Sex, dungeons and dragons: are you ready for romantasy?

The fiction world has been set alight by a racy, lucrative beast this year. It’s called romantasy. A portmanteau of romance and fantasy, this genre is less about the gentle romantic exploits of Harry Potter and more… Fifty Shades meets Game of Thrones. If you added one of these raunchy tomes to your bookshelf, a neighbouring copy of The Chronicles of Narnia would probably spontaneously combust.

But it’s being read by teenagers and adults alike. According to retail sales monitoring service Nielsen Bookscan, more than half of these books were bought by women between 13 and 34. And its protagonists are equally as youthful. In one recent bestseller, a 20-year-old heroine attends a “war college for dragon riders” and ejects bolts of lightning as she orgasms. In another, a 19-year-old “huntress” enters the mythical land of Prythian and witnesses a whole lot of “faerie f***ing” (a fan term, not our own, thankfully). It might sound like covered and bound fanfiction, but it’s also wildly successful. According to The Times, sales of fiction classed as both fantasy and romance reached £27 million in the UK last year, a significant increase from £15 million in 2022.

The big names in romantasy are nearly all women: Sarah J Maas, Rebecca Yarros, Jennifer L Armentrout and Danielle L Jensen. The books follow a reliable template: a spunky heroine with a quest and an unusual, otherworldly male love interest with anger issues. Predictability has a pull: the romantasy hashtag on TikTok has over 764.6 million views and content surrounding Maas’ series A Court of Thorns and Roses has 14 billion. Maas has sold 40 million copies of her books, with 26 million of those sales having been since 2022. The share price of Bloomsbury, Maas’ publisher, rose by 10 per cent this week alone.

But it’s nothing new, says Katie Fraser of The Bookseller magazine. “Broadly it describes stories where romance is the driving force of the narrative in a fantasy world. Many classic Disney films follow this basis — and Sarah J Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses, for many an entry point into the subgenre, was originally published in 2015.” Fraser says the difference between romantasy and Disney movies, or on the more explicit end Game of Thrones, can be seen in the diverse details. “BookTok [the reading-focused side of TikTok] is shining a light on these stories which often prioritise female pleasure and autonomy. The subgenre is also increasingly becoming an area where queer relationships are celebrated and queer protagonists are taking centre stage.” And the readership are being paid their dues. “[Young female readers] historically have been sidelined, but are now treated as lucrative industry leaders.”

And it makes sense — these are the children of The Hunger Games and Harry Potter era. Except now they’re looking for fiction that falls in line with their own maturity and the increasingly diverse world around us. It’s reminiscent of a common trope among internet arguments about fantasy fiction: if a character can be a vampire, hybrid beast-man, otherworldly alien woman or anything else out of this world, why must the protagonists always be cis-gender, straight and white?

Christina Fusco-House, who is 28 and works in marketing, has been obsessed with the romantasy genre since she was nine years old. She has noticed the recent surge in popularity. “BookTok has boosted sales a ridiculous amount, to the point where most of the publishing industry’s growth in the past couple of years is due to social sales,” she says. “BookTok provides this community for people, especially women, who have for years been made to feel ashamed or guilty for reading ‘trash’. It shows that they’re not alone, and there’s no shame to be had in enjoying a bit of fantasy or romantic escapism.”

Fusco-House has enjoyed the likes of Descartes and Austen, but sometimes Kafka just won’t cut it. “It’s pure escapism, it allows you to experience scenarios and emotions that are harder to access in the day to day. Ever wanted to know what it feels like to ride a dragon? Now you can. Or learn how to be a badass ninja, or have a super sexy demi-god of a man confess his undying love? Plus, it’s a way to ignore the chaos and cruelty in the world at the moment. It’s a bit weird to say, but sometimes you can find more humanity in fantasy than you can in real life.”

So she’d be perfectly happy to whip out a copy of The Serpent and the Wings of Night while on the Tube, then? “Oh I’d read it very happily in public,” she says. “I feel a kind of kinship and solidarity whenever I notice people reading similar books in public. People are welcome to call it childish, but I’d argue that those who judge it like that have never read them themselves and are likely projecting their ignorance across the genre. Maybe it makes me just as judgemental, but when I picture someone calling A Court of Roses and Thorns ‘childish’, I’m picturing a middle-aged man who has lost the joy in his life and the only way he can feel superior is by looking down on other people’s source of happiness.

omantasy’s popularity on BookTok has also fostered a new method of purchasing these books. FairyLoot, a book subscription service that specialises in delivering a tasting menu of fantasy novels to readers’ doors, has said that “tens of thousands” of people have signed up for their new romantasy-only subscription box. “The appetite for romantasy books is continuously shown through record-breaking sales,” co-founder and chief executive Anissa de Gomery. “There are so many more stories that have yet to be discovered through traditional publishing.”