The women’s names glow like eyes in the dark, staring out at us from the ruins of myth. Feyre Archeron, Celaena Sardothien, Violet Sorrengail, Galadriel Higgins, Phèdre nó Delaunay. Penellaphe “Poppy” Da’Neer, née Balfour, of Castle Teerman. Oraya, plain and simple, like Rihanna or Madonna. These are heroic appellations drawing on a range of Irish, French, Norse, Welsh, Latin, Arthurian, Hellenic, Hebraic, and American influences, all vaguely sounding, with their air of parody and pastiche, like the kind of name a gay man would make up for a woman. 

Of course no gay man made up these names, nor the assemblages of adjectives and predicaments that, over the course of hundreds or thousands of pages, end up accumulating, almost incidentally, into characters. These ink-and-paper women, rather, are the enormously popular and profitable creations of a group of authors — mostly white, mostly female, mostly middle-aged, mostly straight, some recovered fan fiction writers, some devout Christians — whose doorstoppers combining fantasy and romance have, over the past five to ten years, steadily (or maybe stealthily) come to dominate American popular literary culture. 

The origins of the term “romantasy” are shrouded in low-grade mystery: the publisher Bloomsbury claimed recently to have coined the portmanteau, but it has an Urban Dictionary page dating back to 2008. The genre’s undisputed queen is Sarah J. Maas, an Upper West Sider who began her career as a teenager, posting what turned out to be early drafts of her first novel, Throne of Glass (2012), to the online forum Fiction Press in the aughts. At her side is Rebecca Yarros, a Colorado-based mother of six who wrote over a dozen romance novels in the 2010s before pivoting to romantasy and striking it huge with 2023’s Fourth Wing, set at a military academy for dragon riders. Filling out the castle is a great variegated mass of writers whose works range in subject from sacred virgins gone bad to a Jewish female Rumpelstiltskin in medieval Eastern Europe: Jennifer L. Armentrout, Naomi Novik, Carissa Broadbent, Jacqueline Carey, Scarlett St. Clair, Cassandra Clare, and many more. On the margins of the genre, where it overlaps with monster romance and alien romance, novels such as Ice Planet Barbarians (self-published in 2015; republished in 2021 by Penguin’s Berkley imprint) and Morning Glory Milking Farm (2021) have innovated forms of sexual union between the likes of, for instance, millennials and Minotaurs. Riders of the New York City subway this past year may recall having been warmly invited, by an ad campaign for Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) series, to “BE PART OF THE PHENOMENON.” 

Odds are, the invitation is unnecessary. Between them, Maas and Yarros penned four of the top ten bestselling books in the United States last year. In total, some thirty million copies of romantasy novels were sold in 2024. Yarros’s third and most recent entry in her flagship Empyrean series, Onyx Storm, sold 2.7 million copies in its first week this past January, making it the fastest selling adult fiction release since BookScan began tracking sales about twenty years ago. While romance-fantasy hybrids from decades past do exist — Anne McCaffrey was writing about dragon riders making love back in the 1960s — romantasy has exploded thanks to several shifts in the book world. The rise of self-publishing through Amazon in the late aughts and the 2010s democratized production and distribution for many who had been previously shut out of traditional publishing. Fan fiction forums took off around the same time, leading to a proliferation of microgenres and the formation of tight-knit communities around them. 

On the consumption side, giant books, and giant series of giant books, started going viral on TikTok in 2020, amid the Covid lockdowns. Countless people, spurred by their algorithms and then by screen fatigue, returned to reading and began to relish in smutty — or, in fan parlance, “spicy” — supernatural love stories. Until quite recently, this was perhaps a niche genre for the American adult, but it now can look, more and more, like the only genre left. There seem to be women of all ages, races, classes, educational backgrounds, and sexual orientations who bear their crosses proudly and passionately down romantasy’s via dolorosa. When I attended a Maas event at a Manhattan bookstore, I witnessed displays of devotion I had previously thought unimaginable outside the Vatican. 

