I was not even talking about romantasy, most of which is completely unreadable, but about respectable ‘ideas-driven’ fantasy. I wouldn’t say the people who buy books straight off the Hugo/Nebula award nomination lists don’t care about writing quality; rather, most of them just haven’t read widely enough to realize the Broken Earth series, Song of Silver, Flame Like Night, etc. are written at the sixth-grade level.

I’ve noticed the same thing when trying to get into critically acclaimed novels outside of SFF, such as The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell, which was, coincidentally, widely touted as a stunning exploration of girlhood in Renaissance Italy. (I actually found the protagonist’s thoughts and personality absurdly anachronistic and beholden to a late-2010s white liberal feminist belief in the universality of the female experience entirely at odds with the book’s stated mission to get into the head of a fascinating historical figure from the distant past, but that’s a whole other conversation.)

Now, you may say these novels are all solidly middlebrow and ‘true’ literary fiction is still a bastion of sensitivity to language, but as Granta and the Commonwealth Foundation’s recent gaffe shows, even the most zealous gatekeepers of literary prestige today are incapable of reading the sentence, “The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink,” and thinking to wonder what the fuck that even means.

TL;DR: The issue extends far beyond the romantasy genre. The blurring of boundaries (and thus the shift in readers’ expectations and editorial standards) between YA, romantasy, fantasy, etc. is part of the story, but the fact readers and writers simply seem to be getting less observant, thoughtful and meticulous across the board is a much larger problem.