I went to a romantasy conference and now I have so much unpacking to do

of my tulle-filled suitcase, but mostly my deeply ingrained shame

Last week, I went to a Romantasy book conference in LA with my younger sister. It was wild. 10/10, highly recommend.

Romantasy isn’t really my genre — last year, reading the first two Fourth Wing books back-to-back sort of sent me into a reading slump — but I’ve been trying to lean into choosing chaos, so when she asked me if I wanted to go to a conference full of people obsessed with fairy/dragon/witch smut, I was like, yeah, obviously. Also, at the time February 2025 sounded super far away and hypothetical. Which is the true story of how, three weeks ago, I found myself desperately buying last-minute plane tickets, browsing this Buzzfeed list of fast fashion to buy if you’re “in your fairytale era”, and speed-reading the recently-released third Fourth Wing book (I’m not done yet, so no spoilers). And then, last Thursday, I stuffed my carry-on suitcase with far more tulle than usual, as well as some fingerless lace gloves that the Amazon algorithm correctly guessed I would want to add to my order, and headed to the con.

I learned a lot from the experience. Like: don’t go to a con without a collapsible rolling basket full of books to get signed, you absolute rube. That was pretty interesting to me, because I assumed that, like me, everyone else there mostly read their smut in ebook format so they could pretend they were reading anything else. But no! Everybody else was proudly displaying signed hardcovers.

It makes sense. People who choose to go to a romantasy conference are already in a more enlightened state than I am, because they’ve done some of the work of shedding their shame about liking genres that prioritize the female gaze, female badassery, and female pleasure.

The room was full of absolutely gorgeous women of all sizes wearing corsets. As I left my hotel room the first night, I told my younger sister, “I’m not sure I have the main-character energy to pull off this outfit.” But nobody else looked like they gave a single fuck whether they were pulling off their look. They all had amazing hair — my sister’s friend came with us to the con, and she said she’s never been at an event with such a high proportion of fellow redheads. And everyone was so nice and positive! I got a ton of compliments. But also, people were friendly but not overly so, because I suspect a lot of them were fellow introverts. Nice introverts who were happy to let you sit at their table but felt no need to fill the conversation with small talk. It ruled.

not technically romantasy but definitely a vibe match. Via unsplash

It also activated SO many of my insecurities. Because I went to grad school, one of my worst nightmares is to be in a room of people and feel like everyone knows I haven’t done the reading. And that was exactly how I felt.

I’ve read more than my fair share of fantasy and YA, but that was ages ago. I am not up on the fake-sounding names of most popular romantasy authors and the even faker names of their heartthrob heroes. I haven’t even finished the Fourth Wing books, and I haven’t touched ACOTAR because I heard it’s kind of bad. I’m strongly considering reading some of the Greek myth-inflected romantasy because I think it would make for an entertaining newsletter article or two, but I haven’t done that yet. Every time I met someone new at the con, they’d ask what I was reading, and I’d mumble that I was reading The Blood of Hercules — technically not a lie, I’m 10 pages in — and they’d say, “Oh, I really liked that one!” because of course they’d read it already. Which contributed to my feeling of being a bad student.

That feeling came to a head at the last panel I went to, which was about lore and myth in romantasy. In short: exactly my jam! Except the moderators of the panel — who did a terrific job, which makes me want to listen to their very successful podcast — asked the writers on the panel about what kind of research they did for their books. And the first writer¹ said this:

“I feel like I just absorbed Greek myth as a kid! Even though, like, it’s always changing, according to scholars. Like, my mom’s book club just picked The Odyssey, and I guess scholars now think the same person might not have written both the Iliad and the Odyssey? Which is a pretty huge thing! And when I was a kid, it was like, Apollo is the god of the sun, and now they’re like, oh, it’s really Helios. But anyway, I just absorbed it as a kid, so I didn’t really need to do any research, except when I wanted to find tiny details, like who would tend Dionysus’ bar.”

