Under the burning gaze of a man with a back adorned with black wings, a couple with pointy ears waltz to the sound of cellos. Languid on a bed, a young girl turns her head away from a bare-chested Adonis kneeling in front of her. Equipped with a bow, a silhouette sneaks through a forest populated by magical creatures… From these sequences produced using artificial intelligence, a particular form of eroticism emerges, a sort of Fifty Shades of Gray in the land of Lord of the Rings.
On TikTok, these short video animations abound under the hashtag #acotar. For the fans, Narrow down is the acronym for A Court of Thorns and Rosesseries in five volumes published in 2015 by L’Amérique Sarah J. Maas. Translated under the title A palace of thorns and roses (La Martinière jeunesse), the saga tells the story of Feyre, a young hunter sequestered in Prythian, a kingdom of fairies, where she will fall in love with a great lord.
Smashing success of YA literature (for Young Adult“young adult”), Narrow down belongs to “romantic fantasy” or “romantasy”: a subgenre of fantasy, written mainly by women for women, mixing fantasy, love and initiatory quest. Since the end of the 2010s, this style has invaded bookstores, but especially networks. On TikTok, we exchange tips for making shimmering wings and filters to adorn our face with angular features. On the r/acotar forum of Reddit or the private Facebook group all things Acotar, readers share fan art, analyze the arcs of their favorite character and speculate on the release date of the next books. Sometimes, one of them wonders: is it relevant to qualify Narrow down of « fairy porn » ?
Fairy porn or fairy smut (“fairy porn”) is the affectionate nickname given by romantasy fans to the “spiciest” novels. On TikTok, followers claim the label and display their love of the genre. And there is something for everyone, between the romances slow burn (“slow combustion”) – expression used to describe stories where feelings and attraction between characters build little by little – and those regularly punctuated by graphic scenes calientelike the Blood and ashes (From Saxus, 2021), by Jennifer L. Armentrout, or Fourth Wing (Hugo Roman, 440 pages, 21.50 euros), by Rebecca Yarros.
“It’s a world where I can have it all”
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