Some issues in female-targeted contemporary fantasy
A review of A Court of Thorns and Roses: on Cultural appropriation, Stereotyping and Romanticising Sexual Assault
The emergence of romantasy in the past few years
I have been an active and devoted member of the online book community since learning how to read in English. It has been a very welcoming ground for everyone. The community at large was dominated by women, in whom I have always seen myself. Geeky, nerdy, awkward but bubbly and very passionate women, coming together to make friends, to share a new up-and-coming author, to criticise a problematic portrayal of an ethnic group, to gush over their new favourite book boyfriend, to commiserate over the death of a beloved character. From the sixth grade on, the online world was my oyster in the shape of a beat-up MacBook Air. This community has been mostly good to me over the years. At least a whole lot better than the other communities I used to lurk in during my early adolescence. The book girls didn’t swear or shout at me or call me slurs over a microphone under the guise of justice during GamerGate. They didn’t belittle or undermine me or my knowledge of Star Wars whenever I mentioned I loved the Ewoks (without whom the rebellion would have failed, so they were arguably a very integral part of the story). They were worlds apart from any other male-centred space my hobbies or interests sometimes led me to.
That being said, over the years, a community is bound to make mistakes, especially one filled with people so trusting and willing to give many second chances. In 2017, I was recommended by one of my online friends to read a (what was at the time) not that mainstream series named A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, on account that the third instalment was a few weeks from publishing. It was marketed to me as an epic fantasy retelling of The Beauty and the Beast, featuring a strong, underdog female character who is thrust into a fairy world and must navigate her new surroundings while facing whatever big bad was threatening said new world. Oh, and also, there’s a great romance that develops throughout with a crazy plot twist in the second book. I didn’t need to hear any more. I was already hooked, and there’s no need to say I had trusted these girls with every recommendation up until that point. I had even bought the books that very day and planned to finish the first within three days, so I could participate in the online buddy read of the second one that same week.
Needless to say, the first book left a lot to be desired and made my 12-year-old mind very uncomfortable, what with the very dubious consent and strange sexual encounters. So I soldiered on, read the second book during the read-along, said I wasn’t really in the mood to participate in reading the third one, and went on with my life, thinking I had spent my parents’ money on two mediocre books. I thought the romance felt forced and forgettable, and after a while, I had completely forgotten a majority of the plot, other than the continuous sexual assault throughout the first book, which will likely be stuck in my mind for a while.
Around 2022-3, the book space from other social media had started to migrate to TikTok, which, at the time, seemed pretty fortuitous and filled with potential, the visual possibilities of YouTube, mixed with the short-form media and interaction of Instagram and Tumblr, respectively. Around that time, I noticed the term romantasy started to make the rounds on the internet. Bloomsbury Publishing likes to claim that they coined the term, specifically to describe Sarah J. Maas’s book.1 Their argument seems to falter on account that there are entries on the term romantasy on UrbanDictionary dating back to 2008, several years before her first book was published.
Now, TikTok has been very successful ever since the pandemic and its launch into the mainstream, so obviously, any new niche that was making its way onto the platform was going to see a big spike in popularity. That was definitely the case with romantasy and specifically with the work of Sarah J. Maas. According to The Bookseller, in the spring of 2024, Bloomsbury’s company report cited a 161% increase in sales and up to £49 mil. in profit for the year 2023 following the mainstream success of ACOTAR on social media. This would make the year their highest record mark in almost 40 years by up to 30% in revenue,2 compared to the 11% of the 1997 release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.3
It’s fair to say that the book and the subgenre by extension have reached a high enough peak in popularity over the past three years. It has become basically impossible to exist on any book space on social media without being subjected to the plot, flaws, adoration and controversies of Maas’s work. But is that a fair assessment of its quality?
Very intrigued by this surge of popularity and infamy, almost a year ago, I picked up the ACOTAR copy from my childhood bedroom, nearly eight years after first reading it, and decided to give it another go, to see just what my adult mind might comprehend better than before. It was indeed a very rough few months that followed, and I would like to share my findings with you.
