Quick summary: Romantasy books have amplified longstanding consumer interest in fantasy toys by creating a mainstream permission structure that reduces the psychological barriers to exploring such desires, leading to sustained growth in searches rather than fleeting spikes. This cultural shift differs markedly from previous trends by fostering an ongoing relationship with the genre that builds emotional investment before physical curiosity, with data indicating a significant lag before demand fully materialises and emerging categories like tentacle and alien toys gaining traction. For mental health and wellbeing the findings highlight how normalising these fantasies through fiction and community can support healthier self acceptance while urging healthcare practitioners and policymakers to recognise this evolving audience as one seeking serious, imaginative engagement rather than conventional retail experiences.
Something unusual is happening in consumer behaviour, and it did not start with a product launch or a marketing campaign. It started with a novel.
The romantasy genre (led by titles including Fourth Wing, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and Ice Planet Barbarians) has introduced tens of millions of readers to fantasy and creature romance over the past three years. What is less documented is what happens next, in psychological and consumer terms, when those readers begin to act on the curiosity the fiction generates.
Emily Conway, creative director of fantasy toy brand Dragon Dildo®, has been tracking Google Trends data across fantasy toy categories since 2022, cross-referencing it against the romantasy publishing timeline. Her findings challenge some widely held assumptions about how cultural moments drive consumer behaviour; and suggest that the biggest wave of demand is still to come.
The desire predates the books
The first significant finding is that fantasy toy search interest existed well before the romantasy boom arrived. Dragon dildo and monster dildo searches were already established, high-volume categories in January 2022, before Fourth Wing was published and before BookTok romantasy had reached mainstream scale.
“These desires were not created by the books,” Conway says. “The books gave them a mainstream language and a community. What BookTok has done is function as a large-scale permission structure: a signal that these feelings are widely shared, which reduces the psychological cost of acknowledging them. The desire was already there. It just did not have a name that millions of people recognised.”
From mid-2023 onwards, search interest for fantasy toy categories shows clear upward acceleration, tracking precisely with the period when Fourth Wing’s BookTok engagement began to build. The acceleration is real, but it is amplification of existing desire, not the creation of new desire.
This is not another “Fifty Shades”
The Fifty Shades of Grey moment offers a useful point of comparison for anyone tempted to dismiss the romantasy wave as a passing trend. In 2015, driven by the film release, Fifty Shades peaked to 100 in Google Trends search interest worldwide, then collapsed to near zero within two years. It was a door that opened and closed quickly.
The romantasy wave looks structurally different. Fourth Wing, ACOTAR, Ice Planet Barbarians, and the wave of titles that followed are showing sustained elevated interest across multiple years, with no collapse visible in the data. Each new release (Iron Flame, Onyx Storm, the ongoing ACOTAR adaptations) generates a new peak rather than a final one.
“Fifty Shades was a spike. What is happening with romantasy is a sustained permission shift,” Conway explains. “The reader is engaged in an ongoing, deepening relationship with a genre that continuously expands the object of her curiosity. That is a fundamentally different consumer psychology to a trend moment.”
The pipeline is still loading
One of the most significant practical findings in Conway’s data is the lag between cultural moment and consumer action. Fantasy toy searches do not spike immediately after a major book release. The desire builds over weeks and months as readers sit with the fiction, discuss it in community spaces, and gradually translate emotional engagement into physical curiosity.
When Onyx Storm (the third book in Rebecca Yarros’s Empyrean series) was published in January 2025, it sold 2.7 million copies in its first week, the fastest-selling adult book in BookScan history. Fourth Wing search interest spiked to its highest ever recorded level at that moment. Based on the lag pattern visible in the data, the full consumer demand that publication generates has not yet arrived.
“The pipeline is still loading,” Conway says. “If you read Onyx Storm and found yourself curious about where that feeling goes, you are part of a demand wave that the data says is still building. Most people are earlier in that journey than they think.”
Tentacle and alien: The emerging categories
Of all the fantasy toy categories tracked in Conway’s dataset, tentacle dildo searches show the most dramatic recent growth trajectory, rising to their highest ever recorded interest by late 2024. This tracks closely with the expansion of tentacle and deep-sea creature content on BookTok from 2022 onwards.
Alien dildo categories are showing similar early movement from 2024, in a pattern Conway attributes to the Ice Planet Barbarians phenomenon – Ruby Dixon’s series that established creature romance with non-humanoid partners as significantly more mainstream than the adult industry had previously assumed. Tracking the full range of shifts across these categories, Conway monitors emerging trends through dragondildo.com, the brand’s EU platform.
“Alien was essentially flat for years,” Conway says. “Then Ice Planet Barbarians happened on BookTok and the data moved. There is now a real and growing audience for this category that simply was not visible in search data before 2023.”
A different kind of customer
The romantasy reader arriving at fantasy toy curiosity is, according to Conway’s analysis, a distinct kind of consumer from the traditional adult retail audience. She came through fiction. She is emotionally invested in a world and its creature archetypes before she becomes physically curious about any product. She responds to editorial content, honest information, and brands that engage with the fantasy seriously.
“This audience arrived through imagination, not through conventional retail discovery,” Conway says. “They respond to brands that acknowledge that the fantasy is real and that the curiosity is legitimate. The marketing language that works for conventional adult retail does not connect with this audience at all.”
For psychologists studying desire, cultural permission structures, and the relationship between narrative and consumer behaviour, the dataset is unusually rich. The romantasy boom is not producing a trend spike. It is producing a structural shift in who the fantasy toy audience is, where they come from, and what they need in order to act on what they want.
Robert Haynes, a psychology graduate from the University of Hertfordshire, has a keen interest in the fields of mental health, wellness, and lifestyle.
