Somewhere along the way, having a type became something to downplay instead of something to declare. Taste, especially the specific kind, gets treated like a confession instead of what it actually is: evidence of a person who has paid enough attention to herself to know precisely what she's after.
The woman who can tell you the exact heat level she needs, the trope that gets her every time, the particular flavor of tension she's hunting for in a book — she isn't being difficult. She's being exact. That exactness deserves the same respect as any other refined taste, the kind nobody questions when it's wine or art or a well-cut coat.
This pillar exists to take that specificity seriously: the vocabulary for what she wants, the anatomy of why one trope owns her and another leaves her cold, the case for treating her taste like the deliberate thing it is instead of a phase to grow out of.
The full essay is still being written. Consider this the opening line of a much longer conversation about taste.