Romance and fantasy: Two great flavors brought together for the latest trend in publishing. Romantasy has become the hot new buzzword on BookTok and in literary circles, in large part thanks to the success of the works of Sarah J. Maas. Her doorstop sagas of fairy-tale subversions and spice-heavy drama, such as A Court of Thorns and Roses and Crescent City, have become veritable phenomena, topping the bestseller lists with over 40 million copies sold worldwide, according to The Guardian. Other romantasy titles have followed in Maas’s footsteps, such as the Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros, about an elite school for dragon riders, and A Fate Inked in Blood by Danielle L. Jensen, a Norse-inspired story with magic and hot gods. There’s a real hunger for lavish worldbuilding combined with proud eroticism.
Publishers are hot on the trail of the newest trend, which has become especially popular on BookTok. HarperCollins recently launched a dedicated list of romantasy titles, called the Midnight Collection, to keep up with the likes of Maas. Just google “Romantasy” and you’ll find a lot of listicles with recommendations as well as writers trying to fully define the term. It’s easy to assume that all of this is brand new. Certainly, Bloomsbury, Maas’s publisher, has tried to claim that it coined the term to “identify the genre [Maas] was spearheading.” That’s straight-up wrong as a quick online search can prove, but it also highlights how trends are cyclical even as we forget our recent pasts. Romantasy has long been embedded in the history of romance publishing,
The blending of speculative fiction with romance is an old concept. One could argue that its roots lie in Gothic fiction, where innocent maidens ran through the darkened corridors of crumbling castles, and the monsters within were thinly veiled metaphors for rampant desire. What are fairy tales if not a blending of the fantastical and romantic? The modern and sturdier blending of the two could be found in ’90s fantasy classics like Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels saga, a high-fantasy series about a prophesized ruler who will wield unstoppable power over a matriarchal society. Bishop’s series, which released its 12th installment last year, has long been celebrated for its dark sensuality and focus on female characters in a genre that was and is still pretty male-dominant. These books weren’t necessarily marketed as romance-focused and were shelved as fantasy but they remain crucial foundations of the romantasy genre and paved the way for what followed.
It’s not just Bishop, of course. Mercedes Lackey, a prolific author of various subgenres of fantasy, has frequently blended romance into her worlds, particularly in her long-running Valdemar universe that encapsulates dozens of books. Tamora Pierce, one of young adult literature’s most beloved fantasy writers, has long dabbled in romantic fantasy. In the world of sci-fi, we have the Vorkosigan Saga of the legendary Hugo Award winner Lois McMaster Bujold. This 16-book strong series is set in a faraway galaxy colonized by humanity, and the 1999 entry, A Civil Campaign, was directly inspired by the romances of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. Why shouldn’t the social structures and comedies of manners of the Regency era work in an intergalactic setting?
For the ultimate in sensual romantasy, we can look no further than the legendary Jacqueline Carey. Kushiel’s Dart, published in 1999, is entrenched in the concept of desire and pushing the limits of sexual freedom. Set in an alternate Medieval world with influences of French and Jewish folklore, the story follows a woman named Phèdre nó Delaunay as she comes into her powers as an “anguissette”, a person who experiences sexual pleasure from pain. She trains as a courtesan and a spy, tasked with infiltrating the upper echelons of power to uncover their treachery. The book is, in many ways, rather traditional as a piece of high fantasy, but it’s also extremely graphic in its depiction of sex, much of which is rooted in kink and BDSM. It’s also that rare thing in pop culture, a story centered on a sex worker that does not shame her for being a sex worker. One can easily trace the path from Kushiel’s Dart to Maas’s work, as well as more graphic fantasy-oriented romance and erotica like Katee Robert’s novels or the monster-f*cking subgenre.
But many of these books were never sold as romance. Carey, Bishop, and Lackey’s novels had covers more familiar to fantasy fans than romance ones (not a beefcake in sight, alas.) There are wonderful exceptions, such as the novels of C.L. Wilson, which blend high fantasy with old-school romance and were marketed thoroughly as such with beautiful covers. If modern romantasy trends offer us one thing, it’s a welcome reminder that the strict definitions of genre are needlessly limiting for reader and writer alike.
The lines between subgenres are liminal and often tough to fully define. When does a book go from being romantasy to urban fantasy, or from dark fantasy to paranormal romance? A lot of the progenitors of the current trends aren’t credited as such or recommended by those BookTokers hungry for more of the same. It’s a shame that the queens of paranormal, for instance, don’t get held up with the same enthusiasm as their descendants, perhaps because they feature badass women in leather pants rather than queens and maidens atop horses.
A lot of this might be down to the ways that many of the more prominent romantasy hits of the past couple of years blur the line between adult and YA in terms of their target audience. Like YA, a lot of modern romantasy is sold based on its tropes, with a heavy marketing emphasis on those enticing themes (see enemies-to-lovers, which is big in this genre, or grumpy/sunshine, a trope practically perfect for hot monster stories.) While many of these books are spicy and proudly sold as such – Maas’s books are eagerly called “faerie smut” by fans – it’s not uncommon to see many of these books labeled as teen-friendly. You would never confuse A Court of Thorns and Roses for Kushiel’s Dart, for example, if only because the latter is so unavoidably adult in theme and content (and also contains many scenes of rape), but that doesn’t mean it’s not appealing to or branded for that demographic. That’s caused some furor and much BookTok discourse, much in the same way that cute cartoon covers have led to romance readers mistaking hard spice for fluff.
Romantasy’s appeal hardly needs explaining: high romance, vast world-building, and the safe space of speculative genre to explore feminine desire that goes beyond the stifled societal norm. This is a genre of utmost earnestness: even if the heroine is snarky, she’s still falling head-first into a world of dragons, magic, and men with names like Xaden, Nyktos, and Slade. Many of them are directly interrogating old-school fantasy tropes, like the damsel in distress or beauty and the beast dynamic. It’s baroque, soapy, and female-driven, much like its forebearers, which frequently had to cloak their romantic intentions in ambiguous covers and dude-friendly blurbs.
Current romantasy fans would do well to check out the genre’s foundations. Many of these writers are still working to push romantic fantasy forward. Jacqueline Carey is writing new books in the Kushiel’s Legacy saga, Anne Bishop and Mercedes Lackey have never stopped publishing, and the vast variety of fantastical romance—paranormal, urban fantasy, high fantasy, dystopia, etc—has only grown in the interim decades. Many of the things readers find so fresh and progressive about romantasy have always been there, and many of them aren’t getting the boost they so sorely deserve now that publishers have once again realized that romance sells. As any hardened romance lover can attest, if something becomes a big hit, the chances are this genre already did it!
Kayleigh Donaldson is a critic and pop culture writer for Pajiba.com. Her work can also be found on IGN, Slashfilm, Uproxx, Little White Lies, Vulture, Roger Ebert, and other publications. She lives in Dundee.