We can’t seem to get ahead, and we can’t get off either.
Romantasy, a mash-up of romance and fantasy, is one of the hottest subgenres in romance today. If you have just woken from a years long slumber, it refers to a romance novel set in a fantasy or magical setting. Think high fantasy with medieval inspired elements such as monarchical kingdoms, sullen villagers, hot elves, and a single bed at the inn. If you are looking for some recommendations, you can choose from a growing roster of traditionally published books: Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses series, Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing, or Jennifer Lynn Armentrout’s From Blood and Ash. But even within the indie sphere, originally self-published juggernauts like Callie Hart’s Quicksilver have later been acquired by a Big Five after a feverish 10-way bidding war finally being sold to Forever Publishing, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, part of Hachette Book Group.
Yet, despite Romantasy’s clear popularity, it has inspired superficial and snide coverage. Why are women reading about age-gap relationships between teenagers and 500-year-old elves? Look at this weird dragon dildo! Broadly speaking, we have seemed ready to simply write off Romantasy as women reading “fairy porn.” Such a stance not only signals a historical erasure that elves have been hot long before Orlando Bloom threw on that blond wig, but more importantly, it diverts us from confronting the subgenre’s relation to the rise of neo-reactionary and fascist political cultures. This subgenre can be thought of as a mid or unfinished literary trend connected to a broader ideological movement made visible on our digital feeds: cottage-core design aesthetics, waif-like dresses for medieval-girl fall, and the ubiquitous fantastical tradwife. And much like these other aesthetic movements, the rise of Romantasy reveals something about our current cultural anxieties; it is throwing into relief something about our hopes, our fears, and our desires. Put simply, the romance genre has never simply been about escapism. Romance novels are expressions of and mediations upon our sexual economy. In Reading the Romance, published more than forty years ago, Janice Radway offered a critical account of how women read romance novels to find answers to problems in their lives. So, what answers does Romantasy present to us? And why now?
Romantasy emerges against the political backdrop of the re-election of Donald Trump and the right-ward swing of white women, particularly amongst the Gen Z cohort. While titans like Maas began publishing series like ACOTAR in 2015, Romantasy as a particular subgenre exploded in the 2020s just as the pandemic spurred us back to indoor hobbies like reading and to our screens, where platforms like TikTok could cater to thriving subcultures of young and female-dominated readers who overwhelmingly prefer genres like romance, fantasy, and New Adult.
In the second Trump presidency, Romantasy is driving the entire category of adult fiction book buys in 2024. Even more tellingly, it is dominating the New York Times Bestseller list with one out of every four hardcovers categorized as a Romantasy read. Even within bookish spaces such as in BookTok, many readers, despite their love of “shadow daddies,” (for a more niche pick see wizard Sarkan aka “The Dragon” in Naomi Novak’s Uprooted), appear to be apposed to feminist, progressive politics in discourse about Romantasy. In the wake of Trump’s win, some BookTokers celebrated, while others pushed back against criticism from progressive readers. Things came to a head after creator @lizabookrecs complained flippantly in a video about the politicization of BookTok.
Still, there remains a palatable desire for cozy, faux-medieval domestic content in our books regardless of our political positionality. We may be worried about the price of eggs in real life, but in Romantasy, not only are the eggs magically poached, but our heroines—whether they range from plucky to bitchy to softy (see Feyre, Nesta, and Elain in Sarah J. Maas’ ACOTAR series)—don’t have to worry about these messy material realities of domestic labor, which can sometimes feel like a failure of political imagination in a subgenre that constantly inspires me with the ingenuity of bedding elves, dragons, and vampires. We are already in the realm of the extraordinary, can’t that extend to fantasizing about a new form of sexual politics too?
For those of us trapped in the hellscape of modernity and late-stage capitalism, however, we worry about more things than the price of eggs. Women are confronting both the perceived and real failures of the mythical “Girlboss,” the insidious post-feminist promise that we achieved gender equality, and the crumbling post-war liberal democratic social welfare state. We still have not solved the problem of heterosexual sex, which is to say straight romantic relationships which live up to the lofty feminist promise of mutual fulfillment and equality in and outside the bedroom. Then, there is the sticky problem of capitalism. Put more simply, we can’t seem to get ahead, and we can’t get off either. Various solutions have been floated: Gen Z’s supposed renunciation of sex entirely; quiet quitting interpersonal romance to focus on “romanticizing” our own shitty lives—but nothing seems to stick, or at least to promise a systemic change of our material conditions.
