Everyone is going crazy over romantasy novels.

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There are reasons to envy people who work in mainstream media and there are reasons to pity them, and there is an element of abstraction to this ecosystem and its native PMC lanyards and bog critters that makes either response seem insufficient. These jobs of mashing away at the soundboards on behalf of seething billionaires and out-of-touch and out-to-lunch geriatric political figures aren’t “real” jobs. The work of hunching over and extruding shitty little blogs or videos or podcasts about trans teenagers or Russiagate has no dignity anywhere in it. It’s a hothouse environment and even the figures that aren’t actively poisonous are kind of sad. Which is not to say that the greasy products dropping off the end of that assembly line aren’t fun to laugh at. The work itself is so hilariously undignified, and so self-abnegating in its expression, that it can be confounding and funny in the way that good performance art can be. I think, here, about all the Netflix prestige TV slop and the degradation of journalism into redundant culture war content, and it’s enough to inspire me to get my Goodreads stats closer to my pandemic shut-in levels.

As America’s public reality exists within several different Paul Verhoeven movies at once, you can tell how a society is doing based on the escapism it resorts to. Everything is a bit worse and a good deal dumber by now, so in the book world, the hot trend seems to be all about romantasy novels. For the uninitiated, this is a genre that combines fantasy and hardcore pornography, a form of medieval smut, or basically if Game of Thrones concerned itself with consent and the female orgasm. These are novels that are bringing rimjobs to the shire.

Taken altogether, the experience of reading these stories is that of watching someone who has ingested four or five tabs of acid attempting to explain an extremely common experience, in a way that suggests the person explaining it thinks it’s all a bit silly but also quite entertaining, to a horned-up teenager. This is the type of stuff you’d used to have to dig very deep into fan fiction forums to find, but now it’s front and center at Barnes and Noble. You’ll pass by the classics or current events non-fiction written by legacy media dullards and then, at a table to the right, fairies and elves are sucking and fucking. The titles are Onyx Storm and Iron Flame, and it’s hard to tell if they are works of literature or pills I’d buy at a Sonoco to help me last longer in bed. Either way, I’ll take two.

For the record, I’m not judging anyone who enjoys this. Whatever you need to survive any and every day in America in the year of our lord 2025, is a perfectly reasonable and rational justification for reading romantasy novels. So go off and shoot your dice, even if it’s 20-sided.

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