In Defense of Subjectivity

When does escapism in romance work for you?

As a lover of (queer) romance novels, today I want to talk about a very important feature: escapism.

Escapism has always been front and center as a draw for romance, both for writers and readers. From the 80s stereotype of the high stakes, high drama passion of historical romance for bored housewives to the fantastical mythologies of today's romantasy boom, escapism might be termed one of the genre's central tenets besides a happy ending.

Beyond setting and worldbuilding, though, another method by which escapism makes its way into the genre is through the necessity for the characters to be good people. This may sound obvious - of course your main characters need to be people the audience roots for - but it's nowhere near as true outside of romance. Literary fiction certainly doesn't requre a likeable protagonist. Look at Lolita. Crime fiction, the other genre which keeps the literary market afloat, teems with hard-boiled, deeply unlikeable protagonists. Even young adult and children's literature has more than a few protagonists whose selling point is their villainy, think Artemis Fowl or the Bartimaeus trilogy.

One day I will stop using this book as an example, but only when everyone who references it has actually read it

Romance protagonists (with the exception of dark romance, which is not my cup of tea and consequently not something I have anything to say about) need to go through a full redemption arc before getting their happy ending if they dare to so much as be rude to someone. Probably they also need a tragic backstory to explain their behavior. This isn't news, this aspect of the genre dates all the way back to the ur-text Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Darcy is the original romantic hero who redeems himself by bettering himself, and to be honest it's been over 200 years and still, very few characters are doing it like him.

Instead, in the historical romance section, there are a lot of men with anachronistically progressive views about women's role in a partnership and in society, either from the get-go or through a redemption arc. In modern romance, fictional worlds abound with billionaires who accrued their wealth through no fault of their own and are desperate to donate it anonymously. And as for all those sports romances? Well, in light of the recent events of the Hockey Canada trial, it honestly counts as escapism that fictional hockey players value consent.

When asked about the comparative lack of realism in romance, authors and readers often offer up one response: "Living in the real world is hard enough, I don't need my pleasure reading to be full of the same awful things". Who could blame anyone for that stance? Life is hard and long and in the half a second of free time most of us get to indulge in pleasure reading, who wants to deal with systemic oppression? Especially when a large portion of romance readers suffer under it?

Even more so in some subgenres of queer romance, where quite a few fictional worlds simply choose to ignore the existence of homophobia. Escapism there exists in both the characters and the world they live in being devoid of the prejudices of real life. Queer readers and writers get enough of that all day every day, especially in 2025; who needs another coming out narrative, who needs another character with homophobic or transphobic family members, who needs to read more trauma?

As an avid reader of romance, I have nothing but love and understanding for this stance. It doesn't work for me all of the time, but there's plenty of queer romance that goes in the opposite direction and really makes its characters suffer for that happy ending.

The difficulty for me personally arises when what I'm going to call the aesthetic of oppression is used to create a world where the characters face struggles with none of the actual weight of it.

The tagline even wants us to believe it's about her being a wallflower. If true, how come Nicola Coughlin never got interview questions about whether shy characters should show their boobs and instead had to talk about being fat?

Not to harp on Bridgerton all of the time, but the show has a wonderful example of this. The book Romancing Mr. Bridgerton is outright in its fatphobia: Penelope only becomes attractive to Colin once she loses weight. The show on the other hand decided against this (good call!), but never once mentions her weight and also has diverse casting, meaning there are several other fat ladies of the tonne who appear as background characters and are positioned as perfectly desireable matches. And yet, Penelope is singled out as being unmarriageable…why? Can't be due to her weight because the show has made very clear that's not an issue. Has to be because she's a wallflower and her mom made her wear unflattering gowns, I guess. So when Colin learns the error of his ways and falls for her after all, he's learning to not judge shy girls I guess, because fatphobia doesn't exist in Bridgerton. The end result is that the show actually says nothing at all about fatphobia and whether fat women can be hot and instead kind of just says shy girls can be hot. Which is fine I guess but given all the buzz about Penelope's story and how much the media made it about her weight, it disappointed me.