Romantasy is marketed to young adults, “new adults” (a category invented in 2009 to ease the path out of Y.A.), and plain old adults alike. The books are fun and frothy, marking a shift from the stern dystopias of the Obama era, when children killed each other with rocks (in The Hunger Games, that is). At its best, romantasy is freakishly hypnotic, the whole body tugged into the world of the book. Clear, unfussy prose with predictable rhetorical flourishes — Maas is particularly fond of polysyndeton, with her descriptions of “darkness and fire and ice and wind” and passion that is “unending and wild and burning” — opens the gate to the fantasy realm. There, a world of bright lights and constant stimulation, filled with magical powers and familiar tropes, alongside healthy doses of raunch, gore, and soaring emotion, seals the bond. Eventually, any roommate, relative, lover, or friend in the fallout zone of the reading experience comes to learn a great deal, too, about the goings-on of the faerie courts. 

The heart swells just thinking about a genuine literary “PHENOMENON” occurring in a country whose days of mass literacy may be behind it. That this phenomenon happens to consist of love stories between imaginary creatures engaging in graphic sex — well, you know what they say about beggars being choosers. People are having fun, avoiding the news, discovering new baby names. “I’m 28 and still feel like a teenager,” asserts one fan in the r/acotar subreddit, which has over a quarter million members. Indeed, anyone who talks to enough romantasy fans soon hears about how glad they are to be reading as they did when they were young: enthralled, engrossed, and all through the night. The “narrative ease” of A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015) “did bring me back to this deep childhood state of total absorption and pleasure,” said New Yorker writer Alexandra Schwartz on a February episode of the magazine’s “Critics at Large” podcast. “I, in my bedroom as a child, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with nothing to want for, loved to pretend that I was in a wood, my whole family depended on what mushrooms I could pick that day. And if I would, you know, run into the wizard or whatever. And she’s made bank on that conceit,” Schwartz added, referring to Maas. (Enter Naomi Fry: “Good for her!”) When it comes to romantasy, critical conversation tends to peter out after the obligatory acknowledgments of the appeal of escapism and the spiritual return to childhood. The Irish Times, in a June 2025 feature, offered this helpful perspective: “Reality biting? Burying your head in a romantasy novel might seem a solid option.” But fantasies — even and especially childlike fantasies, after Freud — are hardly innocent of reality.

It is precisely by selling an escape that these books — and I admit freely that, due to various constraints on my time and spirit, I read only four thousand pages of romantasy in preparation for this essay — offer a key into the American psyche. In reading them, one gets a view of the strange and horny terrain where the essential dramas of social and political life today — the crises of agency, morality, and adult personhood — can be rehearsed and expiated. Fantastical thinking, alternative realities, battles between good and evil, the anticipation of a redeemer or messiah or a deus ex machina, the assumption that there is a hidden realm beneath ours, the heavy sense of fatedness and the consequent irrelevance of individual moral conduct, the desperate wish for a decisive ending that will dignify and justify the babble and chaos of the present moment, the cheeky glee in embracing it all: these are features of both the real world and the romantasy world (books and fandom communities included) into which so many wish to retreat. 

The earlier incarnation of this genre, namely the fairy tale, came into being as a discrete category of Anglophone literature around the same time that “child” came into being as a discrete category of Anglophone human. Now, fairy tales are back with a vengeance at a moment when the category of “adult,” as we’ve known it, is fading away. Rates of sexual activity; marriage; independent living; homeownership; and, thanks to a multi-billion-dollar cosmetics industry, even wrinkles — what used to signify, for better and surely for worse, that one had passed out of youth — are all in decline. Reality bites, so, in the words of one ACOTAR hunk, “Don’t feel bad for one moment about doing what brings you joy.” 

Twenty-odd years ago, the scholar Pamela Regis lamented that “more than any other literary genre, the romance novel has been misunderstood by mainstream literary culture.” When Regis’s landmark A Natural History of the Romance Novel was released in 2003, she argued that second-wave feminists unfairly found these books exploitative, male critics deemed them unworthy of attention, and average Joes and plain Janes assumed they were easy to bang out. (“Appearances are, of course, deceptive. It takes most romance writers just under a year to write a book,” Regis explained.) Being “the most popular books in the United States” could not shield them from “widespread disdain” and “condemnation.”

Today, romance is still the top selling category of fiction, with more than 39 million books sold in 2023 — more than double the 2020 figure. By several measures, the genre has marched itself from the periphery of the book world to its center, head held high and freak flag flying. Romance-focused bookstores are popping up in communities from Anchorage to Orlando, The New York Times now has a dedicated romance critic, and a visit to basically any bookshop will reveal a prominent romance display. Still, a woundedness lingers in some regions of Romancelandia. A recent overview of the genre’s boom in Literary Hub contained much commentary, among several of its prominent authors, on stigma, condescension, and gatekeeping. “There is undeniably a hierarchy of genres, and romance is undeniably at the bottom,” asserted the British writer KJ Charles. 

