Description
Fantasy literature has become a commonplace tool within the study of international relations. The politics of Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones, for example, are regularly included in teaching modules and are used to make larger claims about the salience of political ideas within pop culture. Yet, there remains a hierarchy within the study of pop culture regarding the types of fantasy literature that are considered valuable for academic inquiry. Fantasy literature written by women and with predominantly female audiences is often dismissed as “Romantasy”, dragon porn, or fairy porn. This dismissal is all the more galling given that these books are often explicitly about IR themes: war, justice, diplomacy, power, just to name a few. Moreover, this genre dominates the publishing industry globally, with over half a billion USD in sales in 2024. In this paper, we engage with one of the most influential series in the genre in 2025: Rebecca Yarros’s The Empyrean. Set in a military college in the empire of Navarre, this series poses questions about immigration, war, torture, censorship, and the security dilemma. It sold 12 million copies over the past two years, and there are rumors of film and TV adaptations. More to the point, Yarros has been explicit in saying that the empire in the series is based loosely around political decay in the United States. In this article, we analyze the way Yarros constructs key political concepts in the three Empyrean books. We argue these constructions can influence how readers interpret and fantasize about war and should thus be considered an important text for understanding the current political moment. In short, fantasizing about alternate political realities shapes what realities seem possible or impossible in the present.
