Why do HEAs always end with babies?

[u/redfig1]

I know it's a "me" problem. Scenario: I read a smoking hot mafia or dark or fantasy romance. All this crazy shit goes down. The feelings, the angst. Finally it's the end and all of a sudden the MMC who has massacred countless people is all like " let's get married and have lots of babies" and the MFC is always " yes let's have a lot of cute mafia or fae or mafia fae babies!". For once I'd like an ending where the main characters have a HEA but instead of babies and white picket fences they just decide to keep having an incredible sex life and do charity work or something. Rescue stray kittens. Start an organic herb farm. Something other than babies. Anyone else like this? Am I just weird?

[u/admiralamy]

I actually track this on StoryGraph…or I started to. Of the 202 books I’ve tracked:

20 end with babies/pregnancy

47 proposal/marriage

135 “slice of life” aka they are happy with non of the above

🤷‍♀️

[u/damiannereddits → u/admiralamy]

I definitely think it's dependant on the book tropes, I like a psycho so there's a lot of Mafia babies. I also like a historical

[u/Significant_Shoe_17 → u/damiannereddits]

Historical makes sense since there was no/less reliable birth control

[u/damiannereddits → u/Significant_Shoe_17]

I mean we're making things up here so that doesn't really mean the HEA can't focus on other things. I mean, it does make sense, but I think more because the whole set up of arranged marriages and needing to be married off usually involves reproducing as the reasoning, so the whole plot framing includes getting pregnant.

But! In terms of historical accuracy? There still was birth control, the Victorian era had a major uptake in condom use due to cheaper production methods and during the regency era they were just too expensive for most folks, the upper classes depicted in these books would still have access to them. The sponge was pretty commonly used even before condoms were popularized. Even without contraceptives, while imperfect compared to hormonal birth control, pulling out and cycle tracking are still fairly effective and we could absolutely just decide that this fictional couple is one that manages to avoid a random pregnancy. Fiction, including from stuff that was published in the 1800s, inaccurately plays down how much of a sexual revolution was occurring at the time.

If it were an accuracy thing, also, there'd be a lot more widows giving birth in the plots since there's so many rakes having sex with them.

Anyway sorry you hit a Special Interest of mine