The show used the implicit existence of fatphobia to garner attention but refused to engage with it on a content level, basically. Which is the same thing they did with racism in season one, and also kind of with classism in season three.

Not a romance at all but another Netflix joint that loves to imply an important social issue is happening without actually engaging with the issue. Ask me about this in the comments and I will provide four seasons of commentary.

And queer romance can do this too. I'm not going to name specific media (Bridgerton can take it, one piece of criticism is not going to stop them earning millions), but think of storylines where the specter of a character's fear of coming out to their family or to the public haunts the entire narrative to get that sweet "forbidden romance" vibe only for the result to be "oh, it's fine actually, everyone is super supportive" or "oh, it's fine actually, I didn't need that toxic person in my life". Which is a great happy ending and there are plenty of cases where it works well! There are just also some cases where it reads invalidating to me, where my impression is that the trauma this character is going through is mined for drama but the actual fallout is hand-waved. Especially when the issues in question concern characters' physical safety and their right to a free and equal life, to me there are some books where I buy it hook line and sinker and some where I walk away feeling kind of annoyed this piece of media didn't engage with the actual active restriction of rights for trans people in many countries, in some cases for all queer people.

Fiction is subjective. We all know that. Fiction also can and does engage with real-life problems in the world, and fiction usually ends up saying something about them whether it intends to or not - that is the beauty of readers being able to use their brains. Very often, romance takes characters who are subject to some form of prejudice (in het romance it's usually sexism) and has them prove everyone wrong and/or rise above their antagonists. And I believe it's very much up to each individual reader how we react to that escapist overcoming. As a probably queer (still working on figuring myself out) American (sort of) reader, I find it bugs me now more than it used to when queer characters from other nationalities and religions talk about living in America as a way out of the repression of their heritage in an uncritical way. At the same time, as a fat person, I appreciate books where fat people get to live their lives and fall in love and be attractive without constantly being reminded of how they get treated by doctors and random strangers on the internet.

The beauty of the vast world of fiction is that there will be an escapist romance novel that matches the version of the world you want to read, whether that's a no-prejudice-at-all utopia or a hyperrealistic high angst sobfest with the most cathartic happy end ever.

Of course, as a romance author this puts me in the position of having to decide how to draw the lines of my fictional world. What real life stakes do I want to include because I have something to say about them? What things am I leaving out because I want to imagine a world free of them? What things do I have stuff to say about but can't write at this moment in time because it would make me too sad?

In my published books, Heart First and Second Chance, the world is pretty much as is. The characters lead lives reasonably free from homophobia, but many of the other -isms are a factor, and the reason the hypothetical final book in the trilogy Third Degree isn't happening right now is because it would take place during COVID lockdowns and I just can't go there at the moment. Likewise, I have a rough outline stored that is a sapphic cozy horror novel about post partum depression, and I can't do that right now because of my post partum depression.

The Minor Penalties books, the first of which will be out at the end of this year, are the most romance-novel-y romance novels I have ever written, and I cannot explain how comforting it was to write such a happy, wholesome world while I was going through some pretty tough stuff. This means I chose to add in less of the world's worst aspects. But it doesn't mean there are none. In writing about hockey, especially now, I felt the need to include some reference to the homophobia inherent in the institution, the racism and Islamophobia faced by players of color and Muslim players, and the sexism and awful treatment of women perpetuated by hockey players.

Jax Grant is not pathologically impulsive

Tom Crowler definitely doesn't have anxiety

I also felt the need to have fallible characters who don't engage with these topics perfectly at all times; Jax, one lead of the first book, struggles to stop pre-judging hockey WAGs to be in it for the money, while Tom, the other lead, admits to looking away from behavior he deems immoral because he doesn't want the inconvenience of holding others accountable. Both of them work on these traits, and in neither case is it a major theme in the book. I'm interested to see how my choices resonate with readers.

So what's your line in the sand as a reader or a writer? What aspects of real-life prejudice do you feel uncomfortable about leaving out? What aspect can you do without?