lunabee34

Hee. XD

I typically range from mostly uninterested in, to actively put off by sex scenes, and skip or skim them 99% of the time unless they're the point of the fic (as is often true of, say, sex pollen, sex comedy, etc). I mean, I can read sex scenes and sometimes I really enjoy it, but at heart I'm pretty much a gen fan.

But I also feel like, when I first got into reading fic with pairings (circa middle 2000s; I was almost exclusively a gen reader up 'til then) there was an expectation of obligatory sex scenes, especially in slash, that's not quite as much of a thing now. In SGA, for example, I don't think you really ever saw a get-together fic over 10K that didn't include a sex scene. The Obligatory Consummation Scene was as much of an expectation in fic as it still is in genre romance. And I feel like that's less true now, or at least there's more variety and less of an unspoken expectation that romantic fic has to follow a certain basic template. Which means the sex scenes are more likely to only be included if they're relevant to plot or character, as opposed to just kind of being there, and they can also hit at different plot beats in the story than pretty consistently happening at the 90% consummation-of-relationship point as in so many fics in the past. All of which makes them more interesting to me, and less like the sex scene is just shoved in there because it's supposed to be there.

... but to be fair, I don't know if my impressions on this are actual trends or just a matter of which fandoms I've been in lately. I've also gotten a lot more analytical about the way romance is put together since I started writing it, so I notice more of that sort of thing than I used to, as well.