Latest / Mythmakers / Romantasy: Rebecca Yarros and the Latest Fantasy Craze

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Romantasy: Rebecca Yarros and the Latest Fantasy Craze · Mythmakers

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  Hello and welcome to Midmakers. Midmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
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  creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding.
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  Now have you noticed there has been a lot of information for us recently about a sub-genre
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  of fantasy called Renanticie, which is, as the name suggests, a romantic fantasy?
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  I thought it was worth stopping and actually thinking about this, particularly for those
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  of you who are looking for your next fantasy breed and for those of you who are thinking
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  what kind of fantasy book you might want to write at the moment. And it is true that
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  publishers are looking for these books, though there's always a problem here just as a health warning
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  that just as you wake up to a trend you might find the trend is passing. There could be a glut,
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  which I suspect is where we might be in the next year or so. But anyway, it is obviously a
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  fantasy genre where publishers are acquiring books. Now just as put it in context, there have been
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  over the last 25 years since the advent of social media. A few times in publishing where you get
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  a breakout book. The most famous, of course, being the Harry Potter phenomenon, which started
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  in the early 2000s, though the books were published a couple of years at the end of the 1990s.
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  And I thought at the time that that was a bit like the Beatles. It was like a one-off success.
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  And I don't think we've seen anything else quite to match it, but we have had some other books come
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  along to rival it in some ways. So it was followed by the Hunger Games, which had its own moment
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  and its own successful film series, though it didn't have quite the same following in terms of
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  cosplay. And I don't think there is a Hunger Games
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  Adventure World, which would be quite, wouldn't it? Anyway, it had its own moment.
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  And then we of course had the Twilight phenomenon again with a successful film franchise that
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  followed on. And that led to a whole kind of era of Black and Red Books. I actually was writing
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  in YA at that time, was aware of that phenomenon. I did my own series that was about people with
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  paranormal powers, and it fell within that group. And indeed, the cover was Black and Red
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  and white. Very popular book that one, and that whole series written as just
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  turning, did very well for me, went all around the world. So yes, thank you very much, Twilight,
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  for starting that particular wave going through publishing. And then, more perplexing, we had the
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  50 shades phenomenon, which was the erotic thriller, again, with a successful
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  within its own terms, film franchise. Not possibly the best written books ever made, but they did
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  have a moment, didn't they? And one of the things when you look at this is there's probably a
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  connection between the readership who were growing up on Harry Potter, the Millennials and the
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  next group, who then became the buyers, the readers of the other phenomenon books. So you've got
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  that readership skewing female, quite a lot of the tastes within Twilight and 50 shades,
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  it's the female point of view, mainly. So that's where that came from, possibly. 50 shades
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  was a Twilight fan fiction in its origin. So you've got a female predominantly
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  empowered set of female readers who are savvy about social media, so they're spreading word about
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  these books through this new connectivity. And now the thing that we have is a lot of
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  these people are now still on social media, why not? But also they're in publishing and bookselling.
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  So the majority of editors that I meet in publishing are female, and the majority of booksellers
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  I meet are also female. I don't know if that's true across the world, but it's certainly the
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  impression I get in the UK. So this does affect the kind of books that publishers get excited about,
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  and also relates to the fact that when you look at readers, they do tend to be
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  the market is more feminine. There are more women readers out there.
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  Certainly sort of belonging to things like book clubs and doing book talks and what have you.
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  There are men, but they are minority in this particular case.
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  Okay, so what are we looking at when we talk about Romantic? Well, even though it's got its buzz
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  at the moment, it actually started quite a while ago, and arguably there have been romantic
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  fantasies since the dawn of time. But the first sort of big name, who made their
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  sort of career through this, I think was probably Sarah J. Mars. I actually met her in the early
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  2010s because she and I were both at the Frankfurt Book Fair at Meal hosted by our publisher over there.
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  And at that time she was doing the Throne of Glass and that series, and it was doing particularly
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  well, that probably is less of a romanticy because it does have the same elements, but the erotic
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  content is not as big as is expected in the current brand of romanticies. So let's just pause
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  there a moment. A romanticy, I think, to separate it out from just a fantasy with a romance in.
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  These days has more graphic sexual encounters, so it will be quite full on descriptions, going
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  all the way through a sexual encounter, probably some form of, you know, not missionary sex,
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  to say, up against the wall or all sex, other sorts of things which you would not have expected
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  to find in a sort of PG type fantasy. So they're edging to a more adult content, though the context
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  in which the story is set does feel quite YA. It's one of these areas where there's a slippage.
