Transcript
[0:06] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans.
[0:11] And fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
My name is Julia Golding.
Now have you noticed there has been a lot of information, sort of fuss recently about a sub-genre of fantasy called Romantasy, which is, as the name suggests, a romantic fantasy. fantasy.
I thought it was worth stopping and actually thinking about this, particularly for those of you who are looking for your next fantasy read and for those of you who are thinking what kind of fantasy book you might want to write at the moment.
And it is true that publishers are looking for these books, though there's always a problem here, just as a health warning, that just as you wake up to a trend, you might find the trend is passing.
[0:59] There could be a glut, which which I suspect is where we might be in the next year or so.
But anyway, it is obviously a fantasy genre where publishers are acquiring books.
Now, just to put it in context, there have been over the last 25 years since the advent of social media, a few times in publishing where you get a breakout book. book.
The most famous, of course, being the Harry Potter phenomenon, which started in the early 2000s, though the books were published a couple of years at the end of the 1990s.
And I thought at the time that that was a bit like The Beatles.
It was like a one-off success.
And I don't think we've seen anything else quite to match it, but we have had some other books come along to rival it in some ways so it was followed by the hunger games which had its own moment, and its own successful film series though it didn't have quite the same following in terms of cosplay and you know i don't think there is a hunger games um.
[2:07] Adventure world which would be quite agreeable wouldn't it but anyway uh it's it has its own had its own moment and then we of course had the twilight phenomenon again with a successful film franchise that followed on and that led to a whole kind of era of black and red books uh i actually was writing in ya at that time was aware of that phenomenon i did my own series that was about people with paranormal powers and it fell within that group and indeed the cover was black and red and white.
Very popular book that one, that whole series written as Joss Serling, did very well for me went all around the world so yes, thank you very much Twilight for starting that particular, wave going through publishing. And then more perplexing, we had the Fifty Shades phenomenon.
[3:05] Which was the erotic thriller, again, with a successful, within its own terms, film franchise.
Not possibly the best written books ever made, but they did have a moment, didn't they?
And one of the things when you look at this is there's probably a connection.
[3:26] Between the readership who were growing up on harry potter the sort of millennials and the next group um who then became the buyers the readers of the other phenomenon books so you've got that readership skewing female quite a lot of the tastes within twilight and 50 shades it's the female point of view mainly uh so that's where that came from possibly uh 50 shades was a twilight fan fiction in its origin so you've got a female predominantly empowered set of female readers who are savvy about social media so they're spreading word about these books through this new connectivity.
And now the thing that we have is a lot of these people are now still on social media, why not?
But also they're in publishing and bookselling.
So the majority of editors that I meet in publishing are female.
And the majority of booksellers I meet are also female.
[4:35] I don't know if that's true across the world, but it's certainly the impression I get in the UK.
So this does affect the kind of books that publishers get excited about and also relates to the fact that when you look at readers, the market is more feminine.
There are more women readers out there, certainly sort of belonging to things like book clubs and doing book talks and what have you.
There are men, but they are a minority in this particular case.
[5:04] Okay, so what are we looking at when we talk about Romanticy?
Well, even though it's got its buzz at the moment, it actually started quite a while ago.
[5:14] And arguably, there have been romantic fantasies since the dawn of time.
But the first sort of big name who made their sort of career through this, I think it was probably Sarah J. Maas.
I actually met her in the early 2010s because she and I were both at the Frankfurt Book Fair at a meal hosted by our publisher over there and at that time she was doing the throne of glass and that series and it was doing particularly well that probably is less of a romantic because, it does have the same elements but the erotic content is not as big as is expected in the the current brand of romanticies.
So let's just pause there a moment.
A romanticie, I think, to separate it out from just a fantasy with a romance in.
[6:07] These days has more graphic sexual encounters so it will be um quite full-on descriptions going all the way through a sexual encounter probably some form of you know not missionary sex should we say up against the wall oral sex other sorts of things which um you would not have expected to find in a sort of pg type fantasy so they they're edging edging to a more adult content content though the context in which the story is set does feel quite ya it's one of these areas where there's a slippage uh so i'm sure lots of ya readers are reading these books probably, i think social media is opening people's eyes much younger to highly sexualized content so the the sex itself is there's like you know always upping the ante it gets more and more.
