Part Three: Romantasy Proves Historical Romance Isn’t Dead

And here in Part Three, we’ve finally come to the dragon in the room: romantasy.

Because if readers really stopped wanting what historical romance offers, I need someone to explain something to me. Why are they currently devouring books filled with impossible relationships, rigid social structures, political marriages, arranged marriages, powerful families, class differences, elaborate gowns, balls, court politics, forbidden love and women fighting against the roles society has assigned them? And, of course, men with enormous amounts of power who somehow lose every functioning brain cell when one particular person enters the room.

Then there’s the yearning. SO. MUCH. YEARNING.

Historical romance supposedly became old-fashioned at approximately the same time readers started buying multiple special editions of books containing many of the exact same romantic ingredients. Except now there might be a dragon outside.

So I keep coming back to this question: What if romantasy didn’t prove readers stopped wanting what historical romance has to offer? What if it actually proved the opposite?

Readers clearly still want impossible relationships and worlds with rules that the characters desperately want to break. They want marriages with real consequences, forbidden love, political alliances and complicated families. They want two people who have a dozen very good reasons not to fall in love and do it anyway. They want yearning, and they still want the HEA.

Historical romance already knows how to give readers all of that. The bigger question is how we convince them to open the book.

Before someone comes for me with a sword, I am NOT arguing that romantasy killed historical romance. I don’t think romantasy authors climbed onto their dragons, raided the historical romance section and flew away with all the readers. Honestly, I don’t even think these genres need to compete with each other. Romance readers are perfectly capable of reading more than one thing. We do it all the time.

What interests me is what the enormous popularity of romantasy tells us about what readers actually want. Because for years, we’ve heard explanations for historical romance’s decline that essentially boil down to readers have changed. And yes, they have. But sometimes we make this giant leap from “readers have changed” to assuming readers no longer want complicated social rules, formal courtship, political marriages or stories where marriage can determine someone’s entire future. Maybe readers don’t want elaborate worlds where characters are trapped by the expectations of society anymore.

Except...have you SEEN what romantasy readers are reading?

Because I have some dragons I’d like to introduce into evidence.

Strip a lot of romantasy down to its bones. Take away the magic, the dragons, the fae, the wings and whatever shadow-related activity that man is doing over there in the corner. What are we left with?

Very often, we have a monarchy or an aristocracy with inherited wealth and power. There are political alliances, wars between kingdoms, court intrigue, strict social hierarchies and questions about inheritance and family duty. Marriage is frequently being used as a political tool. Women are trying to gain power inside systems designed to limit them. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, two people are falling in love when they absolutely should not be falling in love.

Sound familiar?

Because historical romance is sitting in the corner going, Hi. Have we met?

Obviously, romantasy and historical romance aren’t the same genre. That isn’t what I’m arguing. But a lot of romantasy worlds function much more like historical societies than contemporary ones, and that matters enormously for romance because those worlds give romantic choices consequences.

This is something historical romance has always understood. Romance gets really interesting when two people desperately want each other and there is a very good reason they cannot simply be together, and history is FULL of reasons.

Class, money, family, reputation, religion, politics, inheritance, gender, race, society, a previous marriage, a future marriage, a war, a scandal, a law or simply the expectations of an entire community can stand between two people. Historical settings naturally create those barriers, and fantasy can create them too. I think that’s part of why both settings work so beautifully for romance.

In contemporary romance, an author sometimes has to work a little harder to explain why two independent adults cannot simply date each other. That doesn’t mean contemporary romance doesn’t have stakes, because obviously it does. But sometimes I’m reading a contemporary marriage-of-convenience setup thinking, You know you don’t actually have to do this, right?

Historical romance gives me a woman who has to marry or she loses her home. Okay, I’m listening. Romantasy gives me a woman who has to marry the prince of the enemy kingdom or thousands of people might die.

Well.

NOW WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

The author doesn’t have to manufacture the stakes because the world has already provided them, and that kind of pressure is rocket fuel for romance.

