Alexandra Alter, Why Magic, Dragons and Explicit Sex Are in Bookstores Everywhere, NYTimes, Aug. 20, 2025.
On a whim one night, Simona Stallone clicked on some Harry Potter fanfiction, and quickly tumbled down a rabbit hole.
Ms. Stallone, a 28-year-old real estate agent and content creator who lives in Toronto, kept seeing posts about “Dramione” all over her feed. People on TikTok were raving about stories set in the world of Harry Potter, written by fans, that imagined a romance between the bookish Hermione Granger and her antagonist, the arrogant bully Draco Malfoy. [...]
Lying next to her sleeping boyfriend, she clicked on “Manacled,” a dark fantasy set in an alternate universe where Harry Potter is dead and the evil wizard Voldemort has triumphed. The story centered on an illicit, morally ambiguous romance between Hermione, a magic-wielding healer, and Draco, a vicious executioner who later holds Hermione captive as a prisoner of war. It had familiar elements from the Harry Potter books, but with a delicious twist — the characters were a little older and a lot hotter. And they were cast in decidedly more adult scenarios.
“Manacled” quickly became her “whole personality.” [...]
A staggering number of people share her hyperfixation. “Manacled” drew more than 10 million views on the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own, or AO3, and got more than 100,000 five-star ratings on Goodreads. And now a revamped and retitled version of “Manacled,” by the author SenLinYu, is poised to become one of the year’s biggest debuts in romantic fantasy, the genre that is keeping the fiction market afloat.
The new version of the story that so captivated Ms. Stallone will soon be released as “Alchemised,” and the novel’s publisher, Del Rey, is betting that the feverish devotion to its fanfiction predecessor will translate into blockbuster sales. Del Rey has ordered a first printing of 750,000 copies for the novel’s release in late September; translations are lined up in 21 languages.
A genre is born:
In a way, the romantasy explosion — driven by the success of blockbuster authors like Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros, whose series have sold millions upon millions of copies — stems from the legacy of popular young adult series like “Twilight” and “Harry Potter.” Those books molded generations of young readers who have grown up but still crave big fantasy novels — now with a dose of erotica.
“They grew up with the characters, and the stories ended, but there’s still such a huge appetite,” said Leah Hultenschmidt, publisher of the romance imprint Forever. “They’re still hungry for that magical world building, an epic cast of characters and heroism, and maybe they just want it a little spicier.”
Publishers are frantically searching for the next breakout romantasy series. Last year, romantasy sales topped more than 32 million copies in print alone, a 47 percent jump over the previous year, according to Circana Bookscan. Five of the 10 best-selling adult fiction titles this year are romantasies. At the same time, adult fiction sales overall have stagnated.
It started as fanfic (Like Fifty Shades of Grey):
The kind of romance that’s selling like crazy now — erotically charged genre mash-ups — first took off in fanfiction before publishers recognized there was an appetite for it.
“For a long time, you had to go to fanfiction to find that,” said Anne Jamison, a professor of English at the University of Utah who has studied fanfiction. “Romantasy basically is what fanfiction made.” [...]
As more writers cross over from the shadow world of fanfiction into traditional publishing, the lingering stigma and fear of lawsuits has faded. Entrepreneurial writers realized they could adapt and sell fanfiction without violating copyright law if they changed character names and other derivative material. Publishers who had once sneered at fanfiction writers as nerds cranking out “Lord of the Rings” spinoffs in basements began embracing it as free marketing, and then as a talent incubator.
Some authors, including Ms. Rowling, have given fan writers their blessing, though according to her agency, Ms. Rowling opposes stories that put her characters into “obscene” scenarios, since they were written for children. (She would most likely be appalled by the extensive catalog of erotica inspired by Harry Potter, including “Snarry” stories in which Harry and his Hogwarts potions professor Severus Snape become romantically entangled.)
Authors who might have once been coy about writing fanfiction now flaunt it in publicity materials, social media posts and at book signings and fan events.
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