Around midnight on January 21, 2025, bookstores across the United States experienced crowds they’d not seen since the days of Harry Potter. Customers lined up outside storefronts by the hundreds to snatch up a hotly anticipated fantasy title the moment it hit bookshelves. The fervor was so intense that some shops charged admission. As in the days of Harry Potter, many fans arrived in costume to celebrate their favorite characters.
Unlike in the Hogwarts mania of the ’90s, however, most attendees were women. Their costumes often included leather bodysuits. And the book in question featured not only dragons and a magical realm but also explicit sex scenes.
Rise of Romantasy
The title that sparked so much excitement was Rebecca Yarros’s Onyx Storm, the third book in the Empyrean series of novels within the “romantasy” subgenre. Romantasy blends the tropes of romance with the imaginative world-building of fantasy, creating novels described as “The Bachelor meets The Hunger Games.” Bloomsbury Publishing claims to have recently coined the term “romantasy” to promote their author Sarah J. Maas’s books, but the definition appeared on Urban Dictionary as early as 2008. “It’s not really a new genre, but one that’s grown so much as to receive its own nickname,” explained Marian A. Jacobs during my interview with her; Jacobs is a contributor to the Christian fantasy site Lorehaven and the author of the forthcoming On Magic and Miracles: A Theological Guide to Discerning Fictional Magic.
The book in question featured not only dragons and a magical realm but also explicit sex scenes.
Whatever its origins, romantasy has soared in popularity in recent years. Onyx Storm sold 2.7 million copies in its first week, breaking a 20-year record. At the time of this writing, Yarros’s books occupy the top two spots on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction and the top three spots on Amazon’s “most sold” list. Maas, another author driving sales in the category, has also seen meteoric success; her A Court of Thorns and Roses series has sold more than 13 million copies.
Why have these books achieved such a wide readership over the last few years? Even more importantly, what should Christians know about romantasy—and how can we guard our hearts as these titles become increasingly prevalent?
Lure of Escapism
Social media has played a pivotal role in romantasy’s surging popularity. In the months following the release of Yarros’s first Empyrean book in 2023, fan videos on BookTok attracted more than a billion views. Influencers often praise the female empowerment they encounter in these books. Romantasy “allows women to have it all,” Instagrammer Christina Clark-Brown told The Guardian. Its editorial staff elaborated:
The romantasy heroine speaks to the cultural moment. The strong, female-led stories show young women can be nerdy and sexy, vulnerable and powerful, both “not that girl” and “that girl.” . . . You can be anyone—or anything—you please. This is the fantasy.
Such remarks hint at women’s yearning for meaning and identity. We crave control over our fate. We desire love, to be lovable—and yet to be like God (Gen. 3:4–5). It’s an undercurrent of wayward longing also evident in the link between romantasy and the pandemic. Fantasy book sales climbed by 45 percent from 2020 to 2021, the largest increase across all genres except graphic novels. “Along with the rise in cosy crime, romantasy’s soaring popularity has been attributed to the appeal of escapism in dark times,” The Guardian reflected. “For its devotees, the genre offers the joy of getting lost in another world and connecting with others.”
When I asked a group of Christian high schoolers about their experiences with romantasy, they echoed these themes of loneliness and longing. “My friends who are really into these books are trying to experience what they want, but don’t have,” one student shared. “The boys in these books are all impossibly perfect. My friends can’t find these perfect relationships in their own lives, so they seek them out in books. It makes me sad, because they’re chasing after something they’ll never find.”
Jacobs has observed the same phenomenon. “Post-Covid, women are hungrier than ever to fill that Jesus-shaped hole in their heart that only festered during the loneliness of quarantine,” she said. “And where men usually gravitate toward online pornography in those moments, women are more likely to pick up a romance novel or even erotica.”
Watch Out for Spice
The erotic content in romantasy poses the greatest concern for Christians. While euphemistically labeled “spice,” these scenes are often explicit. For example, in his review of Yarros’s Fourth Wing, Plugged In contributor Kennedy Unthank noted that the main characters “engage in two different graphic sex scenes, both of which are multiple pages long and describe the sex in such detail that readers will get a full anatomy course by the end.” Even some secular readers have found the depictions alarming. “During my journeys in romantasy,” a fan wrote in The Sunday Times, “I found it disconcertingly easy to veer from vanilla stuff to some fairly violent sexual tropes, almost without meaning to.”
