A large chunk of my book marketing information, lately, comes in the form of one of the big social media sites. BookTok, BookStagram, BookTube here and there. So it’s hard for me to gauge whether this problem persists in other places where books are talked about. I imagine it does, as I see its ramifications through more traditional marketing channels.
No one knows what the hell Romantasy is, yet we keep trying to label and market it.
Let’s break down the issue at hand.
Fantasy and Romance (note the capitalization for emphasis) are two different genres with different conventions and expectations.
A Romance novel has two key elements:
1.) a central love story
2.) a happily ever after
More nuanced expectations are going to sit in the typical length of the book, overall structure, and types of content (eg, the presence of sex scenes whether the door is open or closed and other forms of physical and romantic intimacy).
A Fantasy novel is defined as a piece of speculative fiction involving fantastical or magical elements (more or less, depending on the source). Like a Romance novel, it also has expectations in length, content, and structure.
And the thing is, we can combine these things extremely easily.
A fantasy romance is a Romance novel with a typical fantasy setting. A romantic fantasy is a Fantasy novel with strong romantic elements or subplot interwoven into the main plot.
So what the hell is Romantasy?
That’s kind of the problem.
Trying to dub Romantasy as its own term often ignores the fact that we already have some of the language established for some of these hybrid genres. The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany is a classic romantic fantasy. Its essential premise is a man stealing away a fae princess, their marriage, child, and his search for her after she leaves back to the fae-realm. It’s ultimately tragic, but a romance is at its heart. We also look at books like The Southern Vampire Mysteries, Stardust, Kushiel’s Dart, Outlander, and The Princess Bride and large sections of the Kate Elliot and Tanya Huff bibliographies and know that their romantic elements are an essential structure of their narrative.
Yet if you look at something like the Deadly Angel series by Sandra Hill or the Cambric Creek series by C.M. Nascosta or large chunks of the Chuck Tingle canon, you’re looking at romance or erotica novels that happen to have strong fantasy elements as part of their essential setting. The standard fantasy Romance/fantasy Erotica.
If you go on to look at lists of books labeled as Romantasy, specifically, on say Goodreads you’ll find a certain set of books repeated over and over as reader-ascribed Romantasy. But when you really examine the nature of these books, you’ll find that they fall into one of these already-defined genres. There’s no specific reason that something like A Court of Thorns and Roses, for example, can’t just be defined as romantic Fantasy. That’s what it is. An epic fantasy novel that has a strong, interwoven romantic subplot.
So why does Romantasy, as a linguistic label for a set of books, need to exist?
Things like sub-genres don’t exist for no reason. They’re a reflection of a lexical need. A reader likes a certain kind of book, and they search for other books just like it. When they can’t find it using the current existing vocabulary, an informal vernacular develops. Maybe a publisher is seeing an influx of books with a very strong connection narratively, realizes there’s a new trend emerging, and starts defining that trend in their submission guidelines or marketing material. Sometimes an author wants to write with a certain quality or style that defies current genre definitions, and they have enough clout to start defining their own sub-genre that then grows organically from there. In all these cases, these labels are often retroactively applied.
So what is the need that insists on the label Romantasy? Where does it come from?
Is it a lack of knowledge that romantic Fantasy already exists? Or do the books being labeled Romantasy have something special about them that the term romantic Fantasy does not sufficiently cover? And if so, what is that thing?
I would posit that Romantasy struggles because, collectively, readers haven’t figured out exactly what that thing is. And if you want Romantasy to survive long-term as a useful sub-genre designator, that has to be figured out.
What makes Romantasy different than romantic Fantasy or fantasy Romance? The longer that takes to figure out, the more likely we are to also lose the integrity of the original sub-genres. And that’s a major problem.
Pixels and Pins Studio 
I absolutely agree that sub genres don’t exist for no reason, but in this specific case I wonder if it was a reader thing or a marketing thing done by publishers who saw a potential niche and went for it. Admittedly I’m not on BookTok or Bookstagram, is there something there that I’m missing that makes it clear Romantasy is a reader-driven phenomenon?
The first time I started seeing “romantasy” as a term, it was more in reader spaces as opposed to writer spaces. I feel like I’m only just now seeing it in things like agent querying. So I sort of interpret it as maybe something that was seeded by marketing and some publisher somewhere is sort of continuing the cycle. But there’s a very strong reader-run or influencer-run element to it. Like Goodreads lists, for example, are user contributions. But if you look at something like the genre dropdowns in Kindle publishing, you won’t find “romantasy” but you will find “gaslamp.” So whatever romantasy actually is, it’s still not a solid marketing category at some level.