00:03:50.760Maura, how far did you make it into this?
00:03:52.920I read the full first A Court of Thorn and Roses.
00:03:56.420And Abby had come to us with this idea for this podcast, and I had been really excited about it because I knew these were really, really popular books.
00:04:03.640And I sort of wanted to do what she told me to do, which is just kind of like let it happen to you, right?
00:04:10.000Just like, don't resist these books, allow their power to like sort of carry you away.
00:04:38.700I can't, like, make a critical case for these books as, like, great works of literature, but I think it's more interesting to look at them from the point of view of somebody who's, like, really getting something out of them, who's experiencing a lot of pleasure, a lot of excitement, a lot of, like, you know, gratification.
00:04:56.160And what I will say about these books is that they are incredibly transporting. You kind of can't put them down. They are immersive. They put you in this different world. And I felt sort of like I was embodying that world even when it didn't always make sense, even when it wasn't, say, particularly imaginative, right?
00:05:15.660Because something that's very interesting about these books also, and that is characteristic of the romantic genre in general, it is very, very bounded by trope and by formula.
00:05:26.880And something that is really compelling about these is that they're very transporting.
00:06:40.880And I also grew up reading fantasy, and I grew up reading feminist fantasy, which is like a real thing and which is not what I would call romanticy. I would call those two pretty distinct kinds of things.0.91
00:06:54.960But I've definitely found myself in a position of needing to escape and a series with several or like more than several 600, 700 page books where just like you say, Moira, you're in this kind of pleasantly hypnotic state.
00:09:40.800is a very standard kind of romance plot.
00:09:44.040And the reason I'm bringing it up is because it's this interesting thing where the romance plot kind of grounds you and is predictable.
00:09:49.360And it allows the author to kind of weave a lot of stuff around that's unpredictable.
00:09:53.680But like the romance part is sort of its spine.
00:09:55.980If I'm wrong about this, listeners can correct me.
00:09:58.700But my impression always was that like the genius of Outlander was that like its formula combined with something that spun around that goes a little bit against formula.
00:10:08.140And it strikes me that the big commercial antecedent for these is Twilight, right?
00:10:13.740Like this massive multi-book series with a spinoff movie franchise that is focused around a fantasy, a magical element sort of grafted on to a romance novel plot.
00:10:31.740But, you know, this kind of material, the, like, sexual allure of a non-human male figure is also something that's been explored by, like, what we might consider more traditionally artistically ambitious, like, literary fiction writers.
00:10:47.440Like I'm thinking of Bear by Marion Engel, which is a 1976 novel about a woman who is tasked with taking care of a bear, like a literal bear, and finds herself having sexual urges and eventually a sexual relationship with the bear.
00:11:04.280There's also this like famous novel, Mrs. Caliban, which is like the cult classic by Rachel Ingalls from 1982, which is about a woman's relationship with a creature that has escaped from like a science experimental biology lab down her street.
00:11:19.660And these are, like, works coming from the tail end of the second wave that are, you know, looking at women's sexuality and its monstrousness and its relationship to violence, right, in this way that is deliberately about breaking taboos.
00:11:35.840But I think this advent of romanticcy, this like specific genre that we're talking about today, really is something new, right? And it emerged during the pandemic, like Abby was saying, as this kind of like escapist mode from the terror and claustrophobia of those eras, but also as something that could be really participatory. I think it's really difficult to talk about romanticcy without talking about TikTok.
00:12:32.140I feel like someone has hit me on the head with a hammer every time I watch, like, extremely short-form video.
00:12:37.840But I think, like, the existence of it is really, really important because, and I think we'll get to this more when we start to talk about the ways in which romanticity allows women specifically to identify with this main character who is generally traumatized and ends up overcoming.
00:13:02.140trauma and becoming stronger and becoming a fighter and this and that. But it is a social
00:13:08.880phenomenon and it is a social media phenomenon. There are fan communities. You know, it's not
00:13:15.720just BookTok, but it's also like Goodreads. And I think I would almost compare the fan communities
00:13:22.900to something like the Swifties. No disrespect to Taylor Swift. I like Taylor Swift just fine.
