For Marot, romantasy is a safe space for women and LGBTQ+ communities. “The world can be quite frightening for women and queer people in many countries, and I think romantasy specifically feels like a great escape,” she says. Vitally, the genre focuses on female characters. “A world is created that puts female pleasure at its heart, with some male characters, such as in Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses series, willingly taking contraception — so hot,” notes French.
“The storylines can feel quite eutopic. Often, women are the protagonists, women are the heroes. They’re slaying dragons and also having these incredible love stories,” adds Emma Loffhagen, a freelancing commissioning editor at The Guardian, who writes about books and culture.
French sees it as mirroring a wider “pleasure recession”, catalyzed by many young people having less sex, drinking less alcohol, doing less drugs and being made anhedonic by social media. Loffhagen, meanwhile, connects it to the “heteropessism” of the modern dating scene. “With that backdrop, romanticity has kind of filled in the gaps for a lot of women who are not feeling fulfilled in their actual romantic lives.”
More broadly, however, it signals a rise in reading for pleasure: 66% of Gen Z identify as readers, 14% higher than in 2022, according to a recent paper published by Cambridge University Press. We’ve partly got BookTok to thank. As young audiences endeavor to cut through AI slop and endless sponcon, they are turning to literature to find meaning, and intellectual influencers — many of them literary — are becoming increasingly popular. Anything lorish, too, gets people talking. “As readers are fatigued by realism, romantasy offers active world-building, especially within fandoms,” says Tan. “Fans across franchises from ACOTAR and Throne of Glass to Fourth Wing and Crowns of Nyaxia series, turn to BookTok and [Reddit thread] r/Romantasy to share theories, debate relationships, and choose their favorite alliances.”
Fashion is already obsessed with reaching the literati, from Miu Miu’s Literary Club to Ottessa Moshfegh penning short stories for Prada. But “as the dynamics of influence shift, more alternative figures are coming to the fore. Authors are an essential part of this,” says French. Brands would do well to follow Tory Burch’s lead. Maas and Yarros, the two biggest romantasy authors, have three million and 2.3 million followers, respectively, on Instagram alone. When Maas appeared on celebrity podcast Call Her Daddy earlier this year to announce she was writing ACOTAR books six and seven, over 100,000 listeners tuned in for the live broadcast.
Finding style in the smut
Two-thirds of the way through Maas’s House of Earth and Blood, characters Bryce Quinlan and Hunt Athalar are talking in a kitchen throbbing with sexual tension. Bryce, fantasizing about Hunt’s gravely voice and muscular back, pretends her mind is elsewhere. “There’s a sample sale at one of the designer stores this afternoon,” she lies. Hunt, lustily checking out her body, quips back. “I didn’t know clothing sales got you so hot and bothered, Quinlan.”