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  So I'm sure lots of YA readers are reading these books, probably. I think social media is opening
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  people's eyes much younger to highly sexualized content. So the sex itself is like, you know,
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  always upping the ante, it gets more and more graphic and well, you know, more like what we
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  would have called erotic fiction in the past, though I don't think that's probably what the tag
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  they have put on it these days. Anyway, so Sarah J. Miles started with the book about the assassin
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  in Throne of Glass, which of course had more violence, more in the Hunger Games era of
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  killings, basically. And then she has now up the sexy element in the series that starts with a
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  court of thought and roses. There has been lots of people who do things like this now. So you have
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  like the fairy court idea or another world fantasy so that the relationships between male and female,
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  sometimes same-sex relationships is much more foregrounded. That seems to be some of the hallmarks.
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  So if you're looking what is a romanticist, it's probably set in another world and it probably has
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  a sort of fairy world feel to it, probably with magic and with this higher sexual content.
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  It's not a very good definition, is it? Because you'll know when you see it. So others have
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  followed. I was looking at a list of recommended people in this area. So if you're looking for
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  a whole range of people to read like this, I'll put those in the the notes for this. But
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  if you're looking for something with a more diverse origin, you've got Sarah L. Arifi,
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  one that I remember reading, well, there's the old hands almost concurrent with Sarah J. Miles.
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  You've got Holly Black, Cassandra Claire, of course, who I think almost predates. Sarah J. Miles,
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  Carissa Broadbent, Alex Aster, Jennifer L. Armond Traut, Carla Nicole, Daniel J. Jensen,
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  and K. J. Sutton and many others. But the person I've left off this and who prompted me to do this
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  podcast is actually the new breakout in this area, Rebecca Yaros. Now I wasn't reading this genre
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  until I started to hear the fuss around this writer and her book The Fourth Wing. And I thought,
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  I will go and read it because I like to know what's happening when they start saying this book is
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  like, you know, best things it's like spread. I want to know why. So I went and read it, read it very
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  quickly, enjoyed it very much. And I get the impression that Rebecca herself is a delightful person
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  really charming, very grateful for her success and also aware in her humility that she is not the
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  only person out there who's been writing like this. So she sounds a little bit surprised by her own
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  popularity. And that's a nice thing about her. So well done her. And I hope she long may she carry
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  on writing. But I want to do a sort of a deeper dive into her book. So there will be some
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  criticism in this. And some flotspoilers, but it's all meant within a very supportive,
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  actually, I really enjoyed reading your book way. But I thought it would help other creatives have
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  a think about what's going on in this genre. And she's so popular that she'll be able to take
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  anything I say, it won't be negative. It will just be pointing out things that seem a bit odd in
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  the genre to me. Anyway, let's look at the sociology of the popularity of this genre. I've mentioned
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  excuse female. I've mentioned that it has a high erotic content. And in this, it feels like
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  a brand of an adult fairy tale. And it sometimes feels like fan fiction. What I mean by that is
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  someone has thought in their daydreams. Here is a story. What would happen if I do an erotic
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  daydream about it? Where can I push it? That's how it feels to me reading it. And there's nothing
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  wrong with a healthy imagination for your sexuality. That's part of what makes a human, isn't it?
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  So what works in the Rebecca Yarrow's book to make it so particularly popular? Well, just looking
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  at it as a technical exercise, she's picked a first person present tense narrative. Almost all of it
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  is from the point of view of Violet our main character. What this does is it gives an immediacy
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  to the story and it limits our knowledge of the world and its plot. So we discover it at the same
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  time as she does to certain extent because Violet is going into this dragon rider program. So it's
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  relatively new to her, though she has lived quite close to other family members who have gone
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  through the same training. So she does have some knowledge. But that first person immediately
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  sees where she doesn't understand everything that's going on and the little plots and the
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  conspiracies of that world. So we are following her in the way that you do in a detective fiction
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  that's written from a first person point of view. And of course that first person present makes us
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  very close to the character. We are kind of her as we are reading it because of the eye.
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  But that immediacy wouldn't work unless the pacing was correct. It does have the first year at school
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  structure, first year at university which you find in other fantasy novels of course. And sometimes
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  the weakness in that let's do a whole school year thing is that there are you mark time
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  to get to the next big event. And this doesn't happen in this book so when she first joins the
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  dragon rider program, we know that there's a big test coming up called thrashing.
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  And that came earlier in the book than I was expecting. It isn't a climax at the end, it's more like
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  a midpoint big event. So it means that it does actually run along, it gallops along this story.
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  And you don't get to the point where you think, oh come on, skip a few pages, I want to see what
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  happens. And so the actual structure of the book is that we resolve the question of will she or
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  won't she become a dragon rider fairly early on so that we have the rest of the book to unpack the
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  politics of this world. And as you'll see from the actual physical book I'm holding up here,
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  it's a long book for those of you listening to this. Let's do a quick look at the page count 561.
