On taste, romantasy, thought, and nuance

Everyone has an opinion—and I might not actually care about yours? (Alternatively: I have a lot of thoughts about Fourth Wing.)

I can let people enjoy things—let myself enjoy things!—while still thinking critically about how my consumption habits affect who I am.

This morning I told a friend I think one of his favorite movies is boring.

“I don’t care,” he declared. And we moved right on.

My past self would have worried this interaction was callous, but trust me: It wasn’t. My friend was not saying “I don’t care about you” or even “I don’t care about your opinions overall”. He was simply saying he did not care if I was a fan of this specific film he loved, because his love for it exists independently of other people’s takes. No defensiveness, no justification, no only-one-of-us-can-be-right¹ tension.

It took me decades to grow comfortable with this response to low-stakes² opinions. I’m reminded of CJ Hauser’s “Hepburn Qua Hepburn” essay in The Crane Wife: “the reality is that I was threatened by men’s tastes because I assumed they would have to become mine.” They go on to say “I find other people contagious. … I am porous to the world, a kind of joyful sponge for the affectations and interests of the people I love. … It has been the work of my life to build slightly firmer boundaries around myself so that I can figure out where I end and the people I love begin.”

This, too, might be the work of my life.

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I first read Fourth Wing in 2023, three or four months after it came out. The story drew me in—it was fast paced, featured dragons, left me curious—but I decided not to continue with the series because of the writing quality.

As someone who desperately wants to be a Writer, I care about words. I care about control of language, varied diction, sensical sentence structure. I used to harp on these things in an obnoxious, pedantic way where I asserted everyone else should share my concern (and if they didn’t, they were flawed with an undertone of “probably not worth my time”). I’ve worked on relinquishing my ego, but preferences stick around.

Gosh, there is so much to unpack here.

Is it okay for me to critique someone’s writing when I’m not sure I could do better myself? On a sentence-to-sentence basis, maybe I could. (Sometimes I involuntarily copy edit the books I read, restructuring commas and quotes and dialogue to my personal tastes—a compulsion as satisfying as it is ridiculous.) But when it comes to plot… Nope. How do people come up with these stories? With any stories? I can’t even tell Sean about something that happened to me in real life (no imagination required) without including three unrelated narratives and realizing, at the very end, that I failed to set the stage for the punchline. I have no faith in my ability to build a world beyond the one I mentally inhabit every day.

So sometimes I hear the masses critiquing a work—a book or film or performance I agree could, indeed, be better—and hesitate to lean in. Because while better could exist, I don’t think better could come from me. (Have I too deeply internalized Brené Brown’s idea about getting my ass kicked in the arena?³)

In this sense I am full of respect for Rebecca Yarros. Look at this woman putting art into the world, touching people in the process, crafting a universe that feels real to many readers. Look at her thrust into the spotlight—into criticism I imagine I myself would find paralyzing—and still waking up every day to create.

Of course I love that! So it’s no wonder that when I picked up Iron Flame this month, returning to the Empyrean after a year and a half absence, I got super into it.

But stop for a second. See, here I’m doing another thing that might be futile anyway: Trying to justify exactly how I feel. Trying to interrogate my opinions before anyone else can. Trying to make my reactions make sense so that I can be reasonable.

Those are sometimes (often) worthy pursuits. I want to move through life thoughtfully—and intention is especially vital in today’s systems where seemingly little things have ripple effects enough that what we think of them matters beyond personal joy.

But which little things? The books about dragons and young love that aren’t written as well as we’d like but that make us feel anyway?

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I am a big let people enjoy things person. I also believe taste matters. (These points are on my growing list of “ways I might be hypocritical” that my best friend cackled at on FaceTime yesterday.)

By the second, I mean taste matters to the degree that preferences often beget preferences. When someone says “romantasy books get more people (usually meaning: more young women) reading” they might more accurately finish that sentence with “romantasy”: Romantasy books get more people reading romantasy books. Individual journeys vary, but I am not sure how crowded the pipeline from romantasy to other genres really is.