[7:03] Graphic and uh well you know more like what we would have called erotic fiction in the past though i don't think that's probably what the tag they've put on it these days, anyway so sarah j miles started with the book about the assassin in throne of glass which of course had more violence more in the hunger games era of killings basically um and then And she has now upped the sexy element in the series that starts with A Court of Thorn and Roses.
[7:37] There has been lots of people who do things like this now.
So you have like the fairy court idea or another world fantasy.
So that the relationships between male and female, sometimes same-sex relationships, is much more foregrounded. That seems to be some of the hallmarks.
If you're looking, what is a romanticie? It's probably set in another world and it probably has a fairy world feel to it, probably with magic and with this...
High higher sexual content it's not a very good definition is it because i you'll know when you see it so others have followed i was looking at a list of um recommended people in this area so if you're looking for a whole range of people to read like this um i'll put those in the the notes for this but uh if you're looking for something with a more diverse origin you've got sarah l arifi.
[8:42] One that I remember reading, well, I suppose they're old hands, almost concurrent with Sarah J.
[9:10] Maas. many others. But the person I've left off this and who prompted me to do this podcast is actually the new breakout in this area, Rebecca Yaros.
Now, I wasn't reading this genre until I started to hear the fuss around this writer and her book, The Fourth Wing.
And I thought, I will go and read it because I like to know what's happening.
When they start saying this book is like, you know, best thing since lice bread i want to know why uh so i went and read it read it very quickly enjoyed it very much and i get the impression that rebecca herself is a delightful person.
[9:52] Really charming very grateful for her success and also aware in her humility that she is not the only person out there who's been writing like this so she sounds a little bit surprised by her own popularity and that's a nice thing about her so well done her um and i hope she, long may she carry on writing, But I want to do a sort of a deeper dive into her book. So there will be some criticism in this and some plot spoilers, but it's all meant within a very supportive, actually, I really enjoyed reading your book way.
But I thought it would help other creatives have a think about what's going on in this genre.
And she's so popular that she'll be able to take anything I say.
It won't be negative. It will just be pointing out things that seem a bit odd in the genre to me.
Anyway, let's look at the sociology of the popularity of this genre i've mentioned excuse female i've mentioned that it has a high erotic content and in this it feels like a brand of an adult fairy tale and it sometimes feels like fan fiction what i mean by that is someone has thought in their daydreams. Here is a story.
What would happen if I do an erotic daydream about it? Where can I push it?
That's how it feels to me, reading it.
And there's nothing wrong with a healthy imagination for your sexuality.
That's part of what makes us human, isn't it?
[11:20] So what works in the Rebecca Yarrow's book to make it so particularly popular?
Well, just looking at it as a technical exercise, she's picked a first-person present tense narrative.
Almost all of it is from the point of view of Violet, our main character.
What this does is it gives an immediacy to the story and it limits our knowledge of the world and its plot, so we discover it at the same time as she does, to a certain extent, because Violet is going into this, dragon rider program so it's it's relatively new to her though she has lived quite close to other family members who have gone through the same training so she does have some knowledge, but that first person immediacy where she doesn't understand everything that's going on and the little plots and the conspiracies of that world so we are following her in the way that you do in a detective fiction that's written from a first person point of view, and of course that first person present makes us very close to the character we are kind of her, as we are reading it because of the eye.
[12:31] But that immediacy wouldn't work unless the pacing was correct.
[12:37] It does have the first year at school structure, first year at university, which you find in other fantasy novels, of course.
And sometimes the weakness in that let's do a whole school year thing is that you mark time to get to the next big event.
And this doesn't happen in this book. So when she first joins the Dragonrider program, program we know that there's a big test coming up called threshing and that came earlier in the book than i was expecting it isn't a climax at the end it's more like a midpoint big event so it means that it does actually you know run along it gallops along this story um and you don't get to the point where you think oh come on let's skip a few pages i want to see what happens and so the actual structure of the book is that we resolve the question of will she or won't she become a dragon rider fairly early on so that we have the rest of the book to unpack the politics of this world and as you'll see from the actual physical book I'm holding up here it's a long book for those of you who are listening to this let's do a quick look at the page count 561 so it's not a a short read, but it feels short because you're turning the pages.
Twilight had that same box of chocolates feel that once you started reading it, you wanted to keep on eating the chocolates.
[14:05] So, yeah, that works in this.
[14:10] I would just say, though, that even though the characters are supposed to be what I would call more university age, you don't really hear precisely of people's ages, but at one point, Zayden, the male hero, is mentioned as being 23.
