Why does my asexual ass like fairy porn so much?

Or how i loved A Court of Thorns and Roses even though i despise romance and sex scenes

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I never meant to read a fantasy romance novel, let alone fall in love with one. As a 24-year-old woman who is both asexual and aromantic — that is to say I don’t feel any kind of sexual desire, nor do I fall in love — I’ve spent most of my life feeling alienated by stories that revolve around grand passions and steamy encounters. Romance, to me, has always been a foreign country: alluring in theory, but not somewhere I’ve ever wanted to visit.

Add to that the fact that I have aphantasia — my mind’s eye is essentially blind — and you’ll understand why “his smoldering gaze” and “her flowing locks” do absolutely nothing for me. I don’t just feel detached from fictional intimacy; I can’t even picture it — and so I’ve spent years assuming romance in fiction just wasn’t written for people like me (because it’s not).

So it was with equal parts skepticism and curiosity that I picked up A Court of Thorns and Roses, (known by its acronym ACOTAR to millions of ardent fans. The year was 2020¹, and this book had taken the internet by storm. On BookTok and Goodreads it was lauded as the height of “romantasy,” a hybrid of epic fantasy and bodice-ripping romance. Friends who know my sci-fi/fantasy leanings insisted I give it a try, assuring me ACOTAR had enough magic and adventure to make the love story go down easy.

I skeptically cracked the cover, fully expecting to DNF² by chapter three. Instead, to my own astonishment, I was hooked. I tore through the book in two feverish days. By the end, I found myself emotionally invested in a fictional romance for the first time in my life. The obvious question hit me: Why did a romance-averse, aphantasic, aro-ace reader like me end up loving a fantasy romance about fairy lovers?

To explain why A Court of Thorns and Roses captivated me, I need to first convey how profoundly unlikely that was. As a child, I skipped the “kiss the prince” pages in fairy tales because they meant nothing to me. In my teens, while my peers were swooning over movie heartthrobs³ and trading dog-eared romance paperbacks, I was trying to read a popular YA romance, hitting the inevitable chapter where the love interest’s shirt comes off, and feeling utterly lost. Was I supposed to be excited? All I could think was: this scene is doing nothing for me, why are we detouring from the plot?

By the time I was 20, I had confidently accepted that I was aromantic⁴ and asexual⁵ and that the genre of star-crossed lovers and steamy clinches⁶ just wasn’t my genre. If anything, I was slightly judgmental about it. I’d inwardly groan at the clichés: love triangles, jealous alpha males, destined soulmates, gratuitous sex scenes to keep the reader interested.

Frankly, I often found fictional romance boring at best and baffling at worst. I approached romantic tropes the way an anthropologist might approach a strange cultural ritual: with detached, academic interest and a bit of ironic amusement.

You can imagine, then, my attitude going into A Court of Thorns and Roses. The book’s premise is its romantic core: a human girl, Feyre, is taken captive by a lethal faerie lord, Tamlin, in a deadly enchanted kingdom — and of course they begin to fall in love…

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The Familiar Surprise of Fairy Tales

A big part of what ACOTAR did, I eventually realized, was mix the familiar with the unexpected in a way that worked for me. Contemporary media often returns to an old truth: we’re drawn to stories that echo familiar patterns, with an interesting poke of surprise. Maas’s writing hits exactly that sweet spot. She is deliberately playing with well-worn tropes — and then tweaking them just enough to feel fresh.

On the “comforting” side, the story structure of book 1 is a classic fairy-tale quest: “Beauty and the Beast” revisited. Maas serves up the expected beats: initial hatred and fear between pretty Feyre and her captor Tamlin, forbidden wanderings in magical gardens, and a growing sexual tension. He’s every inch the brooding “beastly” love interest — cursed to wear a mask, hiding both his face and his feelings.

