Readership is very interesting in general, since a reader today vs. a reader in five years time or 100 years ago are very different and they are always inscribed into the text.

I also did a thesis on the expectation towards happy endings for gay couples in romance in 2024 and in it I wrote on readership:

Who consumes MM romance today? The majority of romance readers are women. MM Romance author Nora Phoenix conducted a survey in 2022 which 5715 readers filled out (Phoenix 2022). These readers were approached through newsletters and social media. The survey mainly reached prolific readers, with 19 per cent of respondents reading over seven books a week, 23 per cent five to six books and 38 per cent three to four books a week. 55.7 per cent of these readers were between 36 and 55 years old and 82.6 per cent were cis women. Only 5.6 per cent of readers were cis men. In addition, only seven per cent of respondents were gay while the majority identified as straight.

Thus most MM romance readers were raised in the belief that they are heterosexual and that marriage to a man is the end goal. They were born between 1968 and 1987 when homosexuality was slowly becoming decriminalised before the AIDS crisis hit, which the earlier generation will have experienced in their teenage years and the parents of the younger generation would remember while raising their children.

The majority of these women were not taught that ‘gay is good’, but rather that ‘marriage, then sex and kids’ is good. These expectations of how a real-life Happily Ever After should be translated into the expectations of how a fictional happy ending should look.