Chapter 1: What is Romantasy and how is it defined?
I was very aware of the hot take on it being conservative propaganda.
I think the specific phrasing was conservative propaganda for tradwives with a patriarchy kink.
We are putting a microscope into women's bookshelves. But women are still people and it can also reinforce patriarchy.
If you've been in a bookstore lately or even just walked by a newsstand or airport book display, you might have seen a sudden increase in a certain type of book. Maybe it has dragons on the cover or those fancy colored edges or a portrait of a gorgeous fairy on the cover. That's F-A-E-R-I-E, fairy, if you're spelling it by the way. Dragons and fairies.
You might think these books contain some classic fantasy epic a la Lord of the Rings. Well, you would be wrong. Books like A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, or Akatar if you're in the know, are being billed as romanticy, a blend of romance and fantasy. And this new genre is taking the publishing industry by storm.
Bloomberg estimates that in 2024, Romanticist sales totaled over $600 million, up from about $450 million the year before. It's one of the fastest growing genres of books.
A lot of those readers will talk about it as a space for exploring feelings of feminine rage about a culture that they feel is increasingly turning misogynistic.
But with all of this popularity comes a whole host of questions. Is Romanticy just an old-fashioned reductive romance novel with a few dragons thrown in? Or something more sinister?
Is it reinforcing heteronormative, you know, paradigms if we're going to have these stories where women just keep ending up married to these men?
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Chapter 2: How does Romantasy reflect societal views on femininity and patriarchy?
and video essayist. Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. Netta, for those who are new to Romantasy, what is it? Give us the elevator pitch.
So a lot of times it gets described in public understanding, like sort of awareness, as just we mashed up romance and fantasy together. The problem with that is it's not that, and it's actually just a rebranding of fantasy romance, which is a subgenre of romance. And so in 2015, Bloomsbury that published Sarah J Maas took credit kind of for coining romanticism as a term.
And it might have been an attempt to remove some of the stigma that romance as a genre inevitably ends up with. But it had been a term that was floating around.
Okay, so Princess, how did you first encounter this genre of romanticism? What hooked you?
Well, you know, I first started seeing it pop up online. And I was interested because I grew up reading a lot of what we would have called like paranormal fantasy or like paranormal romances, like the Anita Blake books, the Kim Harrison books, these kind of texts that were like female centered, had like romance subplots, and were kind of treated as like sort of like
pulpy, femme-centered fantasy. And so I was excited at this idea of having this mixture of romance-centered fantasy as a genre. And then I was being recommended Akatar and Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yaros, which is this really popular... romanticist series about this big character who is forced into this brutal war college for dragon riders, which is a really good premise for a book.
And while they weren't entirely for me, I do think that they spoke to this burgeoning new femme readership online that was looking to have this more adult side fantasy stories that had more sexuality and intimacy.
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Chapter 3: What are the criticisms surrounding the portrayal of power dynamics in Romantasy?
As romanticism becomes more and more popular, people have had more and more to say about it, good and bad, as you both have noted. But there's something people are criticizing it for that I want to dig into with you two.
There's a YouTube video, I believe from last year, that has prompted months of discourse among authors, influencers, and fans, making the argument that popular romanticist books are filled with old school, trad wifey ideas about relationships. Like in A Court of Thorns and Roses, the main character is powerful, but her male love interest is even more powerful and has to save her a lot of
Do these criticisms ring true for you? And are there any examples of this that people are discussing in particular that you've seen?
These are conversations that have plagued the romance genre from the very beginning. This idea of, is it reinforcing heteronormative, you know, paradigms if we're going to have these stories where women just keep ending up married to these men? And then you'll have stories where they are, where there are you know, power structures being reinforced.
And that does happen, especially in some of the most popular ones. But then, of course, there are always subversions to those things. But you also have, in my opinion, two different kinds of readership. People who are just, you know, have always loved reading and continue to read. And those who really became readers through the book talk
algorithm and their relationship to reading is a lot more tropified and so they are reading to get particular tropes out of the stories and they tend to kind of bristle at more critical discussions of like those power structures and they just want to they they don't want anyone to perhaps what they might feel is interrupt their fun Yeah.