Marriage of convenience might be the easiest example of what I’m talking about. Readers LOVE this trope. I love this trope. And historical romance has been feeding it to us forever because historically there were approximately nine billion reasons someone might marry a person they weren’t madly in love with.

Money, property, inheritance, children, social position, family obligation, reputation, political alliances and sometimes just plain survival could all make marriage necessary. You don’t have to spend six chapters convincing me why these people need to get married because the world has already done the work.

Fantasy figured this out too. Two kingdoms need an alliance? Congratulations, you’re getting married. You hate each other? That’s unfortunate. There’s only one bed? Even more unfortunate. Please proceed.

And suddenly readers who supposedly don’t want stories about marriage being used as a political or economic arrangement are absolutely inhaling them.

Maybe the trope was never the problem. Maybe the packaging changed.

This is where romantasy has an advantage historical romance simply doesn’t have: fantasy gets to cherry-pick history. An author can keep the castles, gowns, balls, swords, political marriages and rigid class systems that create fantastic romantic tension, while changing the pieces that don’t work for the story they want to tell.

Maybe women don’t have limited legal rights in this world. Maybe women command armies and inheritance passes through the female line. Maybe queer relationships are completely accepted. Maybe the kingdom is racially diverse without recreating the racial hierarchy of nineteenth-century Europe. It’s fantasy. You make the rules.

That gives fantasy authors an incredibly powerful storytelling tool. They can take the pieces of historical societies that create all that delicious romantic tension and leave behind the pieces that might make the story less escapist for a modern reader.

Historical romance doesn’t have quite that much freedom.

This is where things get complicated. If you’re writing a real place during a real period, you can’t always just say, Not in my kingdom, because it wasn’t your kingdom. It existed.

There were actual laws and wars. There were systems of oppression, racism, colonialism, restrictions on women and very real consequences for queer people. As we talked about in Part Two, historical romance has to figure out how to navigate those realities without making every story about a marginalized person a story entirely about suffering.

That isn’t always easy. Fantasy has an escape hatch that historical romance doesn’t always have, and I think that matters to readers more than we’ve sometimes acknowledged.

And look, sometimes you just want the damn gown.

I don’t mean that flippantly. I actually think this is a huge part of this conversation. Sometimes you want the ball and the castle and the arranged marriage and all those ridiculous social rules that mean these two people can’t just TALK TO EACH OTHER like normal human beings. You want the forbidden romance, the tension and all that delicious yearning.

But maybe you don’t want your escape read to also require you to confront every terrible reality that would have existed in that particular place and time.

I get that. I really do.

Fantasy gives readers another option. You can have two princes fall in love and decide nobody in this particular kingdom gives a shit that they’re both men. You can have women inherit kingdoms and command armies. You can build a racially diverse world without recreating our history of racism. You can have a princess forced into a political marriage without also importing every historical restriction placed on women.

Romantasy gets to offer the aesthetic and emotional distance of history while rewriting the rules, and that is powerful.

But I also think that’s exactly where historical romance has an opportunity to say: Okay, but let me show you something fantasy can’t.

Not the specific romance, obviously. I regret to inform everyone that most of our favorite fictional dukes did not actually exist.

But the world did.

People really lived inside these constraints. Women really found ways to build lives despite having limited legal and economic power. Black Americans really built communities, businesses, families and futures while living within systems designed to restrict them. Immigrants really crossed oceans and borders and built new lives. Queer people really found each other. Working-class people really fell in love.

People lived through colonization, political upheaval, wars, migration, economic collapse and massive social change. And here’s the thing I think gets lost when we talk about history only in terms of those enormous events: while all of that was happening, people were still just living.

They fell in love. They flirted and kissed and had sex. They got jealous and made spectacularly terrible romantic decisions. They wrote letters they probably shouldn’t have written. They waited for people. They hoped for things. They wanted things they weren’t supposed to want.

They found joy.

There is something incredibly powerful about historical romance being able to remind us that these people weren’t simply victims of history. They had entire lives inside of it. They loved people, built families, found communities and created happiness wherever they could.

