The Viral Book Cycle

Let’s do a quick history crash course on how trends in genre fiction actually evolve.

ACOTAR was drafted long before the romantasy boom.

Sarah J. Maas started writing the earliest version around 2012, right at the tail end of the YA vampire craze. Paranormal was fading out, dystopian was peaking, and no one was touching fae in a mainstream way. When she finally published ACOTAR (2015), she absolutely reframed the fae mythos.

And that’s the point.

Authors who reshape genres are rarely “on trend.” They’re breaking formulas before

formulas exist.

Think about it:

• Stephenie Meyer flipped the vampire trope on its head — sparkly, teenage, “vegetarian,” and aimed at a huge YA audience.

• Anne Rice made vampires erotic, queer-coded, philosophical, and glamorous decades before it was mainstream. 

• Suzanne Collins took the Running Man/Battle Royale concept and reimagined it with a traumatized teenage girl at the heart of a political uprising.

• Sarah J. Maas took Gaelic/Irish/Scottish fae folklore and turned the fae male archetype into something explicitly romantic, sexual, and epic — a total departure from the trickster/creature/faerie traditions of old.

None of these authors were following rules.

They were breaking them. 

Every genre-defining book exists because an author ignored “don’t write this” discourse.

So when modern readers start demanding:

• “No more prologues.”

• “No third person.”

• “No dual POV.”

• “Don’t write royalty.”

• “Don’t write fae.”

• “Don’t use tropes.”

…it’s honestly wild.

Because every major phenomenon in fantasy and romantasy happened because a writer refused to follow what people said was ‘allowed’ at that time based on trends. 

Genre evolves when writers try something new — even messy, weird, risky, or “against the grain.” If we police creators into one acceptable format, we don’t get ACOTAR. We don’t get Twilight. We don’t get The Hunger Games. We don’t get Interview with the Vampire.

We get beige, same-same, algorithm-friendly stories with zero teeth.

Let writers write.

Let readers read.

And let genres grow instead of shrink.