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Notes -
A few things which irritate me about the LitRPG genre and web fiction in general. You may picture me as comic book guy for purposes of this rant.
I could go on but I feel better getting at least this much off my chest.
I'm back at my computer. But not sober enough to put together the best recommendation list. Some additional thoughts:
Re #1: I have tried Russian and Chinese litrpg and Wuxia, and honestly, maybe you don't like reading about people inappropriately spouting progressive values, but a world of power-hungry psychopaths that read like if KulakRevolt were given super-powers is even more depressing to me. What is there to root for? Why would I want any of these people to win?
Re #2: Agreed that the John Carter movie was good and tragically mismarketed, but (seconding @WhiningCoil) the books are fun but if you've read the first couple you've read them all, and this is actually true of a lot of the old pulp stuff (like Tarzan, Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Lensmen, etc.) They all follow a very predictable formula and the writing is often not up to modern standards either. Even some of the more modern classics (Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven) don't really stand the test of time, IMO.
Re #3: I see ranting all over the Internet that "No one is writing books (men) want to read" when there is in fact an entire ecosystem of indie-published authors doing just that. Now a lot of what they write is awful, and a lot of it is marketed with not much more of a hook than "This will really trigger blue-haired progs!" but apply Sturgeon's Law and you can still find gold amidst the dross. (Devon Eriksen and Travis J Corcoran come to mind- also plenty of right-wing trad published authors like Larry Correia and John C. Wright).
I agree with all of this. There are always tradeoffs in life, and in product consumption decisions.
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The indie part is key. The complaint is not that nobody is writing books for men; the complain is that none of the mainstream publishers are publishing books for men, nor are any of the established awards recognizing them. Hence Sad/Rabid Puppies and "I just hope you like Amazon Exclusives".
And, of course, this has broader consequences. Bookstores can't stock copies of web novels. Since weeding manuals explicitly call for the removal of old books, libraries are increasingly populated by texts no man wants to read.
I haven't stepped into a Barnes & Noble in years, but I understand that it's mostly walls of romantasy and Brandon Sanderson nowadays. But you know, it's a chicken-and-egg problem that has more to do with the ruthless pursuit of quarterly earnings than it does with some malicious cabal of white female NYC publishers refusing to greenlight anything a man will read. What genre has always outsold every other genre? Romance. Who buys the most books nowadays? Young women. Hence Twilight, 50 Shades, Sarah Maas, and so on.
I'm skeptical that there is some breakout male author who could bring in male readers the way these authors bring in female readers (the last truly cross-gender mass phenomenon was probably Harry Potter and even that was a majority female fanbase). I'm very skeptical that publishing would refuse to print it if they actually smelled that kind of money.
The fact is that the publishing industry has changed dramatically in a lot of ways since the golden age of SF. Not just in tilting more strongly towards female preferences, but tilting strongly towards "Only books that are bestsellers and will bump our QEs are worth supporting." (See this phenomenon also with movies, which have turned into a different kind of formulaic slop, but not exclusively targeted at women.) The death of the midlist is I assume common knowledge by now. It used to be that agents and publishers would cultivate a relationship with an author whom they expected to produce books over the course of a career, and if every book wasn't a best-seller, as long as each one paid out, it was good enough, because the cumulative earnings were enough to sustain the author (and his agent, and his publisher). Nowadays, not so much. Publishers don't want a long tail from middling sellers, they want bestsellers and are only willing to invest in a book that has a chance of becoming that, and they are only willing to invest so much in an author who doesn't break out.
Hence Brandon Sanderson (whose fanbase is large male) doing fine, and Stephen King and Haruki Murakami and a few others, but only if they are huge sellers with already established names. Meanwhile, while even the John Scalzis and Larry Correias are making a decent living, you will not usually find them occupying premium real estate in a bookstore.
I am not denying there is also a "publishing sneers at white males" problem, but it's not happening because publishing is unwilling to pick up money that's lying on the table.
Your links, are, unsurprisingly, also rather distorted views of reality.
The Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies affair was a reaction against leftism and SJWs in science fiction. Female-coded, to be sure, but their complaint at the time was not "Nobody is writing books men want to read" but "Nobody is writing books we want to read." Seriously half of it was Vox Day's abiding hatred for John Scalzi.
