Romance is my least favorite genre. For me, adult fiction (my go to are mystery thrillers so like cops and shit) 99% of the books I find have that mandatory cop and their basically useless sidekick. Honestly, even the fantasy ones I read are like that. I want just adults going on epic adventures, just skip the unnecessary sex scenes. Like, why are you kissing?!? Here?!? Them arrows are flying!
That doesn’t surprise me at all considering like 99% of network cop shows are like that too. There’s a lot of reasons Elementary is the only one I like and that’s on there.
I don’t know, I’ve basically found I frequently just have to skip the sex/highly implied sex scenes, even in genre fiction. One of the reasons I still read YA stuff is because YA writers can’t put sex in their books and so are forced to actually write character interaction. Even if that does frequently lead to crappy love triangles that sort of shit is telegraphed and you can just put the book back down and get something else.
It really doesn’t seem like people can make any kind of media without romance, doesn’t it? Even every action movie needs a romance plot shoved in there, often crappily.
Took a glance at my bookshelves to see if I could spy anything there. The only series I came up with were Lord of the Rings, Bruno and Boots (Canadian YA books), and A Wrinkle in Time. I think you can toss Narnia in there from what I remember though I’ve misplaced my own like three moves ago. Of those, LotR is the only one involving adults.
So...yeah. C’mon, genre writers. There’s a whole huge market of people sick of shoehorned romance for you to tap into. Get with it.