Romantasy, the hot new literary genre du jour
A friend recently found himself trapped on a plane next to a young woman reading a Kindle bedecked with stickers of dragons and pointy-eared, hunky men. The font size was so large it was impossible not to see the sexually explicit text. He observed, “I was reading The Lord of the Rings; her book was more along the lines of I’m the Lord of Your Ring. I’ve never felt so uncomfortable.” Welcome to the cultural phenomenon of romantasy — a newly mainstreamed trend fueled by TikTok, or rather BookTok. It’s a shame there isn’t room in the portmanteau name for “sex,” which is a crucial ingredient in the genre, made clearer in the alternative informal term “fairy porn.
