u/Burgin

Hi, it's Voidburger and I might have mod approval to post my video essay/review/unrelenting takedown of Return to Silent Hill!

Which I am honestly not doing for self-promotion reasons, lol. I just think folks would have fun watching this thing, and appreciate how they have far better media literacy than the guy who directed two of the three Silent Hill movies

Hello, I'm kinda new to romance novels in general and I'm trying to get a bit of a taster-platter of different popular vs. niche ones.... and have found out I'm the pickiest person on planet earth and would love to read an Actually Funny book that is also Actually Hot, lol. It seems like most things that're tagged under "funny" on romance.io have the most repellent blurbs possible when they're in the romcom genre (overly sarcastic, sassy, cringe.) I especially would love a monster romance thing, tho it's clearly not a ride-or-die requirement. No real gender preferences, either, but it'd be great if it was in the 3-5 spice range.

I've read (ordering them from funniest to least):
- {The Irresistible Urge to Fall For Your Enemy}: Slam dunk, Actually Funny. Had some scenes that felt straight out of Rude Tales of Magic (my favorite podcast) This may have set my bar too high, as it was like, the 3rd romance novel I've ever read.
- {The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy}: Not as funny as the first one, it got a little too cliche/straight-faced when I felt like it did a lot more irreverent lampshading previously.
- {Heated Rivalry} audiobook: I get the hype, this was a pretty good time. Some good humor in there, though part of it was definitely because the narrator had a very funnysexy voice to me
- {A Soul To Keep} (not done reading, intend to maybe read all the Duskwalker Brides): Loving the hell outta this, but it's kinda unintentionally funny, mostly from me clutching my damn pearls and getting whiplash from the author suddenly describing something in the most unsexy way possible lol
- {Eat the Ones You Love}: Very much enjoyed this! It's not a book that's trying to be funny but still, it had some genuinely good banter in there that I feel counts a bit towards this.
- {Lights Out} audiobook: The top tag for this on romance.io was "funny" (over "dark romance"?! and "stalking"?! and many, many more appropriate tags lol) and maybe that set my expectations too high but this one started chuckle-worthy and degraded over time in a huge way. Pretty much once they got together officially, the humor dipped bigtime and the Serious Plot set in (and that's the entire back half of the book, yeesh). Thank you to the male VO for making some of the joke attempts actually half-land.

Other book tastes:
- I like Pratchett's Discworld but read too many in a row and got a little sick of him, hah. Taking a break (The Death Series btw... I like skeletons 🤷‍♀️ (see also: A Soul To Keep))
- everyone Loves Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Jean Shepard (A Christmas Story)
- John Dies at the End
- The Spellsinger series (ironically, for the most part, tbh)

Funny games, since I'm more of a gamer than a reader, and these more define my sense of humor accurately:
- Undertale, Deltarune
- Earthbound
- The Stanley Parable
- Cryptmaster
- The Case of the Golden Idol
- Hypnospace Outlaw
- Portal/Portal 2
- Psychonauts 1/2
- Night in the Woods

Sorry for the big list, but I figured being specific about what I find funny would be appropriate. Anyway, look out for my own monster romcom eventually (110k words already) because I have decided to be the change I want to see in the world, and this is all research to me now, haha. Thanks in advance <3

🚨EDIT🚨: I am officially not trusting any of you with usernames like "RandomWord-OtherWord-4 digit number"(hyphens or underscores). I suspect these are all bots. One tricked me into buying what I strongly believe is an AI generated book that I thankfully managed to refund by saying "this is ChatGPT, almost certainly." 💀💀💀💀💀 Please downvote these usernames with prejudice, unless they are compellingly human by posting history I guess. (One of the mods has this format of username lol I'm scared.)

I noticed the very excellent tag on romance.io for "creative anatomy" and was curious from those who've read far more than me: Weirdest one you've seen? Least sexy? Most sexy?

(I can't wrap my head around the ovipositor thing, that's a bit far for me lol)

I'm sure most of these examples will come from monster and romantasy and sci-fi subgenres, but I wonder if it's ever been sprung on a reader in a more normal context, too lol.