Netta, I want to hear from you on this as well. How are you interpreting these criticisms of romanticism that you've seen? And are there any examples of this kind of discussion that you've seen out in the wild?
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Chapter 4: How do readers interpret themes of feminine rage in Romantasy?
Yeah. I mean, I was very aware of the hot take on it being conservative propaganda. I think the specific phrasing was conservative propaganda against for Tradwives with a Patriarchy King. You're not looking at the text as, say, a critic experiences it in isolation and thinking about what does it say we should be.
And instead, you look at it from the perspective of the communities of readers that build knowledge about what it means to them. So what do they say it does for them? And a lot of those readers will talk about it as a space for exploring feelings of feminine rage about a culture that they feel is increasingly turning misogynistic, more so than ever before.
they'll talk about it as giving them representations of male partners that they don't perceive as realistic in real life. And it has nothing to do with the muscles and the things they talk about instead are, he's supportive, he listens to me, he believes me, he is unthreatened by a powerful woman, he accepts me and affirms me, he's emotionally intelligent.
And that's what they tend to be receiving from it. And they're very interested in a lot of books that skate under the radar, but are actually highly discussed in more niche spaces.
that deal with issues of authoritarian governments, with patriarchal religious control of women, with misogynistic cultures, with economic inequality, with imperialism, and this sort of feminine rage and a heroine who then is able to exert some control over that society. which given our moment is something a lot of women feel is not available to them.
There is another vein of persistent commentary that I want to get into, which is the way that politics are discussed and interpreted within these books. Some of these books, as you mentioned, Netta, present serious challenges to fascist governments or authoritarian rule.
But there are also other books that seem to reinforce some of those politics, or at least that's the way that some readers have interpreted them. Talk to me about how the politics
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Chapter 5: What role does politics play in Romantasy narratives?
show up in these books, or rather how it seems like some of these books or series are imagining or reimagining authoritarian or fascistic or prejudicial governments?
It's understanding. I forget theorists who have talked about you have to accept books on their own internal logic. Or you're faced with arguing they should be didactic texts teaching us virtue, which is actually what we kind of were doing in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly with women, viewing it as this is how you, in a very patriarchal way, deliver goodness and virtue and values.
And women or other readers are passive receptors for what authorities have determined about should be input, right?
So that kind of read could be insulting to a whole lot of women readers.
Yeah, we do have a lot of documentation of the way people worry about women reading romanticy now is an exact mirror of what they worried about women reading romance in the 18th century. Oh, wow. And we're saying the same things. It's dangerous to them. It could give them wrong ideas about Sex and sexuality, it's potentially hazardous.
And in doing that, we both ignore actual psychology of how value systems and doxa are developed. But we also treat women as children. Like violent video games, we say women and romance, this is dangerous. It will teach them. wrong things and they need to be protected from it. And their reading material needs to reinforce what we deem as correct values.
Princess, I see you nodding a lot.
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Chapter 6: How does Romantasy challenge or reinforce conservative ideologies?
I hear some mm-hmms. Tell me what's on your mind.
I have complicated feelings about that. Because on the one level, I do agree that we definitely police what women read more so than men. We have these kind of discourses about the genres that especially young women and older women all around enjoy. I do, however, as a Black woman, do Bristol because I will see my white female peers really...
gleefully sit in racial ignorance of how certain characters are written and presented and how... passive imperialism is recontextualized in these texts unintentionally. Like one of the criticisms about ACOTAR is like how it sort of reinforces very passive anti-Irish aesthetic in its text.
