Who did this to you?

Hear me out – a great cultural revolution is taking place. While awards shortlists and MFA programs continue stanning the traumatic and/or autofictional, and people whose minds might once have been usefully deployed spiral into the madness of St Jerome attempting to parse the all-caps gnomic nonsenses of Altman, Trump et al., That Which is Actually Read has moved into some very interesting territory indeed.

By far the most remarkable literary phenomenon of our times – the genre known variously as romantasy, New Adult fiction, horny fairy books, and monster smut – has quietly effected a Napoleonic takeover of the cultural realm that has traditionally been the most responsible for linguistic and social change, and yet, at the same time, of least interest to researchers and commentators: the inner lives of women. As we clear away the soggy confetti from the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, it is worth recognising that this has happened before, and in notably similar ways. The mass literary culture of the long eighteenth century – Austen’s inheritance, the sows’ ears out of which she created six unsurpassably gorgeous silk purses – served the same long-neglected and disparaged demographic. In Europe cheaper print technology and the rise of the circulating library allowed the novel (and at that time, they were almost all romance novels) to flourish. Today internet fanfiction and self-publishing platforms grow alongside discounted e-books and subscription services such as Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited. We can now all consume as much fictional trash as Catherine Morland on a rainy day in Regency Bath – or rather more, with our access to electricity and self-lit e-readers – and at considerably less expense.

The writing of eighteenth-century novels was a largely amateur affair. Almost all were written by women (or at least under feminine pseudonyms) and by authors educated to literacy in their mother tongue but not much further. Few expected, and not many made, any money out of their novels; only a handful earned anything approaching a living from it. This was partly due to publishers’ careful business practices and mostly to do with the economics of the book industry, but low prospects of remuneration for writers certainly did not slow their production. It was in their coverage of novels that the magazines of the eighteenth century first began to feel the strain of reviewing all publications, on all topics. The whinging of critics about the ‘trash with which the press now groans’ was a cliché long before Northanger Abbey, but claims that novels had become a ‘drug on the market’, as economists once said, were clearly mistaken. There was an almost terrifying deluge, with new publishing companies like the infamously low brow Minerva Press forming to cope with submissions, but this could not keep pace with the desperate demand for content. In 1776, as in 2026, a novel (with the possible singular exception of Samuel Johnson’s 1759 Rasselas) takes far longer to write than it does to read.

The blurring of novel consumer and producer in the eighteenth century has its echoes in the fan-made fictions that began to proliferate in late 1990s internet culture. Then as now such works pushed at the limits of contemporary eroto-literary possibility. The episodic television that dominated screens at the end of the twentieth century relied on what was not very euphemistically called ‘sexual tension’: the endlessly deferred consummation of teased-each-season-finale relationships between Scully and Mulder, Lois and Clark, Nanny Fine and the guy with the haircut. In the unregulated, uncensored realm of internet-based fanfiction, audiences took these ready-made characters and settings and did with them what a friend of mine used to do with her Barbie and Ken dolls – stripping them down, trussing them together with hair elastics, and shutting them in her closet to ‘make them reproduce’. All these weird and erotically charged fan-made fictional ephemera, with their curt and implausible nods to an amorphous concept of intellectual property, came out of an anonymous network of writers and readers unconnected by geography, unharassed by editors, agents, or publishers, and untroubled by conventional literary norms and aims. Austen might have been surprised by the prevalence of the coma/amnesia/evil-demon possession tropes nicked from TV plots, but she would have found the basic set-up reasonably familiar. At once punk and trite, slavish and irreverent, fanfiction was thoroughly disreputable, even before the queers got involved.  

