It’s the slightly irritating portmanteau taking the literary world by storm: welcome to 2023’s hottest genre, ‘romantasy.’ The #romantasy tag has 475 million views on TikTok; Goodreads has just added a new Best Romantasy category to its yearly Choice Awards; romantasy books are filling bookshelves and topping bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. So, what is romantasy? And why should you care?

The term ‘romantasy’ has been floating around for a little while – it’s not that hard to stick ‘romance’ and ‘fantasy’ together – but it blew up in recognition in 2023. Romantasy describes romance novels in fantasy settings, usually of the ‘high fantasy’ kind: worlds significantly apart from our own, often featuring warring kingdoms, elemental magics and mythical creatures. The most common non-human creature in romantasy is the fae, heavily used in romance and erotic fiction for their near-human but malleable form, their beauty, and their ethereal, unpredictable, at times sinister nature (TikTok jokes abound about ‘fairy porn’). But you’ll also find a healthy dose of vampires, demons and dragons, and a lot of books anchored in Greek and Roman myth, particularly retellings of Hades and Persephone.

That doesn’t really cover it, however: romantasy is an absolute marketing behemoth, managing to synthesise a dizzying array of current literary trends. They’re generally heterosexual romance books with a generous dose of ‘spice’ – BookTok’s term for eroticism and sex – coupled with competitive/subterfuge and political elements. The stock formula is that a woman, essential to Insert Fantasy Kingdom Problem Here, is being guarded, imprisoned or targeted by a man she hates, and that this hate blossoms into sexual tension: ‘enemies to lovers’, as BookTok would call it. Some recreate magical universities or training academies, borrowing elements from the ever-popular ‘dark academia’ genre, while others incorporate Hunger Games-style battle royales. More typical romances tend to value lightness, escapism, and pleasurable predictability; romantasy values danger, twists and immersion, and uses violence – or the threat of it – to build sexual tension.

When I wrote about some of these books in spring 2023, the term ‘romantasy’ hadn’t fully caught on yet: I used ‘dark romance’ to describe a broadly similar genre. The popularity of the term likely followed the BookTok-powered virality of Rebecca Yarros’ smash hit Fourth Wing, which hit shelves in May and hasn’t left the New York Times bestseller list since. (As I’m writing, it’s currently in second in both combined fiction and hardback fiction, behind its own sequel, Iron Flame.) Fourth Wing is the first title in romance publisher Entangled Publishing’s Red Tower Books series, a new imprint ‘focused on romantic fantasy and science fiction genres’, seeking to ‘champion feminist and empowered perspectives in the fantasy and science fiction space, while also enfolding in what Entangled Publishing does best… romance’. Combining romance and a desire for ‘explosive, cinematic new stories’, Entangled recognised a marketing powerhouse when they saw one: a genre that can fuel BookTok’s signature brand of intense community enthusiasm, while also generating potential movie and TV deals (an Amazon-headed Fourth Wing TV show is already in the works).

Fourth Wing itself makes for a positive but inconsistent reading experience, in that it’s a genuinely compelling fantasy novel built around a much worse romance novel. It follows Violet Sorrengail, an unwilling cadet at an academy to train aspiring dragon riders, who wish to be elite, magic-wielding defenders of the kingdom of Navarre – if they survive (only a quarter of the cadets live to graduate; personally, if I was Navarre’s sworn enemy, I’d be thrilled that they’re so efficient at decimating their own fighting-age population). The novel is good when it’s delineating the intricate relationship between dragons and humans, a combination of reluctant, context-dependent truce and intimate psychic bond; or depicting physical combat and motion; or shading in the contours of Violet’s life as a woman with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which she must carefully hide and compensate for to survive the punishing academy. The novel plummets in quality, however, when Violet is with one of her love interests. Suddenly, we’re in the territory of sentences like “he’s gets-you-into-trouble-and-you-like-it level of hot” or “Beautiful. Fucking. Asshole.” Suddenly I am asked to care about a man named Xaden. I resent this.

