Romance and fantasy spawned this year’s biggest breakout genre
polygon.comDo y’all remember Twilight and its death grip on what felt like every bookstore, movie theater, and mall in America in the early 2000s? At the time, critics regarded it poorly — like so much other entertainment aimed at young women. Now, in 2023, Twilight is having a pop culture resurgence as fans embrace it unironically and otherwise, with a sort of joyous abandon usually reserved for Disney adults and Christmas people.
As the attitude toward romance books has positively shifted, an influx of readers has spurred another era in which fantasy romance has a death grip on pop culture — except this time, the audience wants to be choked (just a little). Publishers Weekly found that fantasy and romance each experienced a surge in book sales in 2022; 17.4% and 52.4%, respectively. The intersection of these two genres was poised to make a big splash this year, appealing to readers outside of the supernatural romance boom of the early aughts.
“Romantasy” is the latest reading trend to slam into the publishing industry, riding a wave of voracious readers seeking out sexy fae, elves, witches, orcs, and physical manifestations of death itself. The term is a combination of “romance” and “fantasy,” popularized by the force of nature that is BookTok, a lively TikTok community that sprung up around the first shelter-in-place orders of 2020. BookTokers have gone on to influence everything from end-cap displays in bookstores to special Congress sessions with the CEO of TikTok himself.
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“TikTok and Discord are definitely where I got my start,” says Kimberly Lemming, romantasy author of titles like That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon and the recent That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Human. Her books are self-referential and
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