They do feel younger to me. They do feel more like high schoolers.
[14:35] I don't know. Maybe that's just me because I'm old and crumbly. but they they kept saying they're adults and they're mature but they didn't feel hugely mature to me anyway that was just my my my jaded that's me being too old i don't know but i felt they felt younger than their given ages um before i came to this book i had read i was looking for what was different about it in according to reviewers and i saw two things things which were sort of touted about it one was the very high death count so yes lots of people die you do meet you do lose a couple of beloved characters but they're not central characters they're adjacent characters so are we shocked by high death counts i mean harry potter killed off quite a lot of people that was a long time ago now game of thrones killed off a lot of people I don't know if that's that shocking and obviously any book that has a war in it is going to kill people so okay maybe the fact that it there is no morals in this world is, it's quite fine to kill off your fellow student.
[15:51] That feels odd and perhaps means the world isn't actually very, maybe later books will unpack the wrongness of that, that people are accepting that students at school can be just polished off because you're jealous of them or want their dragon.
I don't know. It'd be interesting to see where she goes with this.
I found it, I would want to question that more.
Or it yeah anyway there was they seemed to be a suggestion that because they were dragon riders in some part reflecting the dragon society that this was the result but actually the dragons didn't seem to go around killing each other so that was just one question i had about it, and then the second difference that i read about it in reviews was about the dragons being in charge that's not actually right that review i read gave me the wrong impression.
[16:48] Dragons are not subservient but it's more like an alliance between the dragon riders and their dragons they both have their pride they both have their command structures and they seem to have come together to protect part of this world and the connection between the dragon the dragon riders definitely isn't new um there's telepathic the reason you do telepathic connections is because it's very hard to imagine a dragon speaking been there done that in an earlier book i wrote um but also the fact this connection gives the rider a power from the dragon that also is something which isn't unique to this book i actually did something 20 years ago in a much much younger children's series called The Companion's Quartet, where the companion to the dragon would channel part of the dragon's power.
That was the whole thesis behind that book. And I don't remember thinking that was original at the time.
I'm sure it's in a line of stories that have done that.
But it doesn't actually have to be purely unique in order to be good.
It can be a new way of doing this.
And Rebecca does do it very well in her own world.
So, you know, kudos to her. She's dipped into the cauldron of story and bought out this element and done it well.
[18:12] So, moving on to the other part of this, of course, which we keep circling back
[18:17] around to, is the higher sexual content.
And there is already a strong correlation between dragons and more sort of edgy, kinky sex.
The first book i ever read about dragon riders was the famous uh series by anne mcafree dragon riders of pern which i read as a teenager some of the books in that series the very first book in that was published even before i was born in 1967 so has quite a history to it i went back and read it more recently and actually discovered well i didn't like it very much when i went back because because of the gender relationships in it.
It has this kind of queen dragon rider idea with a menage of dragon riders around her who kind of fight for her favors.
[19:05] Kind of animalistic idea, which is a bit of the kind of idea going into this Rebecca Yarrow's book.
Because when there's two dragons, which two of the main characters are connected to, when they they're mated pair when they have their matings the human characters are driven by that sexual drive so there is a connection there which you can see in the dragon riders of pern series and also there's a whole sub-genre on uh kindle and probably also in print of the dragon shifter books where that's unlike being a dragon rider where characters turn into dragons this also has that um animalistic sort of sex appetite that's what that's using you get it in the werewolves and the vampires as well it's all part of that same releasing of those more i don't know is it more erotic aberrant.
[20:11] Not aberrant, but just more fierce sexual passions.
Somehow by having this connection to dragons or wolves or whatever releases something in our imaginations which is sexy, so that's why it works.
[20:29] What about the actual sexes in this book? It's not all the time.
Um the character tends the main character violet reaches a sexual encounter with the hero i'm not going to give the name of which one it is um towards the latter last third last three quarters of the book so it's not too not like loads and loads of bedroom scenes in this story.
[20:55] That for me was a relief because i didn't particularly enjoy the the sex in this book book it's not badly written it's not gonna you know not not a thumbs down from that point of view i just wasn't that interested in it because it didn't do much for me in terms of of making the plot move along wasn't kind of necessary it could almost have been a a version of doing the sex where you see them go to bed and it fades to flickering fire and back here we are to the story that would have been as good for me but that's probably just my choice I'm at the stage of my life where I don't particularly enjoy reading erotic fiction it's an odd thing to say and I'm sure other people will actually really enjoy this element so for me when I saw that coming along I kind of thought right quick skim read it it wasn't the bit of the book I enjoyed at all I got a bit bored by it, but your view might differ and it might be something that really does light your fire. It didn't light mine, but there we go.
