Last year, burned out from going straight into a full-time lectureship after a pandemic PhD, I needed the kind of intellectual rest that only one thing brings: re-reading an old favorite novel. For me, that was Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels Trilogy, the fantasy series that got me through my teenage angst.
My dilapidated 2003 paperback omnibus edition sports an illustration of a black-scaled dragon on the cover. Going by this aesthetic, you would be forgiven for thinking it’s some classic Lord of the Rings-esque adventure fantasy. In reality, the generic design hides both an erotic and dark story – and I mean several-trigger-warnings dark. “Not for the faint of heart” according to several Amazon reviews, it is about a morally bankrupt, violent society; magic that can cost you your sanity if not channelled correctly through jewels; corrupt Queens and “their males” who dominate and terrify; and three anti-heroes who have vowed to serve the all-powerful Witch destined to set the realm to rights. There is a love story in there, but this series is hardly a romance: it’s about how, when sexuality is purely a matter of having power over others, we lose something central to being alive. The storyline embraces the dark and imperfect aspects of our interiorities as creative forces for good or ill.
Parallels have been drawn between the Black Jewels Trilogy (BJT) and the wildly popular A Court of Thorns and Roses (ACOTAR) by Sarah J. Maas, the latter of which is credited with inaugurating the current wave of Romantasy taking over the perfectly curated bookshelves of BookTok. In case you have been living under a rock, the five-book story follows Feyre Archeron, a mortal who becomes entangled in the world of the Fae when she accidentally kills one. In subsequent books, Feyre discovers her immense powers and faces various ancient threats with the help of the enigmatic, protective and frequently snarling MMC (male main character) Rhysand, a High Fae. I won’t rehash the similarities between its main male characters and those of the BJT, which can be found detailed on Reddit (the most blatant being the race of winged “Illyrians” in ACOTAR, who explicitly mirror the “Eyriens” in BJT). But what I do want to discuss is how surprisingly unlike one another these two series are, despite the surface parallels.
Taking the creative potential of the fantasy genre as an opportunity to reimagine how gender, the psyche, and ecology could work, the eroticism of BJT is deeply linked to the frightening yet seductive vulnerability of mind, body, and nature itself. Like all the best fantasy, it pairs the author’s own unique take on compelling storytelling with capturing truths about our own world in a new light. In ACOTAR, however, I found no such depths. Though I more or less enjoyed the series, this lack of complexity in the storyline and perfection of its protagonists made me at times lose track of what was happening. There is little character development throughout: Feyre is, impossibly, fierce yet soft, cunning yet moral, sexy yet innocent, self-assured yet self-sacrificing from the start. Rhysand enjoys some light BDSM and makes some dubious choices, but that alone isn’t enough to make him a layered character. I was, truth be told, a few pages into the fourth book before realising I’d accidentally skipped the third and had to go back.
I then moved on to Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. At this point I was growing motivated by the prospect of better understanding what people in their late teens were reading, given many of the students in my university courses on postcolonial literature seemed to struggle with novel-length reading assignments. After all, my own love of YA and genre fiction had eventually led to three English degrees; I just wanted to know they were reading something that fed their imagination and their literacy (even if it wasn’t Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart). But Fourth Wing, too, left me feeling underwhelmed by yet another too-perfect, all-powerful heroine; the constantly high-strung character interactions; love interests that are immediately obvious (largely through angry exchanges); and sexual tension that barely has time to unfold before being sated.
Surely supernatural worlds could give us greater freedom to experiment with how beauty, attraction, and desire could work.
Two authors does not a genre make, so I decided to give the five-book Romantasy series From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout a chance. This had an entertaining blend of known tropes around vampire and werewolf tales, but our male anti-hero is, once again, enigmatic, protective and snarling, and our heroine Poppy Balfour is, once again, a perfect blend of strong-yet-vulnerable – that is, a very socially acceptable kind of “feminine.” By now, I was also noticing the consistently “porcelain” complexion and blonde/red/chestnut hair of all our heroines, and the consistently olive/brown complexions and black hair of all our male leads. It’s difficult not to see parallels here with recent research findings on race and desirability (biracial men with medium skin tones are apparently found highly desirable by everyone, while Black women get the fewest responses on dating apps). Surely supernatural worlds could give us greater freedom to experiment with how beauty, attraction, and desire could work.
