\nI s2g Anne McCaffrey must have mixed up her How to Write Romantic Fantasy and How to Write Romance Novels notes at some point
Like, something you can see reflected in how the female protagonists relate to men in the Pern, Talents (which does not get nearly enough attention for being all late-‘70s incest-“gifted” ESP special children when the core novels were published in the early 90s), and especially Crystal Singer series is that before she was a big-name author she had been a fixture of institutional SFF fandom and as her publishing career took off at the start of the '70s she divorced her husband and moved to Ireland.
Anne McCaffrey is absolutely a writer of romantic fantasy romance novels for women who got divorced in the early '70s and the daughters they hope won’t have to.
Yeah I’ve read a lot of Anne McCaffrey. I was a hyperlexic 11-year-old with a library card, and if a lot of its really YA, I was 11! And if a lot of was really women’s YA, I had a really femme tweenhood, ok? (I also read a lot of the Babysitters’ Club books.)
Eventually I was reading one of the Pern books and a plot development so unsurprised me I was like “wait have I read this one before?” but realized I’d just read enough to fully internalize her authorial voice and stopped hitting up that shelf at the library.
"}