00:13:28.940But like, if you've heard one Taylor Swift song, you've heard every Taylor Swift song to a certain extent. And if you've read one of these, you know, you've read all of these, again, to a certain extent. But that means that people take up this project of reading them and scrutinizing them in ways that the text just simply won't bear.
00:13:48.100like the way that people are looking for Easter eggs
00:16:43.900And then it's sort of, once you get into the domestic sphere, you end up with all the trappings of the age in which the fairy tales were collected, sort of the late 18th century.
00:16:54.900Like it has real Regency costume drama energy.
00:16:58.540Unlike Game of Thrones, which I feel like has the medievalism all the way through,
00:17:03.480this series sort of does a temporal break the moment it sort of abandons its more straightforwardly heroic fantasy trappings
00:17:11.180and is suddenly kind of like, yeah, Jane Austen redux.
00:17:14.880And so, like, it is a consummate mashup.
00:17:17.320It's really just kind of using different motifs and tropes and kind of grafting them onto each other
00:17:24.620in, I think, a pretty smart, interesting way.
00:17:26.620But it's interesting that, like, people are looking for deep meanings when what it's really doing virtuosically is, like, smashing together surfaces, right?
00:17:41.940But since Adrian and Moira are either done with or part away through book one, I will kind of pick up here and say that A Court of Thorns and Roses, like, book one, is a kind of fake out.
00:23:06.120Fourth Wing came out in 2023, and there are three books out so far of a projected five-book series.
00:23:15.080To speak a little bit to how these have been just, you know, time when increasingly nobody is reading, everybody is reading these books, she sold 12 million copies in two years.0.98
00:23:31.320Yeah. It was harder to find the statistics on ACOTAR, but I did go and look at Sarah J. Moss's website, which claims that of all of her books, she has sold 70 million copies.0.99
00:23:46.02070 million. So I think perhaps it makes sense as we're thinking about the ways in which these characters have very little character, that 70 million people can find themselves in there.
00:23:58.000Yeah, it's a vehicle for reader identification, and that is a very broadly applicable mandate, yeah.
00:24:03.940Yes, but it's a publishing juggernaut.
00:24:05.960Okay, so here's what happens in Fourth Wing.
00:24:08.500We follow our hero, Violet Sorengale, who, in a kind of twist of the genre, which, you know, is all about strength, the strong woman,
00:24:19.260suffers from what seems to be Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which the author does as well.
00:24:24.800She was very clearly trying to get some representation of folks who are dealing with that into the books.
00:24:31.800But that is particularly interesting because this book is set at a battle college.
00:24:36.960And the mother of our heroine is the general.
00:24:43.420So she's all about strength in a very literal sense.0.94
00:24:47.840So although Violet is, like, there's much made of how she's physically weak and how she's in constant pain, she is smarter than everybody else.
00:24:58.900And so she finds a way not only to survive, but actually to thrive in the world of dragon writing, which is honestly, like, somebody dies on almost every page.
00:25:10.220It's really, you're just like, oh, you're just going to kill off half of the freshman class, like, maybe like two-thirds of the freshman class.
00:25:17.580I mean, I can't overstate the extent to which there's just, like, death and dying and school all mashed together.
00:25:26.020It's the Dragon Riders of Pern reimagined as, like, Battle Royale.
00:28:55.320Like, the sexual relationships, the romantic relationships, the sort of, like, suspense and intensity involved with those retain their power even when stuff is, like, literally on fire around you.
00:29:06.980The fantasy there, I think, is partly about, like, assigning power to those parts of your life, right?
00:29:12.280Whereas in our unfortunate banal real life, like, that stuff can kind of seem a little less important or, like, can recede from the front of your mind at times when you're under stress.
00:29:53.720And some of the tropes we're comparing those two are straight-up YA tropes.
00:29:58.360And I have to admit that, like, my impression was that the readership here is targeted at adults.
00:30:03.480Do you have a sense, did this come out of a YA space and then sort of escape containment?
00:30:08.200Or is this adult fiction that sort of just happens to also traffic in tropes that a lot of people grew up reading when they were, like, in their mid to late teens?