Fantasy – whether featuring the sub-genre qualifiers of ‘romantic,” “dark,” “high” or “young/new adult” – can certainly aim to be a fun read. But depth does not come at the expense of enjoyment; in fact, if “reading for fun” is about reading that which grips your imagination and steals you away from the mundane everyday, then a compelling level of human and world complexity is vital. On this, contemporary Romantasy is falling short of its Fantasy forerunners. Its author aside, there are nuggets of insight on how we deal with love and death in Harry Potter that spoke to millions around the globe at the turn of the millennium. There was something particularly relatable about the brutal realpolitik of A Song of Ice and Fire in a post-2008 financial crisis world, and the number of people shipping Galadriel/Sauron in The Rings of Power shows how Tolkien turned the question of evil in his Lord of the Rings universe way more interesting when he made it take the form of what we covet.
This matter of desire can drive depth in plot, character and world-building. When reading Romantasy, a focus on romance and sex is to be expected. But what my foray into BookTok Romantasy had done, I realized, was somehow give me both without morally, philosophically, politically and socially rich worlds around it and, in doing so, left me frustrated – and not in a toe-curling way. In addition to keeping to largely conventional markers of attractiveness for characters, there are only so many times the mechanics of heterosexual coupling can be described before it starts to become just another day. The reader encounters at least ten highly detailed sex scenes in ACOTAR, with some noting that the especially graphic nature of the fifth installment, A Court of Silver Flames, veers decidedly out of the parameters of YA. Fourth Wing has at least four detailed, long sex scenes packed into it, which might not feel like so many if the book wasn’t perpetually fixated on the build up to and transition between them. Amidst some incidental dragon-flying, there is snarling jealousy at the thought of the other having sex, will-they-won’t-they banter about having sex, and build up to possibly having sex later. And yet this over-focus on sex acts leaves very little room for the erotic.
According to BookToker delayjaye, one of the first things asked in comments under her book recommendation videos is, “is it spicy?” In BookTok parlance, “spice” level – sometimes indicated by one to five chilli pepper emojis – is an important factor in whether or not many will pick up a Romantasy novel. In “one chilli” books, delayjaye argues, “it’s the plot that really matters.” At three chillies, we are apparently still “adding a spark without overpowering the story” (A Court of Silver Flames falls under a mere three chillies, with 53 of its 768 pages being purely descriptive sex acts, not inclusive of any set-up or aftermath). Youtuber Honest Fiction, whose spice-ranking system goes from “Mild” to “FIRE,” describes the latter ranking as “more spice than story.” Erotica is an age-old genre, and it will always exist. The more interesting observation emerging here is that a reading culture has come about that does not question its self-designated division between “spice” and “story.” How did we end up with an x-axis in our heads that runs from “plot” on one end, to “hot” on the other, and never the twain shall meet?
A Goodreads forum titled “Just BookTok Stuff” reflects this new dichotomy. “I usually avoid books with sexual stuff. And if by chance I was reading a book that’s got sexual parts I’ll just skip it,” writes Rori. “I love books with spiceness [sic] because while clean books are precious, I feel like they’re not as realistic,” Alys counters. Another user called Cassidy writes “Tension > explicit spice,” in response to both the enthusiasts and the haters. This short but sweet comment actually comes close to hinting that when “plot” is deemed the opposite of “spice,” contemporary Romantasy can miss the wood for the trees.
To put compelling storytelling on one end of the spectrum and ‘spice’ on the other fundamentally misunderstands ‘plot’ as ‘everything but sex.’
