The unbearable whiteness (and straightness) of being

What is romantasy?

As a reader and a writer, the state of fiction is of extreme importance to me—particularly the state of genre fiction, which constitutes our big non-General categories like Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, and Romance.

An emerging sub-category is Romantasy, a portmanteau of Romantic Fantasy. No one really agrees on the definition of the genre, but for the purpose of this article, we’ll be using the broadest definition: mostly single POV romantic fantasy set in a secondary world where the A plot is focused on the romantic relationship between two characters and the B plot is focused on some disturbance in the fantasy world.

However you define it, romantasy has taken the fantasy genre by storm, not to mention the world at large, with a notably boom ever since Sarah J. Maas published her faerie fantasy romance A Court of Thorns and Roses. Now there are a slew of similar books selling millions, like the recent Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarrow, about a school for dragon riders.

So what’s the problem?

The other day, my writer friends and I were talking about romantasy and one thing really became clear as we were reviewing recent deals and acquisitions:

Romantasy is hella white and straight.

I mean, so is publishing in general (a subject I will leave to others; c.f. Book Riot’s Why is the book industry so white?), but romantasy seems to center white and straight characters over and above even fantasy alone, and is written primarily by white authors. And today we’re going to pick on romantasy because it’s big and hot and new and that means there’s momentum for change.

A lack of representation in novels means that all the nonwhite, queer folk out there aren’t finding books that feature characters like them. It makes them feel othered and unrelatable—especially in kidlit but even in adult fiction.

As Keshe Chow wrote in her article “The rise of the romantasy genre, feminist fantasy and diversity in literature”, “[I]t was not until I was well into my 30s before I came across a female Asian main character in a fantasy book. In the books, shows, and films of my youth, Asian characters were rare; if one was present, they were almost always the unattractive, nerdy sidekick.” She goes on to say:

Representation matters. It makes people feel seen and happier. We want people, all people, to be happy! And we’re not getting it.

Let’s look at some data

To check out the problem, I took to Goodreads to look at the most popular, most-read romantasy books. Here are the books most read last week in all of Fantasy. I oranged out the ones that would not be considered Romantasy.

The remaining books are all written by white authors. So I kept going down the full list. White. White. April Moon has no picture so unsure. White. Hell, most of the other fantasy was white too. If This Woven Kingdom by Tahereh Mafi counts as a romantasy then we have one romantasy on the entire list by a person of color. It’s still straight, but we’re getting somewhere?

Now, these are just the ones people are reporting reading the most. Not the only ones that exist. For that, you have to look at Publisher’s Weekly deals. But from an Anonymous Source I know who catalogued a bunch of recent deals, I can tell you…those are looking overwhelmingly white and straight. And the biggest deals are going to white authors, while BIPOC authors are getting more moderate advances.

*Obviously photos aren’t the ideal way to determine race, so numbers may be slightly off. We’re also not assuming sexuality of the author, only the characters. 

We get more precise data from Keshe Chow’s article. She discusses stats for romance, an adjacent genre to romantasy:

So where do we go from here?

As readers, we need to do better. We can’t fully control the acquisitions process, but we can vote with our dollars. Right now, we know from even big boxes like Illumicrate that book subscription boxes have people skip the month significantly more when the protagonists are BIPOC or queer than for white or straight characters. (Just go read the comments.) That’s unacceptable.

Instead, we can demand and purchase romantasy written by BIPOC. We can buy queer romantasy. (Hell, someday we’ll even talk about fat characters, mentally ill characters, disabled characters, religious minority characters, and other identities in romantasy so tiny as to be negligible in the stats.)

But we can start with getting out of our bubble and actively seeking out other perspectives.

Maybe part of that is going to look like looking into indie and self-published works. Traditional publishing’s eyes is on self-pub right now; they’re ravenous for commercially successful titles. Let’s show them it’s not just the white, straight books that sell.

Thanks for reading C.J. Subko Books! This post is public so feel free to share it.

A reading list

This was hard to collect, not being familiar with all recs, because people like to do things like put The Poppy War by RF Kuang on romantasy lists (this is the problem with a fluid subgenre definition). But here are some by BIPOC authors that definitely fit the romantasy bill using our definition above.