Still waiting for the romantasy bubble to burst, but on the flip side there's a greater rise of "these books are shit" YouTubes. YT'ers who used to just review fantasy books are shifting focus towards becoming the Nerdrotic of BookTubers and making content where they eviscerate shitty books online.
I think these bitchy reviews may be a direct evolution from the previous decade's pile-on habit. Yes, reviews attack the work and not the person.
But it satisfies the rat desire that still exists to obliterate anyone who appears to have a little bit of success.
Only problem with splitting is F/F isn't popular enough to stand on its own. Whereas F/M can, and will sell with few skips except illumicrate will get cancelled for heteronormative blah blah blah bullshit. Ought to just offer an alternative book every month so that way the five sapphics can have their titty on titty, and the majority can have their bad boy romance or whatever they're calling nowadays.
I still maintain that there were never enough readers that were privately into F/F! It was always a virtue-signal genre.
AO3 lists 8.3% of the pairing tags as F/F, and I'd go so far as to argue that fanfic writers, in order to appease Le Wokke Mobbe, will throw in a secondary F/F pairing or write something extremely short. Someone did a deeper dive to filter
complete works over 20K and with the F/F pairing being the main characters in the story. It turned out to be something in the area of 2.5%
I mention AO3 as a reliable indicator as it is primarily the biggest crossover of romantasy/fantasy readership, and somewhat divorced from the mainstream marketing apparatus. Fantasy tastemakers are still trying to push the illusion of it being nearly 50%, and it ain't even half that.
There's two types of gay romance in contemporary lit right now.
Wholesome chungus meet-cute romcom tropes safe-horny (for women) gay
and
bent over the back of a dumpster in (insert big city here) with thinly veiled author whining about how DomTop 29 blocked him on Grindr "ugh im so tired of hookup culture
" while actively engaging in it gay
Note that all flavors of nonbinary and genderblobbery go in the first category
Autoandrophilia of straight women is just not spoken of enough.
It's emotional manipulation because the main characters (love interest(s) included) are written to be such non-characters that the reader can self-insert herself into the role to "experience" it. That's the "female power fantasy", and that's why BookTok will only talk about the sex.
I suspect that a male romantic character who is "difficult" to reach in fantasy narratives, somewhat inoculates female readers and self-inserters from the secondary anxiety of "if he is so good, why doesn't he have another woman better than the MC?" The spectre of cheating is a huge turn-off, so there's usually some in-book reason for him being celibate by the time female MC comes along.
I think most of them are "slow burn", too, which is surprisingly popular but only works well when the characters act like real characters. Been reading ACOTAR for the psych study (I swear it) and the main characters have of yet to boink halfway into the book, of which you swear based on reviews and talk of it that that's all the characters ever do. The modern woman doesn't care about story, they just want the illusion of having the "perfect" man—the one who's sexy, protective, and provides for everything no matter what even if you're a stupid defiant brat who deserves the terrible consequences that comes with disobedience.
There was a YT'er who just went through the ACOTAR plot (too long, won't read) and apparently the author basically swapped romantic MMC's by book 2. I think SJM was basically pantsing the series - it was her second, so she had the muscle memory to do it.
