What is Romantasy?

The origins of Fairy P*rn

At its most prosaic Romantasy is a marketing term coined by publishers to tantalise readers with the prospect of smouldering sex in their fantasy romps. Whilst the term, a portmanteau of ‘romance’ and ‘fantasy’ feels marketing department, the concept and content are as old as literary time. For as long as there have been literary Elven Queens, there have been those heroically trying to seduce them.

Greek Myths abound with the beauty and violence of love, stories that underpin many of the tropes that frame fantasy fiction, but it is Shakespeare’s Midsummer Nights Dream that is most redolent for me. Here we have a world of fairy Kings (Oberon) and Queens (Titania) pitted as jealous rivals, wielding arcane magic to test their seductive arts and play with mortal minds. This conflict of magic and mortal lies at the heart of Romantasy writing. The world of fantasy allows us to suspend disbelief and to explore the more primal aspects of what it is to be human in a world removed from our own. The best of these worlds are at once familiar, mostly medievalcore with the disruptor of magic at their heart. Sex has always been a part of fantasy writing, but it has taken the success of writers such as Sarah J. Maas and her A Court of Thorns and Roses series to have publishers rush to define this bestselling fantasy genre better. Sex is no longer an aside, it is a main event. Fairy p*rn has trounced the brooding and the lovelorn.

I have no doubt I will return to the cultural reasons as to why Romantasy is finding a much broader audience than traditional Fantasy, but at it’s most basic for me is a generation that came of age reading Harry Potter and now seeks something more reflective of the adult romantic experience - they are also the generation that grew up in tandem with the proliferation of internet p*rn and its disturbing extremes of expression. I can’t help thinking that Romantasy is a reaction to this and the intimacy of the imagined fantasy experience over the video and the visceral.

Romantasy becomes foreplay in a world of distorted sexual politics. Romantasy is a world to indulge in fantasies that have no bearing on reality - offering us respite from the mundanity and velocity of modern life.

Literature and art have long been champions of the erotic experience, often subsuming the erotic into teasing imagery that reflects the permissiveness and openness of the age in which they were created. The internet has rather done away with this coy challenging of social conventions around eroticism. Kinks and niches abound in disturbing instantaneous technicolor - we have lost the slow art of seduction of the mind, the art of appealing to our imagination over our eyes. The art of romance and fantasy fiction to delight us with their otherness of world and being.

At a time when the world feels so brutal and raw, a retreat into a fantasy realm feels necessary, perhaps even meditative and restorative. I am excited to explore how Romantasy writing can enliven and thrill the primal fabric of our beings.

I am nervous about sharing work, which by its very nature invites wry commentary - the world of erotica has ever been thus, but Substack feels like the right place to share writing that places the seduction of words at its heart. I hope in sharing work to make myself more accountable - to escape my writers vacuum and refine my craft.

I intend to publish regularly to the Substack app and will send a singular email each Wednesday highlighting new work, artwork and posts (such as this) on the writing process. I hope to create stories that speak to our attention deficit times and offer us a seductive rekindling of the erotic literary experience.

Please consider supporting this endeavour by sharing, restacking and recommending this post 🙏🏽.