Out of this chaos has arisen a new legion of amateur authors who know that, no matter how strange or unlikely or poorly spelled their tales, somewhere out there readers exist for them. Aesthetic standards are irrelevant, originality redundant: just like the voracious novel readers of the eighteenth century, or a three-year-old on their hundredth viewing of Moana, only repetition – only the realisation of the most fully justified of expectations – can satisfy. As Malin Hay explained to readers of the London Review of Books, in this brave new Booktok world, novels ‘are understood as different combinations of a fixed number of plot devices and are rated not on their originality but on the flair with which those devices are arranged’. The social-media sphere is filled with what to some might seem embarrassingly specific requests for works with particular plot elements, as well as titles as long as anything published by Samuel Richardson or John Murray spelling out a novel’s contents not just to attract readers, but also to warn away those whose preferences might lead to a negative review. No one gets any prizes for guessing the plot of Elara Haze’s The Lycan King’s Rejected Bookish Mate: A Rejected Mate Secret Baby Shifter Romance (2025). The romantasy genre is remarkably respectful of readerly preferences and dislikes, and has pioneered the use of both the genuine trigger warning and the trigger-warning-as-advertisement (in Booktok-speak, ‘triggers’ do not refer to the recognised psychological response to past trauma, but merely literary elements one prefers to avoid). Readers know, and value knowing, exactly what they’re getting.

The penchant for adult retellings – for quite literally sexing up – traditional fairy tales, themselves already so familiar through generations of intensive repetition and adaptation, is the most obvious element of this drive for predictability. Most begin with a similar question: what if Red Riding Hood fucked the wolf? If we got to see what happens in the library between Beauty and the Beast? If Goldilocks embarked on a polyamorous affair with all three (now all male, all adult) bears? If a Victorian housemaid had sex with every character from Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman, severally and together? If this sounds titillating, or even pornographic, be assured that it (almost always) isn’t. The imagined combinations of even the most creatively united characters remain stubbornly limited, confirming all my most shameful lesbian biases regarding the erotic paucity of the heterosexual imagination. I have found the effect of reading these novels to be blessedly soporific, the most reliable remedy for my fractured ability to fall or stay asleep. A KU subscription is significantly cheaper than sleeping pills.

I am not the only reader who feels that the derivativeness and predictability of these narratives are their most appealing aspect. For my own part I would welcome a far greater range of personalities in my fictional heroes and heroines, but I seem to be alone in this: characterisation is restricted by the tightest of parameters, under the prosaic tyranny of the ‘relatable’. Nor is there much that could be considered writerly: these novels hew to a style that is, at best, functional. No one is competing for any awards here, and that’s a major part of this genre’s charm. Coming off the back of years of disordered nights and a shattered capacity to focus, I find it impossible not to appreciate a novel one can read amidst the noisy chaos of domestic life, or in the muzzy sleeplessness of 3 a.m. as bass from next door rattles the walls, and one fights for bedspace with a starfishing child or twitchy dog.

The assumption at the core of popular novels – in the eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries – is that we, all of us readers, are connected by a shared version of real life which bears little to no resemblance to the ‘realism’ of fiction, and for which novels are the antidote. The self-reflexiveness of the genre acknowledges this, the fact that each writer picks from a limited palette of well-known clichés, and even that we are all reading and responding in much the same way to many of the same works. In Austen’s Emma, the busy farmer Robert Martin fails to read Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791) and nearly loses the girl who recommended it, but in Brynne Weaver’s Butcher and Blackbird (2023), the sappy Irish serial-killer chef dons a strap-on and an itchy polyester costume to roleplay as Sol, the hemi-penised hero of Katee Robert’s The Dragon’s Bride (2022).

The novels’ winks at this shared universe of readers is enjoyable in a meta sort of way, but more important is the explosion of readerly feedback on social media, the Booktok cycles of recommendation and appreciation, accessed by people of my advanced age via helpful reposting on Facebook (loving, if irreverent, criticism is reserved for specialised platforms such as dedicated romantasy shitposting groups). This is unregulated readership, which has – again building on fanfiction cultures – developed its own arcane critical lexicon. Emojis provide the most obvious shorthand: multiples of chillies or flames to indicate degrees of erotic ‘spiciness’, pretzels to stand for ‘knots’ (a feature of many heroes’ genitalia that, like canine phalluses, swell post-orgasm; and a staple of the omegaverse subgenre). In the spirit of Twilight fandom’s notorious TITSOAK rallying cry, acronyms proliferate. Readers lament the length of their TBR (list of books to be read) or condemn a book with the brutally laconic DNF (did not finish), while true success is marked by the acronymising of a title: FW for Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing (2023) and its sequels, ZA for the Zodiac Academy series (2021-24), most famously ACOTAR for A Court of Thorns and Roses (2015), and the series usually known by the same name (ongoing). The author of the latter, Sarah J. Maas, has achieved the heights of her own abbreviation, and is SJM on every relevant platform. Heroines are Female Main Characters or FMCs, all plots end HEA (happily ever after), even when they are ETL (enemies to lovers). RH is reverse – that is, gynocentric – harem, where featured multi-partner relationships are indicated MFM or MMFMM, etc. Many of the more obscure abbreviations presumably arose via the search terms used in pornography databases, although I suspect STFUATTDLAGG has its origins solidly in the Booktok sphere. IYKYK: everyone else can google.