As 82 percent of romance readers are women, the soaring popularity of spicy romantasy has implications for the sisters, daughters, and mothers who sit beside us in church. Jacobs, who has written extensively on the topic of women’s lust and fiction, says romantasy “can absolutely be a gateway drug to a pornography and/or erotica addiction.” While most research on pornography emphasizes its dangers for men, Jacobs has encountered increasing numbers of women who struggle with lust in silence and shame—even in the church. In 2018, she conducted a small, anonymous survey of Christian women and found that 94 percent struggled with lust; this same percentage reported that literature and television exacerbated their temptation.
While alarming, these findings shouldn’t surprise us when we consider that the content we consume, whether written or visual, shapes our minds and hearts (Rom. 12:2). Diving into explicit fiction reflects a chasing after wind (Eccl. 1:14) as we search for meaning, connection, and love down avenues that will never satisfy. In her book Pulling Back the Shades: Erotica, Intimacy, and the Longings of a Woman’s Heart, Dannah Gresh writes,
Reading erotica, like viewing pornography, may lead to an intense sexual reaction but the characters are one-dimensional lies. With each page of erotica . . . evil is reinforcing the lie that sex is just about physical pleasure—divorced from true commitment, unselfish love, and God’s holy design. You will be left with a deep ache for something more. The truth is you were created for something more! (40)
In a world riddled with anxieties, the lure of stories that offer diversion and fantasy can be powerful. Yet they leave us yearning for something deeper and lasting because we were made not for transient pleasure and escape but for communion with Christ (Matt. 22:37, John 15:9, 1 John 3:1).
Caution for Families
The potential to accidentally stumble into sexually explicit scenes in romantasy is a warning to parents and a risk teenagers actively navigate. In an interview for Reedsy, romantasy author Jennifer L. Armentrout commented, “A lot of romantasy covers look like fantasy books, so new readers may not be aware that they’re reading a fantasy romance, which is expanding the readership.”
This ambiguity means young readers may see an intriguing cover and unwittingly end up reading grievously inappropriate content. The high schoolers I interviewed said the back-cover copy of fantasy books rarely offers clues about spice. After discovering a scene that troubled her for weeks afterward, one student learned to look up books on Common Sense Media or Goodreads before purchasing.
In a world riddled with anxieties, the lure of stories that offer diversion and fantasy can be powerful.
Such review sites are a valuable resource for families. “I’ve been warning parents for years about the young adult novel market,” Jacobs noted. “There are very, very few secular authors that write without using sensuality in young adult books. . . . If a teen is avidly reading secular young adult novels, I guarantee they are reading softcore porn. And their parents may have no idea.” Yarros’s books illustrate Jacobs’s point. When she first pitched Fourth Wing, Yarros set the story in a military unit. Her publisher, however, had a different idea: They “suggested a tweak that would appeal to a younger audience: rather than a military unit, the setting should be a war college, with new recruits.”
Guard Your Hearts . . . and Your Bookshelves
In this murky environment, how do we guide one another toward books that are true, pure, commendable, and lovely (Phil. 4:8)?
Critically, we need to cultivate discernment, shepherding one another toward a biblical understanding of God’s design for relationships. Sisters in Christ should dialogue about the beauty, the gift, and the fulfillment of covenant marriage as an image of Christ and his church (Gen. 2:24; Eph. 5:21–33). We should point one another to satisfaction not in the transient things of this world, and not in adoration from man (Col. 3:23–24), but in a restored relationship with God through Christ, who so loved us that he laid down his life for us (John 3:16; 1 John 3:16).
Thankfully, we also have safeguard options. We can adopt a practice of screening for objectionable content through review sites, whether for our children or ourselves. Plugged In, Common Sense Media, and Lorehaven all offer reviews of popular media and fantasy books, with a focus on identifying inappropriate elements.
Additionally, we can fill our bookshelves and minds with life-giving stories and recommend them to others. Delve into classic literature. Draw out themes of redemption, hope, and self-sacrifice. To find good books for kids and teens, grab a copy of Honey for a Child’s Heart or Wild Things and Castles in the Sky and peruse the pages for recommendations. Also, check out Read-Aloud Revival, Good Book Mom, Redeemed Reader, and WORLD Magazine for reviews from a Christian perspective.
Jacobs urges believers to consider the plethora of vibrant and God-honoring literature from modern Christian authors. “There are literally hundreds of Christian authors of speculative fiction [writing that includes genres other than realism] that are desperately trying to get their books into the hands of Christian kids, teens, and adults, and are struggling to do so,” she said.
She had a word for Christian publishers as well: “They should publish clean, God-glorifying romantasy that seeks to lead readers closer to Christ rather than into a life of sexual addiction. Romantasy is a genre that can be, and sometimes is, done well. The danger is not that this genre exists but that readers need help finding the right books.”
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