I am currently looking at book reviews on Goodreads so I can have something more appropriate to read while waiting for my classes to start other than fanfics. One book of the science ficition & fantasy genre caught my eye so I started reading some reviews and found the book even more appealing. Several reviews state, and I quote, "There [is] NO romance in the story," and I was happy. In fact, so many reviews stated this exact sentiment that I started to think it was weird that people were bothered by the lack of romance. Part of it is my understanding that this author has written, in the past, gay mystery romance novels with one of the love interests being a Korean male named Jae, I kid you not (I found this out literally ten seconds ago). 

Let me take a moment to absorb that information, because I am writing this totally on the fly, and I am very surprised. Just found the full name of this character is Kim Jae-Min, known as Jae. Oh, I know this author is infected by the hallyu wave just by reading the reviews of the other series. Words like chaebol and hyung and IT, I might just read it. 

But the surprising discovery of an almost DBSK-like fanfic novel is not what this rant is about. It is about the concept of romance in novels and how everyone cannot get into their mind that not everything revolves around romance. I say this as a female who appreciates and enjoys well written and integrated romance in all aspects of literature, movies, music, all media basically. I despise when relationships or romance are forced into a story that absolutely does not need it or does not benefit from it. 

I don't think I can go too much into this without sounding incredibly cold hearted (which I am often told I am). When I say I appreciate romance, that means I value it, and like anything with value, the more you have of it, the less value it has. If every story comes with a moving, heart warming, tear jerking, satisfying romance, then the value of those romances goes down. It gets to the point that romance has to be hyped up (ing glorified) and it becomes unbearable. These novels rely on the reader being just emotionally vulnerable enough to not care about that.

The same can be said for violence, murder, and . We are desensitized so it needs to be bigger and bolder. Not everyone is irrationally violent, a murderer, or a fiend; however, almost everyone seeks relationships in their life. Whether those relationships are platonic or not, people seek them, and romantic relationships are just relationships with supposedly deeper bonds. It is everywhere and always has been. 

So I acknowledge that romance is ubiquitous (can't believe I spelled that right on the first try) but you don't have to force it to be everywhere. Here comes the shipping part. I think that some authors and some readers have to put certain characters together or they aren't satisfied. This is very weird for me to address towards the kpop fanfic community, but don't you see it? Writings without romance are very hard for the general public to read or even acknowledge. 

I especially have found this to be true over the past five years of writing and reading fanfics. For the past two and half years I have been writing OTP oneshots based on 100 given prompts and have found myself forcing romance into most of them. Three summers ago I did a personal prompt challenge for a month and wrote 30 forced romance oneshots and drabbles. I am torn between wanting to write a decent oneshot and pandering to the audience I am writing for. This is completely understandable for the fanfic community. People are fans of the couple, fans of the ship, and want to read about the romance between the two (or sometimes of more) characters. 

Remember, the fanfic audience here on aff is here for fanfics about an Asian celebrity and often their relationship with an OC or another Asian celebrity. That is what the audience of aff is asking for. And even then, romance is not always necessary and sometimes forced. 

But the novel I was looking at reviews about is not a fanficiton (to my best knowledge), so I don't understand why so many people have to say in their review "This has no romance, be warned." It's not an Eat, Pray, Love romantic comedy. Actually, when I read a synopsis for a book, I look for key signs that there will be romance in a book that otherwise does not need it, and I also look at the reviews to see how well readers took the inevitable romance. Romance is also one of the things I'll thoroughly mention when I write reviews for these books. I'll be blunt about it.
"I wanted to kill Penny. She was a . Obviously the author has never met a real woman and should never get married." For the record, that author's book made me want to write him death threats. It was that awful.
"I found the MC's effort to court this girl for two novels straight humorous and somewhat enlightening, especially at the end when he finally started to see the world more from her perspective after relating her values with his own troubles with abuse and authority." That series I bought both a virtual and physical copy of. 
But if the romance actually doesn't play any role in the story, or the story lacks romance, I don't go "Well, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets lacked any romance, but it was five star book based on everything else the book did have." 

It comes down to our need to "ship" any two characters that have any form of chemistry, whether it is good or bad, together. Look, people in life CAN have a relationship without confessing their undying love and devotion to one another. Let's get away from the "Now Kiss" mentality for a moment and appreciate a story for what is has when it lacks a certain plot device. 

And to everyone who really wants to dig deep into this, think about why the author didn't add romance first before you start warning people that there isn't any. This is an entirely different can of worms I can go into but won't. 
 

Now excuse me as I go buy the "No romance" book and the other books by this author featuring y gay Korean Kim Jae-Min and a bullheaded gay ex-cop . 

Update: So I did end up buying the book that supposedly had no romance. I was sadly tricked by the reviews. There is romance. A bunch of it. There simply no . After delving into more books like this, I have found to be the rule, not the exception, making this particular book an anomaly. That being said, it was a great book and I look forward to the release of the sequel. Still, this goes back to people's expectations of love and romance in fiction. But I am more in the mood to rant about character psychology than romance.