And because this is romance, they get the HEA.

I keep coming back to this because I think it’s one of historical romance’s greatest strengths, and we don’t talk about it enough.

Think about how most of us learned history. We learned wars, presidents, kings, revolutions, economic collapses and political movements, along with approximately eleven million dates we memorized long enough to pass a test and then immediately forgot.

But that isn’t how people actually experience history.

Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, Well, today I shall participate in an important historical period. They wake up and make breakfast. They go to work. They worry about money. They raise children and fight with their siblings. They make friends. They fall in love. They’re just living their lives while the things we eventually put into history books happen around them.

And that’s something historical romance can do so beautifully. It takes these enormous periods that we usually look at from thirty thousand feet and brings us down into somebody’s kitchen, bedroom or ballroom. Suddenly history becomes intimate.

What did it feel like to be a person here? What did you want? Who did you love? What stood between you? How did you find happiness anyway?

When we allow historical romance to tell more than one version of history, those questions become even more powerful.

And THIS might be the part historical romance should pay the most attention to.

Romantasy is really good at telling readers what kind of emotional experience they’re buying. Enemies forced into an alliance. An arranged marriage between rival kingdoms. A deadly prince obsessed with the one person he cannot have. Forbidden attraction. Touch her and die. Who did this to you?

Only one horse.

Okay, I made that last one up, but honestly? Someone write it.

The point is that I immediately understand what you’re promising me. Historical romance has often been marketed through setting instead. Tell me it’s a sweeping Regency romance or a glittering Gilded Age romance, and okay, that tells me where I am. But it doesn’t tell me why I’m going to care.

Tell me it’s old money versus new money and their families hate each other, but unfortunately these two cannot stop kissing? NOW you have me.

Tell me she has to marry to save her family and the only man willing to help is the man she publicly humiliated three years ago? I’m seated.

Tell me they can never acknowledge their relationship publicly and he falls anyway?

There it is.

I don’t need you to sell me a history lesson. Sell me the emotional experience. Give me the stakes and the impossible choice. Tell me why these two people should absolutely stay away from each other and why we all know they won’t.

Sell me the yearning.

Then tell me what year it is.

I keep coming back to this throughout this series because I really think it’s one of the biggest disconnects between historical romance and the way newer romance readers discover books.

Readers talk about romance differently now. They talk about he falls first, enemies to lovers, marriage of convenience, forbidden romance, found family, forced proximity and second chance. We can complain about trope marketing all day, and trust me, there are things about it that annoy the shit out of me too, but there’s a reason readers use this language.

They’re trying to figure out what am I going to FEEL?

So don’t just tell me he’s a duke. Tell me why being a duke makes loving her impossible. Don’t just tell me she’s an heiress. Tell me why everyone wants her money except the one man she desperately wants to choose her.

Don’t just tell me it’s 1885. Tell me she’s new money, he’s old money and their families would rather burn New York to the ground than see them married. Don’t just tell me they’re queer characters in the 1950s. Tell me what they risk by choosing each other.

The history creates the stakes. The romance makes me care about them.

That’s the part we need to sell.

Please do not leave this series thinking my solution is put a dragon in Bridgerton.

Although...

No. I’m staying focused.

The lesson here isn’t that historical romance needs to become romantasy. Please, publishing, that is NOT what I’m saying. I do not need forty-seven books next season about dukes who are secretly dragons because somebody misunderstood the assignment.

Historical romance doesn’t need magic or fae, and it doesn’t need to chase whatever happens to be selling this year. What I’m saying is that we should probably pay attention to what romantasy understands about romance readers.

Readers want to get lost in a book. They want big feelings and impossible choices. They want that moment where you genuinely don’t know how these two people are going to make it work, even though you know, because this is romance, that somehow they will. They want characters fighting against expectations and relationships where choosing each other actually costs something.

Historical romance already does that. It has always done that.

So why aren’t we selling that?

And this is where we come back to where this entire series started. Historical romance cannot grow by endlessly trying to recreate what worked twenty or thirty years ago. That doesn’t mean abandoning the books or authors who built this genre, and it definitely doesn’t mean Regency has to disappear.