There are consequences for the amateurs having it all their own way, consequences mostly for language. The absence – or near-absence – of mediation between producer and consumer has led, inevitably, to what older models of publishing might see as quality control issues. I was raised by old-school linguistic prescriptivists, and while I have since apostatised from the faith of my proofreading forebears I can’t seem to let go of the blue pencil of the mind. There are real losses in the evident death of the editor. A heroine ‘dowsing’ herself in water or ‘pouring over’ a letter is only amusing, while replacing ‘ravish’ with ‘ravage’ – when what is meant is consensual sex, with maybe a shirt losing some buttons – just seems to substitute one unhappy linguistic slippage for another. The use of ‘disinterested’, however, when what is meant is ‘indifferent’, has accompanied, I suspect, the loss of the very concept of disinterestedness. I’ve noted this usage now in several works by professional historians published by university presses, so that prescriptivist ship has most definitely sailed. And how to describe actual enormities, when enormity is now a mere synonym for immensity? In monster-fucking novels, it has dwindled into an, if not the principal, adjective for genitalia.

Which leads us to what is perhaps the most obvious, and yet the most interesting aspect of these novels: the importance of explicit sex scenes and, relatedly, the fetishisation of monstrous male anatomy. As one of Ruby Dixon’s kidnapped earthlings reflects in When She’s Common (2024), ‘Some humans had positive experiences in bed with their alien captors, but one theme has been consistent overall – the dicks are always huge’. Monstrousness is of the flesh, not the soul. Much has been made of what is known to Booktok as the ‘morally grey’ hero (I can’t yet bring myself to think of them as MMCs), but on investigation the grey turns out to be more of an off-whitishness. There is no love interest in any of these books to compete with the moral shortcomings of, say, Charlotte Brontë’s Mr Rochester, although I do suspect that the continued prescription of Jane Eyre to teenagers may be the early literary-psycho-sexual conditioning behind the popularity of monsterfucking books for what are (let’s hope) adult readers. Either that or many of us watched Ladyhawke at a too-impressionable age.

While heroes are spectacularly diverse in appearance, like everything else in this broad genre, expectations are clear, and authors are clearly happy to meet them. They are generally between ‘well over’ six and ten feet tall; naturally there is a graph making the rounds of the internet visualising this arms race in fictional stature. The only exception I’ve found is in SJ Sanders’ The Pixies’ Chosen (2024), in which the inches-high heroes magically shrink their human target before claiming her as their mate. Apart from differences in horn curvature, wingspan, and number of arms, there is a remarkable conformity of torsos: to the girdle all sport the physique of Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, Jason Momoa’s Khal Drogo, Henry Cavill’s Witcher, or Idris Elba. Any exception must be clearly signposted to manage readerly expectations: the heroes of Violet Rae’s Dad Bod Demon and Lynnea Lee’s Dad Bod Ogre (both 2024), for instance, are endowed with Hugh Jackman’s grizzled-but-still-implausible musculature in that year’s Deadpool & Wolverine.

