One of the big publishing questions of 2024 has been What Is Romantasy?
It’s a hot new marketing tag, thanks to TikTok and a rising excitement about books featuring swords and kissing. “Romantasy” sells books, and we do love a magical word that sells books. But with a magical word that sells books comes great responsibility. Readers have expectations, and if you falsely claim a subgenre or trope that doesn’t properly fit your book, those expectations can come back to bite you.
This has happened before.
Chick Lit exploded onto bookshelves in the nineties, led by our queen, Bridget Jones. You could spot one of these books from across the store: covers were quirky, cartoony (not unlike what’s popular in contemporary romance now).
Chick Lit was the book equivalent of a romcom, which meant that humour and the heroine’s journey was at least as important as whether or not she got her Happily Ever After. (Remember the term HEA, it’s coming back around in a minute.)
As happens with every Hot New Sales Thing in romance-adjacent publishing, Chick Lit went overboard. Soon every book by or featuring a woman was being wrapped in a cutesy cartoon cover and marketed as Chick Lit even if it was a rather grim literary affair.
Oh wait, you say. Isn’t this just like what happened with Young Adult, where suddenly any fantasy novel by a woman got pushed onto that shelf, because Young Adult was selling hand-over-fist and everyone wanted some of that Girl With Sword Cash?
And Vampire Fiction, when suddenly every cover looked like Twilight, and every paranormal romance had to have a love triangle?
Yes, oh yes. This has happened before.
Now it’s all about Romantasy. Publishers are begging for it, readers are hungry for it, and authors are turning around in rapid circles trying to figure out if they will get roasted or rewarded for slapping the label on their books.
It feels like Romantasy just happened, though many of the crucial texts of the canon have been out for years.
Mostly what we know is that it sells and it sells and it sells.
But what is Romantasy, you ask?
It Does What It Says on the Can
Romance+Fantasy seems like a no-brainer concept. “Is it a kissing book?” the obnoxious child asks his grandfather at the beginning of The Princess Bride.
Yes, yes, it is. No further questions.
Does Romantasy = Romantic Fantasy, or is it more Fantasy Romance? Those are two really quite distinct publishing categories with different reader expectations—and they’ve been argued over for decades already!
Unfair or not, there has always been a bit of suspicion with combined genres that someone’s going to miss out. Either the romance will be hot and the world-building disappointing, or the elvish quest business will be top-notch and the smooching will be tepid. (Or, as some readers grumble, all that hot loving will get in the way of the actual plot…wait, what do you mean that’s the plot?)
The official consensus with Romantasy is that, much like that fairy tale where a girl and her hair had to be cut off each other, it should be fifty-fifty. Solid romance plot, solid fantasy world. Pretty people falling in love against the backdrop of a world gone mad (and/or full of homicidal dragons).
However, like any literary genre that dares to borrow the capital R off Romance, Romantasy does promise that your lovers will find their Happy Ever After (HEA). And this is where the Romanta part of the portmanteau sets the Antasy part on fire, makes intense eye contact, and walks slowly towards the camera.
The Great HEA Debate
The aspect of Romantasy that readers and writers are mostly likely to get mad about is the Happy Ever After question. “Okay, it’s Romance and Fantasy…but I don’t have to spoil the ending, right?”
This stems from a massive cultural misunderstanding, because it turns out that Romance readers prefer to know the identity of a book’s Romantic Combo (usually pairing, but let’s not exclude the throuples and harems) in which they are expected to invest their time and energy. They like to know UP FRONT, ideally from the blurb, certainly from the first three chapters.
They expect the majority of scenes in that book to feature at least one member of the Romantic Combo, ideally from their point of view.
Romance readers also expect that the Romantic Combo will end up happily together at the end of the book (or at least the series), with most problems resolved, and that we can all believe they will continue to be happy together after the reader has put the book down.
But many Fantasy readers (and Fantasy authors) feel like this takes away too much tension. They prefer to not know who will end up together, and reserve the right for lovers to meet with surprise doom along the way.
Romantasy says NO. When it comes to worldbuilding, Fantasy can take the wheel, but when it comes to plot and structural story beats? Romance rules apply. (Threats are fine, but no actual killing off of protagonists and their sweeties. Not unless you activate the Princess Bride clause to enable a HEA regardless of character death.)
The truth is, all books combining Fantasy and Romance have come under scrutiny for decades, suffering from the perception that you have to choose which group of readers you want to oblige, and which to annoy.
What is often ignored is that there is a third, powerful, sizeable group of readers who enjoy both Romance and Fantasy, have high expectations of both genres, and are super excited for them to be combined equally, instead of allowing one genre to be window dressing for the other.
Romantasy wouldn’t be selling so hard if those equal opportunity readers didn’t exist, in droves.
What’s Your Rating?
Much like Romance and Fantasy, Romantasy doesn’t come in a single flavour. While there are some breakout bestsellers which have massively skewed reader expectations towards certain features such as “dragons!” and “hot faerie sex!” that doesn’t mean that’s all that is available under the Romantasy umbrella.