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  So it's not a short read, but it feels short because you're turning the pages. Twilight had that
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  same box of chocolates field that once you started reading it, you wanted to keep on eating the
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  chocolates. So yeah, that works in this. I would just say though that even though the characters
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  are supposed to be what I would call more university age, I don't really hear precisely if people's
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  ages, but at one point Zaden, the male hero is mentioned as being 23. They do feel younger to me,
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  they do feel more like high schoolers. I don't know, that maybe that's just me because I'm old and
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  crumbly, but they kept saying they're adults in the mature, but they didn't feel hugely mature to
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  me. Anyway, that was just my, my, my J did, that's me, being too old, I don't know, but I felt
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  they felt younger than their given ages. Before I came to this book, I had read, I was looking
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  for what was different about it, in according to reviewers, and I saw two things which were sort of
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  touted about it. One was the very high death count. So yes, lots of people die. You do meet, you do
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  lose a couple of beloved characters, but they're not central characters, they're adjacent characters.
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  So are we shocked by high death counts? I mean, Harry Potter killed off quite a lot of people,
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  and that was a long time ago now. Game of Thrones killed off a lot of people. I don't know if that's
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  that shocking, and obviously any book that has a war in it is going to kill people. So okay, maybe
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  the fact that it, there is no morals in this world is quite fine to kill off your fellow student.
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  That feels odd, and perhaps means the world isn't actually very, maybe later books will unpack
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  the wrong list of that, that people are accepting that students at school can be just polished
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  off because you're jealous of them or want their dragon. I don't know, it'd be interesting to see
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  where she goes with this. I found it. I would want to question that more. Yeah, anyway, there
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  seemed to be a suggestion that because they were dragon riders in some part reflecting the dragon
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  society that this was the result, but actually the dragons didn't seem to go around killing each
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  other. So that was just one question I had about it. And then the second difference that I had
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  read about it in reviews was about the dragons being in charge. That's not actually right. That
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  review I read gave me the wrong impression. Dragons are not subservient, but it's more like an alliance
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  between the dragon riders and their dragons. They both have their pride, they both have their
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  command structures, and they seem to have come together to protect part of this world.
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  And the connection between the dragon and the dragon riders definitely isn't new. The telepathic.
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  The reason you do telepathic connections is because it's very hard to imagine a dragon speaking,
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  been there done that in an earlier book I wrote. But also that the fact this connection gives
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  the rider a power from the dragon. That also is something which isn't unique to this book. I actually
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  did something 20 years ago in a much younger children series called the Companions Quartet where
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  the Companion to the Dragon would channel after the dragon's power. That was a whole thesis
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  behind that book and I don't remember thinking that was original at the time. I'm sure it's in a line
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  of stories that have done that. So it doesn't actually have to be purely unique in order to be good.
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  It can be a new way of doing this. And Rebecca does do it very well in her own world. So you know,
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  Qdosta, she's dipped into the cauldron of story and bought out this element and done it well.
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  So moving on to the other part of this, of course, which we keep circling back around,
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  two is the higher sexual content. And there is already a strong correlation between dragons and more
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  sort of edgy, kinky sex. The first book I ever read about dragon riders was the famous
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  series by Anne McCaffrey, Dragon Riders of Pern, which I read as a teenager, some of the books in
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  that series. The very first book and that was published even before I was born in 1967. So
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  has quite a history to it. I went back and read it more recently and actually discovered
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  I didn't like it very much when I went back because of the gender relationships in it. It has
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  this kind of queen dragon rider idea with a menage of dragon riders around her who kind of fight
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  for her favours called animalistic idea, which is a bit of the kind of idea going into
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  this Rebecca Yarrows book because when there's two dragons which two of the main characters are
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  connected to when they they're mated pair, when they have their matings, the human characters are
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  driven by that sexual drive. So there is a connection there which you can see in the dragon riders
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  of Pern series and also there's a whole subgenre on Kindle and probably also in print of the dragon
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  shifter books where that's unlike being a dragon rider where characters turn into dragons,
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  this also has that animalistic sort of sex with appetite. That's what that's using. You get it
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  in the werewolves and the vampires as well. It's all part of that same releasing of those more
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  I don't know is it more erotic, aberrant, not aberrant but just more fierce sexual passions
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  somehow by having this connection to dragons or wolves or whatever releases something in our
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  imaginations which is sexy so that's why it works. So what about the actual sex in this book?
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  It's not all the time. The character tends the main character violet reaches a sexual encounter
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  with the hero, I'm not going to give the name of which one it is, towards the latter, last
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  last three quarters of the book. So there's not to not like loads and loads of bedroom scenes in
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  this story. That for me was a relief because I didn't particularly enjoy the sex in this book.
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  It's not badly written, it's not going to, you know, not a thumbs down from that point of view.
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  I just wasn't that interested in it because it didn't do much for me in terms of making the plot
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  move along. It wasn't kind of necessary, it could almost have been a a version of doing the sex
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  where you see them go to bed and it fades to flickering fire and back you way after the story.
