How Rebecca Yarros’ Empyrean Series Came to Dominate Modern Romantasy

How Rebecca Yarros’ Empyrean Series Came to Dominate Modern Romantasy

Romantasy has come to thoroughly dominate modern publishing. Thanks to a few choice titles and the almighty algorithms of TikTok, this new breed of genre mish-mash has led to a boom in the romance world. Take the trope-y goodness of a classic love story and meld it with the dramatics and world-building of high fantasy and you’ve got the good stuff that’s filling up bookstore shelves everywhere. While Sarah J. Maas has been widely credited with kickstarting this new era with her A Court of Thorns and Roses saga, another writer has been cashing in big with an addictive blend of dark academia, steamy passion, and dragons.

The Empyrean series, written by Rebecca Yarros, became an instant sensation. The first installment, Fourth Wing, was published in April 2023 by Red Tower Books, an imprint of Entangled Publishing, and it immediately became the hottest read on BookTok. It was one of the most borrowed titles in American public libraries during 2023 and 2024 and it’s been on the New York Times bestseller list for 77 weeks. Yarros quickly followed that up with the sequel, Iron Flame, published in November of the same year. The trend only grew from there, and Yarros became a star at fan conventions where she received rapturous responses one would be more likely to expect at Taylor Swift concerts. With the recent arrival of the third book, Onyx Storm, which received release parties akin to the heyday of Harry Potter and Twilight, the success is expected to continue. 

The series follows Violet Sorrengail, the daughter of General Lilith Sorrengail, the commanding general at Basgiath War College in the kingdom of Navarre. Students must choose which of the school’s four quadrants to align with. While everyone expects the wallflower Violet to become a scribe, she is forced into joining the deadly dragon rider quadrant, where warriors are trained to ride these majestic creatures in defense of attacks by griffin fliers from the neighboring kingdom of Poromiel. Violet is small and deals with chronic pain, and just getting to the Quadrant kills more students than helps them. To make matters worse, as the daughter of a general, she’s got a giant target on her back. 

The Empyrean series is kind of the perfect romantasy series in the way that something like Deadpool is the perfect blockbuster hero. It’s a concept that is highly familiar yet jazzed up with enough flair and solid storytelling to keep readers hooked. Every detail can be reduced to a trope that can be sold to the masses (a popular way for BookTokers to promote their favorite reads.) It’s got a bit of everything: a love triangle, a smart heroine who becomes a badass, academic and political intrigue, various dramatic trials and battles, dragons, and, of course, sex. If you were to put together a romantasy bingo card, the Empyrean series would get a full house by the end of the first book.

This is not to say that the books are bad. It’s more that Yarros is a savvy writer who knew which way the tides were turning in the romance world and engineered the perfect raft to carry her across the waves. Prior to the Empyrean books, Yarros was a contemporary romance author of adult and New Adult fiction. A mother of six, she began writing while her husband was stationed in Afghanistan. As a writer, she was prolific and efficient (she’s published at least 24 books in around a decade), penning novels full of high emotion and personal strife, many of which were inspired by her life as a military wife. The Last Letter is about a soldier who becomes the pen pal of his fellow recruit’s sister, a single mother dealing with a sick child. Full Measures follows an army brat who falls for a hockey star. In Great and Precious Things, a soldier returns home without his younger brother and hopes to reunite with his one true love. Goodreads reviews of Yarros’ non-romantasy work frequently describe them as tearjerkers, high-emotion stories that would be more at home next to Colleen Hoover’s books than those of Sarah J. Maas. 

When Entangled decided to start an imprint for adult romantasy stories, they approached Yarros for some ideas, and so Empyrean was born. It has all of the things that die-hard romantasy BookTokers wanted: a hot bad boy love interest with a strangely spelled name (Xaden!), an enemies-to-lovers dynamic, hot first-person sex scenes with orgasms so powerful that they trigger the heroine’s magical abilities; and those dragons, who are graceful and intelligent but suffer no fools. If Maas’s books were denser with mythos and grander in ambition, Yarros’ are proudly accessible but also thoroughly readable (although she has also been called out for her questionable use and pronunciation of Scottish Gaelic terminology used in the novels.) Think of her as the Divergent to the Hunger Games of ACOTAR. 

It’s in the details where Yarros thrives. Violet suffers from an unnamed condition that the author confirmed was Ehlers–Danlos syndrome (EDS), a form of connective tissue disorder that can cause serious pain and joint dislocations. Yarros has been candid in discussing her own experiences with EDS, which left her in agony with no diagnosis for many years. As she told the New York Times, “I wanted to tell a story about a girl who should not succeed, and who should not be able to endure a brutal environment.” While Violet does get somewhat stronger, she is largely forced to rely on her wits to both hide her illness and deal with injuries caused by dragon rider training. It’s a rare moment of disability representation in a genre still largely populated by able-bodied ladies with swords. The stakes are also thoroughly real in this world. The death toll puts most slasher movies to shame, as students are murdered, fall off cliffs, or eaten by dragons, and this is when they’re in school.

Yarros has said that the series will be five books long, but there’s currently no publication date for the fourth installment. Fans are waiting eagerly for more. The subreddit dedicated to the series currently has over 115,000 followers. If romantasy becomes just another fad to be replaced by the next big thing, it seems likely that Yarros and her dragon riders will be able to continue, having moved from trend chaser to publishing phenomenon.


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.

 
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