Xaden Riorson, “tawny skin,” and Romantasy

• In Event: Racialized Sexuality in Latinx Culture and Politics

Abstract

Fantasy romance, or “romantasy,” combines the world-building, magic systems, and high stakes of high fantasy novels with the sexual content, love story, and happy ending of genre romance. A publishing juggernaut with casual readers transforming into collectors, midnight releases, destination events, and one author alone selling nearly forty million copies of her books worldwide, I'm interested in asking what it means for white women to eroticize men in literal fantasy worlds where the racial formations of our own world need not apply. The three most popular romantasy series all feature a highly eroticized racially ambiguous character as the heroine’s primary love interest. Hsu-Ming Teo’s Desert Passions: Orientalism and Romance Novels helps me historicize this phenomenon in genre romance while Helen Young’s articulation of fantasy’s “habits of whiteness” situates race in the history of fantasy. My research is both ethnographic and literary. Fans quickly fall into vehement camps about the ethnicity and race of these characters. Some fans will refuse the character's description altogether and unapologetically insert what they find most desirable. Other fans wage wars of close-reading to prove "he's really Latino" or "he's obviously South Asian," even when there is obviously no Latin-America or Asia in the worlds of the novel. And yet, even when the character is not at all coded as a man of color, he still becomes a focal point for fans of color, cosplayers of color, and fan-artists of color. In this paper I consider how Xaden, the racially ambiguous “shadow daddy” of Rebecca Yarros’ Empyrean series becomes meaningful to readers through close reading, digital ethnography, and interviews with readers of color.

Author

• Marcela A Di Blasi, Dartmouth College