Last year I read Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing and loved it. Then I read Iron Flame. Then I read Onyx Storm.
I didn’t necessarily read Fourth Wing because I wanted to. I actually wasn’t too familiar with it beforehand.
I read it because my wife asked me to. I was handed a book by someone I love and told, very plainly, “I need someone to talk to about this.” So I read it. That’s marriage. Or even just being in a relationship. Sometimes it’s romance. Sometimes it’s taking turns being the main parent. Sometimes it’s compromise. Sometimes it’s agreeing to watch an episode of Love Island. And sometimes it’s reading a 500-page romantasy novel because your spouse is vibrating with feelings and needs a witness. Whatever it takes to take an interest in what your partner is interested in.
Before that, the closest I’d come to this particular flavor of fantasy was watching Netflix’s Shadow and Bone, which I enjoyed in the same way one enjoys gas station nachos: knowingly, unapologetically, and with no illusions that it was doing anything revolutionary. Is it fancy? No. Is it satisfying? Absolutely.
Enemies to lovers is a goofy trope. Always has been. It’s the narrative equivalent of saying, “What if these two extremely hot people were mad at each other for reasons that evaporate the second they kiss?” Fine. Whatever. It works because it works.
The parallels between Shadow and Bone and Fourth Wing mostly end there, though, unless you want to zoom out far enough that “magic exists and people are horny about it” becomes a genre in itself. Which, honestly, maybe it should. I do hope my local bookstores label a section “horny magic.”
Fourth Wing isn’t just some fluffy romance with dragons duct-taped onto it. It’s brutal. People die constantly. Sometimes mid-sentence. Sometimes because they slipped. Sometimes because a dragon decided they looked annoying. It’s a military school story that treats bodies as fragile, power as conditional, and heroism as something you bleed for. It’s Hunger Games energy with tenure-track politics within a war setting. In other words, it’s bad ass.
And then there’s Violet Sorrengail — a character who absolutely should not work and somehow does. She’s small. She’s breakable. She has the physical durability of a haunted Victorian child. She’s also smart, stubborn, and strategic in a way that feels earned, not bestowed. She’s not chosen by destiny. She survives by paying attention. And for getting super magic powers from a badass dragon who gives her shit constantly. And then she starts getting frisky with the dude she don’t like and then there is magic orgasms. Bad ass.
Fourth Wing (or Shadow and Boner, as it will live forever in my heart) grabbed me in a way I wasn’t expecting. So naturally, after finishing it, I did what anyone does when they enjoy something: I talked about it. First with my wife, then on Reddit, then watching all the BookTok videos about it.
That’s when I discovered that a not-insignificant number of straight men refuse to read romantasy on principle.
Not because it’s poorly written.
Not because they tried it and bounced.
But because it’s “for girls.”
Or, just as stupidly — because it’s “kinda gay.”
This is where we need to pause and talk about what’s actually happening here.
Fantasy has always been full of romance. Always. From Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones to The Princess Bride, the genre is wall-to-wall longing, forbidden love, tragic couples, magical bonds, and people staring into campfires thinking about someone they absolutely should not be thinking about. The only difference is who the books were marketed to — and who felt comfortable admitting they liked them.
When women and queer readers claim space in a genre, suddenly it’s “romance-forward.” Suddenly it’s “not serious.” Suddenly the same dudes who sat through eight seasons of Game of Thrones pretending they were there for the politics get squeamish about a sex scene that doesn’t involve exploitation or control.
What Fourth Wing, and it’s sequels Iron Flame, and Onyx Storm, do really well is refuse to apologize for caring about feelings. These books say: yes, the world is ending. Yes, the government is lying. Yes, dragons and governments are each committing light war crimes. But also — relationships matter. Trust matters. Who you love affects how you fight. That’s not soft. That’s real.
The sex scenes are not the point, but they’re also not a problem. They’re part of the story, the same way violence is part of most fantasy stories — and somehow we never hear complaints about that being “distracting.” No one’s calling sword fights gratuitous. No one’s saying, “Ugh, another battle scene?” But two people consensually enjoying each other? Suddenly we’re clutching pearls.
Which brings us back to the original question.
Guys, is it gay to be literate?
No.
It’s gay to be, uhh, gay. It make you real shitty to be afraid of books.
It’s insecure to avoid an entire genre because it might make you feel something. It’s embarrassing to announce, unprompted, that you won’t read something because women like it. That’s not a personality. That’s a warning label.
The wildest part is that these books absolutely rip. They’re fun. They’re tense. They’re propulsive in a way a lot of modern fantasy isn’t. And they aren’t the only series to do so.
While Percy Jackson and the Lightning Queef, I mean, Fourth Wing, is it’s own story, but loads of others in the genre are laden with betrayals, revelations, power shifts that feel genuinely destabilizing. They aren’t Hallmark movie with wings, they are picture-less X-Men comics, but with dragons and casual sex. In other words, they are BAD. ASS.
If anything, romantasy is doing what fantasy has always claimed to do but sometimes forgets: reminding us that power without connection is empty, and that survival alone isn’t victory.
So yeah, I read Fourth Wing because my wife asked me to.
I kept reading because the books were good.
And I’m talking about them now because the idea that literacy has a gender or sexuality is one of the dumbest cultural leftovers we still pretend is normal.
Read the book.
Or don’t.
But if the reason you won’t is because you’re scared someone might think you’re “kinda gay,” then congrats — the dragons aren’t the fantasy here. Now, I have to go start about 40,000 pages of another series, A Court of Thrones and Roses.