[22:02] Another trope in the book is, as well as the dragon sex part of it, is there is a love triangle.
And I know some people really hate love triangles. I am not that keen.
And when I see one emerge, I have a tendency to roll my eyes.
And we have here the boy from back home, the boy next door, Dane, and the bad boy who wants to kill her from the rebel side.
Um zayden and you this is where i'm going to give a little bit of a plot spoiler so put your fingers in your ears but there is a sort of drift in the story to the good boy being a bit bad for her and the bad boy being good which you do see in other love triangle stories all i can say to this is fair enough if you're going to do a love triangle it's not badly done um i liked the unpacking of of Zayden's character and his motivations.
[23:04] Yeah, that was fine. The other part of the story, which if you're thinking about how you would put together your romanticism, is that Rebecca has chosen to have the heroine with a weakness.
The boy under the stairs, the underdog, this is a classic for storytelling writ large, not just romantics is now violet i thought was really interested in this story and actually it's a bit i probably like most is that she has um.
[23:40] A weakness, which is to do with, it seemed like a form of brittle bone disease or weak joints.
I'm sure Rebecca has in mind a particular medical condition, which isn't given our current name in the story because it would break the world, the world building.
[23:58] But I really liked the fact that it wasn't easily cured.
There were some accommodations made for it. and there was also a philosophy about it later which is that you need weakness as a balanced power i really like that i thought this was a very strong part of the novel it made me like violet who i didn't have much of a sense of her interiority really even though it was her first person book um i like this aspect of her the other really strong part of the book is it has very well well-placed plot twists with big shots so that's great if you're looking for a book to take you by surprise so i would say well done it's a good read and takeaways for those of you who are out there writing your romances is remember that you're expected to have this high erotic content um probably go further than you think you need to go because that's what what publishers are looking for.
[25:03] Remember some successful things to put in.
This is an immediacy of an I, first person. It doesn't have to be first person present, but that's what Rebecca has done.
Love triangles seem to be perennial. Okay, that might work.
But having a hero or heroine starting from the underdog position is also usually very successful.
[25:27] You can, of course, do a fall from grace.
So you can have like the princess who becomes the outlaw, who becomes the hero.
You can do that kind of story as well, but they have to battle against adversity.
And I'm sure you're probably doing that anyway in what you're writing because it makes story.
Um so i enjoyed reading um fourth wing i thought it was i'll put it up again it's got a lovely cover i enjoyed reading it would i recommended it i would recommend it yeah my daughter reads loads of romantic and had the conversation with her i did give some of my caveats about it um so i'll be interested to see what she thinks when she does get around to reading it she's going to borrow this but we both agreed that it'd be quite hard to take away from what is our favorite dragon fantasy i don't think it's a romanticist because it doesn't go in for like masses of sexual content there is a sexual relationship but it's a slow burn and i would say that i would recommend without caveats uh t.a white's dragon ridden series it's wittier and funnier than what I found in this, um, in the fourth wing.
[26:46] It doesn't have a love triangle, which is kind of like a negative recommendation. No love triangles here.
[26:56] And what I really like about it, in this one, it's a dragon shifter story where the main characters turn into dragons. But they're like an alter ego.
They're not the same person becoming a dragon like a werewolf.
It is, there is a dragon who resides alongside in the soul of the person who comes to the fore. So the dragon has a very different personality.
And that's part of the fun because the heroine has this ridiculous but powerful female dragon, Alter Ego, who is just delicious, really, really fun.
And it's a very good paced series which unpacks the world. and you actually find out you're in a science fiction story as well.
It opens up so that you think you're in an archaic world, but actually you see, no, no, no, this has come from an older, science fiction story, a bit like Planet of the Apes, where you suddenly think, oh my goodness, there was this other civilization beforehand, which makes sense of what we're experiencing now.
[28:02] So, Romanticy. If you want to write Romanticy, top tip, do it quickly, because I think the the wave will pass through.
And do let me know your thoughts on your favorite romances that I have left off my not exhaustive list.
[28:18] So thank you very much for listening.
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