Diversity is acceptable where abs are not involved, and heroes’ skin and hair may be of what colour it please God, even if down from the waist they are centaurs, or basilisks, or swamp men. Wikipedia must be recording an inordinate number of hits on its mammal and reptile anatomy pages, as hundreds of writers attempt to accurately imagine, and then describe in mere words, what it might be like to have penetrative sex with a gargoyle, or a catman, or a part-turtle ex-space gladiator with an inverting umbrella-like phallus based on that of (I think?) the snail. It is, ultimately, only in variations of physical monstrousness that these novels truly differ. They might be alphas, angels, Aries (and other anthropomorphised astrology signs), aristocrats, barghests, bears (typically grizzly or polar), bikies, billionaires, blue- or purple-skinned barbarians, boa constrictors, boar men, cage fighters, centaurs, cerberuses, clones, convicts, cougars, Cthulhus, cyborgs, devils, dragonkin, dragon shifters, dragons (non-shifting), monstrous Easter bunnies, elk men, elves, fae, fiends, fox shifters, gods of darkness, gods of death, gentlemen gorgons, griffins, a shapeshifting chthonic forest deity identifying as hemlock, ice giants, ice hockey players, incubuses, krakens, krampuses, lions, lizard men, the Loch Ness monster, lycans, mafiosi, Draco Malfoy, manticores, mercenaries, moth men, mountain men, mountain monsters, nagas, rugby players, sasquatches, satyrs, sea-ogres, shadow demons, shadow gods, snow beasts, spider men who ejaculate cobwebs, stalkers, swamp things, tattooists, tiger shifters, trolls, overprivileged undergraduates, unicorns, vampires, personifications of various Ancient Greek vices, vikings, a kidnapping high-finance conspiracy of viking cosplayers, werewolves, wolf-shifters, wyrms, wyverns, and yetis. These attributes can be almost infinitely combined in a genre that loves recycling, so a heroine might be troubled by an overprivileged undergraduate dragon-shifting mafioso billionaire (Zodiac Academy) or an ice-hockey-playing pair of yeti and krampus lovers (Clio Evans and Ashley Bennett’s Monster Pucker, 2023) or an ursine ex-bikie tattooist (Olivia T. Turner’s Marked by the Possessive Polar Bear, 2025).

Despite their persistence in high-end horror cinema, in the Booktok zone vampires and zombies have had their day. In a win for Team Jacob, the various lupine/human combinations (including the wolfy-but-not-always-shifting alphas of the sprawling omegaverse) have the clear majority. The next most popular monstrous heroes are orcs, who appear in some of the better contributions to the marketplace, such as Finley Fenn’s Orc Sworn series (2019-ongoing). Minotaurs come in a close third, likely due to the improbable success of the weird – even for monster smut – premise of C.M. Nascosta’s Morning Glory Milking Farm (2021). The tentacular possibilities of kraken and other neocoleoid lovers make up for the obvious challenges of writing convincingly enjoyable bathypelagic sex, although increasingly novelists with an eye on the marketplace – Rebecca Yarros, Jennifer L. Armentrout, Colette Rhodes – are simply endowing their heroes with shadow-wielding abilities that allow them to manifest tangible, tentacle-like appendages as needed, all on dry land. Thalassophobic readers rejoice.

In my witching-hour research I have yet to come across anything like the kangaroo man who made such a delightful book boyfriend in the Tank Girl comics of my youth. Despite their truly intriguing anatomical evolution, marsupials have been almost entirely ignored by novelists (an exception is Sarah Spade’s 2025 Fake It ’til You Mate It, whose heroine is an opossum shifter with an unmanageable ‘play dead’ reflex). If I have mistakenly overlooked a romance of echidnas who learn to love cuddling or rugby-playing wallabies, I apologise. It may be that my own ‘triggers’ to eschew titles which include anything set in Australia have led me away from an extant body of marsupial-shifting literature (I couldn’t suspend disbelief enough to persist in reading about a secretive billionaire orc alien barrelling down Martin Place). I deviated from this for Sam Hall’s Bearly Hanging On (2025), in which the presence of tiger, bear, and wolf shifters hardly registers as disconcerting against the setting of their meet-cute with the heroine, as she endures the universal human experience of being painfully hungover in a Bunnings. So relatable, as the Booktok people say.

It may seem frivolous to look to such works for any insights into aspects of our present polycritical reality. But if I may essay one last historical analogy, it is arguably the marriage plots of the long eighteenth century that – pace Blake, Byron, Wordsworth, and friends – are that period’s most enduring artistic legacy, the one most culpable for the way in which we experience our lives. It is novels, and not just the good ones, that invented what we now think of as gender, sexuality, marriage, the family, love, and the relationship between individual and capitalist hegemony which we none of us can escape, even in imagination, even when that imagination can encompass sexual relations between, say, human and whale (see Jessa Kane’s Moby, 2025).