Authors of romance are not alone in feeling excluded by the establishment. The astonishingly successful fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson, whose books have sold more than 45 million copies, once asked, on his blog, “why is fantasy and other genre fiction looked down on by the literary world?” He described having been rejected from MFA programs at “most of the top schools in writing,” some of which he claimed categorically did not accept genre fiction. “You can’t use their rules to define what makes good literature, folks,” Sanderson declared. The genres of “genre fiction” contain enormously popular books while still functioning as subcultures, suffering their slights and maintaining their intricate codes of membership. Conquest of the bestseller list is no salve for the critics’ withholding of their approval, their taste, whether or not there is a “their” there. 

Curiously, it is the fusion of two sidelined genres that has thawed critics’ icy hearts. Existing coverage of romantasy has largely avoided snobbery in favor of an approach that lands somewhere between anthropology and literary poptimism. In New York magazine, Emily Gould walked readers through what’s on offer in the world of monster romance. (“Our phones runneth over with stories of men with tails and two dicks.”) When those New Yorker “Critics at Large” turned their faculties toward romantasy — with Fry admitting, in the process, that she had learned the term just a month before — the harshest critique that made it to air was her argument that the genre lends itself to a customized reading experience. “It’s not even literature anymore,” she said. “You know what it is? It’s A.I.” Schwartz quickly batted away the objection: “I’m not quite as concerned as you are, I gotta say.” 

Perhaps the books are so enchanting, offering so much total absorption and pleasure, that they obviate the need for critique. In addition to sharing a sense of alienation from a supposedly spiteful mainstream, fantasy and romance overlap in deriving their potency from how intensely fictional their fictions are. J.R.R. Tolkien argued in his 1947 essay “On Fairy-Stories” that part of what distinguishes fantasy as a genre is its creation of a “Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter.” This, as opposed to the works of imaginative literature that construct magical worlds through the frames, for instance, of the dream or the traveler’s tale, or those that take place in the “Primary World” — i.e., the one in which you’re reading The Drift — and simply introduce bits of fantasy into it. So many Secondary Worlds tumbled out of Middle Earth (Westeros, Discworld, the Stillness, the Cosmere), so many millions of hours of imaginative play in alternate realms, encumbered only by select elements of reality. It’s this quality that, when welded to romance, permits the hybrid genre’s dramas of passion and desire to play out as they do. In romantasy, the fantasy latent in all romance novels — what if a British prince and an American First Son kissed? — is lifted to the surface and raised to its fiercest pitch, allowing the same process to occur to the wild sexuality latent, it would seem, in all of us.

The adjectives “primal” and “feral” appear frequently in romantasy, most notably in the work of Maas, who has made something of an art of using them as much as possible. The heroine of the ACOTAR series, Feyre, narrates in A Court of Mist and Fury (2016) that “every inch of my body calmed at the primal dominance” in her lover’s voice when he screams to wake her up from a nightmare. Later, she is surprised by a display of his “primal, male rage.” Even later, she says, “some feral part of me beamed in savage delight.” In A Court of Silver Flames (2021), when a love interest’s “cock plunge[s] even deeper” into Feyre’s sister Nesta, “rubbing against that spot,” she emits noises that are not “human or Fae, but something far more primal.” One of the field guides in Yarros’s Fourth Wing describes the bond between two dragons as a force that “goes beyond the depth of human love or adoration to a primal, undeniable requirement for proximity.” Lovers do not match so much as mate — but more on mating later. Suffice it to say, for now, that the search is for a sexual impulse that has not had to pass through society on its way to your body. No heterofatalism here: just an innate, unmediated, innocent lust. 