A defence of romance as genre and motif
I want to make it clear that the issue I have with these books does not sprout roots in the centralisation of romance within the narrative. I also don’t think that we should necessarily categorise romantasy as a subgenre of romance rather than one of fantasy. A point of view stands to reason that romantasy books centre romance too much, it overpowers the story. Other arguments in favour of the first claim are that the worldbuilding is usually flawed and the characters are never as fully fledged as in, say, Tolkien or Le Guin, and as much as I can attest to that given the romantasy books I have read, I think this is not only a categorisation error but also a blatant dismissal of romance as a genre. Firstly, if said terms were to apply, we should then bump Harry Potter down to children’s fiction, along with many other popular contemporary YA fantasy with poorly thought-out magic systems. Secondly, the romance genre has never been just romance and dismissing a badly written book immediately as a symptom of the romance disease will only ever do more harm than good. I believe that romance represents, first and foremost, the backbone of the female writer. The romance story is not a feminist practice by any means, and I do not claim it to be, but from Sappho to Austen and the Brontës, a woman found her way to write about another woman, a happy one, in a world that is her own, in which she always triumphs. Talking about the beginning of the romance novel in the XVII-XVIIIth centuries, Maya Roadale points out, „they experimented with that newly invented literary form: the novel. Because it was new, it wasn’t 'respectable' or 'cool' yet, and so they let girls play around with it. These women wrote novels. And in these novels, they had the audacity to suggest that a woman — who should be seen and not heard, who was not considered a full person in eyes of law — could be interesting for the length of a whole novel and strong enough to carry the plot all by herself! They suggested that she might go on the hero’s journey, petticoats and all — and that she might even be victorious“.4 And so I believe that disregarding the genre, as a whole, means dismissing these women who sat down in the drawing room, at tea or during dress fittings and invented a new genre.
I always love to quote Sally Rooney when discussing this issue. In Beautiful World Where Are You, she mentions that writing romance is not trivial or superficial because it’s not just romance, and it will never be just romance. And even if it was just that, what we are reading is an expression of adoration for love, communication, sex and connection. Those are the things that we tend to think about so often, we talk about them so frivolously, as if they were just involuntary impulses, which they can be, of course, but we choose to run towards them. At the end of your life, on your deathbed, the last thoughts on your mind will not be your regrets or your sorrows; they will consist of the people you loved, and who loved you back. So why don’t we appreciate the art we make about it? I want to give my criticism this dignity; I want to think of it as an important form of self-expression.
The girlboss Belle and the misogynistic Beast
To summarise this book, we can easily think of it as a product of its time, written as a way to cash in and hitch a ride on the strong teenage female protagonist wave of the 2010s. If I were being flippant, I might even call her a poor imitation of Katniss Everdeen if she were not interested in a revolution or the well-being of others. Our main character is named Feyre, which seems to be Maas’s spelling of the Old English name Fayre, marking the first of many sources of direct inspiration.
One day, Feyre commits a crime which breaks the accord that the humans, of which she is one, have made with the supernatural creatures referred to as Fae. Now, as penance for her indiscretion, our protagonist has to endure a life in the Fae Realm, where she will have to live the rest of her days in a castle with the very beautiful fairy High Lord of the Spring Court, Tamlin, (named after the beloved character Tam Lin) surrounded by servants who cater to her every whim, while back home, her poverty-stricken family is taken care of for the first time in years (awful, I know); and eventually, as it always seems to happen, the two fall hopelessly in love.
At first glance, the book reads very slowly, and I was racking my brain, wondering why, because it seemed to have nothing to do with the pacing. I realised it might not actually be the writing style but the narrative. The story is chock-full of tropes, and as you cruise through the plot, every other major (and even minor) development comes in with a big warning ahead. It is very predictable to the point where you know exactly what’s coming, and you are very aware of its direction throughout, making you feel like you are being walked, with your hand held, through the point instead of being shown it.
Feyre is a severely underdeveloped character. Maas tries to tell us directly about how brave and resilient the protagonist is, but her actions remain sort of inconsistent. She’s anxious about small drawbacks and cowers at minor threats, and her reactions remain that way through the first half of the story, but in the meantime, she flirts with and teases her captor every chance she gets. She seems like a scared girl trying to put on a mask in the face of danger, but only when there is no actual danger around. At other times in the book, when put in life-threatening situations, she doesn’t flinch a millimetre. Not only that, but by the end, she somehow loses all previous objections and fears and actively chooses to put herself in new deathly situations, which she only manages to escape with help from her reticent but somehow well-meaning enemies. Deus ex machina is not a condescending enough term to fully explain the improbability of the resolve Maas uses to take Feyre out of these conundrums.