Is that even a problem? A huge part of me screams “no!”

I’m particularly hesitant to critique the romantasy genre because I am sick of people making fun of the things women enjoy. Society has looked down on “feminine” tastes for so damn long it makes me want to throw fine china. Amanda Montell discusses language examples of this at length in Wordslut—qualities of speech we associate with women (particularly young women) are often thought inferior to the ways men communicate.

That’s bullshit. We do not deserve this relentless derision.

Plus grouping habits and preferences and tastes into rigid gender-based categories woefully ignores the fact that we—complex, individual people—can enjoy many different things. I consider my own ability to find bits worth liking in a huge range of media something of a superpower. I am a “charitable” reader and watcher and consumer. There aren’t many things I hate. There aren’t many things I even strongly dislike. I hope it’s less about being a spineless doormat who never has thoughts (I worry I have too many thoughts) and more about being able to sink into a moment (a movie, an episode of a show four separate friends recommended, a book) and enjoy it for what it is.

I like enjoying things very much.

At what point do we consider the larger implications of our tastes, though? Some claims I’ve heard about romantasy in particular: The genre reinforces puritanical heterosexual norms. If men approached this reading the same way women do, we’d be disgusted. Erotica affects brain chemistry not unlike visual porn.

To which the classic rebuttals fill my head: Can we just, like, stop hating on women already? Reading is better than watching. Entertainment doesn’t have to be educational. (“Sometimes we need hot garbage,” insists a close friend.) Let people enjoy things. Let people create things. Let women enjoy and create things.

I am tempted to make the classic food analogy (treat your media diet like an actual diet; have some candy alongside your protein so long as you do not subsist on candy alone) but also resistant to its flaws. Some of the nonfiction books I read are deeply nourishing for my worldview. Some of the pop fiction books I read fuel intense joy. This is not as simple as my body’s energy needs—what even is reading candy?—and I’d like to skip tired arguments over the height of our brows.

So maybe it’s about the ultimate effect of our tastes. Who do we want to be? My answer need not be the same as yours—and vice versa—but once we have goals in mind it’s nice if our actions move us toward them. My desire to not be someone who primarily watches reality dating shows doesn’t mean I think those shows are the greatest blight on modern society. I just realize that preoccupying myself with the drama of strangers, in a format that makes me think so little as to not really think at all, negatively impacts my creativity. (And maybe Temptation Island doesn’t do that for you. We can be different!)

When I read Dopamine Nation this winter, I was surprised by Anna Lembke’s personal example of indulgence: her addiction to romance novels. I remember turning off my Kindle screen and sitting in our campsite and wondering what kind of sexist undertone that was. Was Lembke saying an addiction to reading was as bad as her patient addicted to masturbation (to the degree that his real-life marriage was crumbling) or the many held hostage by “real” drugs? Consuming words is obviously healthier, no? Was I losing my mind?!

I think I understand her better now. Lembke was talking about a compulsion to read novels that she did not enjoy beyond surface-level payoff (she skimmed until she reached climactic scenes) that negatively impacted other areas of her life. It was maladaptive.

And if all I read was Fourth Wing—if I couldn’t put it down, couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t continue living in my real world—I think it would be maladaptive too. That would be the point to consider how my tastes beget my tastes. What ways do I want to spend my time? What things do I want to think about?

Valid questions about what I consume and why.

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Wrapped up in this conversation are ideas of what we attach our identities to. We are more likely to be defensive—and to feel disparaging toward others—if we strictly define ourselves in relation to media we consume. I struggled with this for years: If someone said “I don’t like ___” but ___ was one of my favorite things, I felt threatened and panicked. In my insecurity, “I don’t like ___” sounded like “I don’t like you” and it made me prickly and judgmental and super not fun to have at your lunch table.

But I can choose to respond more like my friend did when I called his favorite movie boring. I can trust those around me to be mature enough to respond that way, too.

