On fairy porn, queer vampires, and the unleashing of utopian eros
What happens if we connect the desire to be swept off our feet with our desire to be in a better world?
A few months ago I started talking to someone via dating app Bumble. We asked each other what the nerdiest thing was that we were currently into.
I talked about an utterly insane video I’d just seen about how the internet has turned Garfield into an inspiration for super dark cosmic horror. She mentioned that she’d been reading books in the genre of ‘romantasy’, or romantic fantasy. She told me this was a new experience for her because she’d never been a fantasy reading kind of person.
She was reading a best-selling series known as ACOTAR, after the first book — A Court of Thorns and Roses — by Sarah J. Maas. It’s a series disparagingly known as ‘fairy porn’, ‘fairy smut’, and so on. There are fairies involved, and sex. You get it. It’s a global mega-phenomenon of fantasy wish fulfillment with many millions of copies sold.
I was immediately intrigued, and felt a kind of tingle, like, ‘oh, juicy!’, not knowing exactly why yet. I set out to read the series. My friends who are into this genre told me that it’s very hetero-normative and that there are more excitingly challenging, queer and experimental series out there. My date who first mentioned it to me agrees. But I was interested in the mass appeal so I wanted to start here first.
I’m always looking for sources of emotional energy and new types of imagination that can help give a spark to individual and social life, and the merging of romantic/erotic imagination with fantasy-style escapism just ignited something.
Last week I attended an event where the language and imagery of the political left was being discussed. Philosopher Thijs Lijster spoke about the need to find the passions of the left. He was inspired by Marcuse’s perspective that Eros — the powerful force of desire, eroticism and romantic love — should be unleashed in the service of political revolution. One of his first slides was a picture of a muscled Marx holding a woman in classic ‘bodice ripper’ book cover fashion, against a background of factories. Then, in a panel discussion led by journalist Or Goldenberg with political philosopher Savriël Dillingh and writer, theatre maker and psychologist Marthe van Bronkhorst, the conversation turned to the need for ‘a new narrative’ for the left. Savriël said:
‘but isn’t the narrative of the left really simple? Racism is shit, inequality is shit, and so on, and let’s drink, dance, and fuck!’
In my previous piece I spoke about the need for leftist and progressive movements to mobilize emotional energy through mythic resonance. In that piece, I focused on the need to recognize the power of spirituality. I think the same is true not just for the erotic but also for the romantic — and how all of this ties to the desire for utopia. Ruth Levitas connects utopia to ‘the desire to be otherwise’ and the way she talks about it is positively sensual and romantic.
Existing ideas like ‘pleasure activism’ are more about the liberatory quality of sensuality and sex. I think it’s helpful to connect these ideas to worlds and experiences that are more emotionally imaginative, fantastic, and romantic. Something that steals our wild hearts and sweeps them off to a better world.
There is a true masterpiece YouTube essay out there by the queen of witty intellectual left-leaning essays, Contrapoints, on the Twilight series. It is a 3-hour epic covering sex, power, death, fantasy and gender dynamics. The essay shows how Twilight readers identify not only with the (initially) rather hapless and purposefully under-developed heroine Bella, but also with her love interests, the vampire Edward and the werewolf Jacob. What is going on for her readers is this kind of multi-role identification play of power and wish fulfillment from multiple angles.
Twilight, for many people, is a way to touch something essential about being alive. Dangerous, powerful and forbidden love. Supernatural forces clashing. It’s a way to kindle the erotic fire of existing in the face of life’s deadening structures.
I recently read an article that annoyed me, because it put ‘fairy porn’ on the same pile with TikTok and other supposedly superficial distractions. The typical ‘what women are reading is bad’ take that has happened since the dawn of time. Except this was cloaked in coolness, telling people to instead go out there and just do drugs and have real sex.
First of all, why not both? And secondly, I think this grossly misrepresents how nourishing it is for people to be able to play in the realm of their own imaginations with romance, fantasy worlds, and eroticism. Tolkien himself wrote an excellent essay arguing for the importance of fantasy for adults — as a source of escape, consolation and recovery, and a reflection of our desires.
The reason that romantasy and ACOTAR lit me up as soon as I learned about it from my date was that I grew up with this stuff. Not with Twilight, but with its arguably much more revolutionary predecessor — the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice. Anne Rice transformed vampire fiction by making the vampires the point of view characters. From Interview With the Vampire on, her heroes Lestat, Louis, Claudia, Armand and the others gave readers dark stories of passion, loneliness, beauty, reflection, and playful exuberance. Rice’s books are delightfully queer, subversive and sexy. They are wild and adventurous and full of the appreciation of life as a ‘savage garden’ (as Lestat, Rice’s protagonist, puts it). I devoured all of them as a teenager, and felt like something nocturnal, passionate and sensitive was being seen by them. The books can be cheesy and full of baroque language, but that is part of the joy.
