The Guardian celebrated the opening of Bad Girl Books in Oxford — the UK’s first romantasy-only bookshop — in July 2026, featuring women queueing outside bright pink doors clutching tote bags reading “hot girls read smut” in the same city where J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis taught at Magdalen College. The romantasy genre’s explosive growth, driven by BookTok and Sarah J. Maas adaptations, has produced a publishing phenomenon built around explicit romance and “morally grey” heroes — and The Guardian’s celebration of it in Tolkien’s Oxford is a cultural moment worth examining seriously.
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