(And then sort of came to appreciate it)
This is not a positive review of “Melt for You”, but it’s also not an un-positive one.
Ask the lifestyle dommes of the internet and one of the most reliable things we complain about is that we do not feel represented. We don’t see ourselves in popular media, except accidentally or with a Hays Code style tendency to have our stories end in punishment. We know we aren’t the target of most porn, even when it’s ostensibly about us. We also sit through a lot of things that claim to be neutral, but re-enforce our opposite as the default, not just vanilla, but femsub. To be a lifestyle dominant is to be simultaneously called a unicorn with infinite suitors and called irrelevant, a rounding error in the planning of creative people in the world.
Inversely we also have a pop culture that likes to fantasize that the dommes of the world are, if not the bad girls to be punished, the patron saints of not being impacted by all the other “-isms”. A whole cottage industry exists in teaching women to embrace their inner domme (or manufacture one) for a raise, the upper hand in their personal relationships, an end to imposter syndrome. This doesn’t work, but it doesn’t stop the first word people pair dominant with being “empowered”. Being one just doesn’t magically change the rest of the context you are trying to do it in, and most dominants feel very neglected by the collective Gaze.
We desperately, absolutely beg and plead for something more, and the market is actually starting to deliver. Unfortunately that poses another problem, that just because something exists doesn’t make it good. As part of my commitment to try to popularize and curate more domme fics, I have been reading a lot of dog awful stuff. Some good things, but there’s a few dozen books now, where I tried to get into it and had to give it the dreaded DNF.
Usually I let the crap go unremarked. I talked about this here, already, that reviews of our itty bitty niche therefore needs to be done with a bunch of forbearance. If something isn’t actively harmful (like The Control Book), if I don’t have anything nice to say it’s usually better to say nothing at all. With this book, when I initially read it, I ripped it to shreds in a series of angry blusky posts as I went, but I scrupulously didn’t share the title. I am breaking my usual rule, however, because I think even if I hated it, there’s still something of value it gave me, and it might give that to you, too.
Melt Into You: A BWWM BDSM Romance, as well as following the trend of indy published romances starting to resemble the same title traditions of lightnovels, was an attempt. It was a swing, and a miss. It was not just bad, but layers of bad, but… it’s a good thing the author tried. And the focus is still interesting.
The TL;DR is that a newly minted surgical tech and domme blogger/podcaster/educator hooks up with a wealthy doctor, with neither of them then expecting to work at the same hospital. Both characters have disabilities, and the heroine is black and the hero white. It’s part of a larger series, by a 41+ books written and counting USA Today best selling author G.L. Tomas.
Obviously we want more of all that: characters who are PoC; characters who are disabled; dommes who are acting outside of a sex work context (or if they are, stay sex workers after the HEA instead of being “rescued” by a relationship); lifestyle dommes being normal, flawed people; even subs being whole people, not automatic doormats. This review is not even a “this, but not like that!”. It’s partial credit with a bunch of caveats.
Sure, I could enumerate its faults, big and small. Globally, it has the problem of attempting to be educational while actually showcasing lots of sketchy behavior, and attempting to be woke while having some very questionable choices. It also is about 50% infodumps through the character explaining to you the reader.
But, notably, it’s a fantasy about me. Not necessarily me specifically, as in Pearl the person, but a group of only a tiny handful of women, probably less than 200, maybe even 100 depending on how you define it. A very specific kind of domme. Not a professional domme, not a girl next door, or a woman with real meat space authority who happens to be kinky. An influencer. It’s a fantasy of being Ferns, or Venus Cuckoldress, or the other tiny slice of women who make their desire to dominate in a lifestyle relationship the anchor of a vocal and vaguely respected online presence. It’s imagining what our life is like through rose coloured glasses, but hey, I am seen… even if I am all pink and kind of distorted!
What it also says is that the author, when it comes to describing femdom, turned to us as examples. They often had a touchingly naive idea of how the sausage is made (the heroine has a person who gets her sporadic paid kink related speaking gigs, there’s no Patreon mentioned, she made the hero a Tiktok star in a matter of months), but holy shit I am not going to get mad they think my life is better than it is. There’s value in me kicking over my own pedestal, but it’s not the author’s job.
Reviewing it also forces you to confront how many issues in text are actually realistic even as they are regrettable and how much of the unreality is basically a symptom of the genre of romance, not the fault of just the author. If I lay any sin at the feet of the author, it’s that they don’t seem self aware of the book’s flaws and contradictions. But it’s a lot to ask of someone to be completely critical of their own work when they were, based on my knowledge of the publishing industry, getting paid peanuts and probably wrote this in a month.
Is the hero kind of a turd? Sure, but alphahole is a common descriptor of characters in a romance genre for a reason. A good part of romance is a conquest fantasy, the woman winning out against the man over the arc of the story. It’s supposed to be about her wiles and magnetism versus his power, lifting the hero up as high as possible only to make his inevitable fall (in love) more spectacular.
Is the heroine a nincompoop? Yes, but often we all are, and romance as a genre demands vulnerability to allow for the ever present rescue fantasies and a sense of growth. If she wasn’t bad with money enough to get stranded without enough twice, how could the audience justify him giving her guilt free sugaring? If she wasn’t spectacularly bad at vetting, how would we have the surprise second act where they end up at the same workplace?
Do the social justice parts undermine themselves through some very questionable behavior and as much through over-explaining like the characters were ambulatory tumblr bios given life and the audience are idiots? Sure, but would it be really better if the author didn’t try?
Are they absolutely fucking bizarre about the hero’s Greek heritage, including characters declaring him being a completely different group they find sexier? Yeah, but as someone also on the ethnically ambiguous side of white (enough to trigger “where are you from” conversations and random racists to occasionally fling slurs), boy am I used to people speculating what I am and thinking it’s a compliment to assign me a completely different background!
Interestingly, buried in the book is also a plausible, but much less happy story. It’s one where kink educators often barely know what they are doing and do creepy shit like asking out a demo bottom in the middle of the class. It’s one where trust in the idea of a safety mechanism replaces real checking; getting an STI test so you don’t read it (or know how to follow up with a past partner later), making a safe call without sharing someone’s name. It’s a world where you repeatedly get put into sketchy situations by your mentors.
It’s one where someone is kind of racist and only considers your perspective in an issue because you are fucking (while still sounding incredibly insincere to others); and where a relatively impoverished person gets sporadically bombarded with money that always has implicit strings. One where marrying well, to an older man often will beat anything you can achieve through working your whole life. One where that dude is the sort of person who will enmesh women into their life and then leverage the power they have over them in a way that fails to consider the power relationship they have while also downplaying real harm and danger.
That story is painful, and littered with fuckups and awkwardness that made me hoot incredulously, but I still read the whole thing when I could have just dismissed it to the DNF pile and never mentioned it again. It was bad, but entertainingly bad. That’s not nothing. I hated it enough I was completely entertained. Based on how much I enjoyed being annoyed at it, it would qualify as fun as any of the stuff I would give 4 stars to.
Taken as an attempt to pair BDSM education with a romance, this failed to demonstrate safe behavior, drastically undermining its goals. Taken as a symptom of the author’s heart being in the right place, while writing an otherwise bog standard Greek billionaire doctor romance I could buy at the grocery store? This is absolutely not something I would waste my breath being angry about.
And ultimately, 10 years ago, a book like this wouldn’t exist at all. It means that what I did as a small part of a larger project to make being a lifestyle only domme more visible, worked. I can’t help coming away from reading this less irked and more shaking my head indulgently.