In book 1, Feyre (the girl) must fall in love with Tamlin (the boy) so that he can be free of a spell from a witch queen who enslaved his people

Normally, I’d scoff at that archetype like I did for every supernatural bad boy creature since Twilight⁷, and ACOTAR certainly comes close to the line. Tamlin’s jealous outbursts and territorial behavior are portrayed as dangerously attractive in the early chapters, in line with a certain romance-novel logic that equates “angry and possessive” with “passionately in love.” Feyre herself, who’s had a loveless upbringing, interprets Tamlin’s protectiveness and bursts of fury as evidence that she’s special to him. I remember bristling at that — part of me was mentally shouting, “Red flag, girl, this isn’t healthy!” Tamlin even restrains Feyre with magic when she disobeys him, scoring dangerously high on the violent-o-meter. It was the kind of dynamic that usually would have me slamming the book shut.

But here’s where the “gentle touch of surprise” came in. Maas wasn’t content to simply romanticize the Beauty-and-Beast trope; she actively subverted it as the story progressed. About three-quarters through the novel, the plot took a hard turn that utterly changed the game. Tamlin is kidnapped by an evil faerie queen, and suddenly Feyre — our “Beauty” — must rescue her “Beast” by descending into a perilous underworld. This gave Feyre agency in a way I hadn’t expected; she transforms from prisoner to savior, proving her love through bravery and wits rather than just sweet words.

For the last quarter of the book, we quickly move back to the plot devices of fairy tales — 3 deadly trials (including a goddamn riddle) to save a prince — but with a tone shift to the darker tones of old fairy tales instead of YA romance. Once Feyre is under the mountain facing the villain queen, Tamlin — who had loomed so large as the love interest — suddenly fades into the background. He becomes oddly passive, more damsel than hero, barely interacting with Feyre at all while she suffers on his behalf.

Now, this is a perfect execution of a fairy tale retelling! I’ve become jaded from the bit-lit⁸ era, to see the same stories be told in nearly the exact same way, over and over again. For once, we get a new development — and one that truly feels empowering for our heroine. Up until the end, Tamlin doesn’t come to the rescue, or manage to free himself at all. Ok, he does deal the killing blow, but Feyre was actively dying at this point so the scene faded to black and was explained to her in 2 short sentences lol.

Then the narrative energy pivots sharply towards Rhysand — a dark, enigmatic faerie lord who is ostensibly an enemy but aids Feyre for his own mysterious reasons. He’s fascinating when Tamlin, in captivity, has gone dull. Feyre finds Rhys infuriating, dangerous, immensely attractive, and the reader can’t help but notice the chemistry. I had a moment of, “Wait a minute, this guy is more interesting… is the story actually leaning that way?” But by the end of the book, Tamlin and Feyre do reunite and share the expected fairy-tale kiss among “meadows of wildflowers”. A neat happily-ever-after…on the surface.

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The Big Love Switcheroo

Fairy tales and modern romance are natural companions. They both heavily rely on tropes and repetitive structures — girl meets boy, boy dates girl, girl kisses boy, boy marries girl. It’s one of the main characteristics of the genre, and it serves the similar goals: be entertaining and comforting — we know there’ll be a happy ending, so we can let go and enjoy the story.

But there are things you just don’t do in romance, like changing out the main love interest. You can get away with it in “family” series, where you switch out the heroine for her sister in each book. But in a standalone book, you only want to let go of Prince Charming until things cool down a little, so that you can build the tension back up with heaps of jealousy and ultimately have your heroes making up in the corner. You don’t, ever, switch your dude out entirely after building him up for 400 pages!

But it turns out (as the sequel confirms in spectacular fashion) that Maas was not actually endorsing the controlling Beast as the ideal partner — it was just the partial, biased, somewhat unreliable narration that comes with a teenage girl. In the next book, Maas flips the script completely. Tamlin had been neglecting his beloved Feyre, refusing to help her with the trauma she endured to save him, isolating her from her friends, controlling her movements and clothing — all under the guise of safety from the enemies they just escaped. In book 2, he finally breaks into the visible stages of domestic abuse, with bouts of rage that destroy her room and belongings, dangerously throwing books at her face, and ultimately holding her prisoner in his castle.

Violent-o-meter, a tool by the Observatory of violence against women in Saint-Denis, France — source (in English)

From there on, we switch into the main fairytale theme of book 2: a retelling of Persephone and Hades. Rhysand — High Lord of Night and resident of the very literal Court of Nightmares, also under a fricking mountain — exploits a magical loophole to whisk Feyre away for one week each month. While she initially experiences it as an abduction (and rightfully so!), Maas uses that forced proximity to slowly elevate Rhysand as the true love interest who values Feyre’s freedom and strength.

