I just read the summary for a popular YA where the heroine is from a (magical) marginalized group and her love interest is part of state sponsored police force that hunts and kills her people.

So basically a fantasy version of the sexy nazi trope, but it’s okay because...

I’m not here to kink shame anybody.

But I do what to address that the issues with the sexy nazi/sexy slave owner tropes aren’t just because white people conceed that Nazis and slavery are bad.

It’s because these are TERRIBLE FOUNDATIONS FOR A ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP!!!!

A man who has spent his life exterminating your people doesn’t magically forget the lifelong indoctrination programming him to see you and your people as less than human. To say nothing of the impact on him that comes with actively perpetrating GENOCIDE. He’s will abuse you.

If an author writes him as an exception. THAT is a fantasy and poor characterization.

Even from that very generous perspective he is a man who has been murdering people he knows to be innocent and did it anyway.

No one walks away from that without psychological damage.

There are ways to write people who kill as developed characters who are capable of love but it takes a lot of work and you can’t just hand wave away the impact of that much violence on a person’s self perception and interpersonal relations.

Wanna see it down right read @KitRocha

But even with all that work, the implication of him killing the heroines people. The psychology program is takes to not only convince people to that another group of people deserve to be extermination but to recruit them to do that blood work...he is a trained abuser.

Why choose him to be the romantic hero when it requires atrocities like genocide to be forgive by a member of the very group who suffered at his hand?

What about that idea is so appealing and romantic?

Why does a girl have to convince a man she’s human and worthy of love?

Write what you like, enjoy your romantic fantasy. But I do think a lot folks don’t realize how much of these relationships are fantastical even more so than the fictional world they set them in.

Because I’m done with being subtle:

This romantic trope is a form of cultural tourism with the specific identifiers removed (queerness, Blackness, Jewishness, etc) so a cishet secular white girl can play at being an oppressed person while being desired by violent men in power.