Romantasy and dragons
My experience with the fantasy genre is very little to be honest. When I was young, I read all of Harry Potter's books and saw all the movies, it was such a huge hype around it. Then I saw Lord of the Rings but I was never a fan, I am sorry. The dragon spark slowly arrived with the animated movies How To Train Your Dragon and a little bit before that I was amazed by the cute Mushu from Mulan. And a couple of years ago it got really interesting for me when I saw Game of Thrones and Daenerys together with her dragons became my favourite character in the TV series. So yeah, mostly movies and TV shows. In my adulthood, I was focused mostly on non-fiction literature, especially personal development and motivational books, then psychology, philosophy, health, but I completely gave up on fiction stories. One day, I thought I felt like reading some romance, so I bought two random books from a very popular bookshop here, but they were so bad that this was the moment I decided that I will continue to watch romance on Netflix and I will stick to reading books that can fix my life.
My sister has always loved books more than me and I was always the movie fan. But this summer something changed. When we hung out together, I asked her what books she was currently reading and she told me about the story of an academy that trains dragon riders and two main characters who fell in love. I thought, okay interesting. And almost a month ago before my vacation started I started to think about dragons, that maybe I should try to immerse myself into this world because it would maybe help me to stop overthinking so much and redirect my thoughts to something else. So I asked AI what the best romantic fantasy books with dragons are, and what came up first felt familiar. I asked my sister if those were the books she was telling me about and she confirmed. I borrowed all three from her and today I started to read Onyx Storm, the third one in the Empyrean series.
As far as the WHY goes, I absolutely love this story because it has nothing to do with my daily life and problems. I can escape to a whole different universe full of magic and mystical creatures for hours. That must be the reason why the fantasy genre was created in the first place right? To escape from reality. And since there are millions of fans, I think this strategy really works. And then there is this romance. I know that there are many beautiful stories about friendships, family, resilience, survival... but relationships and love, this topic will always be something that we talk about the most. I need a good romance in a book or movie. The way these two main characters protect and care about each other, it touches very deeply the reader's heart. What makes me happy is that it seems that even men are getting interested in romantasy books. I don't know if it's because they are so curious what most of the women are so hyped about at the moment, but they can definitely learn a couple of things from these stories, that's for sure. And my fascination with dragons? This one I cannot really explain, but it's there. They are strong, big, terrifying, kind. They have real characters. They always come to save humans, they are their only hope.
On Insta it looks like everybody is going crazy about romantasy. Such a huge part of the content is dedicated to book reviews and recommendations, paintings, making costumes, cosplay, book binding, or creating another type of craft. Even a graphic novel and TV series are on the way. It reminds me of the obsession with HP, this time maybe even bigger. It's probably temporary as with all sensations but it is definitely worth it. I am glad I found it, or it found me?! Most probably the timing is right because life is not exactly the easiest at the moment so if you feel the same, maybe give it a chance too. Books can be healing and life changing. Or simply bring excitement, peace and rest for the mind.