Age Range? Do readers look for characters their age?

[Kaia]

@Tisha - no offense taken on this end either! I like the journey of getting inside a character's head, so I get seeking out certain things in fiction that may not live up to our ideals in life (I think dark erotica does that for lots of people, or shows like Dexter, for example). There's is nothing un-feminist to me about the act of reading and enjoying certain things, because men get the luxury of mining all sorts of murky territory and not being judged harshly for it. Feminism is all about equality and choice after all.

The attempt to try new things is just what you strive for, but we all do that within the confines of shared experience and recognizable tropes. Like Lavender said, that's comforting. When I was younger I gravitated towards stories where you had to start over in a new town, and I loved vampire fiction. Part of that was the shared experience of moving and traveling, and the other was the desire to be transported to another world. Those characters were younger because that's what I was and that's the easiest time for a character to upend their life as part of the plot. That trope is alive and well today.

I think this topic is raised though because each generation takes tiny shifts to the left of right of those tropes. We live longer now, have access to more knowledge at a quicker rate, so our ideas about what is young, who can be a Maiden/Mother/Crone archetype has extended. Women are "maidens" for longer as independent unattached people and women can give birth and become mothers later. So all those heightened experiences you would feel during the earlier phases can be explored with protagonists that would have been considered Crones. That may be why older women are responsible for a lot of the popular YA/NA fiction today, and why people in this thread for the most part don't have an age requirement for their romance/erotica. In fact I think as a whole because we live longer we've moved young love forward a bit.

[Anino]

Tina wrote: "@Anino & Taida -

. I read this ages ago and loved it.

The heroine is in her forties and "runs away from home" from her grown thankless children ..."

Thanks Tina! I'm going to check this one out...

[Anino]

Tisha wrote: "I have read all your comments on NA books and found them interesting. Of course we each have grievances on the romance genre as a whole. I must say though that because we are in the era of the inte..."

Tisha, you are definitely correct in regards to there's "nothing new underneath the sun.." Even the BDSM flavored books are a rehashing of what's been undercover for years.. I know this to be true, because I worked in a bookstore and maintained the "alternative lifestyles" section.