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[Gweilo]

Just saw this  torrent: The Guppy Prince (The Silver Isles Book 1) - C W Gray "Dover Rees is a guppy tailed merman... This is a paranormal, merman, mpreg insta-love story" I get the feeling of books being written to tick as many boxes for current hot genres as humanly possible.

[MicaMica]

This is how the romance genre is produced, marketed, and consumed: The writer takes a combination of tropes and throws them together into a story. The marketer lists off those tropes, either explicitly (in this case) or by describing each trope as part of the blurb. The reader picks up books that match the tropes they happen to like. Whole sub-communities build up around extremely specific tropes or premises (like Only One Bed, or mpreg).

Romance is predictable and formulaic on purpose, because its intent is not to challenge or surprise the reader (though there is a subgenre, Romantic Suspense, which does do that). Its intent is to be comfort food for the soul. It's not a unique feature of the romance genre either, there are soooo many fantasy and sci-fi books that stick to formula 100%, that work because they're comfortable.