Escaping into romantasy

Otago Daily Times

5 days ago

The huge popularity of romantasy fiction's handsome princes and horny dragons tells us something about what women want, writes Sophie Heawood.
Newspaper headlines on our collective mental health report loneliness, isolation and anxiety. And while doctors are yet to suggest tragic princes, horny dragons and 800-year-old faeries shape-shifting in the immortal realm as a potential cure, the publishing industry most certainly is.
I've met a lot of romance authors who trade in happily-ever-afters, only to reveal their own love lives to be a pit of despair. So it's rather satisfying when Lauren Roberts, who is all of 23 and has sold well over 5 million copies of her romantic fantasy series Powerless , turns up with a strong-cheekboned fiance who looks not unlike the love interest in her books.
Not that her man is Kai, exactly — the handsome killer prince with a tortured soul and the ability to channel anyone's magic powers, battling a cruel father who believes in an elites-only society — and not that she's quite Paedyn, a beautiful streetwise thief trying to pass herself off as a psychic to escape being put to death by the very royal she is falling for. "Because that doesn't happen", sighs the author from Michigan, who wears jeans and cardigans and black eyeliner and poetic tattoos about fragility, and whose books blew up in 2023 on TikTok. She certainly shares some of her heroine's relentless determination, though. At 18, she quit university to get a cleaning job so she could self-publish the book she'd been up excitedly writing until 4am some nights, only to then have it snapped up by major publishers Simon & Schuster and to speedily write several more.
"But no, on our first date Zac and I went to see monster trucks at Detroit Stadium," she admits, sitting backstage before a sold-out event in London. Zac is with her, hanging on his girlfriend's every word just as a leading male character should. "But in a romantasy," says Roberts, "it's like: first date, oh my God that's my sworn enemy from a different kingdom and I'm riding a dragon".
Romantasy, as you might have guessed, is the merging of romance with fantasy in commercial fiction, conjuring worlds where would-be lovers fight superhuman elements and oh-so-human feelings. It grew to critical mass in the pandemic, as people sought escape, with authors such as Sarah J. Maas, whose A Court of Thorns and Roses series starts with a 19-year-old woman falling for an ancient faerie man disguised as a beast. Rebecca Yarros only began in the genre in 2023, but this year published her third, Onyx Storm , which sold 2.7 million copies in its first week to become the fastest-selling adult novel of the past 20 years.
The books are often dedicated to the readers themselves. Roberts's novella, Powerful , begins with the line: "To the girls with softer dreams — your purpose is just as powerful".
Yarros goes a step further in Onyx Storm : "To the ones who don't run with the popular crowd, the ones who get caught reading under their desks, the ones who feel like they never get invited, included, or represented. Get your leathers. We have dragons to ride."
"I think the reason 'romantasy' was coined in 2020 during the pandemic was because people were looking for that fun escape. That's why they are 500 pages, 800 pages — some of these books are like weapons," says Roberts, pretending to use one to whack someone over the head.
Some of them are what the BookTokers describe as "spicy", written from the female gaze, full of orgasms and even interspecies love-making. But Roberts, who was raised as an evangelical Christian, writes for a young adult (YA) audience, keeping hers cleaner and full of longing. At a live London event she holds for her fans — many of whom have flown in from all around Europe — teenagers and young women fill the room with gasps and screams.
As someone raised around women's rights activism in the 1980s, I did not foresee 2025 bringing me to vast rooms of young women willingly calling themselves "girlies". But this is the internet parlance that everyone here uses, Roberts in particular. It's all girlies, it's all "Oh my God, you look so pretty", it's the host Bella Pritchard saying she wants to link a Taylor Swift song to every relationship in the book and everyone squealing. "We all want tall, dark and handsome," says Roberts about her male leads. Looking around the venue, it's clear this is the generation who grew up watching makeup tutorials. Everyone looks immaculate, even if they're 12. I feel like I haven't seen a woman with short hair in 100 years. Humourless, middle-aged feminism surges within me.
When the actor who plays Kai in the audiobook comes on as a surprise guest, the girlies scream in ecstasy. When he is asked for his own favourite book, and he says Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five , they fall into a bemused silence, apart from one lone voice whooping, and that whooper is me. Roberts then speaks about the concept of yearning — and she suddenly sounds deadly serious. "I really liked writing a man where there's not much toxic masculinity in the way they treat their women," she says, and despite her hero being, erm, an assassin, I can see exactly what she means. Reading the books, I became so desperately fond of him that it was hard to put the man down. So when we're alone, I ask her to expand.
"OK, we're in 2025, where men, most of the time, are not good. Obviously there are exclusions. But it begs the question: what does romantasy have that is so intoxicating? And I truly believe it is that yearning. It's a man who's going to physically protect you. There's no texting. No phones. It's an emotionally available man who's going to tell you how he feels."
