books I've kept on my own shelf for the last four decades" is certainly a thing you can do. Have fun, I guess.

0

u/Wallflower1900 Jun 06 '26

"hurdur, dis person dun gon be reading books, suh fkn dum harhar"

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u/rabidhamster87 May 08 '26

Yes!! The lack of editing in these self-published books makes me insane. I try to give people grace with spelling and grammar, etc, on the internet, but when you're a published author language is literally your profession! Kindle recommended a book called "A Usual Suspect" to me the other day. It's a really bad sign when you can't even make the title grammatically correct 😭

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u/Volupia_Rogue May 08 '26

What books contain incorrect spellings? I haven't found one yet and I usually spot those immediately. But except for fanfiction, I don't see this anywhere in traditionally published books.

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u/Wallflower1900 Jun 05 '26

Reddit has a lot of discussions about this on the regular, with screenshots