Its Time for Men to Colonize Romantasy
Men do enjoy romance and this past weekend proved it.
If you’re not keyed in on twitter’s trend of the week, I’ll briefly explain how a female Draco one-shotted half of twitter for damn near a week.
Twitter user and artist REDTEN dropped a cute image of a gender-flipped Draco Malfoy.
Original art by @REDTEN
Now, gender-flipping and playing with the dynamics of Harry Potter is nothing new. The fanfiction community has made it their mission for two decades to chart out every possible multiverse variant of Hogwarts. A gender-flipped Draco Malfoy has been done to death in those hallowed halls of heretical literature. My God, shippers attach to this franchise like barnacles to the underside of an oil tanker. But something was different this time. Something that has been cooking in the heads of a lot of readers who enjoyed Harry Potter and then grew up to think about it just a little bit.
Yes, a lot of Harry Potter’s world-building falls apart if you think about it for more than a few minutes, but as a whimsical child’s book, I think it’s oaky to take the world as is and go about your day. It was never made to stand up to nit-picking super-autists with a microscope. And part of this is aspects of character actions, mainly a lot of the men have feminine traits instead of masculine ones. It’s almost as if the books were written by a single mom that didn’t understand boys in their early-to-late teens.
What followed has been a week of art galore, AI comics and clips of Female Malfoy (dubbed by the twitter braintrust as ‘Malfoid’) of a bratty, snooby elitist girl deriding Harry while secretly pining for him.
Malfoid was a Tsundere and it one-shotted twitter—mostly online dudes who haven’t had much exposure to this particular Japanese trope. Not only was it cute and fun to play with but it also revealed a weakness in the Potter universe: Malfoy being a girl attracted to Harry solved a missing link in the books. Harry initially chased an Asian student named Cho Chang. Three books he chased that chinese dragon only for it to fall apart faster than a Temu bookshelf. Malfoid made sense because it bonds him to his rival in a fundamentally different way that flows with the story more naturally.
In essence, it turned Malfoid and Harry into Helga and Arnold.
If you know, you know
Romance has felt dead in literature for some time—especially since the Romantasy genre exploded and gave its readers ten metric tons of books about fae kings, shadow daddies, mob princes, werewolves, and minotaurs who all were hundreds of years old, have infinite money, killed anyone who touched their love interest, were always willing to share their traumatic backstory, and always had the same validating politics as the author. All of that and they always fell in love with some plain jane brunette.
To say men don’t like romance is false, but romance so aptly keyed into that specific of a dynamic doesn’t exactly grab male readers by the throat. It grabs the female readers by the throat, something they’re fond of (just watch their booktok reels). Modern romance and Romantasy is targeted at what the female power fantasy is. The hilarious thing is that the male fantasy is also the female fantasy.
What men and women both want....especially the butt grabb
But a lot of women who are insecure or locked deeply into their ideology won’t admit it because muh solidarity. Masculinity filtered through femininity is a man who is reactive and passive unless directed otherwise. The female power fantasy is a dangerous being that they direct at their discretion. The back-and-forth and unresolved dramatic tension is what keeps a literary romance interesting. Why do you think soap operas have been on tv for so long, not to mention who kept them popular.
Wholesome has been making a come-back. I’ve said this before. The Malfoid trend was full to bursting.
This comic will give you diabetes...in a good way
Wholesomeness and yearning and the kind of innocence that feels like it could only have come from an earlier, pre-internet part of humanity. But also something that’s been desperately missing from western media as of late: sincerity. Everything has become so awfully ironic, cynical, or porn-brained that often the sincerity of attraction and affection is either ignored entirely or, in the case of most romantasy, tied up in layers of author hang-ups they’re incapable of putting down. It’s made romance reading in western media so feminized that there’s no appeal left for a male reader.
Which doesn’t mean men don’t like romance because Eastern media hasn’t been infested with toxic levels of irony and cynicism in their storytelling, and it draws in male readers by the boatload. Once upon a time, romance was ALSO a men’s genre. The how, where, and why that happened is not something I’m up to speed on, but nevertheless, men’s romance became a niche of a niche that only the Japanese manga and anime artists managed to keep alive. (To mixed results, admittedly).
Right now, Romantasy is a female-dominated market without any internal checks or balances. There are a number of clean romance women writing smut-free books, but their numbers are few and the mean girls on booktok/bookstagram like to bully them in the comments for what they perceive as shoving their puritanism onto them. (I have read a few and will 100% drop a list of great female authors who write decent romance later)
They could use our help. Time for men to colonize Romantasy and take romance back from the terminally online foids and their monster romance. Plant our flag on their soil. They love writing stinkpiece articles about “men don’t read anymore”. Piss on that, I say. We never went anywhere and we damn sure didn’t stop reading.
We never stopped yearning for that wholesome affection. Nothing is more attractive to a guy than a girl who adores him.
A girl who values him.
A girl who doesn’t belittle him.
A girl who wants him regardless of any other circumstance.
A girl who doesn’t treat him like a piece of shit. (Unthinkable to the women terminally on tiktok)
Married men with successful, long-lasting marriages know how to write damn good romance because they’ve made it work. They’re living proof its possible and not some vapid dream that’s inaccessible. And romance’s primary representation has been so subsumed for so long by overt degeneracy coming from both sides that a simple, wholesome sample of a genuine interaction is enough to kick the internet into a tailspin.
Youtuber and friend Mage Leader made an excellent point in regard to what this has uncovered.
Women said this only to turn around and write worse
Women subsumed publishing with so much romance they felt emboldened to push the envelope by orders of magnitude until they were celebrating books that were worse than any misogynistic smut that male authors could think up on their worst days. Their boos mean nothing, we’ve seen what makes them cheer. Men can take back romance for a generation that is starved for it.
In March of 2025, my most viral tweet ever calling out the lack of books for men in a store book aisle saw female readers by thousands jump down my throat for calling out that publishing had all but abandoned male readers. Fast forward to later that very year and earlier this year, journos and big booktubers all latched on to the very name notion. Today, it’s pretty well established that much of romantasy and monster romance isn’t even trying to hide what it is or what its’ appeal is. Everyone is in on it now, but I was one of the earliest shots across the bow in this particular culture war.
If the Malfoid phenomenon is any indication, the next curve will be a small wave of healthy men’s romance. Men already have their own corner for spicy romance, it’s called the HaremLit genre and it’s doing fine. But not everyone wants to indulge in literary smut. For my part, even when reading a HaremLit or spicy romance novel its abrupt and not quite my tempo. But a wholesome romance and some yearning? Yeah, I rock with that.
So, write that Malfoid fanfic, sensitive young man. Then file the serial numbers off and stamp your foot into the romantasy trenches and plant the Men’s Romance flag.
For my part, I’m already working on it and have been for months. The third book in the Age of Adventures and its third entry point is The Scarlet Shrike, a swashbuckling vigilante romance adventure in which romance plays a prominent part (Think Game of Thrones interhouse warfare and the main character is Zorro). The book will star a deposed princess of the Crown Pantheon fighting a vigilante war against the corrupt House that killed her family in a bloody coup. And the man that House sends to stop her is its own prince. How much yearning does it take for two childhood friends turned enemies to stop before they kill each other?
Guess we’ll find out. ;)
John A. Douglas is an independently published author and the author of the Age of Adventures fantasy series including its two starter books: The Black Crown and The Lionheart: Icon of Justice.
He can be found every Monday at 7:00pm Central on the Knights Watch livestream with Shadiversity
Articles every Monday and Reviews every Friday over on Substack and Twitter.