A critique of romance as genre and motif
Fantasy is a genre that has historically been very male-dominated, both in terms of its authors and characters, but also in narrative, where female characters have been underdeveloped and mistreated or used as plot devices to further the male hero’s journey. And what we see very often online is a proclivity to describe the romantasy genre as one that privileges female pleasure. In his Dazed article, Eli Cugini describes it: “The stock formula is that a woman, essential to Insert Fantasy Kingdom Problem Here, is being guarded, imprisoned or targeted by a man she hates, and that this hate blossoms into sexual tension: ‘enemies to lovers’, as BookTok would call it. (…) More typical romances tend to value lightness, escapism, and pleasurable predictability; romantasy values danger, twists and immersion, and uses violence – or the threat of it – to build sexual tension.”5 The main problem with what we call here sexual tension is that in a few very popular books, including ACOTAR, it often crosses the boundaries of consent. Despite the conversations surrounding female pleasure in romantasy, and the very valid critique its fans have brought to the sexual politics in Game of Thrones and the female character development in The Lord of the Rings, you would be surprised to find how disturbing books like ACOTAR can be in retrospect.
Some very dodgy sexual dynamics are established right off the bat, in the first chapter. Before Feyre goes to the fairy kingdom, she tries to make it clear that she has never really looked for a relationship, but she used to sleep with a guy from her village, whom she describes as:
Stolen hours in a decrepit barn with Isaac Hale didn’t count; those times were hungry and empty and sometimes cruel, but never lovely.6
A little later in the book, it becomes the issue of her relationship with Tamlin. Putting aside the basic power imbalances between captor (Tamlin) and prisoner (Feyre), the age gap between a 500 and a 19-year-old, beyond even all of this, the actual sexual encounters are, for lack of a more academic term, kind of gross. There is a scene in the first quarter or so where Tamlin is high off this fairy sex festival, and when he gets a hold of Feyre, he kisses and then bites her as a sort of punishment for her not remaining inside during the celebration. The next day, when confronted, he says that he could not possibly be held accountable for what is to be the first instance of sexual assault in the story.
“So, if Feyre can’t be bothered to listen to orders, then I can’t be held accountable for the consequences.”
“Accountable?” I sputtered, placing my hands flat on the table. “You cornered me in the hall like a wolf with a rabbit!”
Lucien propped an arm on the table and covered his mouth with his hand, his russet eye bright.
“While I might not have been myself, Lucien and I both told you to stay in your room,” Tamlin said, so calmly that I wanted to rip out my hair.7
Towards the end of the book, when our protagonist has to face the main villain of the story, she is being held captive, a time in which she is consistently drugged by Rhysand, the man who would later become her main love interest.
“Feyre, for Cauldron’s sake! I drug you, but you don’t wonder why I never touch you beyond your waist or arms?”8
Meanwhile, she is being paraded around, she dances for him, undresses at parties and flirts with him. At the end of it all, he says that he roofied her for her own good so she wouldn’t remember the events that transpired in captivity for the several months she was there. He does not sexually assault her in her inebriated state, but he flat-out admits that he would have liked to.