Suddenly I get it. This isn't the backlash to feminism. No, this is the backlash to porn culture. To feeling expendable. To being swiped past, haunted by bad news, ghosted by your lovers. To a world where politics feels unfixable. In romantasy, whole kingdoms can crumble when a woman fights for the truth. Societies can be fixed. Love can be found. In fact, the Powerless world steers well clear of dragons and goblins, and while some people do have magic powers, the entire plot hinges on misinformation about the Ordinaries that is being used to prop up the Elites.
I wonder if Roberts will shy away from political comparisons but no, she likes it "when people notice that it's topical. Because there very much are Elites and Ordinaries in our world. There's hierarchy, there's poverty, things that are not being addressed. But it wasn't that I wanted to write an expose of America. It was more that art imitates life and I write what I see".
Back at the event, this phenomenon is also, according to one German woman I meet who has flown her daughters here from Dusseldorf, something that gets non-readers to read. "My daughter, Antonia, would usually rather shoot herself than write — she hates it. But she wrote to Lauren to thank her for writing that book. I've never heard her so emotional in 14 years", the proud mum tells me. "And her sister Victoria, she's 12, it's always a fight to get her to read at all. But, finally, two weeks ago, she picked up the first one and read it in one go, for the first time in her life! And then she wrote to Lauren, too, and said, 'I cried, I laughed, I went through every emotion a human being can go through. And I thank you'. And then I thought, 'Oh my God, I thank you too!'."
The books are quite violent as well as romantic. When I speak to the kids, the deaths seem to break their hearts in two. One says, "I was literally crying so hard at the last one that my sister asked, 'Are you OK?'."
They all speak about Roberts on first-name terms, feeling a kinship with the author who posts funny videos online direct from her living room, at the desk where she writes the books, sharing her plans, her sense of humour, the dog. It all feels so much nearer than it once did. I realise how cancel culture could be so meaningful to a generation for whom the art and the artist are both equally close to you. If you're in a parasocial relationship with someone, of course you care how they behave.
There are adult fans, too. I meet two women in their 30s from Cambridgeshire: Katy, who works for the NHS, and her friend, Danielle. They are in a community on Instagram who engage in "buddy reads", 20 to 30 women in an online book club with people they've never met. Katy reads on her phone, syncs the audiobooks to her car as she drives to work, and has shelves full of the print versions at home. "But those are more like trophies," she explains.
Lily and Jillpa, in their early 20s, tell me that social media, so often vilified for ruining our attention span, is making them read more books, because of the risk of someone posting a spoiler from a new release before they get to the end. I ask them about plots that keep you waiting ages for the romance to build up. "Slow burn," they reply, in unison — everyone knows the shorthand. On BookTok, one user will post about a new favourite, only for another to ask if it's a love triangle, because they hate that trope, they say, but they're good with forced proximity, or enemies to lovers, or even fated mates.
"If I hear people shouting for a certain trope that doesn't affect the plot of the book," Roberts says, on stage, "I'm a woman of the people, I'll use it. So sue me".
On the one hand, the audiences believe so deeply in this fictional universe that they're wearing homemade shirts saying things like "We Love Kai Azer" or "Team Kai", but they're simultaneously savvy of all literary devices that create these worlds. In my day you wouldn't have said the word trope unless you were doing an English degree, but Romantasy isn't afraid to be uncool. Or to mix the strange with the familiar: in fact, that's how it works. It uses escapist elements to take us away from our lives, only to build up to a swooning or heartbreaking moment that, crucially, could actually happen to any one of us. Readers relate most to the part where a prince who has fought his way through a supernatural trial, say, quietly picks up his beloved's shoes.
When I tell my 13-year-old what I'm researching she sneers, saying she sees girls at school reading romantasy, that the covers look naff. I could agree with her — and these are YA novels, after all, so not meant for me — but the unfortunate truth is that I'm halfway through the trilogy and now deeply invested in it. The power of Lauren Roberts' writing is that, although very unsafe things happen in this world she has built, you start to feel very safe in it. The writing seems to hold you.
Still, there are only so many ways to smoulder and suffer for 800 pages at a time. Like any genre of fiction, the tropes repeat and the sentences start to become synonyms for their predecessors. You're halfway through the second book before Paedyn and Kai even so much as kiss — and that's a tortured one. Then there's a decent snog, but it takes place in a sewer, in which they are about to drown. By this point I feel I might go and watch some pornography myself, just to speed things up a bit. Instead, I post on social media to tell my friends what I'm working on, and ask if anyone likes these books. I get lots of positive replies, but most sent as private messages.