Tolkien said that one of the virtues of “the magic of Faerie” was its ability to satisfy “certain primordial human desires,” such as the wishes to commune with animals and to transcend space and time. He easily could have added the wish for good sex. The heroines of romantasy are licked, flicked, nuzzled, ridden, throttled, bitten, pulled, plowed, hit, filled, soaked, and — here’s a Maas favorite — shattered (as in “my climax shattered through me” and “I groaned his name as I shattered”) every which way, by fingers, members, tongues, and more. Vektal, the alien love interest in Ice Planet Barbarians, the first entry in Ruby Dixon’s 22-book series of the same name (Barbarian Lover, Barbarian Mine, Barbarian’s Prize, Barbarian’s Bride, The Barbarian Before Christmas, and more), has bumps and ridges on his tongue and “a textured, huge cock with a bony, protruding knob an inch or so above it.” When he meets the heroine, Georgie Carruthers, after she and a group of other young female victims of alien abduction stage a mutiny and crash-land their spaceship on a strange planet, he is curious about her, and — first with his “enormous” hand “like a baseball glove,” then with his frankly petrifying tongue — begins to explore her body. (“Those bumps and ridges on his tongue move against my clit, and my entire body quakes, and then I’m coming hard. Over and over, my pussy clenches and the orgasm rocks through me.”) In a climactic scene in A Court of Silver Flames, Nesta’s winged lover ejaculates into her, scoops up the faerie semen trailing down her thighs, rubs it against her clitoris, and makes her come for the second time in what must be thirty seconds.

Romantasy sex scenes function not as spicy interludes between events but as critical moments of world-building and character formation, much like song-and-dance sequences in musical theater. It is during a sex scene (in truth, a heavy-petting scene) in Fourth Wing that one learns that when the dragons have sex, the humans they are bonded with wish to have sex with each other, too, as though by the transitive property. “You’re going to have to learn to shield against Tairn or his escapades with Sgaeyl will drive you mad — or into someone’s bed,” Xaden (bonded with Sgaeyl, a female dragon) warns Violet (bonded with Tairn, a male dragon) when she comes to him feeling “like I’m on fucking fire.” But Violet can’t yet “shield” well against Tairn — she’s only a novice dragon-rider — and she desperately wants to climb Xaden, she tells him, like a “tree.” Cue the typical motions: his hips rock into hers and she gasps at “the delicious friction”; they become “a tangle of tongues and teeth”; “need pulses between” her “thighs,” as it always seems to do. In addition to delivering crucial exposition on the nature of the human-dragon bond, this scene offers Xaden a chance to demonstrate his commitment to active consent: he breaks off the kissing and vertical humping (they are pressed against a wall, at night, in the snow), because yes does not mean yes if the desire is channeled into the woman via dragon. 

The passion that springs from all this primal desire is fierce and ferocious, and it offers a vision of a liberated female sexuality whose thrill must surely be authentically felt by readers. The ladies get on top often, literally and figuratively; they also experience a wider set of scenarios with common enough, if not entirely politically acceptable, appeal: they are kidnapped, gagged, choked, obliterated. Witness the thrill and tension of this balancing act in A Court of Thorns and Roses, in which Tamlin, the High Lord of the Spring Court, must allow “great and terrible magic to enter his body” in a sex-filled bacchanale at the start of spring. That night, amid this major ritual, his close advisor sequesters Feyre for her own protection: under the influence of magic, Tamlin is liable to rape her. 

“It made me sick,” Feyre thinks, “the thought of Tamlin forcing me, that magic could strip away any sense of self, of right or wrong. But hearing that… that some feral part of him wanted me….” It may make her sick, but this is the dream, or the ruse, of magic: that it allows one to lay down the burden of the self, of right or wrong, and live by the code of the “feral” and “primal.” To be free, so to speak, of developed personhood; to experience in the Secondary World of the spring rite or the novel a space free of society and order, where the fires burn and the drums beat and “magic will consume everything,” everything except for “that one basic command — and need.” 

Both fantasy and romance are born into the world breech, leading with their endings. A law of romance is that all its love stories end well, a trope known to fans as the “HEA” — or “happily ever after.” Fantasy exhibits, if not as a rule then as a prized tendency, what Tolkien called the final “eucatastrophe,” or the “Consolation of the Happy Ending,” which he believed essential to “the true form” and “highest function” of the fairy story. The happy ending, he said, “reflects a glory backwards” over the preceding tale. 

