What are the secret ingredients of the ‘romantasy’ genre? Sex and spice

It’s almost midnight. An author walks unannounced into a New York bookstore and all the young women scream. Thousands of other young women line up in the cold outside bookstores waiting for the magic opening hour.

What kind of authors command these rock-star receptions? The leaders of the newest popular genre, romantasy.

Fantasy author Sarah J. Maas’ three series have sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.Credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Which is what it sounds like: a mash-up of romance and fantasy. You can’t get more escapist than that.

The author who got the fans screaming was the queen of the genre, Sarah J. Maas. Her success is extraordinary. Her three series (Throne of Glass, A Court of Thorns and Roses and Crescent City) have sold a combined more than 40 million copies worldwide and have been published in 38 languages. The hashtag for her Court of Thorns and Roses series has several billion views. And whenever a new book comes out, hundreds of bookshops celebrate with midnight release parties.

Maas may be the queen, but there are plenty of princesses, notably Rebecca Yarros, who started off writing romance and moved into romantasy with her book, Fourth Wing, in which “Violet, the bookish daughter of a formidable mother, must put aside her fear to become a dragon rider”.

Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros.

It’s a gruelling training program that takes her into two more books in the Empyrean series. Heroines in romantasy books either are, or must become, tough and super bold, and they tend to fall in love with an equally tough and super bold sworn enemy. Not to mention dealing with dragons, fairies, vampires or werewolves.

We have Booktok, the book corner of Tiktok, to thank for this exploding genre, which had a sales increase of 42 per cent between 2022 and 2023. For those who haven’t caught up with the trend, two Australian academics, Jodi McAlister and Kate Cuthbert, have written a helpful guide in The Conversation.

Although this phenomenon has really taken off in the past few years, the academics point out that it’s not new: “The two genres have been in conversation since Guinevere first saw Lancelot.” Since then, we’ve had series such as Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight vampire schoolkids.

So what’s the appeal of the romantasy? Sex, for one thing. Or as the fans call it, “spice”. Sworn enemies smoulder and get into spicy clinches. It’s inclusive: there are queer romances too.

Then there are high stakes. “The thing I love about romantasy is that the romance can have these world-ending stakes that you just can’t get with an office rom-com,” author Nisha J. Tuli told The Guardian. “I love the whole ‘he murdered your whole family, but now you’re going to fall in love’ – something which you can really only create in a fantasy world.”

In Tuli’s novel, Trial of the Sun Queen – described as “The Bachelor meets The Hunger Games” – her heroine, Lor, has to compete with nine women to become the Sun King’s queen. If she loses, she dies. There are three sequels that you mustn’t miss “if you love enemies to lovers, fated mates and fake dating”.

Although it can get pretty dark, romantasy tends to be more hopeful than, say, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire epics (aka Game of Thrones), where favourite characters get killed off without mercy for the reader.

Georgia Summers, whose novel The City of Stardust sends her heroine into “a magical underworld of power-hungry scholars, fickle gods and monsters bent on revenge”, told The Guardian we’re seeing the rise of a more cosy romantasy “in these recent times, when hope seems a little bit in short supply”. Good on her. Let’s ride the dragon to better times and places.

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