Romantasy can be Cozy, Dark, Gaslamp, Epic, and so on. It can be het, or any flavour of LGBTQIA+. It can be sweet or spicy—in romance terms, sweet means no sex or maybe a little light bedroom action with the door firmly closed; spicy means hold on to your hat, everything else is coming off.
Just as sensuality on the page is a staple of Romance, but not essential, so romantasy does not need to bring out all the anatomical vocabulary. But it can if it wants to. Dark usually means at least one of the protagonists is a villain. Epic suggests the magical world is not ours. Gaslamp means there are parasols at play.
The main rule of thumb is that Romantasy readers like to have their expectations managed. Don’t promise something you can’t deliver.
At the same time, make sure to tell your readers what you are going to deliver. If your book features popular romantic tropes? Tell the world. Your sexy book has dragons? Tell the world. No one wants surprise dragons in their book any more than they want surprise dead romantic heroes sprawled all over their breakfast table.
My personal stance is that Romantasy does not include stories set in a version of our world in the present day, largely because urban fantasy and paranormal romance have already been patrolling those streets for twenty-five years or more. No need to make them hang up their leather pants just because there’s a new magic word in town. Your mileage may vary.
Just How New Is This Hot New Thing?
I checked in with a friend of mine, Stephanie Burgis, author of the upcoming Romantasy series Queens of Villainy, to see if she had any thoughts to share about the rise of the recent genre.
Stephanie is not only a writer who has been combining Romance and Fantasy for her entire writing career, but also a dedicated reader of both genres.
“In the late 1980s, I was devouring fantastic romantic fantasy novels by authors like Emma Bull, Patricia McKillip, Robin McKinley, Barbara Hambly and more. Back then I always had to play a guessing game whenever I picked up a fantasy novel as a reader, trying to figure out whether it would include a fun romantic thread or not—because publishers never put that info on the cover (for fear of turning off stereotypical male fantasy readers who looked down on romance, maybe?). So I did a lot of peeking at the end of books (and thus spoiling a lot of plots!) before I committed to buying any of them, just to find out whether I really wanted them or not.”
Stephanie got an agent for her first manuscript, Masks and Shadows, in 2005, but the novel was seen as too difficult to market. It didn’t make it to publication for another eleven years. Even then, “I ran into exactly the same problem I’d had as a Romantasy reader in the 90s: in order to sell to fantasy readers in the fantasy section, the romance wasn’t made obvious in the blurb…which led to (a) non-romance-lovers posting annoyed reviews about having a romance sprung upon them, and (b) romance lovers not even finding it in the first place.”
Any publishing issue dealing with romance (or Romance) always comes back to the gender thing—or to be specific, the Woman Thing. It would take an entire library of PhD theses to properly explore the layers of sexism that female fantasy readers and writers have experienced over the last fifty plus years, but there is a strong correlation between “readers & publishing professionals who are obnoxious in how they deal with their personal ‘ick’ reaction to romance in fantasy fiction” and “misogyny.”
While there’s nothing wrong with not liking Romance, or not wanting sexual/sensual content in one’s reading material (all the more reason to champion the marketing of these factors instead of hiding it under cabbage leaves!), there’s also nothing wrong with enjoying those things, and there has often been an unpleasant “ew, girl germs” aspect to any backlash against romance in fantasy fiction, whether we’re talking about the 1970s, the 1990s, the 2010s, or the Right Now.
Stephanie’s experience with Masks and Shadows, which eventually found publication eight years ago, was troubling.
“I ran into an issue with one particular genre magazine, which refused to post an excerpt after all once they discovered the romantic element to the plot. They also insisted that I rewrite the book’s blurb before they would even follow through with their promised giveaway, explicitly to ‘take away any hint of a possible romance.’ Ugh! In practice, what that meant was that I had to rewrite the blurb without mentioning any of the female characters, because apparently having them in there along with the male characters made it seem too dangerously likely to signal romance.”
Female-led subgenres of fantasy often build popularity with readers because they are given the freedom to be unapologetic about bringing romance into the storyline—and once a subgenre becomes identified as being Too Much Romance, they get get cut off from Fantasy as if too much kissing somehow dilutes all the blood, magic, and politics.
Will it be different this time around? It’s hard to say. It felt significant that the rise of Cozy Fantasy was led by the success of Legends and Lattes—a thoroughly romantic book that also happened to be written by a man. Maybe Cozy Fantasy will embrace Romantasy as a beloved cousin and invite it into the tavern for an ale.
Meanwhile, the readers who enjoy a sword in one hand and a hot dragon-rider in the other (as it turns out, this is quite a lot of readers), don’t really seem bothered about what Fantasy thinks.
So…It Was Romantasy All Along, Right?
Yep, if you were a big reader of female fantasy authors in the 80s and 90s, then chances are you’ve already consumed plenty of Fantasy with a Romance structure. Melanie Rawn, Anne McCaffrey, Mercedes Lackey, Jennifer Roberson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Robin McKinley, Tamora Pierce…and as for Romance with a Fantasy hat on, the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, and the witchier books by Nora Roberts both spring to mind.
We’ve been there, ladies. We have swords on our t-shirts, and we’re not afraid of protagonists who know how to kiss.
