The Healing and Empowering Influence of Romantasy

Fictional feminine heroines on a quest can guide readers on their own journey.

Reviewed by Abigail Fagan

Key points

• During times of personal and national turmoil, fictional heroines can inspire real healing.
• The fight against domination in a fantasy world may provide fuel for fighting for equal rights in reality.

How does a woman reclaim power after being pushed down? Push back when one’s personal safety is targeted? When the odds may feel insurmountable? Sometimes the journey to find strength can be through story, and sometimes that story involves dragons, fairies, and shapeshifters.

Women across the country are engrossed in romantasy books, such as Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing series, or any of the three series (Throne of Glass, Court of Thorns and Roses, or Crescent City) by Sarah J. Maas.

These books, over hundreds and thousands of pages, outline how a smart, strong female protagonist grieves and heals after significant loss, but then slowly builds back her emotional and physical power. With time and great effort, she is able to conquer the forces that have tried to harm, degrade, and control her.

The books include many storylines that recognize and move through loss; they were my go-to read after the death of my father. I met other readers who found comfort in the books as they navigated an emotionally challenging time: a 30-year-old woman managing the stressful early cognitive decline of her mother, an 86-year-old woman adapting to life alone after the death of her husband of 63 years, a young woman managing emotional whiplash after her short-lived marriage disintegrated. The power of a story, with the fight displaced onto a world of fairies or dragons, provided an escape. Even more importantly, it provided a narrative of how to heal, build female power and never give up.

Within these novels, the female protagonist is not perfect but she is smart, recognizes the importance of good friends, and feels comfortable speaking her mind. Her first romantic partner is not her true love. The couples that have staying power showcase men who celebrate women’s power. Maas coins a term in the Throne of Glass series: if a couple were “carranam” their powers could boost and amplify one another in a time of need. The female is an equal, not a damsel in distress, a side-kick or arm candy.

The female hero builds a diverse supportive community of men and women to fight the dark forces, but the relationships are not idealized; they weather misunderstandings and tough times. With her team, she is ultimately successful in her quest against evil but it takes thousands of pages to reach victory. The authors convey a key message: it isn’t easy to fight those whose aim is to push you down and disable you. It takes a while. Reading how resilient female protagonists battle injustice in a fairy tale world may help one to find the needed inner strength to fight the battles on the home front.

And the battles on the U.S. home front couldn’t be more real even if it feels, for some of us, like we have been catapulted into a dystopian fantasy. Forces that control and demean? Check. Ignoring women’s needs and putting our medical and psychological health at risk? Yep. Women’s freedoms are under attack in 2024 America.

Georgia state law defines allowable medical procedures around abortion, with the threat of 10-year imprisonment for clinicians who don’t toe the line. As a result, doctors hesitated to provide 28-year-old Amber Nicole Thurman with appropriate care after she suffered a rare complication from abortion pills. The delay led to her preventable death and her young son lost his mother.

When women’s health care is restricted, medical trauma can follow. Just one of many stories: Carmen Broesder has publicly shared how she was turned away from multiple Idaho emergency rooms during her 19-day miscarriage. A new lifelong diagnosis of atrial fibrillation has emerged after her ordeal.

Fourteen states have a total abortion ban; many others mandate so many abortion restrictions that access remains incredibly limited. In many states, the government is a third party inhabiting the confidential space of the doctor’s office. A woman’s needs, wants and control over her own body have in part been taken over by a voting body. It is a loss of autonomy for American women. For some, it has been traumatic, either directly or indirectly.

Meanwhile, some have used this moment to unfurl their misogyny. After Taylor Swift, a self-made billionaire and the 2023 Time Person of the Year endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris for president, Elon Musk posted, “Fine Taylor…you win…I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.” Trump continues to claim that Vice President Harris slept her way to the top, because of a relationship decades ago. It is an established sexist attack line, that treats her as “less than” and ignores her long history of elected service. In both cases, the men feel entitled to publicly demean the successful woman; chauvinism is celebrated.

In the final book of the Throne of Glass series, (Kingdom of Ash), the captured queen, Aelin, is trapped in a cage, taken out intermittently to be tortured physically and then healed while she is unconscious so there is no physical evidence of the crimes committed. She starts to cry, and hears the whispered words of her deceased mother “Fireheart, why do you cry?” She whispers back: “Because I am lost. And I do not know the way. “And her mother’s message comes through to her “You are my daughter…That strength flows through you. Lives in you. You do not yield.”

We might be reading about a fantastical world, but we are also reading a playbook on grit and determination through a female lens. We can identify with Aelin’s visible and invisible trauma. Then, her journey towards healing and her struggle for freedom echo through us and into our reality. We nurture our vision of a world that protects and supports women. In the next several weeks, we dig deep, continue to build our diverse coalition, find our power, and move to action to make this wish a reality and we do not yield.