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  That would have been as good for me but that's probably just my choice. I'm at the stage of my life
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  where I don't particularly enjoy reading erotic fiction, it seems an odd thing to say and I'm sure
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  other people will actually really enjoy this element. So for me, when I saw that coming along,
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  I kind of thought right, quick skim read it, it wasn't the bit of the book I enjoyed at all,
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  I got to be bored by it, but your view might differ and it might be something that you really
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  does light your fire. It didn't light mine but there we go. Another trope in the book is as well as
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  this dragon sex part of it, is there is a love triangle and I know some of people really hate
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  love triangles, I am not that keen and when I see one emerge, I am a tendency to roll my eyes
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  and we have here the boy from back home, the boy next door, Dane and the bad boy who wants to kill
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  from the rebel side, Satan and this is where I'm going to give a little bit of a plot spoiler,
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  so put your fingers in your ears, but there is a sort of drift in the story to the good boy being
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  a bit bad for her and the bad boy being good, which you do see in other love triangle stories.
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  All I can say to this is fair enough, if you're going to do a love triangle, it's not badly done,
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  I liked the unpacking of Satan's character and his motivations, yeah that was fine.
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  The other part of the story, which if you're thinking about how you would put together your
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  romanticity, is that Rebecca has chosen to have the heroine with a weakness. The boy under the
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  stairs, the underdog, you know, this is a classic from storytelling, writ large, not just
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  romanticist. Now Violet, I thought was really interested in this story and actually it's a bit,
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  I probably like most, is that she has a weakness which is to do with, it seems like a form of brittle
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  bone disease or weak joints. I'm sure Rebecca has in mind a particular medical condition which
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  isn't given our current name in the story because it would break the world, the well building,
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  but I really liked the fact that it wasn't easily cured, there were some accommodations made for it
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  and there was also a philosophy about it later, which is that you need weakness as a balanced
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  power. I really liked that, so I thought this was a very strong part of the novel. It made me like
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  Violet, who I didn't have much of an sense of her interiority really, even though it was her first
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  person book. I like this aspect of her. The other really strong part of the book is it has very well
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  placed flat twists with big shots, so that's great if you're looking for a book to
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  take you by surprise. I would say, well done, it's a good read and take away, for those of you who
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  are out there writing your romanticist, remember that you're expected to have this higher erotic
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  content, probably go further than you think you need to go because that's what publishers are looking
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  for. Remember some successful things to put in this is an immediacy of an eye, first person,
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  don't have to be first person present, but that's what Rebecca has done. Love triangle seem to be
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  perennial, okay, that might work, but having a hero or heroine starting from the underdog position
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  is also usually very successful. You can of course do a fall from grace, so you can have like the
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  princess who becomes the outlaw, who becomes the hero. You can do that kind of story as well,
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  but they have to battle against adversity, and I'm sure you're probably doing that anyway
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  in what you're writing because it makes story. So I enjoyed reading fourth wing, I thought it was,
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  I'll put it up again, it's got a lovely cover, I enjoyed reading it. Would I recommend it? I would
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  recommend it. Yeah, my daughter reads loads of romanticity and had the conversation with her, I did
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  give some of my caveats about it, so I'll be interested to see what she thinks when she does get
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  round to reading it, she's going to borrow this, but we both agree that it'd be quite hard to
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  take away from what is our favourite dragon fantasy. I don't think it's a romanticity
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  because it doesn't go in from like masses of sexual content, there is a sexual relationship,
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  but it's a slow burn, and I would say that I would recommend without caveats,
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  ta white, dragon ridden series, it's wittier and funnier than what I found in this,
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  in the fourth wing, it doesn't have a love triangle, it's kind of like a negative
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  no love triangles here, and I really like about it, in this one is a dragon shifter story
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  where the main characters turn into dragons, but they're like an alter ego, like they're not
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  the same person becoming a dragon like a werewolf, it is there is a dragon who resides alongside
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  in the soul of the person who comes to the fore, so the dragon has a very different personality,
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  and that's part of the fun because the heroine has this ridiculous but powerful female dragon
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  alter ego who is just delicious, really, really fun, and it's a very good paste series which
• 27:36
  unpacks the world, and you actually find out you're in a science fiction story as well, it opens
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  up so that you think you're in a archaic world, but actually you see, no, no, this has come from an
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  older science fiction story, a bit like planet of the age, you know, where you suddenly think,
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  oh my goodness there was this other civilization beforehand, which makes sense of what we're experiencing
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  now, so romantic, if you want to write romanticity, top it, do it quickly, because I think the
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  the wave will pass through, and do let me know your thoughts on your favorite romanticism that I
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  have left off might not exhaustive list, so thank you very much for listening.
• 28:24
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