I just feel like especially in fantasy (which is the genre I read most of) it is way overdone. As a main plot romance is really powerful and touching. I get it, a good romance subplot is amazing. I would love to see more of these in books, but romance seems to be the go to when it isn’t the main genre. I think there are so many interesting subplots that are underused I wish romance would take a backseat sometimes. We end up not getting satisfying scenes and resolutions in the rebellion/war/school play or whatever the main plot is because that time has been sacrificed to the SUBplot. Sometimes we spend pages upon pages making out and falling in love and the main plot falls to the side. Romance is also the subplot I see upstaging the main plot most often. Sometimes characters will go from hating each other to being in love with very little fanfare because it needs to be rushed in order for everything to fall into place by the end. Pokemon Adventures on the other hand, trying to determine a romantic subplot is like trying to predict the next JoJo story arc. We end up with flat characters who have little chemistry and I’m often not invested in seeing how their relationship works out. In the anime version, I was confident that it would be a more basic run-of-the-mill romance because the story structure of the anime is to be quite frank, predictable.
The problem is plenty of books don’t manage this.
Six of Crows does several romantic subplots amazingly with their main cast. You’ll notice that both of those things require time, which is a problem when romance is only a subplot. To have a successful romance subplot there are two main ingredients: 1. Most books have at least one subplot to keep things from getting too dull, and romance is really popular because we all love love…but the problem is romance is probably the hardest to pull off. When they’re good they’re very very good but when they’re bad they’re horrid. I picked this topic because I have a VERY turbulent relationship with romantic subplots.