Romantasy: a crossover label

Romantasy is a shelving convenience for books that answer to two sets of expectations at once, and it is worth being precise about which set is doing the structural work. The label tells you the ingredients. It does not tell you the recipe, and readers who are disappointed by a particular book are usually disappointed because they assumed the wrong one.

Two different promises

Romance as a category makes a structural promise: the relationship is the plot, and the ending resolves it satisfyingly. Fantasy makes a different one: the world operates on rules that are not ours, and the consequences of those rules drive events. A book can honour both, but one of them will be load-bearing, and which one it is determines the shape of the last hundred pages.

If the relationship is load-bearing, the world exists mainly to keep the pair apart and then to let them be together. Magic, courts and wars are obstacles, and their resolution can be brisk. If the world is load-bearing, the relationship is one thread in a larger settlement, and it may be resolved earlier so that the ending can belong to the plot.

How to tell which one you have

The most reliable test is where the climax sits. Ask what the final confrontation is about. If the last major scene turns on what the two people decide about each other, the book is a romance in a fantasy setting. If it turns on a throne, a spell, a siege or a rule of the world, the book is a fantasy that contains a romance.

A second test is the point of view. Books whose romance carries the structure almost always give both parties a viewpoint, because the reader needs access to two interiors. Books whose world carries the structure often keep a single viewpoint and let the second party stay partly unknown.

Why the label appeared

The label became useful because the two shelves had drifted apart in bookshops while readers had not. Someone who wanted both was being sent to two different sections and finding, in each, books that delivered half of what they came for. A crossover label is a practical answer to that, and its rapid adoption says more about shelving than about a new kind of writing.

Being precise about it

The label works best as a first filter followed by a second question. Saying a book is romantasy narrows the field usefully. Saying which of the two promises it keeps first narrows it to something a reader can actually act on. In descriptions on this site the second half is always stated, because it is the part that determines whether a given evening goes well.