Readers of young adult fiction, who have long been drawn to stories that combine relatable characters and fantastical elements (think Twilight or The Hunger Games), have been aging into new reading levels and more adult content. Enter Romantasy, which combines romance and fantasy elements. It is currently one of the fastest growing publishing genres and a “massive focus” for TikTok fandoms. No small part of the popularity of romantasy is owing to the fact that the genre has associations beyond its mix of romance plots with otherworldly imaginative settings and characters. These associations are … sexual. Romantasy usually has what fans call “spice.” Readers can expect detailed, extended, and—naturally—extraordinary sex scenes. Extraordinary how, exactly?
A remarkable range of popular contemporary romantasy series feature relationships between human women and non-human males, from dragons to mermen. There is Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses and its sequels, in which women commingle with immortal faeries; Carissa Broadbent’s The Serpent and the Wings of Night, featuring a female protagonist who is the only human daughter of a vampire king; or Tentacle Entanglement, a “monster mates” book by “Siggy Shade,” the title of which tells you what you need to know. Often these relationships involve “fated mates,” with the males unable to escape an exorable drive to love the women with the utmost passionate devotion. All of these are huge on BookTok. What is the appeal of these novels, and why do they seem to be proliferating now?
In Ruby Dixon’s Ice Planet Barbarians, a series now numbering 21 titles, women trapped far from Earth learn to survive with the help of erotically gifted aliens. In the first book in the series, human Georgie awakens on a spaceship wearing only a light pyjama set. (Fortunately, it’s cute.) After heading out in search of sustenance or aid, she is rescued from danger by alien Vektal, who brings her out of a temporary unconsciousness in a surprising way: cunnilingus. Georgie is aware that she should not enjoy what he is doing—he is a total stranger, and an alien—but she can’t help herself given how rare the pleasure is: “I’ve dated guys that I haven’t been able to convince to go down on me, and this one’s doing it as a greeting.” Aliens are unfamiliar with human mores. Vektal does not know not to love performing oral sex. Nor does he know about consent.
This invitation to temporarily suspend investment in socially expected forms of gendered comportment turns out to be key to the whole reading experience. Vektal has no choice but to pursue Georgie, because his “khui,” an inner essence that is something like a brain and a heart combined, “resonates” when he sees her. He describes the resonance as an inescapable “possessiveness”: “Your mate is yours … It is more than a feeling. It is knowing,” because one’s “khui chooses the mate, and the khui is never wrong.” There is no wondering or considering involved, no ticking of boxes; there are no mixed signals.
Vektal is a hunter and provider, very much a traditional heroic archetype. Against a cold and threatening landscape (it’s an ice planet!) he represents youth, strength, and vitality. But Ice Planet Barbarians is comically knowing about its revisioning of classic romance tropes (the damsel in distress, the lonely hunter). A set of explosive sex scenes, focused on Georgie’s pleasure, indicate Vektal’s dominant and yet gentle, attentive, loving nature and commitment to her fulfillment. He will gladly do anything for his mate, and he is strong enough to pick her up and “fling [her] over his shoulder, caveman-style.” Yet he is no brute. In sex, there are “No demanding touches. No insisting of anything. Just pleasure in touching me. In pleasing me.” Nor does he want Georgie to be weak. Instead, he is pained by “her vulnerability, her fragility” and vows that it “must be corrected.” She is in an inhospitable environment and needs to be strong to survive: “I despair at how helpless my mate is,” he states. He lets her have one of his knives. He helps her learn to fight.
And Georgie remains a girl's girl. Romance fandom is a space for women’s sociality and friendship. Ruby Dixon honors that. Georgie feels guilty about leaving the other women stranded at the ship; she wants them to have what she has. She decides to find them and consult with them about what they want, even if it means trying to return to Earth, leaving Vektal behind. When the women are deciding whether to stay, Georgie makes Vektal promise that no woman be forced into a relationship with a man, and he confirms: “Any male who wishes to mate a human woman must have her by agreement.”
Georgie explains to Vektal that, lost in some distant galaxy, “Something has to be my choice … So many things have been taken from me. I need to claim something for myself.” Vektal can only “resonate” with one being, so if she rejects him, he will be doomed to a life of loneliness. “She doesn’t feel the teeth-aching need to claim,” he laments. “She doesn’t feel the hollowness of a lonely spirit.” In all of this, he really has no say in the matter. She is the one who gets to decide, without fear, compromise, or force. It is a fantasy, in other words, of a man’s total commitment and compulsion to love, but without domination or control.
This invitation to temporarily suspend investment in socially expected forms of gendered comportment turns out to be key to the whole reading experience.
Is the point of using aliens, then, just that Dixon is helping her readers get around the difficulty of imagining human males behaving in the ways that her novels would need them to? “An actual man could never,” a friend once quipped. That’s certainly part of it. There is more to it though. Contemporary romantic relationships are fraught with anxiety, unease, uncertainty, ambivalence, and boredom, and yet feelings of emotional disinvestment and disaffiliation hardly release people from the pressure to maintain the bonds of coupledom—bonds that people are after all compelled into for many reasons. Worries about whether dating and relationships are worth it clash with significant challenges to complete exit from the pressure to form couples. The complex negotiation is then itself a cause of pervasive anxiety.