“It’s the only claim I have to innocence,” he said, “the only thing that will make Tamlin think twice before entering into a battle with me that would cause a catastrophic loss of innocent life. It’s the only way I can convince him I was on your side. Believe me, I would have liked nothing more than to enjoy you—but there are bigger things at stake than taking a human woman to my bed.”9
Repercussions of the Tolkien effect
Cardiff University academics have dedicated years of their lives to arguing that the visible (and audible) echoes of Welsh culture are present in The Lord of the Rings.10 It is very hard to come up with a traditional fantasy book that builds on the existing mythos surrounding creatures such as fairies, elves etc., without adapting other aspects of Celtic culture, even involuntarily. Also involuntary are the reverberations of Tolkien’s work in more contemporary fantasy universes. Some scholars applaud the use of Celtic, and in particular Welsh, inspiration, while others warn against its possibly harmful misuse. In Tolkien’s case, most would agree on a neutral stance and sometimes even appreciate his adaptation of specific Cymraeg sounds in Sindarin (one of his two main Elvish languages). Dr. Phelpstead of Cardiff mentions, concerning Tolkien: “He read a lot of medieval Welsh literature, taught medieval Welsh when he was working at Leeds University, and you can see the influence of the language and the literature in his creative writing and his scholarly work.”11 Prof. Dimitra Fimi, lecturer at Glasgow University, and formerly at Cardiff, also praises the use of Welsh in TLotR, but also condemns its later iterations: "I think what happened is you get a generation of writers after Tolkien who want to write fantasy, [but] they don't want to replicate what Tolkien has done."12
We can see these things everywhere in new fantasy, but as of late, it seems to be more and more prevalent in romantasy. People often cite the very famous blunder of Rebecca Yarros (writer of Fourth Wing) from 2023, when, during a ComicCon interview, she was asked how to correctly pronounce the Scots Gaelic names she used in the book. As you can imagine, she butchered them quite a bit, but that was not the only issue. Within the same breath, she called these same words Gaelic (gay-lik), that is, she used the pronunciation of the word referring to the Irish language, as opposed to Scottish Gaelic (gah-lik). This sparked quite a bit of outrage, with Yarros being forced to issue a public apology. Commenters online have criticised her use of the language, saying: “She’s just sprinkling Gaelic words in there to add a bit of spice to a fantasy book” and “I am so sick of Americans using Celtic languages because they can’t come up with their own names for things. It’s incredibly lazy”.13
My main takeaway from this is that the use of an indigenous language, different from that of the authors, needs to be intentional and thought through, but first and foremost, it requires sound reasoning. The demand and interest for reimagined Celtic folklore and Arthurian legends is in no shortage by any means, but fantasy is inherently a genre that needs justification and a strong characterisation for a new world to be built properly. In ACOTAR, for example, a glaring issue is the pan-Celticism. We almost end up with an awkward mix of a world based on Irish lore with Welsh and Old English names, where Manx slang is spoken, and they eat Cornish food. Authors tend to throw everything in a bowl and pick at random without any respect for cultural differences and geographical and historical accuracy.
Which brings me to my main beef with the ACOTAR world-building. Inserted below is the map that Maas uses at the beginning of the first book to showcase the lands where the story takes place.
I think it is pretty self-explanatory, even without my earlier point, what countries she chose as inspiration for the design of this world. But the issue here is not the lack of creativity, really. Looking at the map, we can identify very obviously that some existing borders within the real world have been kept fairly accurately and have been reimagined into new regions and countries. The Mortal Lands, inhabited by humans, take the place of the entirety of Southern England, with the Wall that divides them from the other right above where Greater London would be. Just above that, the actual Fae Realm begins. The seven courts making up the land of Prythian (England, Scotland and Wales) are built on a seasonal divide, as well as three of them regarding the times of day.
