Fourth Wing, ACOTAR, Ice Planet Barbarians – the data shows the romantasy wave is reshaping desire, and the biggest shift hasn’t arrived yet
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If you have spent the last two years lost in Fourth Wing, ACOTAR, or Ice Planet Barbarians, you are probably already aware that your reading habits have changed something about what you want. What is less obvious is that the search data has been quietly tracking this shift – and what it reveals is more interesting than a simple BookTok trend.
Emily Conway, Creative Director of Dragon Dildo®, has been mapping Google Trends data across fantasy toy categories since 2022, cross-referencing it against the romantasy publishing timeline. What she found is not the spike-and-crash pattern you might expect from a viral cultural moment. It is something more lasting.
“The pipeline is longer than people think,” Conway says. “Readers do not finish Fourth Wing on a Friday and act on it on Saturday. The desire builds slowly. They sit with the fantasy, they come back to it – and months later, the curiosity finds somewhere to go. That journey is gradual, but it is real and it is consistent.”
The desire existed before the books
The first and perhaps most surprising finding in the data is that fantasy toy categories were already established, high-volume search terms in January 2022 – before Fourth Wing was published and before BookTok romantasy had reached mainstream scale. These desires were not created by the books. The books gave them a mainstream language and a much wider audience.
“What the romantasy boom has done is introduce a completely new kind of person to this curiosity,” Conway explains. “Someone who arrives through fiction and imagination rather than through existing communities. That is a structural shift in who the audience is, not just how many of them there are.”
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 and ACOTAR’s sustained platform presence was drawing consistent new readers into the genre.
This is not another Fifty Shades moment
The cultural comparison that matters here is not what this wave resembles – it is what it does not resemble. Fifty Shades of Grey went viral in 2012 and drove a documented surge in adult toy sales. The Google Trends data tells the full story: it peaked to 100 in search interest in early 2015 (driven by the film) and collapsed to near zero within two years. By 2016 it was essentially flat. Intense, brief, and over.
The romantasy wave looks fundamentally different. Fourth Wing, ACOTAR, Ice Planet Barbarians, and the titles that followed are showing sustained elevated interest across multiple years with no collapse visible. Each new release – Iron Flame, Onyx Storm, the ongoing ACOTAR adaptations – generates a new peak rather than a final one.
“Fifty Shades was a door that opened and closed,” Conway says. “A huge number of people walked through, but it did not stay open. What is happening with romantasy is different. The door keeps opening wider, and there is no sign of it closing. Sustained curiosity is fundamentally different from a spike.”
The Onyx Storm effect is still arriving
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, making it 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 wave of curiosity that publication generates has not yet fully translated into consumer behaviour. The pipeline is still loading.
“If you loved Onyx Storm and you have found yourself curious about where that feeling goes, you are part of a demand wave that the data says is still building,” Conway says. “You are earlier in this than you think.”
The tentacle and alien categories
Of all the categories tracked, tentacle toy searches show the most dramatic recent growth – reaching their highest ever recorded interest by late 2024, tracking closely with the expansion of creature romance content on BookTok. Alien toy categories are showing similar early movement, rising consistently from 2024 in a pattern Conway attributes to the Ice Planet Barbarians phenomenon – Ruby Dixon’s series that introduced millions of readers to blue alien romance and quietly established that this kind of curiosity was far more mainstream than anyone had assumed.
“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 reader, a different kind of curiosity
The romantasy reader arriving at fantasy toy curiosity is a distinct kind of person from the traditional adult retail audience. They came through fiction. They are emotionally invested in a world and its characters before they become physically curious about anything. They respond to thoughtful editorial content, honest information, and brands that engage with the fantasy seriously rather than treating it as a novelty.
“If you loved Fourth Wing and you are curious about what comes next, you are not unusual,” Conway says. “The data shows that millions of people are on the same journey. The question is just where that journey takes you.”
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