Birdwings

Look, I'm not a video essay person, and I was only ever a casual Twilight fan. A three-hour Youtube video essay by ContraPoints titled simply "Twilight" did not immediately strike me as a must-watch. But my sister recommended it to me, and my sister is literally always right about things I will like, so I watched it in parts over a series of evenings and...yeah, my sister's record remains unblemished.

This video is entirely about Twilight but also not even a tiny bit about Twilight. ContraPoints is a former philosopher who has this way of integrating serious philosophical, psychological, moral and religious concepts with "shallow" artefacts of pop culture, taking the latter seriously and the former playfully to create genuinely perspective-shifting works that are also straight-up FUN. This time we're talking about womanhood, identity and sexuality and the ways these themes are developed in a literary genre that is overwhelmingly written by and targeted towards women. There's a lot going on here (again, three hour video essay) and I definitely recommend watching the whole thing if that sounds like the kind of thing that interests you, but it all basically revolves around the central argument that romance functions as a genre by playing out tensions within the reader's own psyche, and has little to do with her actual romantic behaviours or preferences. Which I already more or less knew, as someone who spends a great deal of time writing smutty shipfic about a man with whom I doubt I could bear to spend five minutes in real life, but this video really drills down on why that's the case in a way I found both intellectually satisfying and personally illuminating.

So now, feeling freshly validated and emboldened in the mainstream het romance reading fad I'm going through right now, I bring you guys a few of my most recent adventures:

Book Lovers by Emily Henry is a delightful "fuck you" to the stereotype of the frigid forever-alone career woman. Nora Stephens is a high-powered New York literary agent who keeps getting dumped by her boyfriends as they run off to live their tropey country romance tree-change fantasies. Charlie Lastra is a blunt, surly senior editor who pisses her off on their first meeting by being rude about her star client's book. Nora's beloved younger sister convinces her to do a getaway in a small North Carolina town that turns out to be Charlie's hometown, where he is currently staying to help his ageing parents. Despite their rough start, they quickly develop a sharp, bantery rapport that makes it clear Charlie is extremely into Nora's self-sufficiency and ambitiousness. I really enjoyed the clever, funny chemistry between them and the fact (I don't think this even counts as a spoiler - the book is at no point subtle about where it's going) that Nora gets a happy ending that complements rather than compromises her career. Also, Charlie is a dreamy male lead with a sparkling sense of humour, a wardrobe of high-quality neutral basics, and attractively dramatic eyebrows (he's described as Cary Grant meets Groucho Marx, which caused my brain to immediately land on Peter Gallagher and stay there unmoving for the duration of the book.)

The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston: For once, a reskinned Reylo novel that is only sort of a reskinned Reylo novel. Apparently Poston conceived this story as Reylo fic but pivoted to origfic before finishing or publishing any of it. But the MMC looks literally exactly like Adam Driver, down to the specific location of the moles on his face (I pulled up a headshot to check) and is named, I kid you not, Ben. Not!Rey's best friend is named Rose, and the company she works for is called Falcon House. Reylo-gone-pro continues to be the most shameless hustle in the world and I continue to love it.

Florence Day works as the ghostwriter for a famous romance novelist, and also has the ability to see literal ghosts. Benji Andor (Andor! Come ON!) is her gorgeous but hardass new editor who just denied her an extension on her last contracted novel, which she has been unable to complete due to having lost faith in love after a bad breakup. ( More thoughts, including major spoilers )

Forget Me Not by Julie Soto: My mixed feelings about Soto's work continue. I noped out of Rose in Chains early, finding it squicky on multiple levels; I liked the pairing in Not Another Love Song but not the execution; now here's a novel that is both well executed and really enjoyable, but with a romance that contains about as much chemistry as my academic transcript. (I dropped all STEM classes in high school the moment they stopped being mandatory.) In brief: Ama is an ambitious wedding planner who thinks all marriages are doomed because her mum has had sixteen divorces, and Elliot is a grumpy florist who ruined their former situationship by impulsively asking her to marry him. When they both get hired to co-design the same lavish celebrity wedding, old feelings resurface and blah blah you guys know the drill.

( More thoughts )

My Roommate Is a Vampire by Jenna Levine is a fun, silly supernatural romcom that I zipped through while I was on emergency backup brainpower during my Christmas travels. Because of that I don't actually have much to say about it, but I liked it enough to want to include it in the post anyway. Cassie, a broke artist, responds to a Craigslist ad from the enigmatic Frederick J. Fitzwilliam offering bizarrely cheap rent for a room in his extremely nice apartment; it turns out he is a centuries-old vampire who recently awoke from a 100 year coma and needs someone to help him get back in touch with the modern world. The story did not seem to care very much about its vampirism aspect; I got the feeling that Levine just wanted modern heroine/loosely Regency hero, and making him an immortal creature of the night was a convenient way to achieve that. Technically this is yet another Reylo fic turned pro, but I think it might take the prize for characters least recognisable as Rey and Kylo. If I hadn't gone in pre-informed I might genuinely not have guessed its origins.