In light of romantasy’s doubly fixed conclusions — love will be found, some kind of order restored to the realm — its characters’ freedom becomes ambiguous and compromised. Romantasy’s protagonists tend not to bear the burden of personhood too heavily: they are perfectly plastic creations, stiff to the touch but moldable as needed. Feyre, for instance, is capable of executing remarkable turns on command. When she needs to be tough and sinewy, laying a trap in the woods for a terrifying creature called the Suriel, she’s a dead ringer for Katniss Everdeen (“My bow was already strung. Quietly, I loosely nocked an arrow”); when she learns to master her newfound powers, foisted upon her by fate disguised as circumstance, she’s a sexually active Harry Potter (“I’d train with him. Mind to mind, power to power. We slowly worked through the gifts I’d been given — flame and water, ice and darkness”); and when, in matters of love, she needs to choose between a man with light features and a man with dark features? Pleased to see you here, Madame Swan-Cullen. 

At the highest level of abstraction, this kind of remixing carries a whiff of what the critic Jason Farago termed, in 2023, the “glacially slow Ferris wheel” of contemporary culture, “cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around,” although down in the trenches of fan culture it is a sign of the genre at work. As The New York Times reported in its August feature on how Harry Potter fan fiction influences present-day adult publishing, many of the leads in today’s romantasy books explicitly derive from characters originally written for children, like Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger. Series such as Twilight and Harry Potter “molded generations of young readers who have grown up but still crave big fantasy novels — now with a dose of erotica,” the Gray Lady narrates. This craving can be met both with books that explicitly call back to children’s franchises — as Julie Soto does in her 2025 novel Rose in Chains, which builds off of erotic “Dramione” fan fiction — or through more slantwise satisfactions. Fourth Wing and its ilk rearrange a set series of tropes into familiar equations. That is, a heroine may not necessarily have curly, brown hair and be the smartest girl wizard in the boarding school, but when Yarros adds the Chosen One to dark academia and raises to the power of found family, the product is not too dissimilar. 

Romance and fantasy are each dominated by distinct tropes, but romantasy takes this feature and turbocharges it. The internet, and TikTok in particular, has made it easier than ever for the selection of tropes to precede the acts of reading and writing. In January, Katy Waldman reported for The New Yorker that trope-oriented hashtags allow romantasy “authors to tune their creative process to the story elements that are getting the most attention online,” just as readers can use them to sort through the digital muck and locate the stories most to their liking, be they “broody protector,” “shadow daddy,” “morally gray,” “secret stalker,” “star-crossed lovers,” “opposites attract,” “Hades and Persephone,” “magic academy,” “virgin,” “dark elves,” or, among many others, “I can fix him.”

Of all the romantasy tropes, the most crucial may be that of the powerful, independent woman. On her books podcast, former First Daughter Jenna Bush Hager commended Maas for how “the women in your books are fierce — I want to say badass; I don’t know if I can, but they’re badasses.” In A Court of Mist and Fury, Feyre becomes the first-ever High Lady (as opposed to High Lord) of a Court in the faerie land of Prythian. She also gains powers from the High Lords of the realm after she nearly dies and they join forces to revive her, inadvertently planting the seeds for the blossoming of a major — female — rival. Fierce indeed. Other major romantasy protagonists, too, tend to ascend in their societies: Violet, in the Empyrean series, ends up as an esteemed dragon-rider and duchess; Poppy from Jennifer L. Armentrout’s From Blood and Ash turns out to be the rightful queen of a major kingdom. The genre celebrates, and is celebrated for celebrating, women who are empowered both societally and magically. A July piece about romantasy in Psychology Today explained that these books offer “a narrative of how to heal, build female power, and never give up.”

The romantasy protagonists sure are powerful (and they never give up), but, at critical junctures throughout their stories, they also exhibit a strange, inert kind of power, as if they have all the trappings of agency but none of its substance. The scholar Regis noted that the heroines of traditional romance novels win a “provisional” freedom in their happy endings: “freed from the barriers to her union with the hero,” they are nevertheless bound by their relationships to society. The empowered women of romantasy experience a provisional freedom not by virtue of the patriarchy, but by virtue of the fairy tale as literary form. Living in non-allegorical Secondary Worlds, especially ones with imperatives toward happy endings, the prominent characters of romantasy are overdetermined, by fate and by trope alike. 

