Romance 101 Romance Sub-Genres

The second video in my Romance 101 series, today I'm talking all about romance sub-genres.

Books discussed in this video:

Lippie: Colourpop Ultra Glossy Lip in Champagne Mami

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[pengjia]

So glad I found your channel I feel like not enough people talk about romance on booktube 🥰

[starsandsoul]

Really useful video. Thanks for recording it.

[rosewrought]

The distinction you've drawn between paranormal and UF is SO interesting - I've never thought about it like that before. I usually think of paranomal as under the umbrella of fantasy at large because I am, for the most part, a genre fantasy reader, but this makes much more sense in the context of romance.

As for contemporaries and historicals, the way I differentiate them is usually based on when it was written/published. IMO, if a book set in say the 80s was published in the 80s, I would consider it a contemporary, but if it was published now I would consider it historical (as weird as that is to consider).

This is a bit of a tangent, but something the drives me batty--and that I REALLY appreciate you not doing here--is the distinction LGBT romance as a sub-genre in and of itself, because it's really... not... As a lesbian, it feels so othering and honestly a little fetishistic. And I don't even think it's really effective as a sub-genre; there are queer histroicals, contemporaries, paranormals. If a sub-genre is based on reader expectations, that's an incredibly wide range of expectations to encapsulate, with the only similarity being the gender of the pairing. I don't really care if people don't want to read LGBT romances, but segregating them from "normal" romances honestly stings a little.