For many years my daylight research focused on what its first serious investigator called ‘the tenth-rate fiction’ of the eighteenth century, the building blocks of Austen’s masterpieces. In so doing I saw far enough behind the curtain to accept that we can only decouple ourselves from this girl-made Wachowskian matrix of the inescapably hegemonic marriage plot to fall back into it, recursively, forever. The eighteenth-century novel had the difficult task of reconciling women to lives under patriarchal capitalism, and it did an amazingly effective job of it. The assumptions created by the eighteenth-century novel, indeed that are constitutive of it, are what have made our version of reality what it is. Almost all of us are, almost all of the time, unable to think outside of the cognitive structure those fictions built. These unconscious beliefs are the unknown knowns, the missing section of Donald Rumsfeld’s epistemology, the assumptions none of us have the intellectual strength to keep recognising for what they are. A fish may leave the water long enough to know what it is to be wet, but it can only know it for a few uncomfortable seconds. If fewer than a thousand novels over a fifty-year period, half of which we can still get our hands on to study – and almost none of which are actually read these days except by me and the handful of other scholars who have made similarly bad life choices – could etch themselves so irrevocably in our minds that we cannot think outside of their tired frameworks, what could the ever-increasing number of monsterfucking narratives be doing to us today?

One obvious, if dismaying, aspect of these novels is the way that, despite what I’ve argued is their origin in the turn of our century, the limited lessons of those years have been decisively lost. We have ended up in a world where no one has read Tim Winton’s Breath, or Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, or remembers the fate of Michael Hutchence: almost every heroine in the hundreds of novels I’ve read finds a little asphyxiation erotic, and no one ever considers the very real risks of cerebral hypoxia. If this is not mere fiction, I have to imagine (from my lofty monogamous privilege) that choking has become so acceptable and widespread amongst the dating class that nearly everyone is suffering from at least minor traumatic brain injury. If there truly is such porousness between contemporary heterosexual praxis and its literary depiction, it would also go a long way towards explaining the vast increase in syphilitic infection in my local health area. There are, you see, no condoms in the world of romantasy. Either because sex takes place in various kinds of cod-medievalish settings, or because no one has figured out how to manufacture anything that will accommodate an orc. (Fortunately, most monsters are immune to STDs. Sex with the gorgon-librarian hero of Alana Khan’s 2025 Hiss and Tell even cures the heroine’s chronic herpes infection.) All the sex in these novels is, by the standards of my high school education at least, wholly unsafe, even in the rare instance where no biting is involved. There are no concerns about pregnancy: occasionally there’s a convenient contraceptive tea, usually taken by both men and women; more commonly ‘breeding’ the heroine is her monster’s – or monsters’ – most desperate desire. In any case, no one has any concerns about a baby’s potential impact on their finances or career, a state made more plausible if you remember that employment options for romantasy heroines tend to toggle between small-town bakery owner and queen.

It seems that what readers value most in these novels is not so much an escape from reality as an escape from modernity – especially those aspects of modernity which women have been brought up to value as most liberating: the rights to sex outside of relationships, to choose one’s partner, to leave a partner, to pursue a career, to have agency in matters of sex and fertility. Romantasy strips all of these away, with an implicit shared understanding that late capitalism has nothing for us. Women are relieved to embrace, or at least are accepting of, a life largely reduced to the biological: that is, to lots of sex and babies. If there is a feminist bent to this, it lies in the utter self-abnegating devotion of the novels’ heroes, who live only to serve. They are unfailingly supportive, understanding, and sexually and emotionally available, even when they theoretically have an empire (capitalist or feudal) to run. They are, in short, little more than the ciphers which men usually make of female characters, the steroidal masculine equivalent of the Bond girl. Monstrous lovers are not men. Despite their magic and muscles, they lack hesitancy, ego, selfishness, weakness, or any other human shortcoming. Their failures play out on a grander, usually bloodier scale, which can be rationalised as no more than differences of culture. When confronted about his latest murderous rampage, Magnar the Tyrant protests in Layla Fae’s Prize for the King (2025), ‘What are you angry about? Slaughtering those who hurt my woman is our best courting tradition […] avenging you felt like the perfect way to show you my feelings’.

