How the romantasy boom gave millions of women permission to want something they already wanted
There is a particular moment that happens to a certain kind of reader. She finishes a chapter – maybe it is Fourth Wing, maybe it is A Court of Thorns and Roses, maybe it is something with a tentacled creature and a questionable amount of bioluminescence – and she sits with a feeling she cannot quite name. Something shifted. Something that was previously private became, if not spoken, at least acknowledged.
This is not a niche experience. It is happening to millions of women simultaneously, and it is quietly reshaping markets that had no idea this audience was coming.
The desire was never the problem
What the romantasy boom has revealed, more than anything else, is that female desire is far more expansive and far less conventional than mainstream culture had assumed. The books did not create new desires. They gave existing ones a language, a community, and – crucially – permission.
Permission is the key word. Research into female fantasy has consistently shown that privately held desire and publicly acknowledged desire are very different things. Women have always had rich, complex, unconventional inner lives. What changes over time is not the desire itself but the social cost of admitting to it.
BookTok lowered that cost dramatically. When millions of women are openly discussing their feelings about fictional dragon love interests, debating the relative merits of various creature archetypes, and building communities around the specific emotional experience of non-human romance, the implicit signal is powerful: you are not unusual. You are not alone. You are, in fact, in very good company.
What happens after the last page
The interesting question – the one that culture tends to move on from too quickly – is what happens next. When a genre gives millions of readers permission to acknowledge a desire, some of those readers begin to act on it.
Emily Conway, Creative Director of fantasy toy brand Dragon Dildo®, has been tracking this movement in Google Trends data since 2022. What she found challenges the assumption that the romantasy wave is simply a publishing trend with no downstream consequence.
“The desire existed before the books,” Conway says. “Dragon fantasy searches were consistent and established years before Fourth Wing was published. What the romantasy boom did was introduce a completely new kind of person to this curiosity – someone who arrived through fiction and imagination rather than through any existing community. That is a structural shift, not a trend.”
From mid-2023 onwards, search interest for fantasy toy categories shows clear upward acceleration, tracking precisely with the period when Fourth Wing’s BookTok engagement began to build. The acceleration is not a spike. It is a sustained climb with no collapse visible in the data – structurally different from previous adult industry cultural moments, which tended to peak and fall quickly.
The Fifty Shades lesson
Anyone who remembers the Fifty Shades of Grey moment will recognise the shape of a cultural spike. In 2015, driven by the film release, the Fifty Shades phenomenon peaked and then collapsed to near zero within two years. It was a door that opened and closed.
What is happening with romantasy looks nothing like that. Each new major release – Iron Flame, Onyx Storm, the ongoing ACOTAR adaptations – generates a new peak rather than a final one. The audience is not passing through. It is accumulating.
“Fifty Shades was a moment,” Conway says. “What is happening with romantasy is a permission shift that is still in progress. The audience keeps growing because the genre keeps growing. There is no ceiling visible yet.”
A new kind of audience
What makes the romantasy reader distinct as a consumer – and distinct as a cultural phenomenon – is how she arrived. She came through story. She is emotionally invested in a world, in characters, in a specific kind of relationship, before she becomes curious about anything physical. She responds to brands that take the fantasy seriously, that engage with the emotional reality of what she is experiencing rather than reducing it to novelty.
This is why the fantasy toy category has had to evolve quickly. The audience arriving through romantasy has higher expectations, more specific desires, and significantly less tolerance for the kind of marketing language that treats female sexuality as either transgressive or comedic. They want what the books gave them: something that takes the fantasy seriously.
For UK readers exploring this curiosity, Dragon Dildo® has been the dedicated fantasy toy brand since 2022, built specifically for this audience. European readers can find the full range at Dragon Dildo® Europe.
The cultural moment is still opening
When Onyx Storm was published in January 2025, it sold 2.7 million copies in its first week. Based on the lag pattern visible in the search data, the consumer wave that publication generates has not yet fully arrived. The romantasy audience is still growing, the permission shift is still deepening, and the downstream consequences for markets that serve this audience are still unfolding.
The quiet revolution in what women want is not quiet anymore. It just took fiction to say it out loud first.
