The billionaire plot has been a familiar romance trope for a lot of years. In the usual plot line, the ruthless billionaire falls in love with a decidedly less rich heroine who teaches him that money isn’t everything. In its bare outlines, it’s close to a fairy tale: a poor woman (it’s almost always the heroine who’s poor) being swept away by a wealthy man who’ll make all of her problems disappear. It’s also reminiscent of all the folk tales about princes falling in love with commoners who showed more courage and good sense than their aristocratic counterparts. The plot is so widespread and recognizable that publishers like Harlequin put billionaire in the titles of their books to alert the readers to the subgenre: The Billionaire’s Kitten, Billionaire Neighbor, and Billionaire Unloved are all current titles from Amazon.

But in 2018, the idea of the billionaire who only needs love to blossom into a decent human being is becoming increasingly hard to swallow, at least for some of us. These are the days of Billionaires Behaving Badly, after all. The convention of the darkly handsome billionaire who wants to sweep a woman off her feet comes up against the reality of Martin Shkreli, the billionaire who jacked up the price of the AIDS medicine his firm produced from thirteen dollars per pill to 750 dollars per pill (AIDS sufferers take ten to fifteen pills a day). Shkreli reacted to the resulting public outcry with a smirk, and I’ve never seen a picture of him that made him seem anywhere close to attractive. Even his lawyer in an unrelated criminal matter said he’d like to punch him. Then there are the billionaires who fund shady political concerns, like Robert Mercer, funder of Cambridge Analytica, Breitbart News, and other extreme rightwing causes. Or Foster Friess, who recommended that women use aspirin for birth control as they did in the Good Ol’ Days: “The gals put it between their knees, and it wasn’t that costly.” Talk about someone you’d like to punch. And, of course, there’s the Billionaire In Chief, about whom I’ll say little other than express my devout hope that if nude photos exist, I never have to look at them.

It’s hard to find any of these men even vaguely romantic. And it’s hard to accept the romance version of these jerks. With the exception of men like Warren Buffett, most of the billionaires in the limelight today are reprehensible creeps. Their money can’t make up for their total lack of character or sensitivity. Mark Zuckerburg and Bill Gates may both fund lots of charities, but their professional activities still raise eyebrows.

So what becomes of the billionaire trope? My guess is nothing. After all, romance writers still create dashing heroes who are dukes or earls, despite the lack of real life models. And I’m sure more adaptable readers than I will continue to buy billionaire books and ignore their lack of realistic counterparts. But my guess is we’ll also continue to see a rise in a counter-trend: the billionaire as villain. Murderous billionaires, billionaires out to destroy the environment, billionaires bent on wrecking historic monuments for profit—they’re all available to play antagonist to the hero or heroine. And for me that’s a lot more realistic.

Finally, I should stress that the presence of billionaire heroes doesn’t mean either romance readers or writers are prone to excuse the misdeeds of actual billionaires in public life. Although critics love to imply that female readers of romance have a distorted view of reality, there’s no evidence that most of us have any difficulty telling the difference between truth and fiction. A romance reader can devour a billionaire romance one day and take her place at the pussy-hat barricades the next. Billionaires only get a bye in fiction.