Recently, a male fantasy author and I were discussing romantasy.
Now, I know what you might be thinking but trust me—this isn’t quite as bleak as it sounds.
The topic of discussion ended up being how he didn’t believe he could convincingly write a romantasy novel. Me, being curious, probed him on why since I know him to be quite an emotionally-attuned, sensitive, romantic type of soul. Far more than me, in any case. His answer was that he was simply more interested in writing traditional epic fantasy (and he wasn’t convinced he had the capacity to write a sex scene).
A fair answer, but it did get the gears of my mind turning as to why romantasy is such a female-dominated genre—and more specifically, why I was drawn to writing it in spite of my natural disposition to be a black-hearted cynic. While you could make a case for this being primarily about reading histories and personal taste, that conclusion didn’t quite satisfy me. You see, I happen to indulge in a lot of what people disparagingly consider “dudebro” media. You’re more likely to find me tuning into the latest season of The Boys over Bridgerton, in spite of the latter being heavily marketed to my demographic.
And therein, I think, lies the answer.
Regardless of my natural inclinations, media geared towards women socially trains us to foreground relationships as narrative engines, while media catered to men trains them to foreground external systems. This is all down to that subliminal brainwashing of:
“girl = pink and blue = boy”
That gets hammered into our lizard hindbrains, reinforced over years of gendered socialisation. We almost never quite escape it, in spite of who we might later grow up to be.
So it makes sense that even when a man is personally romantic, he may still naturally conceptualise story through epic battles, statecraft, war, magic systems, quests and power structures. Whereas women—even emotionally restrained ones—often instinctively anchor story in emotional dynamics, domestic conflict, family and interpersonal tension.
This is not—at the risk of sounding essentialist—because women are biologically “more romantic,” but because women are taught from childhood that relationships matter narratively. And although my work often has a strong romantic thread, it’s rarely a stock-standard (R)omance in the traditional sense. I still write about political/cultural worldbuilding, court intrigue, fantasy races and lore systems in Essence of the Equinox, it’s just filtered through emotional interiority and relationship tension. This is probably why it still lands in romantasy spaces even if my instincts are not especially fluffy or sentimental.
Despite my chronic cynicism, what drives my engine narratively is a fascination with interpersonal dynamics. I am and always have been hyper-attuned to power in relationships, interested in picking apart emotional contradictions, and studying the psychology of love and sex and why it often leads to our ruin.
Maybe it’s because it’s featured so very little in my own life—while being the primary force for so much of how we structure society—that I ended up becoming fixated with decoding it to satisfy my own curiosity. Like an anthropologist penning notes on ancient, obscure rituals that seems inscrutable to her modern-lens.
There’s also the market reality component.
Women readers massively dominate romantasy, and they are voracious. So women writers are encouraged and rewarded for writing romantasy, and socially legitimised within it. Men, on the other hand, are often culturally nudged towards “serious” fantasy, while socially discouraged from the so-called “girl’s club” of romance. Even when they themselves are romantics.
To be clear, this stigma works vice versa for women entering into epic fantasy spaces (hence the usage of gender-neutral pennames until recent history). But due to misogyny, I think men are more subconsciously primed to distance themselves from femininity as a means of preserving their own gendered status.
And frankly? A lot of male epic fantasy writers do struggle with emotional intimacy on the page. Not because they’re incapable of feeling it, but because they weren’t trained to articulate it the same way women are, and thus they often externalise emotion into action/worldbuilding instead. You can actually see this across classic fantasy. A series like The Lord of the Rings is deeply emotional—but Tolkien expresses emotion through loyalty and sacrifice, such as the transcendental brotherhood bond between the Hobbits. If he does feature romance, it’s portrayed with far less raw romantic interiority and more likely to be hinted at with distant chivalric propriety, such as the one featured between Arwen and Aragorn.
This rather reminds me of when I stumbled upon a blog post from an anti-feminist man who claimed female genius is “limited” because all our fiction is “solipsistic” and concerned mainly with relational matters, citing Austen’s domestics for an example. According to him, Austen should’ve been writing of more important matters such as war, imperial expansion, and other matters of the state—rather than frivolous things such as marriage and money.
What’s ironic is that him saying this of Jane Austen accidentally revealed how narrow his understanding of power is. Because Austen was never “just” writing about romance, her entire backlist is deeply concerned with the social position of high-society women at the time. Of which she was one. The wars were happening around her world, yes. But for most women of her class and time marriage was geopolitics. And I don’t see why it’s self-centred for her to write about how a bad marriage could destroy your life materially, socially, legally, reproductively, psychologically. Especially when such a thing could be seen as an existential threat to her and those around her. To me, that isn’t “small stakes”, it’s civilisation operating at a household scale.
The problem with a lot of male critics, historically and otherwise, is they make the mistake of treating matters of statecraft, military conflict, and conquest as “serious” while treating the domestic sphere in which women dominated as trivial. And it’s just pure misogyny. Because the family unit is how societies actually reproduce themselves. Empires are built out of households. Inheritance structures determine political power. Marriage alliances determine dynasties. Social norms determine who survives.
Austen understood that intimately. That without marriage and motherhood, none of the numerous conflicts men are pontificating about in their fiction actually matter. This is why the criticism that “female fiction is solipsistic” often falls apart under scrutiny, because plenty of male literature is intensely self-absorbed too. The difference is male interiority gets framed as “universal” while female interiority gets framed as “personal” or “domestic”.
A man writing 400 pages about his alienation? “Profound meditation on modernity.”
A woman writing 400 pages about emotional dependency and marriage? “Small-scale relationship drama.”
Meanwhile both are studying human behaviour, the only difference is the scope and scale.
There’s also a hidden assumption in that criticism that implies wars matter more than relationships. Or, at least, that one topic is inherently more noble and erudite to pursue in literature than the other. But does this hold when we look at what wars typically emerge from?
Crack open any history textbook and you’ll typically find a lot of bloodshed and destruction are all instigated from the same banal causes: From ego. From divided loyalties. From succession crises. From ideological attachment. From desire. From fear.
In other words: from relational psychology scaled upward.
Even epic fantasy eventually comes back to interpersonal dynamics. To take Lord of the Rings as an example, what people often remember from that narrative is Frodo and Sam, not agricultural yields in Gondor. What endures are the themes of friendship, forbidden love, betrayal, and character psychology. That’s the emotional engine.
And this is why I write how I do. Because one reason romantasy dominates commercially now is that audiences are increasingly unconvinced by the old hierarchy that says:
“external conflict = depth”
“emotional conflict = frivolity”
Readers want both. That’s why I found the call of writing a romantasy compelling. Not simply to write a romance in a fantasy world but to write emotional dynamics embedded inside a larger sociopolitical fantasy world.
Which is honestly closer to how humans actually experience history anyway.
If you're looking for a fantasy that takes women's emotional worlds as seriously as its wars and kingdoms, that's exactly what I set out to write in The Essence of the Equinox.
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