That /r/romance_for_men cartoon: well, I am not really a romance reader, but I've read a few (so I could at least say I had some understanding of the genre) and while I realize meme-cartoons aren't meant to accurately reflect reality with high fidelity, the Alpha Male Wolf Pack Mafia Boss Billionaire is basically a gross exaggeration of the most formulaic and traditional romance story ever, the one that has been the stock romance story for as long as there have been romance stories: women want to read about an impressive and desirable man falling in love with a woman who is plain and generic enough that any (female) reader can imagine herself in her place. It's no more complicated than that. No, that doesn't leave much for the male reader, but I will say that if you want cute love stories with actual functional couples, there seem to be quite a few that do not feature Chad Thundercock or BDSM.
Yeah, it's unfortunate that there isn't much real "romance for men" outside of indie publishing, but again, that's because men don't buy romance.
As for your beloved idol Dread Jim, I almost literally laughed out loud that he thinks John fucking Ringo is not right-wing enough. Apparently if you don't have women literally in chains... oh wait.
Well, there's always Tom Kratman.
As for this:
It's been a while since I read Lucifer's Hammer, but he's really glossing over how much the theme of that book was "When civilization collapses, white people become farmers and engineers and rebuild, and black people turn into rampaging cannibals." Yeah, the cannibal army wasn't exclusively black (and ironically enough, it was led by a messianic white man...) but I am pretty sure it wasn't 13%. Basically the majority of blacks in southern California joined the cannibal army, and any white people who didn't want to get et joined them. I don't think Niven and Pournelle were intentionally being "racist" (they threw a few black characters in with the good guys as well) but like, I am Niven fan but yeah, he knew what he was writing. (Including the motorcycle gang who takes a girl scout troop as sex slaves, but fortunately a boy scout troop rescues them and now every boy scout has his very own girl scout clinging to his feet, Frazetta-style.) You're taking at face value rants from a guy who thinks a book is too leftist if there is even a hint of female agency.
So yeah, where we are now is indie publishing for anything outside the mainstream or a very few Sanderson- and King-level big names. And that's because publishing (at least the industry as it is today) is dying a slow death.
Well, the main point is that “romance for men” would be about a male protagonist who meets a woman and they have a romance. It’s not just about what the male character is like, but about whose perspective the plot is written from.
Unironically, there’s more romance stories for gay men than there are for straight ones. Presumably this is just a market thing, but I don’t know why it doesn’t even seem to exist. Are there a lot of lesbian romance stories?
I’d probably be a reader of this genre if it actually existed. As it is, occasionally I read fanfiction about male protagonists (probably 80% written by women, but occasionally not bad), and take what I can get from the scraps of media that incidentally have romantic content. Japan has visual novels, but they’re too weird and too Japanese for me, but I liked Katawa Shoujo and some western fan VNs are tolerable.
So you say “men don’t buy romance”, but this is a chicken-egg problem: I can’t buy it if it doesn’t exist.
Well, what would a male romance look like to you? For most men, I'm going to guess it would be something like the classic "Hero goes on a quest and gets the girl in the end." Do men want more "romantic" content (scenes with the girl being cute and sexy and falling in love with him, the two of them having intimate encounters and emotional conversations) or do they want action with the girl naturally falling in love with him because he's so cool and brave?
Basically I think what male-oriented romance exists would mostly be found under another label.
There are tons of anime romcoms aimed at men where the relationship between MC and FMC is the primary draw, rather than being a subplot of another genre. In fact, most of them take place in the standard high school setting and have no supernatural elements. Toradora!, Komi Can't Communicate, Don't Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro, Uzaki-chan Wants to Hang Out!, Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie, Tomo-chan Is a Girl!, My Dress-Up Darling, Teasing Master Takagi-san...
I am specially fond of Nagatoro; my heart melted when I read chapter 114. I was so proud of Senpai for svanyyl univat gur onyyf gb nfx Antngbeb gb cbfr ahqr sbe uvz; it's a very beautiful scene that is the culmination of six years of character and relationship development. Likewise, the scene that sold me on Komi was the blackboard conversation in episode 1; I was completely blown away by the music and the animation and the way Tadano and Komi connected with each other. These are not scenes about something else that happen to include romance; they are romance scenes.
