Reading Romantasy as a Man

I want to tell you about the first time I read Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Mist and Fury.

I was on a long flight, I had run out of the thriller I’d brought, and my partner had left her copy in my bag with a sticky note on the cover: “Just try it.” I was sceptical in the precise way that men who haven’t read the genre are often sceptical—not hostile, exactly, but carrying a vague, culturally ingrained assumption that this wasn’t for me. That it was written for someone else, about experiences I didn’t share, and that I would feel like a clumsy intruder navigating its pages.

I finished the book before we landed. I bought the next one in the airport terminal before picking up my luggage.

I’ve been thinking about that experience ever since. About what it means to read romantasy as a man, what the genre offers that I so fundamentally wasn’t expecting, and why the arrogant assumption that it isn’t for us is not only wrong, but actively detrimental to how men consume fiction.

The Assumption of Exclusion and the Stigma of Sentiment

Romantasy is aggressively marketed to women. The covers, with their sweeping typography and glittering aesthetics, signal it. The BookTok community that drives its massive sales is predominantly female. The emotional register of the genre—the deep interiority, the relentless relationship focus, the explicit, unapologetic attention to desire and vulnerability—is coded as heavily feminine in ways that our broader culture still treats as a warning sign for male readers.

This is a profound loss. Not primarily for the genre—romantasy is dominating the publishing industry and doing perfectly fine without male validation—but for the men who are stubbornly missing it.

Because here is what I found in ACOTAR, and in the sprawling epics I’ve read since: a kind of devastating emotional honesty about desire, vulnerability, and the interior life that male-coded fiction almost never offers. Traditional male-oriented fantasy treats the outer world as the primary site of conflict—armies clashing, kings falling, magic systems breaking. Romantasy takes feelings with lethal seriousness. It treats the inner life as the primary site of drama. It is interested, above all else, in what it feels like to want something and to be absolutely terrified of wanting it.

That is not a female experience. That is a human experience. And it is one that men are rarely given permission to explore in the fiction we are told is “for us.”

What the Morally Grey Love Interest Offers Men

I want to say something about Rhysand that might be controversial in male reading circles: he is one of the most useful male characters I’ve encountered in fiction, specifically because of how he masterfully navigates the terrifying intersection of power and vulnerability.

Rhysand is powerful—genuinely, world-breakingly powerful. He is also, for most of the series, in a position of agonizing emotional vulnerability that he cannot fully control. He loves Feyre in a way that actively costs him. He makes brutal choices that prioritize her psychological wellbeing over his own pride, his own safety, and his own fearsome reputation. He is, in the most literal sense, undone by love—and the book treats this not as a fatal weakness, but as the single most significant, heroic thing about him.