I’ll never forget the day I fell in love with a vampire. It was the summer of 2007 and the air was thick with teenage angst and the sugary scent of Impulse body spray.
I was fourteen when my immortal soulmate entered my life and rewired my desire for an unobtainable, forbidden love that only exists between monsters and humans. The lion and the lamb.
Sadly for me I wasn’t the only one fostering a parasocial attachment to a fictional character. Selling over 160 million copies, it turned out women everywhere were equally eager to sink their teeth into Stephanie Myers cold-blooded love affair, TheTwilight saga.
As I moved into my late teens and early twenties, I grew up and out of the fantasy genre. Instead finding my fix in memoirs and flawed twenty-something fiction, which usually involved a fractured family trope or an unlucky in love type-narrative.
I had put my teenage desires to bed and pushed my supernatural thirst to the back of the wardrobe along with the rest of my skeletons. Or so I thought.
Like most millennial readers, it was on BookTok that I first became acquainted with best-selling fantasy author Sarah J Maas and her beloved A Court Of Thorns And Roses (ACOTAR) universe.
With 8.5 billion views and counting on the #ACOTAR hashtag alone, I was intrigued at how in an ever growing digital age, Maas had single-handedly diverted attention back to paper.
Set in a faerie realm, the six novel series follows nineteen-year-old human huntress, Feyre Archeron in a ‘romantasy’ tale of adventure, love and politics.
Admittedly, it sounded awful. But after the announcement that a planned Hulu adaptation was in the works and Margot Robbie had been allegedly sighted meeting with Maas herself, I decided to push judgments aside and find out.
Call it intimidation, but my past experience with the fantasy genre had often lost me at the lengthy otherworldly names and settings spanning several dimensions, so to improve the experience I decided to opt for a dramatised audiobook version.
Also, given the ‘fairy porn’ conversations I had seen online, I thought the audible erotica claims would make for a more engaging listen.
I’m about half way through the first novel, when I begin to wonder if the real quest is the mission to find the overly-hyped literary smut. Where was all the spice I had heard about?
A few gruffly spoken whispers and some flirty wing flutters later, I do eventually reach the highly-anticipated, yet somewhat underwhelming sex scenes.
Eventually, after the wretched villain is defeated and a century-long curse is broken, the two main protagonists finally consummate the relationship in a true fantasy fashion (horns, wings and all). It is here, between the twisted sheets, that I finally begin to understand the ‘Maas appeal’.
It’s not about sensationalising supernatural sex, it’s about escape.
As the architect of her own female-centric universe, Maas has successfully reclaimed the fantasy genre from the male gaze, and as a result carved out a space where women female pleasure is front of mind and women can indulge in their own desires, free from judgement.
In a recent interview, Maas told marie claire, “The promise of the happily ever after is a huge part of the appeal of romance for me. Reading is a refuge from our real world. But in a romance story, no matter how bleak things seem, it’s reassuring to know that the characters you love will still find each other.”
In an ever growing tense political and economic landscape, Maas lends us the gift of freedom through fairy tales. A space free from taboos and trolls (except the mythical kind), where women can express and explore their sexuality by rewriting the blueprint for a world better designed for women.
