hey could you possibly write about the MMC with shadow powers trope? As a shadow and bone trilogy fan I know the Darkling started it but it's weird that it pops up SO much in cishet romantasy.
yes of course!! sorry for the late reply doll :(( While the Shadow and Bone trilogy popularized this trope, but as you said, a lot of cishet romantasy uses this trope. It took a while to research but it's done! To begin, a lot of cishet romantasy books has the generic MMC that has a type of dark aura around them and a morally grey aspect becuase of their shadow powers trope. This trope has been overused because it offers the ideal male figure since in the case of cishet romantasy, it creates a sense of masculine intimacy (if that's the right word for it) Yes, an MMC with a shadow powers trope is really cool but in these cases, authors would implement this trope to more masculinize their characters, which does half the work for the authors. Due to this, the trope gets really overused and ends up giving the MMC's personality in favor for this attraction or easy persona, creating this type of masculine archetype.
But even if this masculine archetype is like an easy package for authors writing their MMC, its just a reflection of toxic masculinity that everyone mistakes for like hypermasculinity or it's the "ideal man" that cishet romantasy normalized (as I said before). And because this trope is used to make the MMC the "dominant" side, reducing any other possible traits to make them likeable to the audience but rather "likeable" to a possibly infantalized or dumbed down FMC I hope this is what you wanted, happy reading ^_^