Why Romantasy Heroines Are Allowed to Be Selfish

I want to talk about something that makes certain readers profoundly uncomfortable: romantasy heroines who unapologetically want things for themselves. Not for the realm. Not for their impoverished family. Not because a glowing prophecy demands their martyrdom. They want things for themselves—their own pleasure, their own power, their own survival, entirely on their own terms.

These heroines are inevitably branded as selfish. Sometimes this judgment comes from other characters within the text. More often, it comes from readers in scathing reviews. And I think that specific discomfort is worth deeply examining, because it reveals something critical about what we actually expect from women in fiction—and what society is still not quite ready to accept.

The Historical Trap of Female Selflessness

For most of Western literary history, the sympathetic female protagonist was defined entirely by her capacity for selflessness. She sacrificed. She endured. She put others first, consistently, quietly, and without complaint, and her fundamental “goodness” was measured mathematically by how little she asked for herself. The moment she wanted something—truly, desperately wanted it, for no altruistic reason except that it pleased her—she became narratively suspect. She shifted from heroine to villainess.

Fantasy has always pushed against this boundary, but romantasy has shattered it completely. Take Jude Duarte from Holly Black’s The Folk of the Air series. Jude doesn’t want to save the world. She doesn’t have a messiah complex. She wants power. She wants to matter in a terrifying world that has repeatedly told her she is nothing but fragile, mortal prey. She wants Cardan, and she wants to win, and she pursues both with a bloodthirsty ferocity that makes some readers deeply, viscerally uncomfortable.

Nesta Archeron from Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Silver Flames is perhaps the most extreme, polarizing version of this. She is, for large stretches of the ACOTAR series, genuinely difficult to like. She is cruel to people who love her. She makes destructive choices that hurt herself and others. Above all, she vehemently refuses to perform gratitude, warmth, or any of the softening emotional labor that female characters are universally required to provide. As a result, readers either love her fiercely, defending her with their lives, or they cannot stand her—with almost zero middle ground.

I think the fractured response to Nesta is diagnostic. The readers who love her are responding to something profoundly real: the sheer, exhaling relief of a female character who is allowed to be a disaster, to be selfish, to take up space without constantly apologizing for her rough edges. The readers who can’t stand her are responding to something equally real: the deep societal discomfort of encountering a woman who refuses to make herself palatable.

Redefining the Vocabulary: What “Selfishness” Actually Means

Here is what I consistently notice about the heroines who get labeled selfish: they are almost never actually selfish in the malicious way the word implies. They are not indifferent to suffering. They are not cruel without cause. What they actually are is self-directed. They possess an internal compass that points strictly toward their own desires and needs, and they follow that true north even when the entire world is screaming at them to yield.

This is not selfishness. This is self-possession. And it is, within the restrictive context of what women are usually allowed to be in mainstream fiction, genuinely radical.