In contrast to Tamlin, Rhysand allows her to train and learn to defend herself from her still-present enemies. He teaches her to read — the very skill she lacked to win the last trial when she was rescuing Tamlin — and he also becomes her guide into the laws and rituals of the Faes, allowing her more autonomy and letting her make her own informed decisions.

In book 2, Rhysand (Hades) kidnaps Feyre (Persephone) to his castle once a month through a magical loophole and shows her how Tamlin is an abusive asshole (even now that he’s free from the spell). They fall in love <3

Maas used this structural shift in the love interests to quietly critique the very tropes she’d been indulging. The feminist reader in me found it deeply satisfying that the tale ultimately rejected the old “angry possessive male = romantic” notion. Instead, true love in ACOTAR is built on mutual respect and the heroine’s empowerment. That thematic undercurrent resonated with me, because it addressed one of my core frustrations with romance tropes. Maas gave me the trope payoff and a critique of the trope, all in one package. I was both amused and impressed — it’s as if the book got one step ahead of my eye-rolling and said, “I know, I know this is problematic — trust me, I’m going somewhere with it.”

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Fairy Tales Have Good Bones

Aphantasia means I can’t see anything inside my head. Now, that can be somewhat of a problem when reading, because it means I can’t always enjoy all the descriptions as they were meant to be. I make do though, and I can still enjoy most books.

But something that struck me while writing this piece is that fairy tales are an excellent base for me to enjoy! I’ve heard the stories a thousand times, often as a child in picture books, in the Disney adaptation, read at school, at home, by grandma who made funny faces… I have a thousand experiences of them, in all their details, so even if I can't picture any of it, they are associated with lots of good feelings. The very derivativeness of ACOTAR paradoxically makes it so much more vivid and fresh in my head.

Another stroke of genius from Maas, is pairing up on the love-interest switch with a fairy tale switch. In the first 2 books, we were starting essentially from scratch again in terms of plot, and redoing the entire dance of courting. Book 3 doesn’t — no change of boys, no change of tales — and it felt dull and boring to me. Somehow re-doing it all again was more fun that continuing the relationship!

On a less analytical level, I also have to admit: all those tropes I thought I hated? When executed well, they are fun. The novel is shamelessly trope-dense — it stuffs in everything from the “enemies-to-lovers” setup, to the mystical “soulmate bond”, or even the paint-by-numbers melodrama of “there’s only one bed and it’s so cold outside”. Normally, I’d snort at a contrivance like that, but by the time it happened, I was so invested in the Feyre/Rhys dynamic that I relished the tension. It turns out I can enjoy a good trope as much as the next girl, when it’s given a fresh context and when I care about the characters!

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Did I make you want to start this series? Are you yourself asexual or aromantic? If so, what is your relationship to romance in books or tv?

Thank you to

Melissa

,

Claire Butler

,

Matthew Beebe

and

Lily

for helping me edit this essay.

Further reading about aphantasia:

There is no TV inside my mind

Don't Show Me Your Spider Aliens

1. It came out in 2015, but i picked it up in the middle of a covid-boredom infused book club with friends who wanted to read in English more

2. Did Not Finish, ie abandoning the book, slang that originated from Booktok

3. I voted for Edward, but that was purely a toss of a coin (and because shining in the sun so much that you have to skip school is hilarious)

4. Aromantic Who doesn’t feel romance or feelings of romantic love — unrelated to aromatic, that’s just kitchen spices

5. And autistic on top, which doesn’t help the “understand other people’s emotions and feelings” bit

6. Word of the day: clinch — passionate embrace

7. You might not be familiar, but any teen girl can rant off an entire list of those bad boys stuck in hopeless triangles with our main heroine. Off the top of my head: Damon and Stephan in the Vampire Diaries, Jace and Simon from The Mortal Instruments, Pash and Scott from Hush Hush, …

8. Circa 2010, when half the YA fantasy shelf was vampire or werewolves