And I am now—at nearly 28 years old—fully, properly, actually realizing that I can enjoy something while also holding criticisms of it. I used to believe, subconsciously but powerfully, that I could only like a book or movie or album or artist if it was near perfect. My enjoyment of it, and mostly my profession of that enjoyment, had to be an endorsement of the thing overall, right?

Well, not exactly.

Turns out I loved reading the Empyrean series. Does that mean I love the series itself? Maybe that’s nitpicky semantics, but it feels different to me. I certainly loved parts of it, but they’re not going on my list of “best” books I’ve ever read—and that’s okay. I can still be into them. I can reread Fourth Wing and Iron Flame and Onyx Storm for comfort (and clues! and community discussions!) without simultaneously saying this is the pinnacle of art.

(Also, like: What does the pinnacle of art even mean, anyway?)

I’d be remiss not to acknowledge another identity element here, too. It’s not just consumers who love something and feel any critiques of that thing are critiques of them. The critics have their own baggage. Part of the reason I was initially reluctant to admit how much I enjoyed immersing myself in the Empyrean this time around was because I consider myself a Writer and a Reader. I thought it was blasphemous to those identities—those too-rigid identities I’d let be informed by indiscriminate voices around me—to like a book that was widely considered not particularly well written.

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I feel like I keep straddling lines. I worry this comes from an insidious desire to be special—something I’m still interrogating most days—but hope it’s a real attraction to complexity. I am too into romantasy to look down my nose at fellow readers (not to mention too put off by the idea of down-nose looking in general). I am too into writing to quiet the pit in my stomach when sentences lack any flow. I am too into let people enjoy things to commit to conversations about highbrow and lowbrow entertainment, to have confidence claiming we “should” or “should not” consume certain media, to value or not value a person’s experience based on an arbitrary standard. I am too into what we consume does affect what we feel and how we move through the world and who we are to say there should be no standards at all.

So, recently: I felt vaguely embarrassed enjoying the Empyrean series so much. Then I felt ashamed of being embarrassed (because my shame was unkind to others who enjoyed the books, too, and I yearn to be a woman who supports women). And then I realized I could just… own my experience. I could trust myself. I could let people enjoy things—let myself enjoy things!—while still thinking critically about how my consumption habits affect who I am.

I don’t think reading erotic scenes for an excitement high is the same as falling in love with a novel, with a setting, with characters that stick in your psyche. I also don’t want to be anyone’s taste police.

For me, everything always comes back to the nuance. To the “multiple things can be true at once”. To the “yes to that and also yes to this”. To the compatibility of ostensibly contradictory thoughts and feelings, because that marriage is part of what makes life so worth living.

1. I’ve long had a thing with wanting to be “right”. I’ve written about this at length in the dog training space—my journey to realize there is no right (and embrace all the nuance all the time to the point of exhaustion)—but awareness that objectivity is impossible does not preclude my yearning to be good. And one of the ways I’ve defined good, for ages and ages and ages, has been whatever my peers or people on the internet or some imagined higher power of social approval agrees upon. (I must wonder how much of this came from a religious upbringing where I was very involved in church youth programs and very directly taught that any life questions could be answered by a pastor who would tell me the capital-T Truth. But that’s another essay.)

2. I can argue with myself forever about what is and is not “low stakes”. Here I loosely mean anything where not caring precisely how a close friend feels isn’t automatically problematic. My friend loves a show I hate? Cool. Probably not a big deal. Compare that to my friend fundamentally disagreeing with me about human rights or the value of natural environments? Those are situations where I would not be able to say or comfortably hear “I don’t care”. (Of course, this too devolves into a mess of nuance, because I believe in small incremental change and ripple effects and can rarely decide how much something does, indeed, matter.)

3. “If you are not in the arena getting your ass kicked on occasion, I am not interested in or open to your feedback. There are a million cheap seats in the world today filled with people who will never be brave with their own lives, but will spend every ounce of energy they have hurling advice and judgement at those of us trying to dare greatly. Their only contributions are criticism, cynicism, and fear-mongering. If you're criticizing from a place where you're not also putting yourself on the line, I'm not interested in your feedback.” — Brené Brown