Romantasy dominates the U.S. fiction market. Its blend of love story and fantastical adventure has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars for writers and publishers over the past three years, with authors such as Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros achieving record-breaking sales. At first, commentators wrote it off as a tacky byproduct of fan-fiction sites—it was christened “fairy smut” by its own admirers—but now its impressive boom has forced us all to take it seriously. Many celebrate its achievements. Others hail it as an index of societal ills: poor taste, short attention spans, and unprecedented tolerance for obscenity. What should we make of it? I suggest that conservative critics often misdiagnose it. Caught off guard by its immodesty, we mistake symptoms for the real disease. The secret of these novels’ success lies not in any obscenity, not in the graphic inter-species sex, but in a different, more sinister cultural malady, which reaches far beyond the latest publishing craze.
On the face of it, romantasy sells for two main reasons. The first is successful structure: the bestselling authors are masters of keeping us hooked. Take Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing (2023), the first novel in her incredibly popular Empyrean series, which sold twelve million copies in under two years. I read Fourth Wing alongside James Scott Bell’s Plot and Structure, a staple text of creative writing courses. Yarros does everything Bell recommends a storyteller do to engage an audience. The main character is a likable underdog who overcomes extreme physical and emotional difficulties to become a lead fighter and strategist in an international war—and secures her dream man in the process. The scene construction, plot arc, and pacing are skillfully engineered to provide regular dopamine hits and keep you turning the pages. The opposition is suitably terrifying (red-eyed human-adjacents who suck magic out of the material world); the stakes are incredibly high (who will die next?); the style is punchy and concise.
But these qualities are abundant in novels of other genres: thrillers, crime novels, traditional fantasies. Romantasy has a peculiar, timely cultural resonance. It pushes the buttons of its target audience, women in their late twenties to late thirties. Writers exploit the nostalgia of this “Harry Potter generation” by using the coming-of-age narratives that sprang from English-school stories to structure their fantasy worlds. The premise of Fourth Wing, for example, is a military training college for dragon riders. As the heroine trains for combat and learns to wield magic, she emerges (like Harry) as the lynchpin of an epic conflict. And, even more significantly, romantasy thrives on digital fan culture. The latest novels are obsessively shared, promoted, and discussed on platforms such as TikTok (#BookTok), catapulting sales and creating a fierce sense of community among readers.
So why is romantasy controversial? Those with doubts tend to identify explicit sex scenes as the problem. And sex certainly is everywhere in these novels. Fourth Wing recounts the protagonist’s intimate encounters in meticulous detail, with entire chapters given over to sexual description. Fans share ratings online for the “spice levels” of latest releases based on how pornographic they are. The public joke is that readers go to these stories simply for titillation. “Woman not reading fairy porn for the world-building,” ran a 2025 headline from the satirical British newspaper The Daily Mash.
For most serious critics of the genre, this aspect is what we should be talking about. According to Beatrice Scudeler, in a 2025 article for Public Discourse, romantasy’s place at the top of the sales charts is a symptom of Gen Z’s “relationship recession.” Readers hungry for intimacy are turning to idealized sexual imaginings in order to fill a “marriage-shaped hole”; modern culture tells us to be obsessed with sex while simultaneously undermining young people’s ability to make lasting commitments to partners. Romantasy, on this view, distills our society’s dysfunctional approach to sex as both an idol and a throwaway experience.
And all this is true. But the sex in romantasy—its frequency, detail, and idealization—isn’t new. As romance scholar Christine Larson noted in a recent interview, “Anyone who is shocked by the sex scenes in romantasy has not read romance.” Romantasy differs from standard fantasy because its plot remains, at core, a traditional romance plot. And while romances exist at various points on a modesty spectrum—and the genre should not be confused with erotica—most romances trade on vicarious sexual fulfilment; that is how the mainstream genre has worked for about a century now.