My favorite band at the time was Cradle of Filth, a British band that similarly basked in dark gothic eroticism when many of their peers in the black metal genre were (and still are) decidedly non-erotic. Anne Rice and Cradle of Filth together showed me that being in touch with eros, romanticism and darkness was very much permitted, and a great source of joy. This dark romantic eroticism became a kind of ‘base camp’ for my experience of the world. I could always return to it to get refueled by a kind of core desire for life. And I expect this has been true for many other people as well, and especially people struggling with a place for their desires in a judgemental world.
So what about ACOTAR? Maas’ series is not about vampires, but about fairies. Not Tinkerbell, but the dark, powerful fae of Gaelic and other legend. My ‘oh juicy’ response came from seeing the possibilities in this immediately. The fae are more colourful, more actually alive, and more mystical than vampires. They are less damned and more trippy and feral, animalistic.
I’m reading the third book now and I’ve been very pleasantly surprised. The first book, A Court of Thorns and Roses, more or less fit my expectation of Twilight-meets fantasy wish fulfillment. Our main character Feyre is a human swept off to the world of the fae, and it’s all very sexy. I LOLd every time Feyre drools when she finds out the fae lord she’s into is even more powerful than she thought. Like Dragon Ball Z for erotic wish fulfillment. The power dynamics aren’t great but that seems to be part of the fantasy, just like in Twilight.
But toward the end of book 1 and into book 2 (A Court of Mist and Fury) something happens. I don’t want to spoil so much but another relationship emerges that turns out to be very healthy in many respects. Quite equal, very supportive, ‘securely attached’, and so on. The love interests challenge each other, make jokes, provide each other with stability and security. It’s a far cry from Bella trying to harm herself to get Edward’s attention. The two main characters are wild, dark, funny, stupid sometimes, and they’re working together to save the world, going under cover, fighting vicious and bloody battles, and more. It’s mutually empowering.
My Bumble date has since turned into a wonderful friendship and so I get to keep updating her about my progress with the series. One thing she’s told me about ACOTAR is that for many people, especially the women readers who are Maas’ main audience, the importance of the series has to do with its focus on people working through massive trauma in mature, connected ways. Maas writes her sympathetic male characters in this regard, as multidimensional, sensitive, flawed but caring. They can be too perfect, but let’s say it’s aspirational. They struggle with trauma alongside the women. It’s still tropey as hell as well, but I can imagine why ACOTAR fans dislike the ‘fairy smut’ label that people use to dismiss a series that is speaking to meaningful things for them.
Most of all, however, the ENERGY of this series is just so damn JUICY. The whole world just emanates magic and power. The sexuality is focused on maybe two sex scenes per book. These scenes benefit from endless erotic and romantic buildup — in between Game of Thrones-like fantasy politicking. This allows the eros to suffuse everything else. The colourful, wild, joyful energy of the fantasy world aligns with its romantic desire and hotness, creating a current of electric emotional energy. Probably not for everyone, but the status of this series as a crushing bestseller and the way it has dominated social media shows that enough people are really into it, and it means a lot to them.
Fine, Joost, sexy romantic fantasy books are sexy, romantic and fantastical. So what? Well, my sense is that this infusion of imaginative passion in fiction is sorely missing from any type of utopian futures work — whether in science fiction, real political visions, video games, scenario work, and so on.
Love, passion, romanticism and eros — these can be truly liberatory life forces in the face of the capitalist death machine. Obviously they are often harnessed in favor of that death force. I mean, watch The Substance make that point very convincingly.
But let’s go forth and write our sweeping love stories while caught up in the struggle for a better world. Let’s make crushingly romantic and hot films and video games about the worlds we want. Our desires to be deeply connected to, heart, body and soul, to feel the transformative force of love, are not so far away from our desires for a heartbreakingly beautiful and nourishing world.
I’m dreaming of finding a way to fund a story anthology for romantic utopian fiction, something like that. If my enthusiasm sparks something in you, get in touch.
Dr. Joost Vervoort is an Associate Professor of Transformative Imagination at Utrecht University. His work focuses on connecting games and creative practices, mystery, politics and action to create better futures. He leads the NWO Vidi project Anticiplay and is a leading researcher on the Horizon Europe project STRATEGIES which focuses on the transformation of the European game industry. He co-leads the pluralistic meditation group the Dharmagarage, sings about the global crisis in Terzij de Horde and paints weirdly dark album covers for other bands.