Georges Bataille situates eroticism within a tension between the sacred and the profane, as a breaking of boundaries and taboos. For Jacques Lacan, eroticism in literature exposes the tension between desire and its fulfilment, often highlighting the perpetual deferral of satisfaction; a gap which, for Michel Foucault, is often shaped by regimes of power. Literary critics like Roland Barthes add that the literary erotic invites the reader to participate imaginatively, blurring the boundaries between text and self. Reading fiction upwards of 500-pages is an altogether different experiential choice than, say, watching a 3-minute porn clip, precisely because of these phenomenological, existential, political and aesthetic aspects to the erotic. These unfold only through the kind of contextualization that can occur when sexual desire (whether fulfilled or unfulfilled, “explicit spice” or just “tension”), experienced by imperfect beings, is narrativized within a wider world of social norms, taboos, systems, gender roles, and other hierarchies. Hot is only hot when surrounded by the context of what makes it hot.
Context, which must be fully realised even or perhaps especially in the Fantasy genre (given the reader’s initial unfamiliarity with the author’s imaginary world), turns fleeting sexual desire, which can evaporate with a single intrusive thought, into a sustained kind of eroticism that is bound up with a world and the stakes of that world. Context determines whether desire is transgressive, unexpected, long-delayed, unforeseen, forbidden, subversive, gratifying, comforting, exciting, fortuitous, refreshing, consoling, or thrilling, rather than a mere bodily urge fulfilled through mechanical acts one could describe for pages and pages. Let’s say I tell you to imagine a scene where an attractive man and an attractive woman (other genders and preferences are available) are getting it on. Then I give you the same but within conditions that make it totally unexpected, long-denied, or unlikely, and in some way directly in conflict to the individual goals of the characters or the realization of their storyline thus far. Do we really want him to jump her then and there, obstacles be damned, or to hold off until we are squirming with the dilemmas, good or bad, that delayed gratification shall visit upon both the story and the characters?
To put compelling storytelling on one end of the spectrum and “spice” on the other fundamentally misunderstands “plot” as “everything but sex.” This actually does a massive disservice even to readers who are expressly looking for “spice,” because it ignores the art of storytelling as a key aspect of erotic genres. Eroticism in literature lies in the interplay of absence and presence – what you gain and what you lose when you desire – which is why it is not interchangeable with a non-narrative, passive, and non-imaginative activity like watching a 3-minute porn clip. But nor does it emerge (just by virtue of being textual rather than audiovisual) when a sex act is merely transcribed onto paper.
Tension in plot is more than just a tool to defer sexual gratification. It serves to heighten stakes in storytelling, particularly when characters navigate social or moral boundaries. Certain Fantasy novels manage to integrate this tension effectively without relying on explicitness to evoke similar responses. Take Trudi Canavan’s The Black Magician Trilogy, for instance. The eventual romantic couple are, individually, characters we’ve known since the first few chapters of the entire trilogy. They have a minor association until the gradual building of tension through social, moral, and situational barriers brings about a mutual attraction that is so memorable because it breaks Bataille’s sacred-profane dichotomy of class structures, which frame their social roles. Their eventual union becomes not merely satisfying as an end to sexual tension, but a culmination of layered emotional and moral stakes. Similarly with Jacqueline Carey’s Phèdre Trilogy, where the protagonist must turn the vulnerability of desire into agency in a world where her social position calls for the use of pleasure as a tool for negotiation, political subversion, and survival. Carey’s lush prose and sensuous world-building invite the reader into an intimate engagement with the text, echoing Barthes’ idea of the literary erotic as a participatory experience beyond any sex acts that may or may not be explicitly described.
Eroticism risks objectification as it strives for mutual recognition, and risks the dissolution of the self as it seeks to incorporate that which is other, without arriving at the end of the erotic – total possession. As Bishop, Canavan, and Carey show, it doesn’t necessarily need to equal tension that is never sated. But it cannot be disconnected from the moral, political and ontological stakes of desire. A touch is just a touch, a body just a body, unless it is part of wider social and psychic challenges that imbue it with consequence. If Romantasy can let go of its “plot versus hot” divide, it might just smolder in its reader’s imagination long after the final page.
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