people talk about and excerpt the smutty passages from like romantasy booktok hits or whatever and sometimes it's to be "lol look at this embarrassing porn" and other times it's like a self-serious lit person being like "well certainly one can infer that the books' explicit erotic content is much of their appeal 🧐" but nobody is willing to do the real work of like actually discussing why these scenes are bad at being pornography and not sexy or titillating at all. i mean i guess clearly they are successfully this for probably literally millions of people so that's not quite the right phrasing. but it's like the reason i don't read this stuff isn't because it was written to be jerkoff material it's because it's lousy jerkoff material. and it's lousy jerkoff material in ways i actually think are somewhat interesting to discuss from a craft perspective such as an abundance of cliche and a tendency for individual character dynamics to disappear once the fucking starts and an overreliance on banal physical description of insert tab A into slot B. but nobody is ready for this conversation because either they think it's embarrassing or morally wrong that romantasy jerkoff material exists or because they have extremely low literary standards for jerkoff material. everybody on earth it seems falls into one of these two categories except, of course, Me And My Mutuals