It is not a monstrous hero’s actions, or moral probity, or generous decency that attracts the heroine. In these novels the coercions of the marriage plot – the more-or-less nuanced development of characters that forces them to accept their rightness for one another as prescribed by the author and demanded by the reader – are themselves reduced to biological compulsion. To coin a phrase that is oddly absent from the oeuvre: monsters don’t date, they mate. And they all mate for life (and sometimes immortally). Often their attraction is fundamentally olfactory: love comes in at the nose, as Yeats didn’t quite have it. Monstrous heroes recognise their hearts’ beloveds immediately, and while there may be temporary attempts to resist the primal drive to couple up, or to delay breeding for form’s sake, true impediments to love are almost always external.

Even the basic issue of choice, the keystone of the marriage plot and its most significant political legacy, is absent in these novels. The ‘why choose’ trend, which strikes at the heart of everything I once took for granted in fiction, allows heroines to take on multiple permanent lovers at once. Imagine Anna holding on to a buff Karenin and adding Vronsky and Levin into the mix, or Elizabeth Bennet marrying not just Darcy, but also Wickham, Colonel Fitzwilliam, and a strapping stablehand (or two) for good measure. After all, there’s plenty of room at Pemberley. On investigation, however, the ‘why choose’ plot hinges on neither rejection of the concept of opportunity cost, nor abandonment of the fundamental political/ethical function of the novel, but an acknowledgment that the heroine’s needs (domestic and financial, as well as sexual) are unlikely to be met by any one hero. Thus, in a typical reverse harem novel – even if the heroes are all professional sports-playing werewolves or orcish bikers – at least one will have access to an immense fortune, one will have decent carpentry skills, one will moonlight as an emergency physician, and another will be a trained chef. Inevitably someone has taken a massage course and someone else has some experience in interior decorating. So what at first blush (and I did!) might seem like pure fictional anarchy is disappointingly nothing of the sort. Nor is it a welcome development in a polyamorous release from the marriage plot’s heteronormative shackles. Rather, the wish-fulfilling ‘why choose’ plot merely throws into ever starker light how impossible women’s desires are seen to be, even by themselves, and how depressingly far from satisfactory are the real men of their real lives. These fantasy relationships rely on the invention of ideal husbands, and no merely human man can come anywhere near the mark. Novelists who can imagine group sex with multiple species in lands ruled by magic are unable to offer readers one basic, wingless, mundanely genitaled man as a plausible romantic hero. 

Women, or female-coded lovers of whatever species, are not an option in this fictional realm. While heroes are robustly heterosexual or usefully and attractively bi in a manner the heroine finds arousing – sometimes welcoming her into a longstanding homosexual relationship, sometimes tenderly acknowledging their long-suppressed gay attraction with her gentle encouragement – monster-loving heroines have their limits. I did attempt the one overtly queer novel the algorithm spat at me, but it opened with homophobic self-hatred and soon descended into a literal orgy of pronouns that I could not, as it were, keep straight. DNF. (There is some genuine lesbian monsterfuckery which unfortunately does not suit my sedative needs: those interested may seek out Genevieve McCluer’s rather good 2020 novel My Date with a Wendigo).

The impossibility of lesbianism is only one expression of a broader issue of the unimaginable: a pervasive absence of solidarity between women. Romantasy heroines, like their fictional ancestors, are channelled with aggressive teleology into coupling (or quintupling) up, and thus non-sexual relationships, where they exist at all, are relegated to an occasional exchange of text messages. Community, friendship, the idea of solidarity across species, class, or gender – even wider family beyond that of the nuclear – is still not something this form can readily encompass. Siblings are in the Cinderella vein and tend to make Clarissa Harlowe’s look good, or are just there to set up a sequel. Fathers are mostly dead, or useless. Only the very best mothers are lucky enough to be extradiegetically dead. Living mothers are neglectful, if not actively abusive, and usually bear the narrative burden of acting as the inhumane-if-not-literally-inhuman face of an inevitably corrupt ruling class. They have a chance at redemption but only through literal self-sacrifice: a loving act of suicide that the narratives tend to represent as just desserts. As in the novels of the long eighteenth century, older women in authority are a priori villainous. The heroine’s confrontation with such characters – like that between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine de Burgh in Pride and Prejudice – is as one-sided as it is triumphant. If the first axiom of romantasy is that the human penis is not enough, the second is that no woman over forty can be trusted with political power. No one reading widely in this genre would have imagined that Hillary or Kamala could possibly defeat Trump.

