I wrote in my last post that I planned to interrogate the phenomenon of romantasy fiction. So I shall. The subgenre has been the subject of probably countless articles, discussions, analyses at this point, but I think it is worth revisiting in light of its continued smash-hit commercial success—and in the context of our modern moment. The most obvious place to start a discussion is with its current standard-bearer: the Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros, perhaps more instantly recognizable for the three titles currently on shelves and bestseller lists (Fourth Wing, Iron Flame, Onyx Storm, with two more planned), each which has dominated the book market since the first installment in the series was released just under two years ago.
Before reviewing and assessing Fourth Wing and its sequels, a broader examination of the trend it is a part of is in order.
The idea that fantasy (or science fiction, for that matter) might contain some sort of romantic arc is far from novel (no pun intended). Likewise the idea that a romance novel might contain some fantastic elements is hardly new. The biggest distinction between the two, historically, lay partly in emphasis of various plot and character elements, but moreso in marketing. Fantasy was marketed as an archetypical part of nerd subculture, right up there with tabletop roleplay games, space operas, comic books, and eventually video games as well. Nearly every aspect of this culture was deeply gendered; male consumers and in particular adolescents were the main target audience, as can be seen in the often lurid covers of the countless mass-market paperbacks that were churned out during this time. The romance market, meanwhile, had been stubbornly aimed at primarily female consumers for decades, a trend which by and large remains unshaken. Breaching the firewall between these two main consumer groups was not particularly intuitive in a vacuum.
How, then, could fantasy and romance be brought together? The seeds for the new market were sown in the wave of young adult (YA) fiction that swept through classrooms and school libraries in the late 1900s, 2000s and early 2010s. The pump was primed first by YA-fantasy series like (sigh) Harry Potter and Percy Jackson & The Olympians, whose titular raven-haired young male protagonists find their ordinary modern lives upended by a magical birthright and must fight to save their worlds while negotiating ordinary-kid issues of friendship and romance; a second, overlapping wave was led by The Hunger Games, which set a blueprint of strong female main characters, dystopian settings, violence and/or intrigue as a precondition of survival, and the ever-present romantic elements, all of which were relentlessly copied by legions of imitators. Importantly, all three of these series had strong fanbases that reached across gender lines.
Coming into the 2010s, the publishing industry and the authors who fed the metaphorical grist to its mill had already understood that women were avid writers and consumers of thrillers, mysteries, and horror—in other words, that female readers were not shy to violence, danger, complex plots, and narrative tension. Now the widespread success of both the fantasy and dystopian strains of YA demonstrated that much of the next generation of young women not only tolerated the incorporation of things like magic and otherworldly settings in their reading habits, but that they expected and demanded them. The YA market responded accordingly, experimenting with various combinations of romance, action, and magical or futuristic worlds, figuring out what worked and what didn't.
What would happen, though, when these YA readers grew up? The phrase of the hour is "new adult fiction", a marketing term which attempts to essentially provide continuity from the YA market into a style of fiction that is fundamentally fairly similar to YA in its tone and angle—action, intrigue, romance, fantastic or futuristic elements—but that is aimed at a more mature audience, most notably with the inclusion of explicit sexual content. Romantasy can be seen as the leading light of the new adult fiction trend, combining the escapism and high-stakes thrills of fantasy with the emotional roller coaster of romance to deliver the natural successor to The Hunger Games and dystopian YA. Of course, this trend doesn't exist in a vacuum; the current political landscape, particularly in a post-COVID, post-Roe world, has left young women (particularly middle-class progressives) feeling increasingly unstable. A desire to escape into a fantasy realm where a strong female character can genuinely mark her own path, in blood if necessary, is a natural response to the current sense of helplessness that persists. Previous works like Sarah J. Maas' A Court of Thorns and Roses series had begun to make waves, but romantasy hadn't fully found its feet yet. Flash back to the time of the Dobbs decision: readers ache for something that can address the moment, however indirectly. A standard bearer is needed.
In 2023, a romance author named Rebecca Yarros steps directly into the center of the ring. Less than three months later, Fourth Wing dances lightly across the highest ranks of the NYT Bestseller List. Its sequel, Iron Flame joins it there not long after. TikTok, always an excellent place to track Gen Z trends, is alight with discussion of fan theories and recommendations for other books. Up until this point the tide of romantasy has already been rising. Whether Fourth Wing creates the flood or is simply the wave that crests the berms is a matter of reasonable discussion, but given its smashing success, it is hard to argue against the basic premise that the dam broke the day it came out.