For God’s sake, keep the dukes. I LIKE THE DUKES.

What it means is understanding that the next generation of historical romance readers may come through a completely different door. Maybe they’re coming from romantasy. Maybe they’re coming from queer romance or cowboy romance. Maybe they love dark romance because they want enormous stakes, or they’re inhaling contemporary marriage of convenience. Maybe they’re fantasy readers who love intricate worlds and political intrigue.

Great.

Meet them there.

Show them historical romances that connect with the things they already love, and then give them choices. Give them Regency and Victorian and Gilded Age. Give them American historicals and Westerns. Give them Black historical romance, queer historical romance, immigrant stories and working-class stories. Give them different countries, cultures and centuries. Show them all the different versions of what falling in love throughout history actually looked like.

But then we have to actually tell readers those books exist.

Acquire them. Publish them. Put them on shelves. Talk about them. And package those books for the readers we’re trying to reach, not just the readers who are already here.

After three articles and way too much time thinking about dukes, this is where I keep landing: maybe historical romance isn’t dying. Or at least, maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question.

Because romance readers clearly haven’t stopped wanting what historical romance does well. They’re still reading marriage of convenience, forbidden love, class differences, political alliances, complicated families and characters trapped by social expectations. They still want elaborate worlds and impossible relationships.

And GOOD LORD, are they reading men who yearn.

They’re just finding those things across romance now.

And maybe that’s actually good news, because the readers are sitting right there. They’re already romance readers. We don’t have to convince them that marriage of convenience is fun or explain why forbidden love works. We certainly don’t have to teach them to appreciate yearning.

They already get it.

The challenge is getting them to understand that historical romance can give them those things too.

I think this is where I land after three articles and way too much time thinking about dukes.

Historical romance isn’t homework. It isn’t a history lesson where somebody threw in a sex scene to make you finish your vegetables, and it isn’t this dusty little corner of romance that belongs to our mothers and grandmothers while the cool kids have all moved over to fantasy.

It’s romance.

It’s people falling in love while history is happening around them, and sometimes that history is exactly what makes the romance so damn good. It makes loving this particular person inconvenient or scandalous or dangerous. Sometimes it makes choosing them almost impossible.

Almost.

Because we’re still reading romance. We’re still here for the hope and because somehow these two idiots are going to figure it out. We’re here for that moment when all the reasons they can’t be together finally lose to the one reason they should be.

And maybe that’s what we haven’t been selling well enough.

Not the duke. Not the dress. Not 1815.

That feeling.

After three parts of this series, I don’t think the appetite for historical romance disappeared at all. I think the readers are sitting right there. They’re reading political marriages, forbidden relationships, rigid societies, class differences and elaborate worlds. They’re reading characters willing to burn everything down for the person they love.

And GOOD LORD, are they reading yearning.

They just might be reading all of that in a book with a dragon on the cover.

Historical romance already knows how to give them those feelings.

Now we need to convince them to open the damn book.

This is Part Three of a three-part series exploring what happened to historical romance and why its decline doesn’t necessarily mean readers stopped wanting what the genre offers.

In Part One: Historical Romance Didn’t Die. Publishing Stopped Selling It to New Readers, I looked at the strange contradiction between historical romance’s shrinking traditional publishing presence and the continued growth of romance as a whole.

In Part Two, I looked at the reader side of that divide: perception, packaging, representation and discovery. Historical romance is much bigger than Regency England, but readers can only fall in love with the books they know exist.

And here in Part Three, we’ve come to the dragon in the room. Romantasy didn’t prove readers stopped wanting historical romance. If anything, I think it gave us some pretty damn compelling evidence that the appetite is still there. Readers still want the stakes, impossible relationships, social constraints, marriages of convenience, yearning and, most importantly, the HEA.

So maybe it’s time we stop asking how to save historical romance and start asking how the hell we’re going to show a whole new generation of romance readers what they’ve been missing.