00:30:45.820The answer is mostly like, well, if adults are reading at all, they are probably reading something that is functionally YA.
00:30:53.640I don't know in terms of the demographics of the readership, other than to say that it skews towards women.
00:31:00.860Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what I'm interested in as well.
00:31:03.480I do feel like there are a lot of books as of recent that sort of live in that space, but I do think they're often by women authors and seem to be targeted at women.
00:31:10.840And I'm also thinking about the work of Arv Kwong, which like likewise is often said at schools and like has some of the trappings of like, I think she's just kind of enjoys sort of drawing on things that she read when she was the heroine's age, basically, which makes sense to me.
00:31:27.500But it's interesting because like, of course, in fantasy that is targeted at men, I think we've seen more and more of a divide of like the YA and the adult space, right?
00:31:37.460Like, I mean, Son of Ice and Fire, which I guess, you know, has readers of all genders, but like very much the idea was like, this isn't The Hobbit.
00:31:49.620Just the violence and the gratuitous sex.
00:31:51.680But still, there is an element there of like, don't give that to your 16-year-old, right?
00:31:55.840Or I was thinking also of something like Glenn Cook's The Black Company series, which is extremely, has a very unique, I think, readership profile in the sense that it's extremely popular among the armed forces.
00:32:57.900That that's what's at work here in the labeling and the marketing.
00:33:01.540Yeah, I guess the other kind of question, and you already alluded to that.
00:33:05.940I mean, you're coming to us from a psychoanalytic podcast and you already invoked Freud.
00:33:11.140I guess part of it is the question of analysis terminal and interminable, right?
00:33:15.020Like, you can tell pretty much after the first third of A Court of Thorns and Roses that this is a story that no matter how long the author chooses to make it, has a telos, right?
00:33:28.440This is the maturation process of a young woman, and she's going to learn some lessons.
00:33:35.760Whereas, like, famously, George R.R. Martin, sorry, listeners, you're hearing it here first, is never going to fucking finish that thing because it's interminable.0.97
00:33:43.220because, like, these people trip all over themselves0.94
00:33:45.820to kind of stop each other in the back.
00:34:06.580And if that happened in the Court of Thorns and Roses,1.00
00:34:09.720I think it would actually break the generic compact.
00:34:12.080It really feels like this is what these books are going to be about, and you kind of have to pay off on that.
00:34:18.360And that might be a distinction here we can make between something also like The Lord of the Rings and something like The Black Company, where like, right, like The Lord of the Rings is all about, will you get the object to the place it has to go?
00:34:29.840And then like, you know, you basically sail off into the sunset, right?
00:34:33.460Or like, is this a real world in which like, after that, there's another job you have to do and it sucks?
00:34:39.740Well, it strikes me that something that the romantic genre relies on is this like romance trope, right? There has to be an end. And what Abby has described with ACOTAR is like there's one fake out, right? But how many times can you use that strategy, right?
00:34:56.240Like I could see Sarah J Maas sitting down with a calculator going like, if I could give this chick like two more like fake loves of her life that turned out to not be worth it and just like turn her into a little bit of a serial monogamous, I could buy like an island, you know?
00:35:14.240And I think that has diminishing returns because of the expectations of the readership, right?
00:35:21.600Because the genre makes this promise to its readers.
00:35:25.600And part of the function of these books and part of what they fulfill for their readers, I think, is that they don't write their promises.
00:35:31.740Yeah. Although, I mean, like, again, the Outlander series has been able to ring truly astonishing amounts of pages out of what is ultimately like a love story that I don't think breaks the generic convention. I think it's fairly the generic compact is intact, but Gabaldon is able to like really ring a ton of mileage out of it.
00:35:52.440I mean, you know, this would be the Pamela or Clarissa model of like, fucking A, we're only 1,200 pages into this thing and like they're not going to find each other yet.
00:36:02.400But, you know, we do have a couple of like themes that seem to recur throughout these books, right?
00:36:09.160So one is that like there's a protagonist who's a teenage girl or a very young woman who gets transported from sort of like a mundane existence into a new magical environment where she is tasked with more responsibility or has higher stakes, right?