I don't see why you couldn't write romance books aimed at men that were similar. Indeed, some of these titles started out as light novels, and to the extent that the novels on /r/romance_for_men successfully appeal to their target demographic, that seems to be exactly what they are doing.
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Well, I can’t speak for what most men would want. Maybe it’s just me and… maybe @Primaprimaprima and like a guy I know from school in the corner, but no, I’d want romance content as the main enchilada.
Basically, “guy is going about life, meets woman, forms connection with woman, the two understand each other on a deep level, passion ensues.” When you wrote this: “scenes with the girl being cute and sexy and falling in love with him, the two of them having intimate encounters and emotional conversations”, well I guess I like the last bit the most. I find myself bored in some action movies waiting for the emotional character moments to happen.
I like romance stories because I like romance, I like thinking about romance not as a reward for what’s actually important, but as something that itself forms people into who they are and is one of the keys that makes life meaningful. Not “I became the best version of myself to gain you,” but “I became the best version of myself because I met you.” Romance isn’t about reward but about recognition; seeing yourself in the other. Becoming complete through intimate union.
But I am literally the guy who will be at a party and go, “hey, these video games are fun, but what if we sat in a circle and talked about our feelings?” So if you’re looking to me to find out what “men” are into, god help ya.
Also — immediately after I wrote my first message I went to cuddle with my girlfriend, and she was telling me she’s been reading a romance novel, “but not like those romantasy books, I don’t understand the non-human thing.” Well, I don’t either honey.
The thing that gets my goat in most romcoms is, after the meet-cute, they put in a music montage of them talking at a diner. That was the entire ‚they fall in love‘ scene. You had one job. I know writing good dialogue is hard, but this is the heart of the movie.
Then they move on to the stupid obstacle/reason why they can‘t be together of act II which would never happen in a million years. Then it‘s time for the excruciating ‚it was so stupid, I love you‘ ending dialogue.
Who watches this and for what purpose? romcom enjoyers must want to see attractive people humiliated by the terrible dialogue and irrational situations. It‘s like in fight club when tyler bashes blondie‘s head in.
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...Have you tried Kage Baker's The Company series? If not, I'd recommend it, and let me know what you think if you give them a try. I read them years ago and have been waiting all the time since to find someone else who'd read them as well.
Hell, I'd recommend them generally as very good and extremely interesting books. The romance is a big part of it, as is mystery, and a heaping helping of Phillip K Dick.
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The thing is, famous authors start off as un-famous authors. Their reputation is grown by getting good publicity and bookshelf deals from the publisher while they're still nobodies, and they don't want to do this for men as much as for women and minorities. That's why by-men-for-men fiction only thrives in places like Japan and genres like litrpg where it's customary to pluck authors from the highly-ranked webnovel lists, which make it possible to gauge their potential without investing in them.
It has happened to western authors, too. Andy Weir and E. L. James both started out writing web fiction (literally fanfiction in the latter's case) before getting acquired by a mainstream publisher and making it big. But that was 14 years ago.
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Yeah, I like bookstores and libraries. I want to hang out in bookstores and libraries. I don't want to download new books, I want to browse and buy them in person.
I used to love bookstores and libraries. But now there's like 90% chance that when you enter the establishment the first thing you would see a huge trans flag and a bunch of BLM slogans, if not pro-Hamas agitation. And whatever books are emphasized are selected accordingly. Which kinda spoils the mood quite a bit. So I still go to libraries - and local libraries where I live, while usually hosting a lot of lefty types, are not as aggressive in pushing politics - but I no longer think any bookstore or library is the place I'd feel welcome and comfortable.
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I mostly watch Chinese period dramas, and frankly I like the “everyone is an asshole” thing, mostly because it’s not out of step with an actual medieval society. Read about War of the Roses, read about any medieval period. They acted that way because they were basically very polite warlords and understood that everything they did would either expose them as weak or show them strong.
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