Romantasy’s protagonists tend not to bear the burden of personhood too heavily: they are perfectly plastic creations, stiff to the touch but moldable as needed.
Romantasy sex scenes function not as spicy interludes between events but as critical moments of world-building and character formation, much like song-and-dance sequences in musical theater.
The adjectives “primal” and “feral” appear frequently in romantasy, most notably in the work of Maas, who has made something of an art of using them as much as possible.
Series such as Twilight and Harry Potter “molded generations of young readers who have grown up but still crave big fantasy novels — now with a dose of erotica,”
At the highest level of abstraction, this kind of remixing carries a whiff of what the critic Jason Farago termed, in 2023, the “glacially slow Ferris wheel” of contemporary culture, “cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around,” although down in the trenches of fan culture it is a sign of the genre at work.
- Romance and fantasy are each dominated by distinct tropes, but romantasy takes this feature and turbocharges it. The internet, and TikTok in particular, has made it easier than ever for the selection of tropes to precede the acts of reading and writing. In January, Katy Waldman reported for The New Yorker that trope-oriented hashtags allow romantasy “authors to tune their creative process to the story elements that are getting the most attention online,” just as readers can use them to sort through the digital muck and locate the stories most to their liking, be they “broody protector,” “shadow daddy,” “morally gray,” “secret stalker,” “star-crossed lovers,” “opposites attract,” “Hades and Persephone,” “magic academy,” “virgin,” “dark elves,” or, among many others, “I can fix him.”
The romantasy protagonists sure are powerful (and they never give up), but, at critical junctures throughout their stories, they also exhibit a strange, inert kind of power, as if they have all the trappings of agency but none of its substance. The scholar Regis noted that the heroines of traditional romance novels win a “provisional” freedom in their happy endings: “freed from the barriers to her union with the hero,” they are nevertheless bound by their relationships to society. The empowered women of romantasy experience a provisional freedom not by virtue of the patriarchy, but by virtue of the fairy tale as literary form. Living in non-allegorical Secondary Worlds, especially ones with imperatives toward happy endings, the prominent characters of romantasy are overdetermined, by fate and by trope alike.
In each book, the author resolves the crucial mess of matchmaking by leaning on some variation of the concept of “mates” who are paired in a poorly understood metaphysical sense.
A lifelong relationship set in motion and then in stone by the conspiring universe: dream of the failed Hinge user, overwhelmed by options and a surfeit of power to choose.
In this regard, the protagonists in romantasy are more archaic than those found in literary fiction, where characters tend to develop over the course of the narrative via a series of decisive actions. In the realist novel, if the actions that characters take are to mean anything, it’s because they occur under the illusion that the outcome is open-ended until the very moment it isn’t. […] The inevitable conclusion of the story presses only lightly against the plot, maintaining the necessary fiction that the choices made in the novel are like the choices made in life, where the things we do and why we do them matter precisely — even only — because they could have been otherwise.
The romantasy badasses, on the other hand, are stranded somewhere between prophecy and personhood. Most of the decisive, soul-forming decisions they, in theory, would have to take are avoided thanks to a deus ex machina or the machinations of destiny.
[T]he characters cannot come alive as actors in their own stories, as agents in their own timelines. It’s freedom from fate that imposes the possibility of action and the obligation to act. And action — that way of touching existence, being inside of experience, engaging with the mess of life — is what makes the world, to use Keats’s phrase, “the vale of soul-making.” It’s also what makes it, for that matter, the vale of adulthood.
As shaggy plots amble along for hours and hours of reading time, the novels deliver sexual resolution in place of narrative resolution. When physical climaxes are shatteringly achieved, all discomfort with the plot-that-is-no-plot (are we still waiting for the King of Hybern to attack?) melts away into a pleasant, sticky dew.
The power of the fairy tale in the post-adult age lies in its ability to recuperate the energies of a life of action and meaning in a form that doesn’t require getting off the couch. The conspiracist senses that for her, as for Feyre and Violet, the most important decisions about her life have been already made by forces over which she has no control, which have the power to end the world as she knows it. This realization spurs not action but a pantomime of action, the inhabitation of a story with heroes and villains in which the individual is shrunk to near nothing in relation to overwhelming systemic or natural forces, a story that endlessly renews itself through commentary and elaboration, setting off an ever-swelling surge of fantasy. There is, in the end, no escape: in their stilted figurations of the human, their worlds of suspended action, their sexed-up technicolor frivolity, romantasy novels are our great monuments to reality.
The air of tragedy and paralysis that overhangs so much of American life is, perhaps more than declining rates of marriage or property ownership, the real source of strength for the particular type of fairy-tale narrative that has come to dominate our literature. Because what are you supposed to do with your time between now and the end of the world? What should you do with your one adult life?