My last book, Future Sepsis, wasn't a romance, but it did have a romantic element to one of the arcs. I was pleased with myself how I handled it. The male character's whole thing is he's highly moral and sees the world through an old fashioned lens, and so while they were in this traumatic situation and the woman POV character starts falling for him, he goes "Call me old-fashioned. But not here. Not now. We’re going to get off this island, and when we do, I’m going to ask you something, and let’s see where things go from there", and she accepts that for the moment because it's consistent with his character, who has slowly won her over through his insistence on giving her special consideration as a woman, something she initially was extremely hostile about. My understanding is that such a move, as well as the lead-up to it, are sort of unusual in fiction in 2025. Morality is painted as a sort of vague general "be nice", not as a set of rules that sometimes prevents two people who want something from just going for it.

I saw a video recently about Gen Alpha kids and the mistakes their parents are making raising that generation. One of the arguments is that the parents of Gen Alpha were abused and had nasty parents and so they're overcomensating. Is it really that way, though? Gen Alpha is largely raised by the millennials and a few early zoomers. They in turn were raised by the boomers. The boomers were actually raised by parents who weren't very good on account of the modern era's ending through the depression and the world wars basically traumatizing generations of people. As a result, the boomers often raised the millennials with a very gentle, permissive, and protective style in contrast with the authoritarian and often abusive and neglectful childhoods they had. The boomers were, after all, the "latchkey kids" but also the generation to get the belt, and they are the ones who changed that. The boomers get a lot of flack, but in some ways they've seen a whole change in the world. Yes, they grew up in the postwar boom, but they came of age just as that age was ending. They've been living in basically a world that has never stopped decaying around them. Early on when they were doing their basic childcare, many of them still had some benefits from the dead age before them, but their kids did not. So what the millennials and early zoomers brought to the table would be this higher level of parenthood based in the postmodern era that rejected the modernist methods of raising children, paired with a lack of resources to implement that higher level of parenthood. This explains why they'd take shortcuts like using tablets or even buying adult makeup for children and pre-teens, because they don't have enough resources in terms of time, attention, or money to provide the boomer parent style upbringing.

I have transcended my corporeal body. Now I will play Xbox. No bloody 360, no bloody one, no bloody series s, no bloody series x.