What do women really want from men? I delved into romantasy and found a good few clues

The Guardian

08-03-2025

Feyre Archeron has many talents: she can skin a wolf and track a deer, and in the words of an amorous fairy she looks 'absolutely delicious'. An impoverished hunter gatherer, Archeron is the protagonist of Sarah J Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses, or Acotar as it's known to fans. This five-book series belongs to a genre called romantasy, so called because it blends romance and fantasy. And it's not too much of an exaggeration to say that it has the popularity of both combined. Acotar has sold more than 13m copies and all five books are in the top 10 bestselling fantasy titles of 2025 to date. If you haven't heard of them, the chances are that you have seen someone reading one on the train, perhaps concealed beneath the dust jacket of something less salacious.
Most of romantasy's readers are women aged 18 to 44, and part of the genre's appeal is its reversal of gender roles. Archeron, for example, can't read. But that's only because poverty has forced her to focus her energy on hunting. Her illiteracy is therefore ironically a sign of strength. Maas's men, meanwhile, may live in gorgeous palaces with well stocked libraries, but as the plots develop they come to depend on Archeron for their salvation.
It's not hard to see why millions of women are drawn to worlds in which female characters are beautiful hunters and men are bookish hunks. Especially when, in reality, only 13% of men read daily, and then mostly for personal growth rather than pleasure. Men gravitate towards self-help and nonfiction and make up only about 30% of the fiction-buying market. Romantasy capitalises on the scarcity value of literary men and leverages their appeal as sensitive and emotionally intelligent.
Full disclosure: I'm one of the 13%, and I was surprised to find that my daily reading habit might indicate anything other than my unfitness for the modern world. I decided to make a journey into romantasy – a quest, if you will – to see if there was anything else these books have to teach men about what women want. I'm talking morally, of course, not carnally. Because, despite Acotar's much vaunted sexual content, Maas is more interested in friendship than any other F-word. In the third book of the series, A Court of Wings and Ruin, for instance, by the time the various couples get into bed, it's clear that their bond is about far more than just 'rippling muscles', 'corded muscles' or even 'muscles covered in intricate and beautiful tattoos'. It's also about, you know, feelings. Accounts of these books often emphasise their sexual content, as though it's somehow scandalous for women to be reading romance. But what is really surprising is how conservative they are.
Which is not to say that their male leads are shrinking violets. Both Maas and Rebecca Yarros, in her equally popular Empyrean series, establish early on that the male lead could literally kill his female counterpart. He is the Beast to her Beauty but, just as in the original fairytale, his brutality is only skin deep. In order to pursue his relationship with the heroine, he is forced to come to terms with the complex trauma that turned him into such a sexy monster. It is only then that he can reveal himself to be, to borrow a word beloved by romantasy fans, a cinnamon roll. In other words, soft hearted, sweet and, yes, delicious. He may be handsome and powerful, but the hero's real draw is his emotional vulnerability. So strong is the connection readers form with these characters, in fact, that BookTok is full of readers weeping while reading emotional passages. As one young woman bawled while reading the tragic ending of A Court of Wings and Ruin, 'I feel like my family is dying.'
Men sometimes find romantasy threatening – one took to Reddit, for example, after he found his girlfriend's secret stash of books: 'The fact that THESE are her fantasies doesn't sit right with me at all.' But these books are more about community than a desire to actually date men of such cringeworthy perfection. A romantasy fan I know, who happens to work in theatre, surmised that meeting Maas's heroes in real life would be as disappointing as meeting famous actors: 'In reality, they are far stupider than you imagined.' She has nevertheless found that romantasy has enabled her to reconnect with old friends who, after she recently became a mother, she rarely gets the chance to see: 'It makes conversation so easy,' she said. 'I mention a scene and we can talk for hours.'
The connections that romantasy can foster meant it boomed during Covid. And now that our times are becoming ever more turbulent, readers are embracing the genre like a comfort blanket. The societies romantasy depicts are often as chaotic as our own – Yarros's Fourth Wing, for instance, is set during a time of total war. But everyone is given very clear roles that make their world, however dangerous, more predictable than our own: scribes report the news, infantry fight the battles and riders fly the dragons. And, of course, there is an elaborate prophecy that the protagonist needs to fulfil.
Romantasy's ordered worlds sometimes made me uncomfortable. Maas and Yarros are both obsessed with status. Their heroes may be secret softies, but it is no accident they are all titled. In the first book of Acotar, for example, Archeron is abducted by an aristocratic fairy, or high fae, called Tamlin. But, when she finds out that Tamlin is also a high lord and ruler of a domain called the Spring Court, she begins to find her abduction rather more propitious. Despite her physical strength, it seems Archeron's way out of poverty lies through men. She may as well be in a Jane Austen novel.
But it is possible to take this critique too far. Readers don't come to romantasy looking for moral edification. The genre's fans even codify books according to acronyms such as ETL (enemies to lovers), which shows they are looking for familiar narratives into which they can escape. And these novels are remarkably absorbing.
I spent a very happy Sunday with Acotar, the washing piling up in the sink, tea-stained mugs gathering around me so that, when I was done, I could be under no illusion that I was a warrior king. Or even a particularly good husband. I was just happy to be a reader.
Max Fletcher is a London-based writer