To the East, we can see a separate entity, one on the actual land of Ireland, namely Hybern. This decision, I think, was entirely intentional and political. Hibernia is one of the names used by Greek geographical accounts to refer to the island of Éire (Ireland) and later became the classical Latin name for it, used by the Romans and the English following them alike.14 In the story, Hybern is the big bad, the place of all evil, a land of irredeemable monsters who live to slaughter and take power over the innocent fae; fae derived from tales of the very land she labels wicked. We do not know who these people are, and from what I have seen researching this topic, the most important villain in this book never even develops a name; he remains all throughout, King of Hybern. We never get, at least not in the two books I have read, any sort of motivation as to why the people of Hybern choose, or even managed to invade Prythian, a land much, much larger and much more developed than their own (as you see, the Hybernians are also a primitive people). The laziness and lack of tact for this sort of portrayal could very well be just born out of sheer ignorance, but looking further, it is not a one-time thing. Back in our Fae Briton, in the northern part of the island, presides the Night Court, a misunderstood land, a placeholder for Scotland. The ruler of the Night Court, Rhysand (a Welsh name in Scottish territory), is initially an enemy and a kiss-ass for the evil Hybern, but throughout, he helps our protagonist through her trials and makes his way into her good graces, not without a cost, though. For him to help her, Feyre signs a contract, giving Rhysand full control of her life for a week, every single month. This makes it necessary for her to live at his Night Court, where she gets to know and understand the people she has been taught to hate during her stay in the Spring Court. After this whole redemption arc, the citizens of the Court are generally regarded as good people, that is, until we find out about the Ilyrians, the inhabitants of the most northern part. In the second instalment of the series, we learn that the three male protagonists of the series, including Rhysand (who all become eventual love interests for Feyre and her two sisters), belong to another winged ethno-race-species named Ilyrians. The people of Ilyria are dubbed the lowest of the low, the scum of the earth in the Fae Realm, on account that, when the women of the species turn of age (menstruating age, so teenagers), their wings are forcefully cut off and their autonomy fully stripped. They are married off, never to see the light of day, under the control of the men chosen for them to spend the rest of their days with. So obviously, out of a world so cruel, so unjust, and so twisted come out three perfectly understanding, intersectional male feminists. The three characters are used throughout the second book as a comparison marker for all of the men Feyre has encountered, and never again do we see any other Ilyrian character get a redemption or an epiphany of some sort. They are three perfect exceptions, who never falter, never slip up, in the otherwise backwards culture of Scotland — or, I guess, Ilyria.
With this in mind…
I don’t want to lump all romantasy books together with a few unfortunate instances and events, but I believe that we tend to give a lot of power to very undeserving people sometimes. And sometimes those people write books that skyrocket Bloomsbury back into relevance again. I have several unanswered questions regarding this subject matter, most pointedly, how do books like A Court of Thorns and Roses garner so much popularity? Why do we accept a culture where we now know how problematic an author is, and how transparent she makes her politics and views in her writing, and yet her books are still being placed on the main advertisement table at chain bookstores? Why did I torture myself again by picking up this book when I was supposed to be thinking of what MA programme I want to follow?
- Mara
Creamer, Ella, “A Genre of Swords and Soulmates: The Rise and Rise of ‘romantasy’ Novels”, The Guardian, February 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/feb/02/romantasy-literary-genre-booktok#:~:text=The%20American%20novelist%20is%20among,and%20outfits%20inspired%20by%20books.
Spanoudi, Melina, “Bloomsbury’s Revenue up 30% as Profit Soars to £49m in Record Year”, The Bookseller, May 2025, https://www.thebookseller.com/news/bloomsburys-revenue-up-30-as-profit-soars-to-49m-in-record-year.
Boxall, Megan, “The Impact of Harry Potter on Bloomsbury Publishing”, Stockopedia, December 2023. https://www.stockopedia.com/academy/newsletters/bloomsbury-harry-potter-impact/.
Rodale, Maya, “Why Romance Matters”, Medium, August 2020, https://mayarodale.medium.com/why-romance-matters-3f9cdcc370e3.
Cugini, Eli, “Romantasy Was 2023’s Hottest Book Genre”, Dazed, December 2023, https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/61641/1/romantasy-was-2023s-hottest-book-genre-booktok-trends-fourth-wing.
Maas, Sarah J., A Court of Thorns and Roses, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015, p. 10.
Maas, S. J., A Court of Thorns and Roses, p. 227.
Maas, S. J., A Court of Thorns and Roses, p. 443.
Maas, S. J., A Court of Thorns and Roses, p. 443.
Phelpstead, Carl, Tolkien and Wales: Language, literature and Identity, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2011.
“Study Explores JRR Tolkien’s Welsh Influences”, BBC News, May 2011 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-13472344.
Aitken, Catriona, “Literature: Experts Fear Booktok Fantasy Threatens Welsh Culture”, BBC News, January 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y35pg0pwpo.
Aitken, Catriona, “Literature: Experts Fear Booktok Fantasy Threatens Welsh Culture”, BBC News, January 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y35pg0pwpo.
“Hibernia - Etymology, Origin & Meaning of the Name”, Etymonline, https://www.etymonline.com/word/Hibernia.