Fantasy romance

From Guidevines

[edit] Fantasy Romance

A fantasy romance is a subset of paranormal romance at some houses, and its own romance subgenre elsewhere.

Simply, it is a romance novel in a setting of what may be called high fantasy, epic fantasy, or swords and sorcery. Like historical romance, readers are looking for pageantry, but also wonder. If LotR had been all about Arwen and Aragorn, it would be a fantasy romance. Many of the novels of Thomas Burnett Swann would now fall into this catagory, or skate close to it, at least those that end happily: a female protagonist, a world of magic, a focus on relationships.

But a fantasy romance is first of all a romance: 50% or more of the story time should be focussed on the main character's relationship.

Don't be afraid to be epic, glorious, frightening in the Dark Moment and other points of conflict, and wondrous. But also, don't marginalize the woman to a rescue object, don't make the hero unsympathetically domineering, and don't keep them apart for too long. Readers want to see their relationship, the sparks between them, not just have them meet and be torn apart and only get back together in the last chapters.