These are largely heterosexual stories written for women and they seem to be particularly popular at a time where actual romance has never felt more disconnected. Where the birth rate is down, marriage is down, and ghosting and loneliness are up. But it's not just the stories themselves that uplift people — the communities around them are creating real connection, too.
Many romantasy authors start out self-publishing for grassroots readers, later to get picked up by mainstream publishers. Their fans often buy both copies — the "indie" version, then what they call the "traditional" — but with conflicted feelings, because a mainstream deal means the sequels are going to take so much longer to come out. Self-publishing is quicker. Indeed, while not denying the talent and commitment of the authors, the whole romantasy project feels quite crowdsourced. Roberts joined TikTok as a fan of other authors and built up an audience discussing their works, but once she had an idea of her own — about a heroine who, unusually, doesn't have any special powers, but is having to fake them to survive — she asked her followers if they would read it. They said hell yes, so she got to work, sharing extracts as she went along. She even called her heroine Paedyn after a follower in a TikTok Live who said she'd never seen her name in a book. Then came up with Kai and his brother Kitt by Googling "fierce hot male names".
After the books started coming out, a fan theory grew about a pivotal character called Callum being a "dual". "It was wrong", Roberts tells me, but she worked with her editors to see if they could actually incorporate it into the story — and they did, so wrong became right. She calls her US and UK editors her left and right brain, the English one being very imaginative — "we're both dreamers" — whereas the US one brings her back down to earth. She leaves them voice notes every day to test out her new plots.
I watch Rebecca Yarros being interviewed on YouTube by a group of women from Entertainment Weekly who all have enviable careers, also call themselves "girlies" and squeal a lot. "It's a little bit Hunger Games , a little bit Game of Thrones , maybe some How To Train Your Dragon for good measure", says one, when introducing Yarros's work, and the author sits there nodding as all her influences are reeled off. Most artists squirm if their art is compared to anyone else's, but in romantasy, you name your sources freely. Then they ask why she switched to romantasy after previously publishing straight romance novels.
"When I knew my publisher was going to do a romantic fantasy line, I got really excited and I submitted five ideas," Yarros tells them. "She went through those and found where there was a hole in the market. She said: 'We're gonna go with the dragons'."
I'll say one thing for romantasy: nobody, but nobody, is trying to hide how the sausage is made. Private Eye even reported in May that a couple of authors had been caught seemingly using ChatGPT to write sections of their books. Dark Obsession: An Age Gap Bratva Romance by KC Crowne apparently went on sale containing the following paragraph: "Here's an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable and injecting additional humour while providing a brief, sexy, description of Grigori. Changes are highlighted in bold for clarity."
Roberts and her fiance have known each other since high school, where his mother was Lauren's English teacher — the one who encouraged her all along, putting her essays forward for regional competitions. Their families shared an evangelical Christian background; the young couple still have faith, but stress that they are "not rigid, not conservative" and believe the church should be "loving and welcoming". Roberts does thank the Lord in her book's acknowledgements, though, and tells me, "I do think all of this came to be because there is a higher purpose for all of this — truly, I do believe it — so I feel very blessed".
But her English teacher helped, too. "Oh his mom's always taking the credit — as she should!"
Zac brings his tech job on the road with them so he can help. At an influencer lunch, held by leading fantasy book-subscription service FairyLoot, he helps get video footage; at the auditorium event he deals with all the flowers and gifts before sneaking round the back of the venue to get the best photo of his beloved on stage. Men in these books want their women to thrive and be their best and brightest selves. They are turned on by their powerfulness rather than emasculated by it.
Indeed, it interests me that romantasy heroines are never the glossiest candidates for passion: for example, Yarros's lead character, Violet, endures various chronic illness symptoms while battling to keep up with her overbearing mother. Of course, storytelling as a form has always championed the underdog (David and Goliath; now there's a trope). But there is something about these women, with their health conditions, their rough starts sleeping in a slum, surrounded by death — Jilly Cooper it ain't, but sexy it is. Underestimated women battling their way to greatness and their lovers desiring them for it.
"I tried to date Lauren for years, but she would always ignore me," Zac tells me as I meet them for breakfast at Heathrow before they fly to an event in Dublin. All that yearning, finally paying off. We discuss her brand of escapism some more before I'm left alone to read that day's news. Ah, the real world, I think to myself somewhat reluctantly. Except all of the newspaper headlines are about our very own tragic prince, Harry, being estranged from his father the King, after breaking the immortal code of our kingdom and fleeing to another. The others are about Trump reshuffling his courtesans in a new bid to save his very own elites, while denying that they're elites at all. Then there's a third one about a man who may have developed a whole new kind of anti-venom after being bitten by 200 poisonous snakes. Romantasy doesn't seem so far-fetched after all.