As for younger women in the world of romantasy, their position is one of scrappy but inescapable victimhood, the very definition of ‘heroine’ in the eighteenth-century novel. These are fictional worlds where to be female is to be at constant risk of sexual and other violence, to be subject to extreme and debilitating hormonal variation, to have one’s movements and destiny highly circumscribed, to be in high and unscrupulous demand across realms and universes for little more than our primary and secondary sexual characteristics. At the more sci-fi end of the genre, human women are forever being kidnapped from Earth in an unregulated intergalactic slave trade. As nineties band Porno for Pyros anticipated, we make great pets. Many romantasy heroines acquire training in armed combat, but ultimately all rely on the heroes’ marital, muscular, military, or magical protection.  

In the eighteenth-century novel this double-handed literary misogyny – whereby women can either be powerless or power-abusing – was largely a way to get around the issue of critiquing the injustices of contemporary law, society, and government without provoking their real-life guardians. Writers had cover for their denunciation of what they called ‘systems’ – what we might today call ‘the system’ – if they allowed for a suggestion that only in inappropriate (that is, female) hands was power misused, or that everything was fine unless one was somehow unusually vulnerable, such as an orphaned sixteen-year-old heiress with little education and no friends. Only the bravest writers – those with nothing to lose like Charlotte Smith or Mary Wollstonecraft – were able to call things by their real names and suggest that injustice was baked into the system. Writers like Austen who could not afford to cause controversy had to be careful to veil everything they wrote in multiple layers of irony.

Political wish-fulfilment is, however, as central to monsterfucking novels as defined abdominals. For a genre focused so explicitly on escapism, its political valency is weirdly inescapable and grounded in the all-too-horribly real. Insofar as such novels have subplots, the subplots inevitably entail political revolution. When they are not concerned with small-town cupcake competitions, romantasy narratives – especially those with greater literary ambition, such as the genre-dominating Court of Thorns and Roses series and its imitators – focus on the exposure and overturning of the fundamentally unjust regime in which the heroine has been raised. Readers are inevitably clued in to the regime’s corruption by its privileging of female sexual chastity. Rampant inequality is also a ubiquitous indicator, but economic and structural outrages are always secondary to the enormity of purity culture. The genre’s tolerance of inequality has itself become an acknowledged cliché, understood as merely a conventional shorthand for signalling the rottenness of the elite. ‘Superhot warriors riding mystical beasts and wielding mysterious magic?’ narrates the heroine, about to be yanked from poverty, of Sable Sorensen’s 2025 Dire Bound. ‘It’s intriguing, if you can set aside the extreme and punishing classism’. Typically, inequality and compulsory virginity are revealed in these novels to be little more than the surface ills of a regime whose horrors are so unimaginably monstrous as to resemble, in fact, our own daily news feeds. Rulers conceal great genocidal conspiracies, or collaborate in the mass abuse of children, or turn out to be merely the puppets of a cabal of evil resource-extracting inscrutable magical space spiders. So where, exactly, does the genre’s escapism lie?

Booktok has the answer. The oldest and most common form of appreciation is a clip of the emotional reader/poster, or a gif of someone reacting with extreme emotion, while a line or two from the book appears on screen. The line is, invariably, not that of romantic or sexual climax, but the hero’s discovery of the heroine’s past trauma. ‘Who did this to you?’ he growls, as he examines her scars. Herein is the true fantasy. In every novel the hero immediately recognises the harm done to his beloved, even as she attempts to conceal or dismiss it. He instantly believes her account, unless he suspects she is downplaying her mistreatment or making excuses for her abuser. He swears vengeance, often privately so as to absolve the heroine of culpability in the coming violence. His allies do not question his report and eagerly assist him in obtaining retribution. Together they mete out punishment to uncles, dukes, bullies, and ex-boyfriends, who are often left for dead or in pieces. In the bizarre, implausible world of romantasy, abusers are not publicly acquitted of crimes that everyone knows them to have committed. Once their crimes against women come to light, they are punished, not rewarded with greater power. They do not launch defamation suits to bankrupt the heroine, or deploy Public Relations experts to destroy her reputation. When they try to malign or embarrass her with disgusting slurs, someone punches them in the jaw, or stabs them satisfyingly in the heart. As the world’s most successful woman poet has written, ‘When everyone believes ya / What’s that like?’