The romance plot elements of the Empyrean series are relatively predictable, and are generally the least interesting or innovative aspects of the series. Violet Sorrengail—the story's twenty-year-old narrator and main character, destined for a quiet life as a scribe until her war-college-commandant mother orders her to become a dragon-rider instead—falling hopelessly for shadow-wielding bad-boy Xaden Riorson, the son of a treasonous lord, over her eminently sensible and by-the-book former crush Dain Aetos. It's all very classic good-girl-goes-bad fare; Xaden has self-control issues when Violet is in danger, Violet insists that she's tough and can handle herself, former flames of each resurface throughout the series and pose temporary though ultimately unimportant setbacks to their relationship. Readers who are here primarily for romance and smut will likely be disappointed; indeed, a frequent complaint about the sequels seems to be that they spend too much time on plot and not enough time in the bedroom.
What Fourth Wing and especially Iron Flame and Onyx Storm may lack in their serviceability as straightforward romance, they make up for by being fairly good as works of fantasy. The Kingdom of Navarre, home to dragon riders which has a fairly contentious relationship with its neighbor Poromiel and its gryphon-flyers, is safe from intrusion behind its magical wards, but in the first book, it is revealed that this comes at the expense of Pomoriel, which has been fighting an increasingly challenging battle against venin: humans corrupted by direct contact with magic, whose existence is closely suppressed in Navarre. It becomes clear that Navarre's approach of crouching in relative safety is untenable, and the series to date has focused on various battles against the venin and attempts to rally a unified front against them.
The magic system is one area of interest; rather than relying on the common fantasy tropes of ancestry and inheritance, dragon-riders recieve magical powers ("signets") from their dragons once bonded, a single ability that is theirs to control and master as they see fit. The gryphon-flyers of Poromiel recieve their abilities through similar means, though their powers are generally more subtle. The venin are humans who draw "from the source", pulling magic directly from the earth, which slowly turns them evil. Magic is open to anyone strong enough for it, either by surviving enough challenges and showing enough strength to earn the respect of a dragon or gryphon, or by being willing to draw from the source, with the transformation into a venin as the seemingly inevitable result. Even within the Dragon Riders' Quadrant, the opportunity to ride and to take a signet from the dragon that chooses them is open to anyone willing to take the risks; princes, commoners, even rebels are shown to earn the right to ride. It's a welcome change of pace from the typical bloodline-oriented tropes common throughout fantasy; these tropes can be challenged or subverted very effectively (as in Tracey Deeon's Legendborn), but even otherwise fairly progressive works struggle to break free from the common tendency to set key plot elements in the hands of hereditary magics and titles in ways that feel uninspired at best and actively reactionary at worst.
The geopolitics of Empyrean are perhaps less charitably read. Navarre and Poromiel are both hereditary monarchies, though Onyx Storm offers a look at alternative systems of government in practice among the various islands south of the main continent. It is not clear what system of governance the venin favor; the structure of the venin armies, and presumably whatever society exists among them more generally, seems to be hierarchical and meritocratic, with the more powerful and more experienced venin taking the lead. Initially, Navarre is shown to be vigorously isolationist, even with its leadership fully aware of the challenges taking place beyond its borders; much like Edgar Allen Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, the illusion of safety behind seemingly impenetrable defenses is just that—illusory—and the challenge of learning how to work with both upstart would-be rebels and neighboring Poromiel proves vexing. Nevertheless internationalism and multilateralism are shown as virtues in the face of a common foe, a supernatural and ontologically evil invading force from the East. This can be read as a startlingly naked allegory for American neoliberalism and Atlanticism, a view which once might have been the obvious norm but which in the present moment seems clearly to be in need of some ideological defense (and this tracks well with Yarros' own liberal politics and her family connections to the U.S. military). Violet's hope that a cure for the venin condition can be found is not one that seems to have much evidence to back it up by the end of Onyx Storm, but even were one to be found, it would not change the fundamental fact that the venin are intrinsically wicked, cutting themselves off from their own humanity, and even if it were possible to reject the venin condition in some way, the choice would simply be between cure or death. Is it too much a stretch to compare this to the old "Better dead than red"?
This is not to say that Fourth Wing and its sequels are bad books, per se. On the contrary, they are well-written, reasonably well-stocked with decent characters, plot, and worldbuilding, and generally respectable as both fantasy and romance books, though fans of each genre in isolation sometimes find them wanting. Nevertheless their success is indicative. There are no radical themes to be found here: the young protagonists of the series understand that their society is flawed and based on lies, but they are nevertheless compelled to take up arms to defend it against an external threat that would shatter it entirely, while urging their myopic leaders (often, their own parents) to look beyond their ingrained mindset of "Navarre First" and band together with their neighbors to fight said threat. Sound familiar? Despite the memorable closing sentence of Fourth Wing, a revolution this is not.
