I Got On This Romantasy Kick This Year. It's Been Highly Entertaining. I Still Don't Get All The Tropes

I got on this romantasy kick this year. It's been highly entertaining. I still don't get all the tropes but the enemies to lovers thing has been pretty wide in intensity.

Perhaps I'm still stuck being practical in some relationships, but when someone is abusing you or straight up tried to murder you, I find that really hard to find believable to get a romance out of it. Two series I've touched on so far that I can think of, Broken Bonds and I just started Zodiac Academy.

Broken Bonds started me off on this journey, and at first I was a bit 🙃 when it came to North and Nox. Honestly, none of their behavior is actually excusable on how they treat Oleander. But over the range of books I've now read, including the first book in Zodiac Academy it seems kind of tame in retrospect.

I've essentially spoiled some of it myself looking at the ZA hashtags, but seriously the abuse is top level in book one (the last event in the book for goodlord!) and I'm supposed to believe the FMCs still end up with some of these fools? Lol. (Ok, Orion actually seems redeemable for the same scene)

I'm still going to read the series because the setting is a bit insane which in turn is again, entertaining. It's fantasy, but hard pressed to actually see it as romance. Just because characters are sexy and hookup, isn’t that opposite of romance? It's more of a lustasy type story.

I do admit that I almost never read romance stories at all because they seemed boring and all the men were described like Fabio. ACOTAR has reached that level of boring romance by the end of book three.

The story ended in book 3 and I'm trying to power through the holiday filler episode. Feyre and Rhysand are in their plateau, which is why couples like Cassian and Nesta became more interesting. But is this how typical romance novels are structured? It's funny that Tamlin is so vilified because yeah, he was too controlling with Feyre and became the revengeful ex, he actually regretted his actions and tried to make amends to an extent and as far as I could see then left her alone. Compared to the FMC in ZA drowned by 4 hot men, this girl was almost dead and this is still going to turn into some relationship?? Lol.

It seems to me that if the FMC ends up with the abuser, it's hot and acceptable but if they aren't then yeah the MC was a total trash pile. Look, I love suspending belief for a fun story but I'm cracking up here.