(This is not to exclude male or non-binary readers & writers, but the history of Romantic Fantasy is strongly skewed female and given the bizarrely regular reoccurrence of the “ladies in Fantasy are so new, they just got here [except Ursula Le Guin]” myth, sometimes you have to go back in time and stick labels on a lot of otherwise forgotten books that say WOMEN DID A THING, PLEASE STOP PRETENDING OTHERWISE.)
In the 21st century, as publishing belts tightened and the mid-list (reliable authors putting out regular books with solid but unexciting readership numbers…and yes, this is where Romantic Fantasy had been lurking) began to disappear, Romantic Fantasy found other outlets. For those willing to pivot, there was the huge wave of popularity for Vampire Romance, YA Dystopia, Urban Fantasy with love triangles, and variations on a theme.
Thanks to indie publishing, many fantasy writers dedicated to Smooch & Sorcery kept their backlist in print. They started out as rebels against the system and ended up making more money than many of their traditionally published siblings…as did many new writers who saw opportunities for their own fresh take on Swoon & Swords.
These days, we often see big trends happening in indie publishing first, if only because indie can respond to popular tropes with a greater speed than trad pub.
Gaslamp fantasy (Victorian & Regency with magic) is a fascinating example of genre blending because Romance and Mystery have both found homes in Gaslamp—sometimes in separate books, sometimes all mashed in together.
Stephanie Burgis, like many authors who were told their manuscripts wouldn’t sell, took her romantic fantasy books for adults into the indie space, and discovered that, actually plenty of readers were lining up to buy those books.
“In 2023 my agent convinced me to put together a proposal for a new Romantasy series that she could market to traditional publishers. (She said, ‘Everyone in wants Romantasy. You write Romantasy! Give me something I can sell.’) I gave it to her with a lot of skepticism, remembering how frustrating it had been to trad-publish Romantasy back in 2016—but it was a whole different ballgame this time round, and we ended up selling my Queens of Villainy to Tor Bramble at auction, which was wonderful.”
2023 was also the year that Romantasy really became visible as a term, thanks to the BookTok fervour for releases like Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing, not to mention the entire backlist of Sarah J. Maas. More and more authors and book releases clustered to join the “new trend.” Throughout 2024 it’s only gotten bigger, and louder.
We are now living in the Age of Romantasy, with dozens of big releases cued up for the next twelve months from indie and traditionally published authors alike. I’ve been waiting impatiently for Swordcrossed, the new Freya Marske, and I was excited beyond belief to see one of my all-time favourite YA authors, Sarah Rees Brennan, doing so well with the release of her first adult fantasy release, Long Live Evil (“swoon-worthy villain romance”). Tilly Wallace, an indie author who built her readership with the Manners & Monsters Cozy Gothic series, just released Constancy, a dragon-themed romance inspired by Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Natania Barron’s Netherford Hall is another Jane Austen-inspired Romantasy which has made waves since its recent release.
Meanwhile, Kickstarter is spilling over with Special Edition campaigns for sexy, swoony magical books…and over in Proper Romance, the biggest-selling new subgenre is Monster Romance. Never mind vampires and werewolves, the new romantic heroes are minotaurs and orcs!
It’s delightful to be living in an era where Romantasy is celebrated with that big Capital Letter R. But while you’re browsing the shelves (or TikTok) for your next swoony read, don’t forget to go hunting for some of the authors and books that were Romantasy all along.
VINTAGE ROMANTASY READING LIST
Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks
Robin McKinley’s Beauty, Rose Daughter, Spindle’s End, and Sunshine
Tanya Huff’s The Fire’s Stone
Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown
Patricia McKillip’s The Changeling Sea and Winter Rose
Thea Harrison’s Elder Races series
Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter series
Kresley Cole’s Immortals After Dark series
Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld series
Marjorie Liu’s Dirk & Steele series
Stephanie says: “It would honestly feel wrong to leave out Tanya Huff’s Henry Fitzroy series, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s the vampire Count Saint-Germain series, and Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series. All those sexy vampires definitely helped to inspire later full-on Romantasies!”
Tansy adds: “Jennifer Roberson’s two major fantasy series, the Chronicles of the Cheysuli and the Tiger and Del books, are both powerful examples of romance (and family saga) structure combined with all the big dynastic epic fantasy tropes. I’d also give shout-outs to Tamora Pierce, who gave us medieval fantasy with magic contraception when we needed it most. Anne Bishop, Jacqueline Carey, Rowena Cory Daniells…[footnote just as 1980s romance was another country as regarding sexual consent, romantic fantasy of a previous era can be pretty rife with non-con, dub-con, and the like. It feels strange to warn for this given the general portrayal of rape, etc. in fantasy fiction of all eras, but given how strongly attitudes and expectations have changed in Romance over the last twenty years, this is something to be aware of.]”
Stephanie says: also Judith Tarr’s Lord of the Two Lands. But I will stop now!!!!
Which Romantasy of Yesteryear would you push into the hands of a friend? Which Romantasy of Coming Soon are you most excited to read?
© 2024 Tansy Rayner Roberts