After Trump’s win in 2024, we watched the split-screen reactions of some women discussing adopting the South Korean 4B movement, which encourages to decenter men socially and to refrain from heterosexual sex, juxtaposed with white supremacist Nick Fuentes’ self-satisfied rage-bait post: “[y]our body, my choice.” For many women, the seductive allure of the tradwife lifestyle became more than a Pinterest board—it transformed into a vote for Trump. And even if you are not in that camp politically, you are likely sucked in by the desire to wear a nap dress and watch Nara Smith’s hypnotic, silent videos making homemade Cheetos.
Romantasy, then, seemingly offers us a literary escape, allowing us to imagine frolicking around in fields instead of getting sexually harassed on our subway commute, inhabiting a world free from Red 40 dye and redolent of homemade bread made by a kindly off-page peasant. For readers dissatisfied with both the messiness of historical patriarchy and the sexual and class alienation of modernity we are presented with the anesthetizing aesthetic of an atemporal world. Because the medieval specifics are always undefined, presented at some historical remove, we can enjoy the pretty dresses without worrying about the specifics of feudalism. Comparatively, tradwives seek to retcon a vision of the 1950s for many of us wishing to return to some “simpler time,” yet we most likely would not be sitting by the pool sipping martinis and taking benzos or running around in a beautiful palace—we’d be working, inside or outside the home. Fundamentally, it is this “disaffection with modernity” that is mobilized by far-right fascist political movements. and it has manifested in our romance literary culture.
Romantasy does not bother with political economy any more than it bothers with indoor plumbing. It traffics in compelling medieval aesthetics and a simpler, seductive mode of sexual-social relations that suggests a naïve return to honor and hierarchy without forcing us to confront more complex questions about the relationship between sex, power, and work. Romantasy novels offer us not the “gilded cage” of boring bourgeoise heterosexual monogamy, which Emmeline Clein suggests is depicted in Sally Rooney’s contemporary literary fiction or the modern thinking woman’s smut, but an older version of a prison. The story of a pretty princess trapped in a castle. See Nesta stuck in the House of Wind. Or, Katee Robert’s Deal with a Demon Series, where heroines are held captive in various castles and estates, and in one memorable book, by a literal dragon (see The Dragon’s Bride, which I highly recommend). Still, while Rooney aims to push back against the self-indulgent heteropessimistic turn of literary fiction—to mixed success, according to Clein—she is still attempting the messy intellectual work of trying to imagine something else.
Romantasy, conversely, is too often formulaic, taking the parts of medieval history without gerrying-rigging them into something new. By design, Romantasy, like its generic forebears of Fantasy, gives readers more of the same. Dan Sinykin has detailed the creation of the fantasy genre as tied to conglomerate publishers in the postwar period seeking to sell more books to readers eager to “escape the modern age into a world where capitalism and industry had never happened.” Romantasy, then, with its playing in the feudal sandbox gives us plausible deniability as we give in to some version of regressive sexual politics, a version of reactionary sex which Sophie Kemp has framed broadly as “a power exchange. A way to subjugate and to be subjugated.” Romantasy is “spicy,” to use BookTok parlance for graphic sexual content. In A Court of Mist and Fury, Feyre, the peasant-turned-protagonist eventually submits to Rhysand’s teaching her how to read before eventually also submitting to play-acting as the sexy courtesan in a pseudo under-cover mission in the dangerous Night Court. In both scenes, Maas drives home both the immense power differential between the two lovers and underscores the pleasure of submission. Rooney’s more contemporary heroines always end up playing ball too because as Brandon Taylor notes “the pleasure seems to derive…from handing over authority to the men, playing out a variety of trad fantasy.” But in Romantasy, we see this time and again whether we are in a court, a house, or a castle.And when faced with a hot, rich hero, human or fae, who just wants to fuck us and populate our closet with dresses, why worry about anything at all?
Zoë Hu suggests that the seductive promise of this particular neo-reactionary brand of aesthetic fascism and of sex lies in the belief that “tradition can salvage love from modern indignities.” We might not be able to realize that fantasy totally, but we find something about it persuasive, something hot, the book sales speak for themselves. And as Brandon Taylor puts it, whether we are reading Rooney—or, I’d add, Maas—there is a “thrill in abandoning intellect and good liberatory politics for the sweet release of degradation.”