I’ve read a fair few of the most popular romantasy novels, and they’ve generally been mixed in quality, sometimes displaying the kind of amateurish prose (eyes “flaring” multiple times in a paragraph) that makes the reading experience an unintended comic adventure. But they have all been quick, memorable reads, and that makes money. BookTok dramatises the private experience of being wrapped up in a book: live-reading sessions, reviews that are mostly excited screaming, fire emojis, recommendation videos, excited community participation in a new world.

The rise of romantasy, as both a genre and a term, signals that book publishing in the US and UK is aiming to be more in tune with BookTok’s fast-moving, star-making enterprise. I worked as a UK bookseller between 2019 and 2022, and I remember watching publishers struggle to keep up: we’d routinely be asked for BookTok-viral titles – usually romantasy, urban fantasy, or erotica – that we couldn’t access, or that were only available in expensive, large paperback styles from US imprints that would often fail to ship to us. Then, a year later, a bigger imprint would acquire them and release them to huge success – Ana Huang’s Twisted series was one example of this. Publishers are running to catch up on that missed time: Magpie, HarperFiction’s YA imprint, just launched the Midnight Collection, a UK list designed to publish originally self-published romantasy that has gained TikTok traction.

Why the YA imprint, however? The Midnight Collection describes itself as “a place for voracious readers of all ages to discover their next moreish spicy SFF read”. An awkward, unspoken dissonance underlies the popularity and mass marketing of romantasy, as well as ‘New Adult’ and other YA-adjacent, ‘spicy’ genres: what ages are they being marketed to? A precise breakdown of BookTok’s age-based user breakdown is hard to come by – it’s a platform popular with ‘Gen Z’, which covers ages 13-26 – but it’s indisputable that under-18s are a substantial part of the BookTok engine. Teenagers read and write erotica; it’s an important and unremarkable part of many people’s adolescence, particularly that of young women. But it’s notable how… euphemistic everyone appears to be on this subject, and I’ve been preoccupied by it since reading blockbuster romantasy novel A Court of Thorns and Roses, which is often sought out by teenagers and casually shelved as Young Adult – it’s by a famous YA writer and it doesn’t have explicit sex – but includes scenes of intense, sexualised, misogynistic violence that felt genuinely uncomfortable to read.

Plus, if you check Goodreads reviews for other popular romantasy books, like Jennifer L Armentrout’s Blood and Ash, it’s not uncommon to see complaints about the male love interest being domineering and disregarding the female protagonist’s requests, and this being presented as a source of his attractiveness. Any fiction genre can disseminate this kind of heteronormative shlock, but romantasy is an unusually hyperpalatable and media-ready genre, and forms a strange bridge between YA fandom and straight dominance/submission fantasy. That’s a volatile mix.

Romantasy’s the butt of a fair few jokes, and it does deserve some of them – love interests called Hawke and Raihn, eyes made of improbable gemstones, every second book being titled A Blank of Blank and Blank – but many romantasy books have cracked the code of how to immerse and obsess readers, which makes it both a potentially powerful channel to get people into reading and a viral conduit for unexamined fantasies. Granted, some romantasy books are explicitly political, diverse, and progressive: white cis women dominate the genre, but smarter recent titles often centre oppressed protagonists or pay serious attention to the kingdom’s oppressed minorities, include major characters of colour and queer characters, and interrogate fairytale tropes’ effects on women, such as the ‘romantic kidnapping’ or ‘damsel in distress’ tropes. But romance and erotica is the core, and there are relatively set models in romance for what makes a male love interest dangerously sexy. It takes skill to avoid lazily eroticising straight masculinity and misogyny, and when romantasy sells so well – even when its writing quality appears poor – then the primary focus will likely be on publishing it as quickly as possible.

The future of romantasy is likely to be determined in the next couple of years: we’ve yet to see whether those TV contracts will bear fruit, particularly since those dragon wings and fairy…appendages will take time and money to render. If they do, it may mark the official welcoming of erotic romance – a perennial financial powerhouse, but one usually siloed away from the modern commercial bookshop – into the heart of contemporary media culture. If they don’t, it will signal the delicate limits of what books and clusters of fans are afforded respect, regardless of the money they bring in. For now, we are going to continue to see massive new bestsellers in romantasy, and a lot of young readers crafting their tastes in its image. And who knows – maybe we’ll get a really, really good one.