A new genre is taking over the book market. Earlier this year, so-called “romantasy” novel Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros was the fastest-selling adult novel in twenty years, raking in 2.7 million sales in its first week alone. Erin Doom’s The Tearsmith became the most sold book in Italy in 2022; it has since been translated into English by Penguin and has sold more than a half million copies. HarperFiction’s imprint Magpie has launched a line dedicated exclusively to the genre, The Midnight Collection, and London’s first romantasy-only bookstore, Saucy Books, opened its doors this summer.
This is not a passing literary trend. It’s a worldwide phenomenon. But what is romantasy? And more importantly, what does its popularity reveal about our culture?
Romantasy is a genre that, as the name suggests, blends a romance-driven plot with a fantasy setting. It is frequently sexually explicit (online fora often advise new readers on the “spice” level of any given book in the genre), usually comes as part of a series (like regular fantasy does), and often sprouts from fanfiction websites before being picked up by an editor for traditional publishing. Imagine a story about a young witch grudgingly falling in love with a brooding elf lord and you wouldn’t be far off.
The first installment of Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses, one of the most successful series in the genre with more than thirteen million copies sold, was published in 2015. But the genre has its roots all the way back in 2005 with Stephanie Meyer’s bestselling Twilight series which, while less explicit than Maas’s books, still focuses heavily on forbidden romance with paranormal elements. It’s a genre made by women and for a female readership. Back in 2008, when the first Twilight film came out, outlets remarked with surprise that a high percentage of Meyer’s readers were not teenagers, but women in their late twenties and thirties. Data now suggests that the target demographic is specifically women between ages eighteen and forty-four.
Why are adult women reading romantasy? The short answer is the longstanding platitude that sex sells. The long answer is that we need to look more closely at its defining characteristics to establish why romantasy speaks so eloquently to the cultural moment. First, romantasy novels often begin their lives on fanfiction websites like Wattpad, FFN, or AO3. They are usually published chapter by chapter, not unlike how Charles Dickens’s novels were serialized in the Victorian era: a tactic that allowed readership to grow gradually stronger over time (for example, that’s how The Tearsmith garnered enough fans to be considered for traditional publication). They also often take inspiration from well-loved stories. For instance, SenLinYu’s Manacled (recently published by Random House under the new title of Alchemised) started as a Harry Potter fanfiction on AO3. Given the download demographics, we can assume that most readers are women in their late twenties to late thirties, who would have been the original target audience for J. K. Rowling’s novels in the 1990s and early 2000s. The nostalgia appeal is strong.
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Yet nostalgia doesn’t ultimately account for the staggering profit that romantasy is making. I think the driving factor is that we are in a relationship recession. There’s a marriage-shaped hole in Western societies, and romantasy is attempting to fill it.
Let me explain. We know that young people aren’t getting married. We also know that even adults in their thirties are marrying at lower rates compared to as recently as the 1990s. According to a 2024 report from the Institute for Family Studies, about one in three of today’s young adults are “likely to have never been married by the time they turn 45.” Only 61 percent of thirty-five-year-old men were ever married in 2023, down from 90 percent in 1980. For thirty-five-year-old women, the percentage was only slightly higher, with the share of ever-married women being 70 percent in 2023, down from 93 percent in 1980.
We also know that Gen Z is dating less. Terms like “heteropessimism” are being thrown around the internet. Young men and women both seem largely disillusioned with online dating, yet real-life dating also seems not to be happening much anymore. “Situationships” are the new norm. We are undeniably in a romance drought.
Romantasy is interacting with these social trends in two distinct but interwoven ways. First, it’s tapping into women’s desire for marriage by heavily focusing on forced/arranged marriage and/or enemies-to-lovers themes. Second, it’s mirroring the dating-app consumerist mentality by reducing literature to a TikTokifiable, pick-your-own-adventure set of tropes.
There’s no denying that a lot of romantasy is sexually explicit. But unlike traditional romance novels, which often feature suggestive covers, romantasy book covers are normally safe for the subway. Sex scenes can be graphic but tend to be woven into a larger fantasy quest-type plot. The genre is trying to present itself as at once a guilty pleasure and yet somewhat respectable. Engaging with this kind of literature is not conducive to virtue. But my point here is not to shame women who enjoy it so much as it is to emphasize that their enjoyment stems from a good, albeit misdirected, desire for a happy ending that can ultimately never be satisfied by storytelling.
There’s a marriage-shaped hole in Western societies, and romantasy is attempting to fill it.
For decades now the message that young people have received has been: focus on your career, get married no earlier than your late twenties, don’t have kids until your thirties. Yet the longing for commitment remains. Fantasy settings allow women to entertain the idea of a lifelong union without the reality of modern dating and family formation. I’m a “zillennial,” so I caught the very tail end of the (now largely defunct, I’m told) practice of explicitly asking someone out on a date. Anyone younger than I am is effectively entering the dating market without a script. My theory is that the absence of a relationship script is causing a lot of anxiety in young women, and the relationship dynamics in romantasy are symptomatic of this.
