TikTok made me love it

Flora Joll reports for The Times on the rapid rise of “Romantasy” novels, the precocious spawn of the fantasy and romance genres of literature:

Romantasy is the hybrid of two genres serious readers love to sneer at: romance and fantasy. Populated by fairies, goblins, shapeshifters and sorcerers, these novels turn up the charm with fantasy’s high stakes and epic tropes.
Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros have become its dominant authors and their readers take the genre pretty seriously: an estimated £27 million worth of romantasy books were sold in 2023, according to The Bookseller, up from £15 million in 2022.

Wow. But why now? Two decades ago, in the wake of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I could see. What else has happened that would make this mainstream? I don’t think the mainstreaming of Dungeons & Dragons is enough. Perhaps the dominance of computer games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and other fantasy games might be.

But could there be another factor in its rise?

Much of the genre’s popularity is being driven by “BookTok”, TikTok’s thriving literary ecosystem, and one of the most popular titles on BookTok last year, The Villain, by LJ Shen, involves a masked protagonist breaking into the heroine’s house and concealing cameras to watch her without her knowledge. (They soon embark upon consensual sexual adventures plus a few murders, for texture.)

So, thank you, TikTok. You’ve unleashed a new genre for us, with a vanilla fantasy romance mainstream tip of the iceberg, with a dark hidden mass underneath:

As someone who reads widely, some might say indiscriminately, I have devoured hundreds of romantasy titles, including much of the “dark romance” sub-genre, which goes beyond the slightly more vanilla sagas of Yarros and Maas.
Dark romance tends towards kink and can feature nefarious villains, predatory behaviour such as stalking, the blurring of sexual consent and taboo relationships involving transgressive age gaps or family members.

Yet more evidence of the fact that social platforms are not some “other” virtual thing, but a mainstream form of cultural influence.

The question I keep asking myself: what is the “mainstream media” now?