What's Up With Formulaic Tropes in BookTok's YA Fantasies?

Booktok is a social media fanbase where books are recommended and marketed by authors and influencers. For the past six years, the Booktok community has expanded widely in numbers and successfully increased author recognition. The majority of books contain a genre overlap of romance and fantasy, combining mythical components with swooning romantic relationships - known as romantasy.

When BookTok first rose in popularity, it benefited writers, creating relationships based on the connection between stories to authors. According to the Guardian, Booktok had increased 41.3% of market shares for Romantasy books between 2023-2024. Because of Booktok’s support, in 2025 alone, every month 4-11 of New York Times Bestsellers titles are categorised under the Romantasy genre. According to “Lords House Publishing Press” 50% of Romantasy purchasers consist of women under the age of 35, that same age group being 71% of Booktok’s audience. Also, Romantasy titles consistently featured on Booktok regularly see sales spikes of 500-800% within days, the majority of content being: posting collages of a book’s “aesthetic” representing setting, characters or “vibes”,  influencer reviews, or major snippets of events that occur in the novel. 

The books that appear in the Booktok fanbase all contain noticeable patterns in: plot, characters, settings, and even magical components. Authors commonly center their writing around the book’s appearance and first impressions instead of plot to create Booktok material. The Booktok fandom essentially then market their books for free, saving authors from paying advertising finances while reaching a large audience, becoming tropaic. Authors may include certain character relationships, scenes, and character archetypes for this. Some of these tropes can be as vague as character “plot armor” whereas some tropes may be as small as a specific scene like the classic “knife-to-the-throat” chapter, where the defiant and tough female main character has a knife-to-the-throat of the male love interest - a scene so frequent it has its own Goodreads section.

These tropes even influence the premises of novels - for example, the trope of the common protagonist–typically female– who grows up from a disadvantaged background where she/he was vulnerable in the past. Whereas their love interest is born into power and high status. This trope is seen in A Court of Thorns and Roses By Sarah J. Mass, Powerless by Lauren Roberts, Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross, The Cruel Prince by Holly Black and more. Each of these books have ranged from one million to thirteen million copies sold worldwide. Once the books were first published they were then introduced to the Booktok fanbase, due to the repetition in tropes influencers then created the “poor girl x rich guy” trope to categorise these books in order to summarise factors of the story. Subsequentyl, if a reader enjoys one book from the category, they then have a variety of other recommendations , increasing the book's popularity in the process. But due to its constant repetition the trope then becomes formulaic, therefore making it less interesting whenever it appears again in a novel. 

Another repetitive trope rapidly becoming stale is that of the brooding, defiant "strong female lead." Emerging initially to contrast mainstream sexism in fantasy books, like George R.R Martin’s Game of Thrones (an  award-winning Fantasy novel), where female characters are shown to be weak, while suffering from violence and sexual assault regularly. That portrayal of women began to appear commonly in fantasy novels, so when Romantasy became a well known subgenre authors focused on creating more female-centric narratives that displayed female strength due to the lack of it in the mainstream. Yet, the tropaic portrayal began to come at the cost of dimentionality, disregarding that female strength can be portrayed in multiple different ways.

Emotional strength is usually overlooked and is seen as a weakness for most characters with developed emotional senses because they are considered “vulnerable” or “sensitive” which contrasts from the steel-like, defiant woman who “doesn’t-take- orders-from-nobody” that is used for most fantasy books. This type of strength is usually given to the side characters. An example of this would be Taryn Duarte, the older sister of the protagonist Jude Duarte from the Cruel Prince. She shows emotional intelligence by developing chameleon-like skills to blend into the dangerous world around her, eventually settling down in a marriage. This shows her use of emotional strength to adapt to her surroundings and harness emotions when she pleases to be seen as “invisible”. Yet, when the wedding doesn’t work out the way she had hoped, she changes things for herself and ends the marriage.

Moral strength, although seemingly underrated, is one of the most powerful qualities you can find in a character. An example of a non-morally gray character is Iris, the protagonist from Divine Rivals, she is an ambiguous character with a recognised passion for journalism who contains a strong moral compass. These morally strong characters share traits such as have: largely value morals when it comes to making decisions, create actions that align with their intentions, and are passionate/visionisers. And although that isn’t entirely seen as a “strong” character– because what we readers now depict is strong are characters who are physically strong– the ones that have a present moral compass and contain these qualities are the ones who rule kingdoms and lead armies. They are the most intimidating to face and gain the utmost respect from others around them. And if the author grants these characters with a high societal standing they are almost always known to have a spotless reputation, that increases the admiration of people around them. 

 These representations of the type of strengths a female protagonist can have serves as evidence that there isn’t just one way for authors to display power on a character. Yet characters are consistently written to only have physical strength as it is the most popular and repetitive. Instead,what if a female lead displayed and developed various types of strength throughout the narrative? That way the character will be less one-dimensional and more believable while upholding but expanding the Booktok fanbases’ idea of a strong character. Perhaps we can also imagine a BookTok focused less on the tropes a book may include and instead recommending and marketing the novel's characters, challenges and experience, insteadd of focusing on patterns and what is the same between a subgenre of books. This pushes readers to read books with entirely different storylines and value different things when looking for a book,  but it will also encourage writers to not fear if the contents of its novel will resonate with Booktok readers, and develop characters with dimensionality