Actually, no, let’s NOT normalize romances in which the leads don’t end up in a relationship, because there’s already a category which distinguishes that from romance: love story.

IOW, let’s not throw away the communicative value genre language between creators and consumers

There’s such pressure to allow the category of romance to be subsumed into something else that will scrub the romancey-ness from it, and this pressure has a political origin. Happy endings are artistically brave in a society in which many people are exiled from family units

We do not need to erode the concept of romance to make room for other forms of fiction that are similar but distinct, because those other forms of fiction almost always end up being prioritized OVER romance as works of artistic merit

Some will argue “why can’t we call all love stories romance?” Well, broadly, for the same reason we can’t call me a man and we can’t call air water. Words mean things. When we use these words we intend to communicate something, and lot of meanings are in danger of erasure

You do not have to take this away from romance creators, or romance consumers for that matter. We should be able to continue communicating to each other what we expect about these stories. That’s what the term romance DOES, and why it’s not synonymous with love story

I also just want to stress again that supposing that it’s more progressive and more feminist to show people NOT being in a romantic relationship is such a profoundly cis feminist and white feminist take on storytelling and culture

“But it’s the patriarchal norm for women to end up in a relationship”

At best it is only the norm for cishet while women, and even then, it’s n like cishet white women as a group don’t want happy relationships?

“Relationships” isn’t what makes male supremacy a problem

None of what I’m saying in this thread only magically applies to novels so the medium doesn’t change anything