Someone noticed that the map looks exactly like UK and Ireland and several of the courts that are in the good side are in the UK and the evil ones are in the Ireland section of the map. And I don't think anyone believes that to be intentional, but when you are repeating common fantasy tropes without understanding the racial or sexual context that they existed within, you accidentally can be...
you know, replacing certain things. I think even with monster romances, you know, I enjoy Ice Planet Barbarians. I think it's a very fun series. I definitely enjoy it. I do, however, bristle at how those Ice Barbarians are depicted because they do sort of reinforce this kind of very Orientalist sort of like hyper-masculine savage imagery that I feel for like non-white readers is,
we don't connect the same way that certain white readers might connect those same kind of archetypes. And just a willingness to have that conversation, I think, is what most of us really want.
And what ends up happening is this idea that if we bring it out, we are therefore calling readers that enjoy it racist, rather than saying what we are trying to address is the fact that this is something that keeps happening. And I think that's kind of the balancing act that we try to do as feminists who critique or teach is trying to balance the fact that, like,
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Chapter 7: What are some notable examples of Romantasy novels that push boundaries?
we are putting a microscope into women's bookshelves. But women are still people and it can also reinforce patriarchy.
I think that's an interesting question because it does often come back to reader interpretation and perception, right? I mean, there's readers who don't see the anti-industrialization and environmentalist arguments in Lord of the Rings. But we know they're there because he told us they were, right?
But what I think is interesting is the way fantasy structures more broadly often deal with both a attempt to fight against a dangerous status quo and While at the same time, what they're installing afterwards is something that in our real world, we would still recognize as something very problematic in terms of hierarchies, monarchies, right?
To us in a real world scenario, we're supposed to immerse and accept that this is better. Even though if we thought about it, it's like, well, it's kind of just a different name and a different face for a very similar situation, right? Right. And I think some readers don't want to negotiate that or critique that. I accept that a lot of people don't find it fun to explore it.
I think it's interesting to explore those areas with readers while framing it not as a moral judgment of what they're reading. You enjoying the text doesn't say anything about your virtue, your morality, or your belief that this fits in our real world acceptably. What matters is individual interpretations and then understanding each other's interpretations and validating those, right?
Making sure that we're having that conversation instead of saying, no, it's not there. You're wrong. Leave my books alone, which is like, well, now we've just shut down discussions that could be really productive and really interesting about a serious genre. And we make it better by having those in-depth discussions.
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Chapter 8: How can we critique Romantasy without undermining women's reading preferences?
Yeah.
I don't know, there still are some veins of criticism of romanticism that kind of hit upon a common theme, as you both have pointed out. You know, the things that young women like, women in general like, are frivolous or escapist or cheap, you know, romanticism often gets described as a way to turn your brain off.
Like, how do we critique the books in this genre without falling into the misogynistic tropes that demean what women like?
I think you take it seriously. And I think that there's no reason not to. I think that romance is like, I think seeing yourself be loved is one of the most radical things that can happen to people. And I think that when it's been done by authors of color, queer authors, we see that in action and also just the possibilities of what it means.
And I think that it's a great mirror to yearning and desire and communication. And I think taking it seriously is what matters and to fight the urge to want to throw an entire blanket over the readership, and instead be very clear about the text and the archetypes that it represents that are the issue, not necessarily that some people might have an affection for it.
And if you are going to call out that affection, say why. If you're going to call out why that's a problem, be specific.
I love all of that. And also thinking... As a public that's not necessarily professional literary critics, I think we tend to fall into this assumption that literary criticism means criticizing, not trying to gain better understanding, and that there's different ways of doing that.
I don't know, you know, you both still read and have enjoyed at least some aspects of these genres. I'm wondering, what are some romanticine novels that maybe you feel like are really doing something really interesting or cool or pushing the boundaries of what romanticine can be? I'd love to hear a title and a short description from each of you if you want to shout one out.
One duology that I really loved was The Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross. It was in the Romanticist section. I don't know if that's really what they would describe it as, but it is sort of like this World War equivalent where these two rival journalists begin to fall in love through exchanging these letters on their enchanted typewriters.
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