Romantasy is the hybrid of two genres serious readers love to sneer at: romance and fantasy. Populated by fairies, goblins, shapeshifters and sorcerers, these novels turn up the charm with fantasy’s high stakes and epic tropes.
Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros have become its dominant authors and their readers take the genre pretty seriously: an estimated $33 million worth of romantasy books were sold in 2023, according to The Bookseller, up from $18.5 million in 2022.
Yarros currently tops the Sunday Times bestsellers list both for hardback fiction, with Onyx Storm, which sold 2.7 million copies globally in its first week, and paperback, with Fourth Wing. Maas’s Throne of Glass and Crescent City series have brought sales to Bloomsbury not seen since the glory days of Harry Potter.
The most obvious comparable moment in popular culture was the explosion of EL James’s Fifty Shades series, which began in 2011. And just as those books and films made erotica a mainstream talking point, romantasy’s surging popularity tells us something interesting about the desires and frustrations of its mostly female readership.
As someone who reads widely, some might say indiscriminately, I have devoured hundreds of romantasy titles, including much of the “dark romance” sub-genre, which goes beyond the slightly more vanilla sagas of Yarros and Maas.
Dark romance tends towards kink and can feature nefarious villains, predatory behavior such as stalking, the blurring of sexual consent and taboo relationships involving transgressive age gaps or family members.
During my journeys in romantasy, I found it disconcertingly easy to veer from vanilla stuff to some fairly violent sexual tropes, almost without meaning to. Much of the genre’s popularity is being driven by “BookTok”, TikTok’s thriving literary ecosystem, and one of the most popular titles on BookTok last year, The Villain, by LJ Shen, involves a masked protagonist breaking into the heroine’s house and concealing cameras to watch her without her knowledge. (They soon embark upon consensual sexual adventures plus a few murders, for texture.)
Romantasy’s surging popularity tells us something interesting about the desires and frustrations of its mostly female readership.
This is a far cry from the half-faerie hero Rhysand in Maas’s A Court of Thorn and Roses, whose smoldering attraction to the protagonist Feyre builds over the course of several books before he finally makes a move.
So what does this swirl of desire, kink and publishing bonanza tell us about contemporary female desire?
One recurring theme in romantasy books is that the men in them are extremely good verbal communicators. The narrative is dominated by the men talking to women before and during sex.
This is a reflection of the fact that so much of sexual pleasure for women emanates from anticipation. It is all about the build-up — Paloma Faith pointed out recently that foreplay starts the minute you open your eyes in the morning and hope you don’t have to immediately nag your partner about a domestic chore. It’s what you talk about the whole day, not just 15 minutes before wanting an orgasm.
Romantasy characters talk and tease and really put in the work, in a way most of us simply don’t have the time or the energy to do. The male protagonists’ communication strikes a sharp contrast with the faltering “U up?” discourse that dominates many app-based instant message conversations. Men and women today may communicate more than ever before, but rarely do those words stoke erotic desire or satisfy our deepest longings.
Most of us can agree that if you can be bothered to introduce a bit of chat during sex, then you’re probably going to have a more fulfilling experience as a woman. These books corroborate this, showing that we are more about the verbal than the visual. They allow women to imagine an ideal divorced from the funny, awkward, messy and less than epic experience that is sex for most people.
Praise is another common theme in romantasy. Rhysand often praises Feyre in intimate ways, telling her how much he wants her and how intoxicating he finds her.
The male protagonists’ communication strikes a sharp contrast with the faltering “U up?” discourse that dominates many app-based instant message conversations.
This praise kink goes a step further in Babygirl, the new film in which Nicole Kidman plays a high-powered chief executive having an affair with a much younger man. Kidman’s character, Romy Mathis, is tested to see how submissive she is prepared to be: she is told to stand in the corner, wait and, notoriously, to sip a glass of milk.
Kidman’s character loves to be called a good girl, and while women around the world appear to be cringing through a lot of the film, I’ve heard friends and colleagues express a desire to be praised in such a way. (None of them is saying they want carnal knowledge of an elf. At least not yet.)
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — praise is great and being more articulate and expressive about sex is something to be encouraged — but the question is control. The women feeding this demand are usually quite empowered, and a desire simply to hand over the reins to someone else (often a relative stranger) feels … complicated.
In 2012, at the height of Fifty Shades fever, the American essayist Katie Roiphe argued that as women became more empowered in public, breaking glass ceilings in the workplace, they fantasized more about submission and domination in their private lives.
Does this still hold true today? Perhaps on a global level women are still becoming more empowered, but in post-pandemic Britain it certainly doesn’t feel that way: the rate of women leaving the workforce to care for their families has started to rise after decades of decline.
Male dominance still looks shaky, but only because the men dominating the public sphere are shakier, rather than because there are fewer of them. To me that sounds like the perfect excuse to escape into a world dominated by powerful, capable and yet highly communicative and emotionally literate hot fairies.
Flora Joll is a London-based writer