So if sex is the main problem with romantasy, there’s nothing new about it. What explains the explosive power of this particular genre? Does romantasy appeal simply because it adds mythical creatures and magical powers to our staples of semi-explicit literature?
It’s important to note that, while romantasy fans bristle at the allegation that they read for explicit content per se, they aren’t embarrassed about the role it plays in the fictions they read. Instead, they promote the genre’s use of sex by appealing to a deeper reason for reading it: “female empowerment.” Romantasy sex scenes infamously celebrate female pleasure: these are women who are unashamed about their romantic desires, and their intimate encounters are all about meeting their (rather than simply their partner’s) longings. Rather than being the passive object of desire, the female protagonist becomes the active desirer and initiator. For feminists, this seems like a win.
This articulation of the role sex plays in romantasy novels points to the most significant thing, as I see it, about the genre: the logic of self-empowerment. The sex scenes are a symptom of this larger drive, and conservatives’ understandable concern about immodest content can distract us from the more problematic thing it testifies to: a fixation on the self as the locus of ultimate concern.
Rather than being the passive object of desire, the female protagonist becomes the active desirer and initiator. For feminists, this seems like a win.
Romantasy represents the modern self in triumph. These novels are about not just respecting women but about the enthronement of the unfettered, expressive individual. Despite the differences of setting and character, all romantasy plots are essentially about self-realization—and the fact that this happens to a female is not as significant as the more general view of selfhood it crystallizes. A romantasy protagonist learns through hardship to accept and celebrate herself, and in the process is revealed as unusually impressive—her special inner qualities are just what is needed to save the day.
In Yarros’s Fourth Wing, for example, Violet Sorrengail overcomes chronic illness, extreme physical challenges, and a plethora of doubters and haters in order to unleash lightning-wielding ability and uncanny strategic intelligence. In Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015), Feyre Archeron digs deep into her resources to become the savior of the Faerie realm. In Jennifer L. Armentrout’s From Blood and Ash (2020), Poppy must break free from her “Maiden” restrictions to right wrongs in an interspecies war and experience her thrill-ride romance. Snigger if you will at the magical gifts and telepathic dragon bonds. Underneath the trappings of every popular romantasy is this dictum: plots are resolved and happiness achieved when a woman learns to recognize and wield her own excellence. No matter what life throws at her, if she only looks to herself she will gain power, experience pleasure, and outsmart everyone else.
This is a potent dramatization of what Charles Taylor termed “expressive individualism,” a defining feature of the modern West, one that numerous cultural historians have attempted to dissect. Our controlling vision of human telos has become self-acceptance and self-celebration, whereby self is defined solely in relation to itself. Your point of reference for identity is nothing and nobody external, but simply an expression of your own internal you.
Almost incomprehensible is the older idea, upon which the Christian tradition relies, that self is only called forth by the external other and that without the ultimate Other of divine reference we lose our being altogether. Augustine wrote of this distinction 1,600 years ago in Book 14 of City of God: “to exist in onseself … [means] that one veers toward nothingness.” When the self turns in on itself, it loses what makes it real. For Yarros and scores of romantasy authors, however, it’s only when the self turns in on itself that its existence is validated.
No matter what life throws at her, if she only looks to herself she will gain power, experience pleasure, and outsmart everyone else.
Notice how this self-realization myth determines our view of problem-solving. Every story we tell offers some sort of answer to the question: how do we solve what ails us? Romantasy has a resoundingly clear answer: the heroine finds in herself all that she needs to succeed. This represents a significant cultural shift.
