Fairy tales, it seems, are out of fashion. After all, what do they have to teach a modern reader? Finding Prince Charming is passé; we should be getting comfortable with our own company. Evil stepmothers aren’t such a problem when you can just go no contact. And going to sleep for 100 years no longer has to affect your career arc – we’re all on our own timelines!
Yet look a little closer and you might find that a new kind of fairy tale is alive and well. Because what are most of them if not love stories, set in magical worlds? Romantasy, a relatively new literary genre that offers exactly that, is, largely thanks to its popularity on TikTok, having a seismic effect on the books industry. As the name suggests, the genre combines fantasy realms, drawn from the depths of folklore, Gothic fiction and mythology, with a romantic plot – and readers cannot get enough. Science fiction and fantasy sales were up more than 40 per cent in 2024. Romantasy author Sarah J Maas, whose book A Court of Thorns and Roses was released in 2015, was the best-selling author in the US last year, selling 7.7 million copies, and Fourth Wing (2023), the first in romantasy star Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series, was the seventh bestselling book in the UK across all genres. In January the third instalment of that series, Onyx Storm, became the fastest-selling adult title ever, selling 2.7 million copies in its first week, after people queued in bookshops at midnight dressed up as their favourite characters to buy it on its day of release.
These authors find themselves in a curious position (as well as unthinkably rich). Harry Potter and true fairy tales are, of course, for children. But as much as romantasy has inherited the feverish fandom that often comes with an absorbing magical world – fans of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars are some of the most obsessive in the world – it is also the natural successor to Mills & Boon, Jilly Cooper and 50 Shades of Grey. “Dragon porn” has become shorthand for romantasy; steamy sex, or “spice”, to use TikTok parlance, is part of the happy ending. In these fairy tales, the heroines can have it both ways, winning authority over the entire magical realm and a handsome stay-at-home fairy husband.
Violet Sorrengail, the breathless narrator of Yarros’s Empyrean series is a typical romantasy heroine. She’s in her early 20s, studying at Basgiath War College to be a dragon rider, despite being smaller and less physically fit than others in her “quadrant” (this is widely thought to be a nod to the fact that Yarros suffers from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome). She can “wield” lightning, communicate telepathically with her two dragons and loves nothing more than riding them – except perhaps allowing her classmate, previously sworn enemy Xaden Riorson, to fuck her senseless. Xaden – who also rides dragons, and with whom she can also communicate telepathically due to a dragon-related loophole – is her spiritual and sexual soulmate. “Xaden is mine,” Violet thinks. “My heart, my soul, my everything. He channelled from the earth to save me, and I’ll scour the world until I find a way to save him right back.”
Such lines are unfortunately characteristic of the genre’s prose. “He hasn’t kissed me like this since before the battle at Basgiath,” Violet notes. Yarros’s dialogue comes thick and fast – at times it’s more like reading a script than a novel. Where the authors diverge in fantastical creatures they coalesce in style: in Onyx Storm (dragons) but also A Court of Thorns of Roses (faeries) and The Serpent of the Wings of Night (vampires, by Carissa Broadbent), line breaks and full stops are used liberally for dramatic effect. (“Fast. They’re too damned fast,” says Violet as she encounters some “venin”, AKA the baddies of Navarre.)
Violet’s warrior status, her appetite for danger, her courage, her unbridled sexual desire, put her in a different category from the hapless virgins of Disney and the Brothers Grimm who are, all these years later, still stuck in their dusty old volumes fannying about with spinning wheels and dwarfs. Feyre, the narrator of Maas’s bestseller A Court of Thorns and Roses, is also a scrappy little fighter, one who carries daggers and arrows and scoffs early doors at her sisters “chattering about some young man or the ribbons they’d spotted in the village when they should have been chopping wood”. When Feyre unknowingly kills a faerie, and is captured and taken away from her family to the dangerous faerie kingdom over the border and forced to live in the lap of luxury, she protests at the princess treatment: “I hadn’t worn a dress in years. I wasn’t about to start, not when escape was my main priority. I wouldn’t be able to move freely in a gown.”