I literally choked on the croissant I was eating when she said “scholars now think the same person might not have written both the Iliad and the Odyssey.” A of all: that’s not new news. Milman Parry died nearly a century ago. Even the word “written” is pretty problematic in this context.

I would also typically hope that people who are writing books heavily inflected with Greek myth would have a more complex and nuanced understanding than to ask questions like “is Apollo or Helios the god of the sun?” I encourage people to read Helen Morales’ Very Short Introduction, which I discussed here, but the short version is that there was no “god of the sun”, an anachronistic later interpretation. Helios was the Greek word for “sun”, so stories about him are sort of about the sun personified. And yes, Apollo and Artemis are associated with the sun and moon, but Apollo’s associations are also varied and complex. He was worshipped with cults emphasizing different aspects of his divinity in different locations. Delphi was more about prophecy, for example, but Mt. Parnassus nearby was associated with the muses and music. And so on.

But I snapped out of my pedantic doom spiral as soon as the next author started speaking. She had also written a book that drew from Greek myth,² but her approach was different. She said, “The research part can be hard, because there are so many conflicting myths. I was really worried about picking just one aspect of the Medusa story. I don’t really know why I stressed about it so much. Did I think that, like, Classics professors were going to read my YA book and leave comments on GoodReads saying I’d gotten Medusa wrong?”

That, I thought, was an excellent point. First of all, I appreciated that she’d done the research, even if it led her into a bit of an anxiety tailspin, because nothing could be more relatable to me as a scholar. And Medusa is one of my favorite figures from myth, which is why my header image for Myth Takes is her taking a selfie. (Who cares if other people turn to stone when they look at her? The only gaze that matters is hers, and she felt cute.) But also: yes, classicists might well read a YA romantasy book, but I will personally publicly shame any classicist who leaves a “you got myth wrong”-type comment, because wow is that a useless, pedantic, gatekeeping approach to myth and antiquity.

I’d like to think that my colleagues are familiar enough with the freedom that reception allows for variation and reinterpretation that they would know that saying that a version of a myth is “wrong” makes you sound like you’re the uneducated one here. But, as always, it depends on context. Pedantic nitpicking is often a bit of a coping mechanism for traumatized scholars. They’ve convinced themselves that everyone else thinks their work is meaningless — not unreasonably, a lot of people DO think that — so they fall back on a “I know something you don’t know” stance to justify their life’s work. It’s not a great strategy, honestly, but it is a legible one.

And really, isn’t that what I was doing? I felt insecure about my level of competency at the con — just witness my lack of a rolling cart — and everyone there knew more than I did about the actual subject matter, people who can do magic having hot sex. So I defaulted to feeling proud that at least I knew more about this one, much less sexy thing, Homeric scholarship and minutiae about Greek myth. That way I didn’t need to think about how inadequate it made me feel that, not only was I in a room full of people who knew more than me, I was looking at five women onstage who had all written, like, fifteen books by the age of 35, had rabid fanbases willing to wait on hour-long lines to get hardcovers signed, and were seemingly able to wear fake eyelashes without blinking constantly. They made me feel like a small, jealous, pedantic troll. Which was at least situationally appropriate, I guess.

I left the con with several new books in my bag — one of which is loosely based on The Scarlet Pimpernel, a story paradigm I’m an absolute sucker for — and a determination to try to bring the spirit of the event into my life going forward. I want to wear a flower crown if I feel like it and dress in sillier clothes and absolutely geek out telling my favorite writers how much I adore their work. (EVERYONE SHOULD DO THIS. Writing is so hard, and I have never once felt anything other than so grateful and happy when someone tells me that something I wrote meant something to them. My homework for you this week is to tell one writer you like — not me, this isn’t about me fishing for validation³ — that something they wrote is good. You will make their day.)

Just remember: there’s no wrong way to Medusa, except to tell people that they’re Medusa-ing wrong.

1. I’m not going to share what her name/the name of her book was, because I don’t want it to seem like I’m dunking on her! People really like her work!

2. Her book I WILL share, if people want to know it!

3. Although if you ALSO want to tell me you like my work for extra credit, I’m not going to be sad