The all-important crucible through which these protagonists’ personhoods are meant to be formed is courtship and betrothal, per Regis’s definition of a romance novel. In A Court of Thorns and Roses, Feyre must choose between Tamlin and the tattooed Rhysand of the Night Court, who spends the first book as a witty, dastardly antihero. (Both men, for what it’s worth, are unfathomably hung.) Likewise, Violet has two options in Fourth Wing: sweet, protective Dain and witty, dastardly Xaden. In each book, the author resolves the crucial mess of matchmaking by leaning on some variation of the concept of “mates” who are paired in a poorly understood metaphysical sense. Turns out, after all those hours you spent watching Feyre deliberate between Tamlin and Rhysand, that Rhysand was her mate all along — she ends up with him, and it never could have been any different. Likewise, Violet’s fate is sealed when a certain dragon selects her for bonding — and since that dragon’s mate is bonded to Xaden, Violet and Xaden are linked. A lifelong relationship set in motion and then in stone by the conspiring universe: dream of the failed Hinge user, overwhelmed by options and a surfeit of power to choose.

In this regard, the protagonists in romantasy are more archaic than those found in literary fiction, where characters tend to develop over the course of the narrative via a series of decisive actions. In the realist novel, if the actions that characters take are to mean anything, it’s because they occur under the illusion that the outcome is open-ended until the very moment it isn’t. Elizabeth Bennet accepts Darcy’s proposal, and Dorothea Brooke ends up with Ladislaw; either might not have. The inevitable conclusion of the story presses only lightly against the plot, maintaining the necessary fiction that the choices made in the novel are like the choices made in life, where the things we do and why we do them matter precisely — even only — because they could have been otherwise. 

The romantasy badasses, on the other hand, are stranded somewhere between prophecy and personhood. Most of the decisive, soul-forming decisions they, in theory, would have to take are avoided thanks to a deus ex machina or the machinations of destiny. Occasionally, a meaningful individual action, derived from and in turn deepening the inner life, emerges from a protagonist, as when Feyre, early on in ACOTAR, shows kindness to that Suriel she caught in the woods. In doing so, she fosters some goodwill that comes in handy down the road, since the Suriel is somewhat all-knowing and cannot tell a lie. But more often the protagonists move from scene to scene simply because they must, borne along the course of the narrative by force of coincidence; ass-saving; newfound convenient powers; sheer will of the universe (not to mention fans’ appetites); and above all, the need to have the pages proliferate and the series continue headlong toward its ordained end. In this sense the characters cannot come alive as actors in their own stories, as agents in their own timelines. It’s freedom from fate that imposes the possibility of action and the obligation to act. And action — that way of touching existence, being inside of experience, engaging with the mess of life — is what makes the world, to use Keats’s phrase, “the vale of soul-making.” It’s also what makes it, for that matter, the vale of adulthood. 

Overdetermination by external forces combined with apocalyptic premonitions: there’s something so American about it all. Here in our Primary World, the end is always coming, whether it’s climate change or chat bots or Q or a coup. The air of tragedy and paralysis that overhangs so much of American life is, perhaps more than declining rates of marriage or property ownership, the real source of strength for the particular type of fairy-tale narrative that has come to dominate our literature. Because what are you supposed to do with your time between now and the end of the world? What should you do with your one adult life? 

Romantasy suggests that you may as well suck off a dragon or two. The end of the world overhangs much of romantasy — a war or mist or monster race is always on its way. These emergencies generate what Maas has described as “epic stakes,” but they are rarely settled definitively. Even after the long-awaited war finally arrives in the third ACOTAR book, A Court of Wings and Ruin (2017), there are still over a thousand subsequent pages devoted to the predicaments that spring from the fighting: the lingering trauma, the later skirmishes, the new love stories that challenge and redeem in equal measure. As shaggy plots amble along for hours and hours of reading time, the novels deliver sexual resolution in place of narrative resolution. When physical climaxes are shatteringly achieved, all discomfort with the plot-that-is-no-plot (are we still waiting for the King of Hybern to attack?) melts away into a pleasant, sticky dew.

What’s more, that the sexual prose is so graphic allows the genre to assume the mantle of openness, a sense that what was once concealed — female sexual desire and pleasure, mainly — is now revealed. We are under the regime of total disclosure, where nearly every body part is exposed to the bare light of the author’s overweening gaze. There’s a kind of eagerness in these books that I recognize from having once been an elementary school boy who knew what sex was before most of his friends at the lunch table did. “The liquid slide of his cock into her sounded obscenely through his otherwise silent bedroom,” writes Maas. “His balls brushed against her, tickling her with each powerful thrust.” The adult coloring book comes already filled in, as it were. 