“My boyfriend sucks.” “I wish I was a lesbian.” These performances of ambivalence about heterosexuality—or what some critics have come to refer to as heteropessimism—can themselves help acclimate people to what they experience as inescapable. By providing imaginative release from the frustrations and constraints of heterosexuality, romance fiction can do this also. Against the particular emotive mess of contemporary heterosexuality, in short, popular romance continues to be reliably able to mediate prevalent anxieties and offer people a means of fantasizing about resplendent fulfillment in love.
Fantasies featuring non-human males, in particular, imagine a partner free of human social inhibitions and yet—importantly—safe and caring. The heroine is the unquestioned, unique love object, utterly irreplaceable; and while responsible for significant and heroic tasks, she is released from the burden of isolation in that work and can count on her partner to take control when it matters.
Outside of the romance universe, women continue to be in reluctant command of much of the work of emotional management within relationships; they continue to do most of the world’s childcare and housework despite also working for money. Aren’t fantasies of release from the work of decision and control bound to resonate with such an audience? The business of these books is simply the provision of imaginative exit from these everyday traps, and more: from uncertainty and disquiet, yes, but also from wondering what a man wants, from the humiliation of having to cajole him into sex that you find enjoyable, from having to perform sexual satisfaction, and from the feeling of being linked to someone through necessity or practicality rather than through anything like the genuine romantic desire. No doubt you can extend this list yourself.
Ice Planet Barbarians ends with Vektal reminding Georgie that “we mate for life.” This is reassurance that he willingly offers when she wonders in her human way if he could ever resonate with someone else. The two are content; happy endings are basically a genre requirement. But they are also thinking about what is to come for the other women and their alien companions, and they speculate together on a likely next couple. This propels readers toward the novel’s sequel. Each book in the series continues with another pairing between human female and alien male, promising a continuous experience of the same initial pleasure derived from the pairing of Georgie and Vektal.
The romance genre is built upon this kind of playful development of repeated scripts, which differ from one another in sometimes subtle aspects. In this way romance novels actually anticipate BookTok content creation, as people cleverly pick up and adapt video scripts from one another. Romance fiction and its online fandom are highly complementary. With each new title in a series, authors and fans have the occasion to revisit the entire suite of content and discuss favorite titles, characters, and moments. The reading experience can be repeated, reinforced, renewed.
The pleasure of the text can be revisited, and deepened, via short-form videos that cast the characters as famous actors, that feature fan art, that rank titles, and so much else that develops the reading experience into something more encompassing. One’s top book can always be found in this more digestible form, condensed in affective content even when more extended reading is not feasible. In one video, TikTok user @jenbenbooks describes having read six Ice Planet novels in just five days. She works 40-plus hours per week and is parenting a toddler. She can barely fit reading into this schedule; and yet, she feelingly states, “Bitch, I made time for these books.”
Ice Planet Barbarians has often featured among the “comfort series” listed by BookTok users, alongside the ubiquitous Sarah J. Maas, and Rebecca Yarros’s The Empyrean series, which fans characterize as “horny dragon” novels. The comfort series is a unique genre of contemporary cultural life. It suggests the power of romantasy and its fandom as a respite from life’s ever-present worries, disappointments, and compulsions. In essence, the pleasure of reading any one romance novel is heightened by the serial promise of the content’s perpetual return, whether that means a new book featuring similar characters or scenes, or a new fan video that can instantly return you to the emotive appeal of the reading experience.
The “most authentic vocation of romance in our time,” Fredric Jameson argued, is to express “the radical impoverishment and constriction of modern life.” He was of course highly attuned to the utopian dimensions of mass culture. To envision romance with a non-human other is to look to a future in which the primary bonds of life can take new, less misery-inducing and disappointing forms. At the same time, as Janice Radway famously argued in her own pioneering work on romance readers, the relief of fantasizing can also make the status quo more endurable. Romantasy puts utopian erotic and romantic fulfillment in another world, beyond reach. Even if he wanted to try, your partner is probably not going to live up to the standards of the fae prince. A tension appears, then, between utopian yearning and the mundane work of making do. We cannot resolve this tension. It is fundamental to the role that cultural consumption plays in so many of our lives.
Jameson also argued that literature provides imaginative resolution to real social contradictions. The work of the critic was, for him, not to say a particular work was politically good or bad, but to uncover a text’s political unconscious—the underlying historical transformations that are its conditions of formation and its latent content. Let him be our guide here. The political unconscious of books like Ice Planet Barbarians is the disappointments of heterosexuality in conditions that propel people into couple-based life regardless of anyone’s real feelings about it. The popularity of these books has everything to do with our unique historical conjuncture, in which we find, coexisting, an outmoded social organization around heteronormative coupling, and a still emergent newer disposition that is dissatisfied with compulsory heterosexuality. Women want something different from their relationships with men. So different that it can only be figured as alien.
