Asklemmy

It is escapism. Romance usually has very few things that's real. I mean that most romance stories are more alike to a fairytale than reality.

Most movies and books are 98% predictable with the well-known cliches. And that makes them work. Beig wealthy is just an other thing that makes it going.

Most girls were raised on the price charming idea, and a rich, wealthy and emotionally available person fits the bill.

Reality of barely making rent and having no money to fix your car or even just daily struggle to find childcare for a date would break the dream.

When you are watching romance you want the fuzzy feels, the safe environment that everything going to be alright and happy ending is guaranteed. Love, money, heath and safe environment - with tons of loving friends and family - now that's what people want to dream of.

Poverty is not romantic.

Buried into a lot of romcoms is a sense of fantasy. People don't fantasize about being poor.

Note that (some, not all) rom coms also involve a Cinderella story - a poor or middle class woman falls in love with a wealthy man and she is plucked from obscurity into wealth, where she “belongs”. Money is part of the fantasy.

I'd say a good-sized part of it is simply the American preference for watching beautiful, weathly people doing beautiful, wealthy people things. Hollywood rom-coms and US TV shows in general clearly skew towards upper middle class settings when compared to the equivalents from, say, the UK.

In other words, I reckon US media prefer their fictional characters to be aspirational whereas other cultures prefer theirs to be relatable.

More concerning is that so many romantic movies contain an element of cheating.. IE the main characters meet while one or both are seeing someone else and often don't break it off with the other person. In the comedies they are often sneaking around and not getting caught is played for laughs.

Producers are rich, and don't find poor people problems sexy, but rather inconveniently guilt-inducing. When they do show poverty it has a way of being pretty theme-park, too.

I'm not a big rom-com consumer, but of course there's probably exceptions to the rule.

From a showrunner perspective, you want to have a diverse set of sets, activities, and situations you can perform in. That leaves you either with wealthy characters, who can justify doing these things in these exotic places. Or poor characters who behave wealthy inexplicably.

Ie friends where people working dead end jobs had housing better than most millionaires.

Also what no one has said yet, if you put two identical people next to each other, same mindset, same character, same visuals etc etc, but the one is wealthy and the other is poor, for 99% of people the wealthier one is more sexually attractive. Our brains view access to resources as a desirable quality.

And so, why would a rom com that is literally supposed to be about attractive people, make them purposefully less attractive? There's basically no reason.

I was complaining about this on !noyank@lemmy.ml

About 10% of pop culture stories, maybe more, are about billionaires. Are 10% of people billionaires?

And even in a medieval fantasy settings, it's about gold-decked kings: the billionaires of the setting.

It's to perpetuate a class bias.

Because financial issues only keep the plot from moving forward.

Considering the majority of them also take place in California, I'm not surprised.

Corpo propaganda

Because then it'd be a romantic tragedy.

That's what I asked Annette.