But is throwing up our hands and getting on our knees enough? When I am looking for an answer to this seemingly intractable problem of heterosexual sex and capitalism, I am struggling to find it in Romantasy. Jane Eyre, the blueprint of the Gothic Romance, gave us one answer in the indomitable Jane Eyre, who is often described by the magnetic Mr. Rochester to as his own little “elf.” Jane did not throw up her hands; she asserted her independence, tossing herself into the marshes penniless and half-starving because she believed true love could only be achieved on the basis of equality between parties. Charlotte Brontë, through the Gothic Romance subgenre, presented one possible mediation upon the economic problem of marriage and love that was deeply attuned to the socio-political realities middle-class women faced during the ramp-up of industrial capitalism. For the feminine genteel classes, and those in genteel poverty like Jane who had educational trappings but little material wealth to match, marriage was a means of social and financial establishment where love figured in rarely. Of course everyone does a double take during Rochester and Jane’s initial engagement, it is assumed she is quite literally sleeping her way to the top (of the social ladder). And for women unable to find a husband, the solution shifted from marital to material, the harsh realities of laboring in limited occupations such as teaching or descending into obscure poverty looming over them.
But because Romantasy frequently chooses not to grapple with the more uncomfortable aspects of medieval history, it obscures the troubling questions of the material interests it supports, and thus, presents a beautiful if empty literary landscape unmoored from potential historical transformation. To riff on Stuart Hall, cultural settings come from somewhere, they have histories. Just as the tradwife fantasy purports a “willful stupidity about modern capitalism’s historic dependence on the family, a constitutive structure of capitalism,” Romantasy purports a willful stupidity about feudalism’s relationship to violence and primitive accumulation. The genre too often glosses over the gritty details which underlie the larger hierarchy of the noble courts which define the genre, in other words, they are often silent on the relationship between power and property. And crucially, these stories elide what Kemp has noted as the neo-reactionary fetishization of “a return to the hierarchy of the family.”
And listen—I am not insensate to the charms of smoldering eyes, velvet wrapped steel, and eyes darkening. I have been a “Legolas girl” for years. I’m feverishly awaiting the next ACOTAR installment. But as a romance reader and a feminist, I argue there is an obligation to reconsider the broader ideological project this subgenre seems invested in fetishizing, particularly given our current political context which increasingly seeks to eliminate women’s hard-fought choices.
Today, in our real world, Roe v. Wade has been overturned. Women are bleeding to death in parking lots and hospital rooms. Project 2025 is aiming to classify depictions of queer life as “pornography.” Supreme Court justices are suggesting we “re-think” landmark decisions such as Obergefell v. Hodges. It is perhaps no wonder that given the parallel crises of the failed sexual revolution and failure of capitalism that we might want to retreat to picking berries, lounging around the castle, and taking it like the good girls we are.
Still, at the rate things are going, we might not even have that luxury anymore, given the Republican penchant to ban Romantasy books with even the most mainstream hetero depictions of “spice.” These novels serve a purpose, and they bear interrogation about what they reveal about ourselves. Ultimately, however imperfectly feminism has been applied, “at its best, has always pointed to the possibility that love could one day be different.” Romantasy offers us too often the reverse, that love could simply be easier and thus ostensibly more pleasurable, whether with elf or fae, if it just stayed the same. Maybe that’s appealing. It’s not simple to reject and renounce sex, love, and pleasure, to “strive and endure,” when our problems seem insurmountable as Jane says to Mr. Rochester when he offers her to become his mistress. Still, I want to strive for something more transformative, more extraordinary in the romance genre, within Romantasy.
And if we’re in a nostalgic frame of mind as Romantasy suggests we are, perhaps we should take inspiration from Bridget Jones, our modern Elizabeth Bennett. When offered up a relationship that’s both easy and pleasurable by the empty yet hot Daniel Cleaver, she rejects that version of love, affirming that she’s “still looking for something more extraordinary than that.” As a reader and a feminist too, I’m still looking for a version of love, sexual politics, and a political economy that’s more extraordinary—dragon dildo not required.
Emily Lynell Edwards, Ph.D is a publisher and author with a background in digital culture, data analytics, and gender. Previously, she served as an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and today is in academic publishing. Her first book Digital Islamophobia is with De Gruyter. Her research has appeared in venues such as New Media & Society and Critical Studies in Media Communication, and her writing in Typebar Magazine, Polygon, and SHARP News. Learn more about her work here.