Over a decade ago, Matthew Crawford, in The World Beyond Your Head, used the evolution of Disney cartoons to spotlight our altered assumptions about the world-self relationship. Along with other classic shows, like Tom and Jerry, the original Mickey Mouse cartoons give us a world with hard edges; external materials constantly cause frustration, and characters must accommodate themselves to this as best they can. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s sad, sometimes it’s painful, and so on. By contrast, problem-stricken characters in the more recent Mickey Mouse Clubhouse series summon the Handy Dandy Machine, from which one simply picks the correct tool (and the tools always perfectly match the problems). Select the right thing and your frustration is solved. For Crawford, our assumption that technology will always smooth over the relation between will and world ends up robbing us of agency; our illusion of magicking-away problems simply deskills us. This predicament, he observed, is fundamentally moral, because we are misconstruing the nature of the self.
Romantasy novels, though worlds away from Mickey, hinge on this magicking illusion and reveal how we have merged it with our culture of self-reference. What you need to solve your problems is no longer just a tool, but yourself. You are the crucial resource that will obliterate your obstacles.
Romantasy’s most popular works sell, then, because they are perfect iterations of our modern delusions about ourselves. The heroine requires no character change in response to the world, simply a more determined revelation of her inner awesomeness. Certainly, women characters are affirmed and celebrated. But this happens in a way that enthrones our modern vision of self-realization, in which the only obstacles to that goal are external. This vision genuinely moves people: the internet is full of people who claim that Yarros’s Empyrean series has changed their lives, and that’s because, for them, it’s gospel. Our culture’s good news inverts the answer to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism: What is your only comfort in life and death? That I am solely my own, body and soul belonging to nothing and nobody else.
Most of our cultural artifacts endorse this self-realization thesis, from movies to public-policy documents. How is romantasy different? I think romantasy illuminates the scale of our problem in three crucial ways. Most obviously, it’s an especially clear example of how the modern approach to self roots other dysfunctions, including our approach to sexual intimacy. Romantasy also showcases how we baptize self-idolization in the language of empowerment and confuse it with other, often praiseworthy things (such as paying attention to women’s experiences). And, perhaps most striking, romantasy is a vivid example of how fictions can become viral modes of social rehearsal. Its stories of self-realization are devoured obsessively by a millions-strong fan base, its logic ingrained with every flip of the page.
Compare all this to the great fictions of past eras that explored similar territory. Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, for example, gave popular life to the enemies-to-lovers trope that remains so popular and drives fictions like Fourth Wing. Yet in Austen’s novel, the device serves not as a means to Elizabeth Bennet’s self-glorification but instead of her rather unflattering recognition that she was too reliant on her own perception of things. In all Austen’s novels, harmony of plot and community is achieved specifically by heroines not relying on their own intuitions and resources. Or take George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Multiple characters with idealized visions of their attachments and life trajectories end up having to accommodate themselves to the hard edges they encounter in the world. Dorothea and Lydgate both recognize their human limits and foibles, and—very movingly—find a new lease on life in adjusting their sense of self in response.
Does it really matter what we imagine? These are, after all, fictions. Can we write off romantasy—and other novels, too—as harmless escapism? It is here that we need to recognize what fiction always does. When we read a novel, we use our imaginations to rehearse a way of doing life. We entrust our minds to the author’s imagined world, and so parse its grammar of existence. Our imagination is put through its paces and becomes more attuned and attentive to certain ways of understanding how the world works and what it is for. Stories are “equipment for living,” as Kenneth Burke observed. Whether they are populated by fantasy beings or people who look just like us, we use them to navigate the world.
My problem with romantasy is less about sex than about storytelling: we need better stories about ourselves. Less explicit stories would certainly be nice, but the sickness of modern bestsellers runs deeper than obscenity. We need to stop bingeing on the truly pernicious fantasy of self-realization. Stories about “living your truth” elate readers temporarily, and that elation is easily mistaken for empowerment. But it is the opposite of empowerment, because it blinds us to the true nature of human life. As theologian John Webster put it, “being and acting humanly is not a matter of self-possession.” It is instead “to have one’s being outside of oneself, to owe one’s being to the being and activity of the triune God.” Writers and readers can learn from romantasy’s genuine successes but desperately need to discard its modern pathologies.