00:36:24.200Another thing is that there are men who appear to be her enemies or threats to her who become her confidants and lovers.
00:36:31.080Oh, and the other thing we might mention is that, like, at least in A Court of Thorns and Roses, I thought it was interesting that she already has a guy she's sleeping with at the beginning, but he sort of doesn't matter, and he sort of shuffles off, like, on page, like, 40, which is kind of interesting, because, like, what it communicates, which I very much liked, was that it's not about, like, sexual initiation.
00:37:07.780Like, that's another, like, little wish fulfillment is, like, he's reliable and responsible and taking the initiative on birth control.
00:37:14.060I was like, wow, that is just a nice little – these are not what I would call concretely feminist books, but there are gestures in that.
00:37:23.400Like in this fantasy where I'm like, OK, I see these books and the sort of desires that they're expressing as also products of a culture in which like the second wave happened, like the third wave happened.
00:37:35.580You know, they are they're not like these kind of like pre-modern gender politics books.
00:37:39.720And then like something that happens is that a lot of the times in the action and what Abby calls the hijinks and the wars that ensue, something about that young woman's unique gifts and her unique sexual allure are drawn upon for these like world saving tasks of high stakes.
00:37:56.840right and the other thing is there's like a lot a lot of sex scenes which are like explicit and
00:38:02.040prolonged and often do involve like non-human partners or partners with not just magical
00:38:08.500capacities but often like different bodies and one of the things i did for this podcast was i
00:38:14.920reread andrew dworkin's theory of fairy tales from her 1973 i think book woman hating her first book
00:38:22.820where she talks about fairy tales as told to children
00:38:27.300as parables of female passivity and symbolic necrophilia.
00:38:31.320She deals with sort of like the Disney version0.72
00:38:33.120of things like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty1.00
00:38:36.480in which there is a woman who is so passive
00:38:40.420and so beautiful that she's kind of dead, right?0.59
00:38:45.580She depicts them as stories that are talking about0.99
00:38:48.160female agency as always being punished, right?0.99
00:38:51.680The only women who ever do anything in these fairy tales from, like, the Grimm version to the Disney version are the wicked stepmothers who wind up being sort of, like, punished for acting in the world.0.71
00:39:03.480And then the heroines are only ever acted on to the fact that they're, like, literally unconscious in the case of, like, at least Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.
00:39:12.000These kind of, like, two paradigmatic examples.
00:39:14.480The Romantic Sea heroines and the Romantic Sea heroes, by extension,
00:39:18.520they sort of, like, alternately affirm and contradict this model.
00:39:22.260On a superficial level, I think the Romantic Sea heroine is, like, very active and agential, right?
00:39:28.480She can be a little, like, acerbic, at least in ACOTAR.
00:39:31.340There's, like, a lot of witty banter in which she's kind of, like, teasing or undermining or talking back to these, like, authority figures.
00:42:14.020That adorably rebels against but cannot actually refute or undo the childlike or lower status, right?
00:42:22.460And I think, Abby, your point about fate, the role of fate or destiny or, like, sort of, like, some kind of predestination that's, like, often kind of supernatural.
00:42:31.440role. It might be like inherited, this is your family destiny, or it might be like a prophecy
00:42:35.260or like some sort of like choosing of these women. On the one hand, it makes them like
00:42:39.420not like other girls, right? Right. It's not about women's class solidarity like at all.0.89
00:42:45.000No. These women often like don't really have other women friends. Like do these pass the
00:42:50.400Bechdel test? I'm actually not always sure. But then there's also a way in which they're sort of
00:42:54.880like removed from responsibility, right? The fatedness means that they have agency, they make
00:42:59.580choices, but they're not like culpable exactly. Right. Well, and this is where we also, because
00:43:05.740of like above all, like the trope of the fated mate, it almost reminds me of like, you know,
00:43:12.380we don't live in a time where premarital sex is really frowned upon anymore. But the sort of idea
00:43:18.780of like, well, if you get married, then you're allowed to have sex, right? So you might do it0.95
00:43:22.760really young. You're allowed to have sexual desire if he's your fated mate. Like that's part of like
00:43:28.420the fantasy space that these books are opening up.