A lot of romantasy heroes and heroines are compelled to commit to their lovers, whether through a forced marriage, captivity, or a predestined mating bond. We are dealing with elves and werewolves and vampires, after all. Novels like A Court of Thorns and Roses and Deborah Harkness’s A Discovery of Witches include such mating bonds that lead to a lifelong union between the protagonists. Even more disturbing, however, is the case of SenLinYu’s Manacled. Now revised and published under the name Alchemised, Manacled was originally a Harry Potter fanfiction also heavily inspired by Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. The premise is that, in an alternate ending to Rowling’s original story, Harry and his friends lose to Lord Voldemort, and protagonist Hermione Granger becomes an enslaved surrogate for the villain Draco Malfoy. They eventually fall in love, despite Hermione’s being raped by Draco. Violence and sexual desire blend to create a distorted view of love in SenLinYu’s book.
We should care about Alchemised because it’s been wildly successful. Published in installments on AO3 as Manacled between 2018 and 2019, the book has been downloaded on the fanfiction website nearly 16 million times. After it blew up on BookTok in 2023, Random House acquired the rights to the novel. Alchemised, all references to the Harry Potter series removed, was published on September 23, 2025. The publisher, the Penguin imprint Michael Joseph, had an initial print run of 750,000 copies. For the sake of comparison, when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was first published in 1997, the original print run was 500 hardback copies. This is not a niche subculture. It’s an indication of women’s misdirected desires.
This twisted desire for commitment in romantasy is then fed through social media–based book marketing. On TikTok, the hashtag #manacled will direct you to tens of thousands of posts. BookTok creators will recommend your next read based on the trope or vibe that appeals to you most. Novels are described not so much based on key themes or ideas, but rather on the aesthetic or formula they follow: dark academia, enemies-to-lovers, dark fantasy, and fake dating being some of the most popular ones. Ironically, although romantasy revolves around this deep-seated desire for permanence, the medium through which readers discover romantasy novels is more akin to the consumeristic mindset of dating apps. We’re choosing literary content like we’re swiping left or right.
But, once again, simply shaming women for indulging in tawdry content won’t fix the problem. We need to acknowledge the root of the issue, which is that as a society we have an unhealthy attitude toward sex. In her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry argues that the sexual revolution of the 1960s diminished the emotional connection between men and women previously required before engaging in sexual activity, thus making it easier for men to exploit women. It could not (and still cannot) erase women’s yearning for a committed relationship. But what it can do is trick a significant minority of women into thinking that violence is somehow a sign of commitment, the implication being that if a man shows aggression, it must follow that he feels strongly about a woman. In the world of romantasy, tropes like abduction and emotional manipulation signal that the male protagonist cares. And women want men to care so much that they will make “spicy” Harry Potter fanfiction into an international bestseller.
Men and women are both victims of the sexual revolution. While secular culture tells us that sex is very important (in that everyone should have access to it on demand), it also suggests that it is unserious. It’s both cheap and yet a hyperfixation. But the extreme opposite, the kind of purity culture found in some fundamentalist Christian groups, is hardly a preferable alternative, as it tells us that sex is extremely serious (in that it should never be contemplated before marriage) but also extremely important (in that after marriage there should be constant access to it). Twilight, a precursor of romantasy, is an excellent example of this. Its author, Stephanie Meyer, is a practicing Mormon, and she famously infused her belief in premarital abstinence in her vampire novels. That might seem like a positive counter to today’s spicy romantasy, but in fact, Meyer’s female protagonist still obsesses over sex. She simply obsesses over not being able to access it before she’s married. Neither sex-positivity nor purity culture is a mindset that fosters healthy relationships between the sexes.
The right counter is, instead, an attitude to sex properly informed by the Christian virtue of chastity: that is, the right ordering, rather than suppression of, sexual desire. To integrate sexual activity into our lives in a healthy way, desire must be directed toward the commitment of marriage and must be given neither more nor less importance than it is due. As C. S. Lewis argued in the chapter on eros in his seminal work The Four Loves, taking sex too seriously can make an idol of it. He didn’t mean, of course, that when, or with whom, one has sex doesn’t matter; rather, that we should view sex as a gift from God, a healthy but not all-defining part of married life. “It is not for nothing that every language and literature in the world is full of jokes about sex,” Lewis wrote. “Many of them may be dull or disgusting … but they embody an attitude to Venus which in the long run endangers the Christian life far less than a reverential gravity. We must not attempt to find an absolute in the flesh. Banish play and laughter from the bed of love and you may let in a false goddess.”
Following Lewis’s logic, the problem with romantasy is not that it is too bawdy, but that it takes sex far too seriously. Female readers of the genre are flocking to explicit fantasy tales because they cannot envision lifelong commitment in real life. If we can fix our society’s marriage problem, our literary taste may well improve as a result. In the meantime, we can expect spicy necromancer novels to continue to climb bestseller lists.
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