As a genre, enemies to lovers has really picked up in recent years. Maybe I’m not the right person for the genre, as it not only seems to be more popular with female and younger readers — but I prefer romance as just another element of a book, rather than its whole personality. This is my reasoning for finding this trope to be mostly samey and bad for many of the stories it dominates the narrative of.
When readers go out with the intent to find an enemies to lovers book, I almost wonder what the point is. Blurbs are there to give an idea of the story, but they typically don’t reveal the whole lot. It’s like giving you a taster so that you want the full thing… is it too far to say it’s like a literary striptease?
However, when it comes to books where the premise of two characters falling in love after hating each other, isn’t that the entire story already given away? Sure, you can argue that it’s about witnessing how and why they go from hatred to affection, but it still seems rather formulaic. ‘Person A and Person B really hated each other until (reason), and Person A/B realised they loved Person A/B all along…’
Enemies to lovers has the capacity to work in a greater narrative with more depth, and when it’s not explicitly spelled out on the back of the cover. As a general novel trope, enemies to lovers it has lost its subtly and appeal — too many authors write the same millennial-level nonsense about flat characters hating each other and falling in love. It’s not even a fault of books, the same thing is common enough in modern films, comics, and manga, so maybe it’s something with our modern generations and being unable to comprehend emotional depth in our media.
Tone plays a big factor, too. I would be much more interested in a grounded, serious story about two people convincingly setting aside their differences and growing interested in one another. That sounds like a story that has a solid blend of realistic highs and lows, moments of emotional warmth and cold struggle baked into a well-rounded plot with believable characters.
Whenever the books are written with that unbearably confident, slangy modern tongue — on top of having cover art that looks like those soulless Corporate Memphis illustrations — I see it almost as a waste of paper and energy. You can tell it started not with a genuine passion to make likeable, believable, and unique characters, but rather cash in on a trend and appeal to whatever is hot amongst the largest demographic of readers. Not my thing, not my style, and not my trope.
Can you buy and enjoy these books? Certainly. Don’t let anything I say stop you from doing and reading whatever you want. I’m simply urging anyone who enjoys these books to consider if it’s really the best trope they enjoy in novels — it can certainly be carried out well, but you have to look for the novels with passion and care woven through them, rather than something cracked out by an author who pumps out ten books across five or six years.
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