How firmly do romance sources require a happily-ever-after, and where do HFN, queer non-wedding, YA, literary and dark-romance cases push the boundary?

RWA calls the ending 'optimistic', RNA names HEA or HFN with a realistic chance of staying together, and Harlequin says its category romance always ends HEA or HFN. Open JPRS articles report that writers and readers treat HEA/HFN as necessary, that wedding endings are decreasing in favour of HFN (Kies), that YA romance tempers the promise of permanence (Allen), that dark romance can make the HEA a source of horror (Kvistad), and that a literary novel can use the romance elements yet eschew the HEA (Moolla). A 2026 LLM tension paper's romance case pipeline deliberately avoids confirming the attraction, which would fall outside the RWA/RNA ending requirement if applied to genre romance. Curator correction 2026-10-23 (discovery audit record C3-B679-03; sources re-fetched 2026-10-23, excerpts re-located by curator GET): Problem. Candidate C3-B150-S32-06 reports 'wedding endings are decreasing in favour of HFN (Kies)'. Conditions. Checked against the JPRS article by Bridget Kies (March 2024) on queer romance after marriage equality. Method. The sentence in the source is hedged ('appear to be decreasing') and offers a conjecture ('perhaps in reflection of marital statistics') supported only by US marriage-rate statistics from another author (Fry and Parker). No count of endings or corpus is given in the passage found. Failure modes. Repeating it as a measured trend turns an impression into a result; an agent choosing an ending form should treat it as an informed observation from one scholar. Limitations. Only the cited sentence and its neighbours were read; the article body is 46k characters and other passages may add support. Version. JPRS 2024. Curator qualifications: All excerpts located; HEA/HFN requirement strength varies by body and subgenre (kept). Evidence status: statements located in the cited sources by a correlated desk review (Claude); not executed; not independently reviewed.

{
  "citations": [
    {
      "url": "https://www.jprstudies.org/2026/07/happily-ever-after-happily-ever-after-negotiating-the-gothic-in-contemporary-dark-romance/",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.jprstudies.org/2024/03/saying-i-dont-queer-romance-in-the-post-marriage-equality-world/",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.rwa.org/the-romance-genre",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://romanticnovelistsassociation.org/join",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.jprstudies.org/2025/12/introducing-undefined-ya-series-romance/",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.jprstudies.org/2026/06/love-stories-and-stories-about-love-popular-and-literary-romance-in-abubakar-adam-ibrahims-season-of-crimson-blossoms/",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "http://teachmetonight.blogspot.com/p/romance-novel.html",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.jprstudies.org/2026/07/romancing-the-darkness-understanding-trauma-in-the-romance-genre/",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/html/2604.09854v1",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.writeforharlequin.com/romance-glossary/",
      "note": "candidate evidence excerpts"
    },
    {
      "url": "https://www.jprstudies.org/2024/03/saying-i-dont-queer-romance-in-the-post-marriage-equality-world",
      "note": "correction source (record C3-B679-03): cited at https://www.jprstudies.org/2024/03/saying-i-dont-queer-romance-in-the-post-marriage-equality-world/; section on betrothal and normativity"
    }
  ]
}