In sure corners of the web just lately, folks have been debating why “women can’t stop reading fairy porn”.
These discussions centre round the fantasy romance style, also referred to as romantasy, which has exploded in each reputation and gross sales. Onyx Storm, Rebecca Yarros’s third e-book in The Empyrean collection, was the fastest-selling grownup novel in 20 years when revealed in early 2025, in accordance with the New York Times. It bought greater than 2.7 million copies in its first week.
Bloomberg reported that romantasy was estimated to usher in US$ 610 million in gross sales in 2024, revitalising the publishing industry. These rising gross sales have made us, as feminist advertising and marketing students, taken with understanding this style and its readers who swoon over muscular, good-looking faerie princes and dream of dragon taming.
Traditionally, male readers have dominated fantasy fiction fandoms. As such, narratives centring feminine characters have typically been sidelined in lots of of the hottest fantasy fiction books. Think of JRR Tolkien’s Bilbo and Frodo Baggins from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, or Fitz from Robin Hobb’s The Farseer Trilogy collection.
Centring girls’s stories
Romantasy stories counter this, providing fantasy worlds the place romance is a key plot level. The protagonists are typically girls they usually centre girls’s stories and ladies’s romantic relationships.
Female characters in these books set off on “hero journeys”, meet good-looking and caring males alongside the approach, expertise romance and sexual pleasure, and defeat evil. In some methods, romantasy follows many acquainted fantasy tropes, together with good vs evil, medieval settings or magical faculties, fantastical creatures and magical powers. However, in addition they incorporate tropes from romance – a style that has traditionally sustained the publishing industry – equivalent to enemies to lovers, forbidden love and compelled proximity (oh no, there’s just one mattress).
Romantasy books, nonetheless, are typically mistaken for erotica or “smut” for ladies. Readers generally rank books in phrases of “spicy” ranges, indicating how salacious their storylines are. However, sexual content material just isn’t new to fantasy. Some of the hottest fantasy books, like George Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire collection (Game of Thrones), embrace frequent and graphic intercourse scenes.
Romantasy, nonetheless, has a definite draw. These stories characteristic experiences of consensual intercourse and female-centred sexual pleasure whereas additionally tapping into advanced themes. For occasion, Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing offers with power sickness and Sarah J Mass’s A Court of Thorns and Roses offers with a number of traumas, together with grooming, sexual abuse, battle and poverty.
The feminine gaze
Romantasy authors, who are typically girls, goal to eschew the “male gaze” typical of a lot media, together with literature. This is the place, as feminist movie scholar Laura Mulvey describes, girls are typically introduced as passive objects for male sexual pleasure and viewing, relatively than as energetic topics with company. For occasion, in A Song of Ice and Fire and related fantasy books, the intercourse typically contains a kind of violence in opposition to girls.
Romantasy books as an alternative centre the “female-gaze” by which feminine want, energy and identification are explored from a feminine level of view.
In the examine we are engaged on, girls have expressed that romantasy permits them to expertise romantic and sexual fantasies that they may not expertise in the actual world, and helps them uncover and experiment with their sexuality.
Younger readers we spoke to discovered liberation in studying about real looking and non-taboo representations of girls’s romantic and sexual fantasies. Women from conservative cultures stated they have been impressed by feminine characters who are not afraid or ashamed to hunt out sexual pleasure.
Romantasy books are not with out their points, nonetheless. Despite the female-centred narratives, some of the hottest books in the style perpetuate heterosexual norms, both ignore racial and sexual range, or characteristic problematic and limiting representations of them. For instance, Rebecca Yarros proudly states that Xaden, the male love curiosity character in Fourth Wing, just isn’t white, with out specifying which race he’s – as if all non-white racial teams are the identical.
However, in our examine, we proceed to search out that even when all girls (particularly older girls and ladies of color) can’t connect with romantasy protagonists, they resonate with how these stories prioritise feminine pleasure and security, with companions that are dedicated to them. It just isn’t solely “smut” or “spice” that appeals to feminine readers, however extra importantly, the acknowledgement of girls as sexual topics, relatively than objects for male pleasure or targets of sexual violence.
While intercourse is a vital half of romantasy, it isn’t erotica. Where erotica is all about the intercourse, typically, the “spicy” content material in romantasy solely lasts a couple of pages and is a component of a broader romantic arc between the protagonist and the supporting male love pursuits.
As the style continues to develop, we hope that romantasy is taken critically by the publishing industry (it’s definitely benefiting from it) in addition to by the wider public. Currently, the industry popularises TikTok viral books, leading to repetitive, white-centric and heterosexual stories. There are, nonetheless, numerous representations to be discovered. For occasion, The Emily Wilde collection by Heather Fawcett or Paladin’s Grace by T Kingfisher each characteristic girls of their thirties and forties.
For queer illustration and cosy romance, there’s Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree. Additionally, books by girls of color, like The Inheritance Trilogy by NK Jemisin, and The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty, characteristic racial and ethnically numerous characters in a fantasy setting with a romantic subplot.
Perhaps in time, like with different style writing, publishers and readers will hunt down, assist and promote extra numerous stories in romantasy that can attraction to all types of girls.
Athanasia Daskalopoulou is Senior Lecturer in Marketing, University of Liverpool.
Anuja Anil Pradhan is Guest Researcher, University of Southern Denmark.
This article first appeared on The Conversation.
