When I was in middle school, my favorite book series was the Night World by LJ Smith. The plot of all the books revolve around teenagers--a combination of humans and various paranormal beings--finding their soulmates, a cosmic bond they're suck with whether they like it or not.

My favorite of these books was Daughters of Darkness. In it, a budding astronomer finds out her soulmate is none other than the baddy of previous books in the series and someone entirely not right for her.

It is both demonstrated and implied that this bad boy vampire did a lot of truly awful things to humans before he met the heroine of Daughters of Darkness. This is, in fact, a huge part of the conflict in the book. The heroine cannot make peace with his past.

The book raises the issue of consent repeatedly. Regarding the humans, especially women, the vampire soulmate abused before meeting his human soulmate. Regarding the very nature of fated mates. Regarding her own ability to consent in a relationship where power is so imbalanced.

In the end, the heroine sees inside her soulmate's mind, sees his shame and guilt and desire to do better. She knows his remorse is real. Still, she doesn't know that she can be with someone who's done what he's done.

In the end, they part ways.

The heroine needs time to think about things, and the vampire knows he needs to go try to make up for all the awful he's done. He wants to be the kind of person she could eventually love and respect, and he also understands he may never do so, that he may never be redeemed.

One of my least favorite tropes in romance--FYI, the Night World series is YA paranormal romance--is the bad boy being redeemed through love. Not that it can't be done and done well, but so often the redemption arc for the bad boy is that he loves and is loved, and that's enough.

He may require a grand gesture with a heaping side of grovel, but often the worst of his transgressions*, especially against people other than the heroine, are swept under the rug.

* we're not talking winsome rakes whose transgressions are mostly sex, booze, and gambling

What I liked about Daughters of Darkness is it made it clear that some things can't be redeemed simply through love and remorse. Some things require real work, and maybe those things can't be done from within the embrace of someone who loves you unconditionally.

It made it clear that the responsibility for redemption is not on the person who loves the transgressor, but on the transgressor themselves, independently to strive toward. Specifically, it didn't put that emotional burden on the heroine, as this trope in romance often does.

The Night World books were written in the late 90s and had complex, nuanced explorations of consent and redemption and healthy relationships and setting/negotiating boundaries in romantic relationships that were simplified for a teen audience without trivializing them.

It's frustrating to hear adults talking about these same themes in romances intended for adults, but arguing our expectations should be lowered because the texts were written some number of years ago or because interrogating it too closely ruins the fantasy.

It's also frustrating how adult romance often employs these tropes and themes without questioning or investigating them at all. There are, even today, popular, prolific authors writing dubcon and redemption arcs into every single book with almost no critical examination.

And maybe that is part of the fantasy for some readers. Romance absolutely can be a safe space to explore problematic fantasies, but there still needs to be recognition that these are, in fact, problematic fantasies. Content warnings and making space for criticism are critical.

The point here is not that "all adult romance today/yesterday does this" or that "all 90s YA romance did a good job of addressing this", but instead to make the point that discussions around consent and redemption were being handled deftly in romance 25 years ago.

We should be able to set the bar higher for romance written in the years since and certainly for romance written/produced today, and we absolutely should, as a community, be able to have frank discussions around what exactly it is we're consuming and how it might be harmful.