00:43:32.300You know, you start as this, like, maybe kind of spunky, like, I don't know, 17, 18, 19
00:43:36.940year old, but with your 500-year-old faded mate, you will be experiencing, like, a whole
00:43:44.500new world of, like, pleasure and desire and sexuality, and in some ways, I think, like,
00:43:50.140a kind of agency that is nothing to sneer at in mainstream fiction.
00:44:13.960But there's something interesting with that.0.95
00:44:15.600Like, when I was texting Moira that, like, I really felt like there was some real paid-by-the-word energy to Court of Thorns and Roses in the sense that, like, on a sentence-by-sentence level, it's, I think, very well written.
00:45:46.100Because all of these are teenage girls are very young women with supernatural creatures that are living on a longer timeline, right? And there's something about the unreality and the removal from what we might take as like a recognizable social context that I think provides permission for the age gap, but they're also sort of like played with and eroticized on their like own terms or on more familiar terms. Abby, I wanted to hear your thoughts about these.
00:46:11.940Before I give you my thoughts, I absolutely must read you a pull quote from a recent Times article about this very precise phenomenon, the age gap in romanticity literature.
00:46:26.840Quote, but what's the appeal of a 500-year-old boyfriend exactly?
00:54:13.300I almost cringe from using the word trauma now because of all the different ways that it gets diminished or the ways that it gets hijacked for what strike me as nefarious ends.
00:54:23.680But what you're dealing with is like a huge proportion of people living under this category of women who have been raped, right?
00:54:28.260Or a huge proportion of people living under this category of women who have experienced domestic violence or intimate partner violence.
00:54:33.840Or a huge proportion of people, like basically all of the people living under this category, even if they have not directly firsthand experienced such violence, they are living under its threat.
00:54:43.300and its threat is shaping their intimate and erotic lives, right?
00:55:07.760And I'm actually really glad that we're getting to talk about this, Moira,
00:55:11.320Because I know that the figure who I asked you to read or reread, Judith Herman, is somebody whose work you really admire and I also really admire.
00:55:21.000And in order to get into, I'm not going to quite call it a grand unified theory of romanticity, but let's say rather something like, what is the therapeutic function of this body of work?
00:55:33.920So, my take is essentially, and this came from reading the fifth book.
00:57:01.140Which is not, I think, just because they're not always women in the sense of human women.
00:57:10.760It has that kind of like ickiness to when people in regular life in colloquial American English say females and males and you're just like, oh, your sexual politics are going to be really suspect.
00:58:47.480So, thinking about this, I was like, I actually had to go pull out my copy of Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery, which is a book that is roughly the size of any of the ACOTAR books.
00:58:58.120But it is a very different kind of read.
00:59:02.440It is structured around the two poles of trauma and recovery, and it is written in two sections.
00:59:09.580The first half is about traumatic disorders, and the second half is about the stages of recovery.
00:59:14.880And I really think that, you know, as sort of crystallized in this one particular ACOTAR book, but I think this is something that we can expand to account for the way that so many people, again, primarily, but not entirely women, like, immerse themselves and roll around in romanticy series after romanticy series.
00:59:37.220It looks so much like the stages of recovery.
00:59:42.300So what does recovery require? Recovery from trauma. That's what I'm meaning specifically here, which could be a number of forms of trauma. But as Moira alluded to earlier, sexual trauma is never not in the background.
01:00:00.020So it's about what Herman calls empowerment of the survivor.0.57
01:05:00.540They're always training to battle to the death. And so they become these dangerous women to be feared, but without sacrificing or renouncing femininity, right? Like, as Adrian was pointing out about the 18th century element of all this, it's like they move like seamlessly from like battle to like the bedroom to like, I don't know, maybe the boardroom, if that's something that's happening.1.00
01:05:24.720And this is really related to Herman talking about becoming safe in one's body again.
01:05:33.820You know, these are women who are rediscovering their bodies as strong and as instruments to protect themselves.
01:05:41.860I pulled a quote from Herman here that I thought was helpful in thinking about this.
01:05:48.360And of course, again, Herman is talking from the position of the therapist.