This approach is not unique. Many other romantasy and adjacent novels weigh themselves down with the unnecessary baggage of faux-radical, centrist, or downright reactionary political systems. Kristen Ciccarelli's Crimson Moth duology pairs a compelling magical system with gripping action and star-crossed enemies-turned-lovers, all set in a dreary, puritanical revolutionary society where the tyranny of sadistic witch-queens has been replaced with an equally vicious government of paranoid zealots. The affect is one of smug, both-sides centrism—well, of course the red-flag-flying post-revolutionary society that burns any woman with the telltale silver scars or darkened blood of witchcraft has gone too far in its excesses, but that doesn't mean the matriarchal aristocracy that preceded it was a garden of delights, either...
Rebecca Ross' Divine Rivals & Ruthless Vows, while otherwise well-written and highly acclaimed, similarly struggle to establish a coherent politic. For a duology set in a fantasy take on the First World War, it misses the crucial point of that war: its utter pointlessness. The war in Divine Rivals is a war between gods, both of whom are not unwilling to murder their peers to gain even the slightest edge, but there is nevertheless a sense of us and them, that for Dacre's forces to win would represent a victory for evil. If this is meant to be a take on World War One, it is one that fails to acknowledge that that clash of colonial titans was one not motivated by goodness or truth on any particular side, but by ambitious monarchs and scheming politicians hoping to destabilize their neighbors, seize their territory and resources, and acheive imperial dominance over the world. Indeed, those in the story who are willing to organize against the lingering power of all the gods are portrayed as cutthroat and trigger-happy—not the true villains of the story, but certainly not its heroes, either. At least these stories examine these power dynamics at all. Other romantasy books don't even bother: A Court of Thorns and Roses is generic all around, and its political content (such as it is) is so vacuous as to barely exist in the first place. (It's possible this changes later in the series, but I found the first book to be so tedious that I have no interest in finding out myself.)
Yet other books under or adjacent to the romantasy umbrella do not shy away from politics. Take Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series, whose clairvoyant protagonist Paige Mahoney has been forced to live a double life by an oppressive, expansionist regime that kills or abducts those like her, and who stubbornly seeks to incite and organize a rebellion while navigating the increasingly treacherous waters of forbidden attraction. As with many of the other romantasy books previously mentioned, it's well-written, etc., but unlike many of the others, its protagonists end up engaged in an armed struggle for their lives and their freedom—and, in the case of Paige and many of her colleagues, their homelands as well (a defiant Irish anti-imperial streak runs through the series). The series has received renewed and attention of late with the release of author-revised editions of the first four books and an all-new fifth (the series is planned to have seven books total), but its public profile is nowhere near that of Fourth Wing, Divine Rivals, or even Shannon's Priory of the Orange Tree, a sapphic epic fantasy that, while solid in its own right, is substantially less exhilarating and innovative than The Bone Season.
Taken together, it seems that romantasy readers and writers are angling for a form of escapism that promotes agency, especially that of their female protagonists: the freedom to make their own way in life, to take up arms, ride dragons, wield magic, battle monsters and witches and gods, and bed any man they choose (emphasis on man—queer side characters are prevalent, main characters somewhat less so). But it is less frequent for that escapism to espouse anything resembling a genuinely revolutionary sentiment. The societies in which romantasy characters find themselves are flawed, sometimes fundamentally so, but their characters are often either unwilling or unable to unmake those societies to the extent that is needed to address the underlying issues brought about by the story (or, in the unmaking, choose to rebuild in a manner laughably incapable with dealing with the issues at hand).
Is this practiced helplessness a deliberate decision on the part of authors, editors, and publishers? Or is it the result of subconscious capitalist realism seeping in, a disembodied voice whispering from the edge of the bed that this is the best we can do? Is it just that readers have self-selected for the books that match a value system that they find desirable? It hardly matters; whatever the cause, the outcome.
To be clear: I have read and enjoyed my share of romantasy. The genre is populated with good writers who are writing compelling stories, many of which hold their own against the conventional male-gazing fantasy template. And perhaps a genre that isn't predicated on taking itself extremely seriously at all times doesn't need to be a source of cogent political critique. Nevertheless, it is perhaps worth thinking about the fact that one of the most popular fiction genres at the moment, especially among a demographic with enough socioeconomic stability to avidly purchase and consume new books and not much more, has, over the past few years, developed a canon whose form of escapism still denies the reader the ultimate freedom: the ability to imagine a world better than ours.
—coronabeth