There’s something bullying about the heft and density of detail, but this may be the point, the key to a seamless reading experience for eyes and ears trained on binges and scrolls. Like the trauma plot and the personal essay in its dread form, romantasy develops its persuasive powers through the accumulation of information; it states all, conceals nothing. At the same time, when romantasy addresses its in-group, this brazenness yields to the occult world of signification. 

On Reddit forums, TikTok feeds, and innumerable podcasts, as well as, I can only imagine, in person at romantasy conventions, whole cosmologies behind the books are fleshed out. Maas’s grouping of objects in triplets — three mountains over Prythian, three stars over one of those mountains, three girls in Feyre’s sister’s friend group — is not seen as repetitiveness or cliche but as an invitation to numerology. Fans of Yarros’s polytheistic Empyrean series debate the relationship between deities and varieties of dragons. One Redditor offered, with the brio of a debate champ and the clouded lucidity of a mystic, “an absolutely wild Theory of the Gods that was revealed to me last night,” constructing several charts (admitting that “some colors could be swapped with little change to the implications”), anticipating objections (“Now you may be thinking… Wait!The continent is actually named Amaralys, meaning that the continent worships Amari! NAY!”), and holding readers’ hands through some tricky thickets (“When a rider dies, what do they do with their possesions [sic] to commend them to Malek? Burn them! What do people of wisdom do? Read!”), all en route to the inexorable conclusion that the god for brown dragons must be the God of Deception: “Oh and how perfect that would be, the god of deception! Hidden! HAHAHA….” Beneath Onyx Storm, a kabbalah. The hidden is revealed, the arabesque unraveled. “We know Rebecca chooses every word intentionally and there are no accidents,” said one fan, who may as well have been describing God’s writing of the Torah. 

To the ardent romantasy fan who freely exhibits paranoid tendencies in the semi-public spheres of TikTok and Reddit, the texts speak out of both sides of their mouths, addressing at once the general public and a select cadre of initiates who alone have the ability to read the books beneath the books. This doublespeak, a superficial audacity displayed toward the public and a dense knot of code transmitted to the fans, is familiar enough. Taylor Swift albums contain laundry lists of arcane references and sotto voce callouts; our fascist politics proceed with a tongue-in-cheek, wink-wink nudge-nudge swagger. A recent assassin inscribed a furry meme on one of his bullets, daring the public to discover what it means. 

For some, the entire world is a secret text to decode. In an August essay on Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, Fintan O’Toole described the impressive exegesis that sustains conspiratorial communities like QAnon: “The word puzzle that began with the substitution of ‘pizza’ with ‘girl’ will be solved by poring over and teasing out the true meaning of millions of other words,” he wrote. The communities that build around these stories are cloistered; you don’t get to see where your neighbors have escaped to until the relics of their travels break through this side of the veil: when the FBI finds notices, bulges, OWO, what’s this? on a bullet casing or a baby pops out named Feyre.

The power of the fairy tale in the post-adult age lies in its ability to recuperate the energies of a life of action and meaning in a form that doesn’t require getting off the couch. The conspiracist senses that for her, as for Feyre and Violet, the most important decisions about her life have been already made by forces over which she has no control, which have the power to end the world as she knows it. This realization spurs not action but a pantomime of action, the inhabitation of a story with heroes and villains in which the individual is shrunk to near nothing in relation to overwhelming systemic or natural forces, a story that endlessly renews itself through commentary and elaboration, setting off an ever-swelling surge of fantasy. There is, in the end, no escape: in their stilted figurations of the human, their worlds of suspended action, their sexed-up technicolor frivolity, romantasy novels are our great monuments to reality. 

For the briefest moment, Ice Planet Barbarians breaks Tolkien’s rule about building a Secondary World, offering in its first five hundred words a view into the pit of American malaise — the isolation, anomie, impotence, fatedness, monotony. At the beginning of the book, the heroine, Georgie, describes her life the night before her abduction by aliens. “I came home after a long day of working the drive-thru teller window at the bank, nuked a Lean Cuisine, ate it while watching TV, and dozed off on the couch before stumbling to bed,” she explains. “Not exactly the life of a party, but hey. It was a Tuesday, and Tuesdays were all work, no play.”

That Lean Cuisine. On the next page, the fantasy begins. Soon Vektal arrives with his strange tongue, his bony knob; soon the story gets going. Georgie Carruthers will never live through a Tuesday in Florida again. In a desert of boredom, an oasis of cock.