Both Maas and Yarros’s heroines are strong and independent – and yet in both cases they are bound to the man they love, or will grow to love (most romantasy relationships begin as enemies), through life and death. “You’re the only one capable of killing me,” says Xaden, who has been infected by venin as a sacrifice for Violet. In A Court of Thorns and Roses, a loose retelling of Beauty and the Beast, Feyre must fall in love with the “High Lord” Tamlin to break the curse on his kingdom. Their every interaction is loaded with danger: Tamlin is a shapeshifter and could, if he wanted to, tear her to shreds with the huge claws that are at risk of appearing every time he slightly loses emotional control. Similarly, in Broadbent’s The Serpent of the Wings of Night, the heroine Oraya is a human always endangered in a world of vampires. Raihn, her vampire love interest, could kill her, and she has a duty to kill him. “I could open his shirt, slide my hands over the expanse of his chest, and thrust my poison blade right here – right into his heart. He could tear away this ridiculous delicate spiderweb of a dress and cut me open,” Broadbent writes. “The two of us could burn each other up.”
This violent, exaggerated language persists across the sexual scenes. “He’s kissing me like I’m the only air he can breathe”; “nothing existed but him”; “My entire world constricted to the touch of his lips on my skin”. Orgasms are “fracturing”, “splintering”, “shattering”, “unravelling”. The intensity and danger is part of the sexual fantasy – but the heroine in each case is in some way just as dangerous to the man as he is her.
Readers will be reminded here of Twilight, the late 2000s young adult series by Stephanie Meyer that caused a similar frenzy among teenage girls. In Twilight a normal high school girl, Bella Swan, falls in love with a vampire, the sublime Edward Cullen. Bella was dangerous to Edward because he was dangerous to her – he loved her so much that he couldn’t risk endangering her by “losing control” (read: having sex and unwittingly tearing her body to shreds). But what made Twilight so compelling to young women hoping for a perfect love was the unique power Bella had over Edward, and the fact that he did stay in control despite his potential to cause her harm. A similar dynamic pervades A Court of Thorns and Roses:
“The full force of that wild, unrelenting High Lord’s power focused solely on me – and I felt the storm contained beneath his skin, so capable of sweeping away everything I was, even in its lessened state. But I could trust him, trust myself to weather that mighty power. I could throw all that I was at him and he wouldn’t balk. ‘Give me everything,’ I breathed.”
Elsewhere, though, we are reminded of Feyre’s pluck: she is not powerless against Tamlin. Rather, she chooses to sleep with him when she wants to, and doesn’t when she doesn’t: “Don’t ever disobey me again,” he said, his voice a deep purr that ricocheted through me, awakening everything and lulling it into complicity. Then I reconsidered his words and straightened. He grinned at me in that wild way, and my hand connected with his face. “Don’t tell me what to do,” I breathed, my palm stinging. “And don’t bite me like some enraged beast.”
Though plenty of effort is taken to give gravitas to the imagined worlds they feel thinly drawn, like costumes and sets. Names for places and people lack the consistent and distinctive syntax of Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, and immersion in the world is often reduced to crude signifiers, particularly adapted curse words. Yarros, for example, is careful only ever to refer to “gods”, plural, as in “oh my gods” and “godsdamn”, usually deployed at moments of sexual ecstasy; occasionally she opts for “by Malek”, as in, “by Malek, I fucking love you”. Maas goes for “Cauldron boil me!”, while Broadbent opts for “Goddess”, “Mother”, and the exclamation “Ix’s tits”. If all that feels silly, it’s nothing on the fact that, despite stating at the outset of Onyx Storm that the text “has been faithfully transcribed from Navarrian into the modern language” and yet the students of Basgiath War College still understand concepts like “boundaries”, “overthinking” and “hitting the gym”. You half expect them to return to their chambers from a great battle and crack open a can of Diet Coke.
These are, clearly, very modern fairy tales – and, as that would suggest, full of contradictions. A handsome prince, yes, but one who does not control you, one over whom you maintain a sexual power, one who wants you to be free of the damage he could inflict on you. Intense sex, yes, but sex that is incredibly high stakes. A heroine who is powerful and independent but believes in and experiences the kind of true love that is increasingly being called into question by our rational, transactional world. That’s the real fantasy: to be she who has it all. Who has the things that we once wanted and the new ones. The good bits of this and of that. The perfect man, and the perfect self. The danger and the safety. The pleasure and the pain. It’s not surprising we need a magical land to imagine those things could be true.
[See also: English literature’s last stand]
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