Why We Need Romantasy

Notes on a Genre

(I’ve been very ill - shuttled between doctor’s offices and IV infusions and bed this past month. But the thing that is keeping me going is my new project. I’ve been in a writing storm. I’d always known this project would be classically defined as eco-fantasy or grimdark. But as I’ve simultaneously caught up on reading all the recent fantasy favorites people have recommended, I’ve become increasingly convinced that the most exciting place to write right now is romantasy.)

For as long as I’ve remembered I’ve loved two things: romance and fantasy. As a child, I would spend hours trying to create my own elven languages, drawing maps of imaginary worlds, walking around with the tape recorder my father gave me, “telling” myself long epic stories about cross-dressing knights and ecologies where plants could mate with humans. I grew up in a house of writers who were also, most importantly, readers. My parents read aloud the Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, the Chronicles of Narnia, and then Harry Potter to me and my brother until we were all old enough to read aloud together as a family during the final installments in the Potter series.

But the truth is, the older I got, the more I was reading for something else.

I was reading for love. And I was reading for sex. For relationships. Because that’s what most teenagers are thinking about all the time. And if we are being completely honest it’s what most adults are thinking about most of the time.

Right now, if you want, pause and look up the NYT bestseller list. The Amazon bestseller list. The top selling fiction in the world right now all have two things in common: fantasy and romance.

Sarah J Maas, the unofficial queen of the genre, has sold over 37 million copies of her books worldwide, translated into 38 languages. Rebecca Yarros’ highly anticipated new adult fantasy series about dragons and fated lovers became Waterstone’s highest selling pre-order overnight, four months out from its release.

It is really easy to discount the popularity of books like Fourth Wing and A Court of Thorns and Roses. True, often the writing isn’t literary. These books contain a healthy amount of “smut” or “spice” as it is known by its fanbase (defined as sexual material in romance writing). But I think it’s dangerous to discount the stories that “work” for people. The stories that a lot of people desperately want to read.

It's easy to dismiss these books as escapist. As badly written.

And it’s really easy to discount women writing love stories or women writing fairy stories. Especially when they do both at once.