Romantasy

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

It’s time to turn the page on ‘romantasy’

I wrote recently about my delight that an excellent second-hand bookshop has opened in my home city of Oxford. Well, karma has come around. In the upmarket district of Jericho, it’s recently been announced that Britain’s first ‘romantasy bookshop’, Bad Girl Books, will open next month. The shop is run by an American expatriate named Starlin Marot and is the permanent manifestation of a series of pop-up events she ran in London that have attracted thousands of readers.  Marot told the Oxford Mail: ‘The reason I like the romantasy genre so much is because it is so inclusive and empowering. It can be empowering to celebrate stories written by women, which feature women's voices and desires. I'm really looking forward to meeting lots of new customers.

Thursday

William Moore

Under ctrl, the Epping migrant protests & why is ‘romantasy’ so popular?

From our UK edition

39 min listen

First: the new era of censorship A year ago, John Power notes, the UK was consumed by race riots precipitated by online rumours about the perpetrator of the Southport atrocity. This summer, there have been protests, but ‘something is different’. With the introduction of the Online Safety Act, ‘the government is exerting far greater control over what can and can’t be viewed online’. While the act ‘promises to protect minors from harmful material’, he argues that it is ‘the most sweeping attempt by any liberal democracy to bring the online world under the control of the state’.

Monday

Octavia Sheepshanks

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.

romantasy