Birthdays and Romantasy
An old(er) man and a new genre
Front Matter: Birthdays
Today’s newsletter is coming out a day later than usual, as it was my birthday yesterday. Which always reminds me of the best book-related gift I’ve ever received for my birthday, a collection of short stories all about…birthdays. The anthology is called Birthday Stories and it is edited by the writer Haruki Murakami. It is by far my favorite anthology because it is the most random of themes to organize a collection around. A theme so random the book seems largely out of print in the US. But it’s one of the best collections precisely because it is centered on a universal experience that we don’t often discuss but to which we each bring our own personal history. Are you a birthday person?, a new friend might ask.
The collection features all kinds of stories that take place on or around birthdays, including a few that you might have read before and not have noticed that being set on a birthday was an integral choice to the story. Like Raymond Carver’s “The Bath” (which is the Gordon Lish edited version of the story “A Small Good Thing,”), in which the characters leave a birthday cake abandoned at a bakery because of a tragedy (before I read it in a birthday collection I read it as a emotionally devastating story not a birthday story). Most of the birthdays in the collection are used in sad ways or ways to underscore the horror of a scene; my guess is that by and large writers aren’t “birthday people.” Even if some of the stories are downers, it’s an interesting collection as you get to watch different writers, across time, across place, across style, take someone’s special day and use it as a devastating small detail or a whole engine to the story.
How many of us feel the weight of our birthdays when they’re happening? Even if nothing significant happen that day, our senses seemed to be heighted, we notice our life a little more. And what else is a short story if not a description of a period of time or, usually, a day of outsized importance?
Biggest “News” in Books: Romantasy
Nothing has made me feel like an alien waking up in a strange land—or a science fiction character trapped in a world that’s slightly off kilter from reality—as much as the meteoric rise of the portmanteau genre of Romantasy (Romance + Fantasy). This genre is just what it sounds like, taking the sprawling world building of a fantasy novel (think Lord of the Rings) and combing it with tried-and-true romance tropes (enemies to lovers, love triangles, forbidden love, etc.), and the occasional steamy scene.
Googling “Romantasy” will not turn up any articles from national papers. Spell check does not yet recognize it. The genre has largely lived and died, like many book-related trends, on Tik Tok. Even as an editor and a reader, I didn’t know this term a month ago. Something has changed. Romantasy is making the cultural jump to the mainstream—sitting at the top of bestseller lists and proudly out in the hands of general readers not just the hardcore fan community. The book Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros has now spent 19 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, many of them at #1, selling tens of thousands of copies a week. Yarros has sold out 6 of her 7 events for the next book Iron Flame, and some special editions of the first book are going for $850. Another book from the same independent publisher, Assistant to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer, hit the list a few weeks ago. And while the title of this book sounds like an office satire (which threw me off the scent for a while), it is actually a fantasy romance in which the protagonist goes to work for a Disney-esque villain. My head spins a little bit even writing these log lines.
Where exactly did this new genre come from? Well, we have lived through almost two decades of escapism and fantasy ruling popular culture, from the Harry Potter books, to superhero Marvel domination, to Game of Thrones. All the while this romantic aspect of fantasy—and let’s not be sheepish, sexual element—has existed, just at the periphery surrounding the mainstream audiences for these fantasy worlds. Romantasy largely originates in fan fiction, where writers take existing fictional universes and write their own stories in them, many of them romantic, such as the popular Dramione fandom, which imagines the romantic entanglements of two Harry Potter characters. But until now, most fan fiction has been traditionally self-published for free and shared among online communities. And it’s no coincidence that Fourth Wing and Assistant to the Villain came from an independent publisher that looks a lot closer to a self-published business than to a major publishing house or one of the well-regarded, more traditional small Indie publishers.
The seeds that got us to this mainstream moment for Romantasy are fairly evident; Romantasy being some clear mix of Harry Potter, Fifty Shades of Gray (which famously stems from fan fiction of arguably the first blockbuster Romantasy, The Twilight Saga), Game of Thrones, and Colleen Hoover. Almost like fan fiction, elements of each of these is taken to create some new amalgamation, one that thrives largely on Tik Tok, where readers profess their love for certain characters and debate romantic pairings. It is astonishing to see how far a general audience, especially younger readers, especially women, have shifted their taste. Romantasy seems to show that there is an endless appetite for greater and greater escape. While romantic comedies have also had their concurrent meteoric rise—proceeding this genre—for a large readership it seems it is not enough to find your dream guy or girl in a bookshop. Put Romeo and Juliet on a dragon and have them fight an epic war before they hook up, and then we’re talking.
The appeal of this genre may be in its hybrid identity. Just as the rise of the Kindle allowed a huge audience to read Fifty Shades with discretion, Romantasy allows a younger generation to read about sex with a lot more safety, socially. You won’t find any shirtless men or seductive women on the covers of Romantasy novels, bestseller or not. They look like fantasy books, the ones you might have read as a kid, and as I understand it, they lead with the fantasy piece in the storytelling as well. These authors build entire worlds before things get explicit. The packaging and palace intrigue provides enough cover for the reader not to commit to the idea that they’re reading a dirty book.
I tried my hand at reading Romantasy a couple of months ago, before I even had a name to put to the genre. But even without having the term at hand, what struck me was how much of Romantasy is not only grounded in the fan fiction style that came before it, but also how much the novel I read felt like a young adult novel playing pretend grownup. There’s cursing, sex, and violence in Romantasy novels, and they appear on the adult not the young adult bestseller list. While the existence of these traits might make a teenager think a novel is an adult novel, when you read a young adult novel or one written in that style but masquerading as adult you quickly realize “adult themes” are not the distinction between young- and full- adult at all. Adult novels are distinguished by depth and complexity—and while nudity, sword fights, and swearing can be part of that, they certainly aren’t requirements. For this reason, Romantasy is hard for me to get interested in. Increasingly, as I get older (see: Birthday Stories) pure genre, especially fantasy, has become less interesting. Part of this is that you become a better and more experienced reader as you age, so it takes a lot more descriptive talent to spark imagination and awe with fantastical elements (e.g. “there was a terrifying dragon flying across the sky” just doesn’t elicit much fear or imagery in the mind as it once did, at least in this thirty-year-old reader).
In pure genre, dragons and supernatural powers and magic feel more like props than integral pieces of storytelling. An elaborate, but fairly formulaic, way to get to the main point which is romance or in other instances some garden variety hero’s quest. There’s a lot less true surprise in pure genre, by design. What makes me most curious is if a more elevated version will ever come out of this genre. Do the readers of Romantasy even want that? The answer is probably not. They come for comfort not genuine surprise. But it’s amusing to think about the possibility of trying to add serious themes and adult concerns to this genre. Is there an Ursula K. Le Guin of Romantasy out there? There’s nothing inherent to Romantasy that says writers can’t use these same tools to try for something more complex. But as long as the roots of its young adult and fan fiction still show, it will remain, for me, a slightly baffling trend to observe at a distance.