'ROMANTASY' IS RISING

WHY MAGIC, DRAGONS AND EXPLICIT SEX ARE IN BOOKSTORES EVERYWHERE

- STORY: ALEXANDRA ALTER / NYT

n a whim one night, Simona Stallone clicked on some Harry Potter fanfiction, and quickly tumbled down a rabbit hole.

Stallone, 28, a real estate agent and content creator who lives in Toronto, kept seeing posts about “Dramione” all over her feed. People on TikTok were raving about stories set in the world of Harry Potter, written by fans, that imagined a romance between the bookish Hermione Granger and her antagonist, the arrogant bully Draco Malfoy.

As a Harry Potter enthusiast who had always thought that J.K. Rowling should have brought Draco and Hermione together, Stallone was primed to become a Dramione addict.

Lying next to her sleeping boyfriend, she clicked on Manacled, a dark fantasy set in an alternative universe where Harry Potter is dead and the evil wizard Voldemort has triumphed.

The story centred on an illicit, morally ambiguous romance between Hermione, a magic-wielding healer, and Draco, a vicious executioner who later holds Hermione captive as a prisoner of war. It had familiar elements from the Harry Potter books, but with a delicious twist — the characters were a little older and a lot hotter. And they were cast in decidedly more adult scenarios.

Manacled quickly became her “whole personality”.

“I was fully consumed by this book,” Stallone said. “I define my life as before and after ‘Manacled’ — you know, how some people are like, before Christ.”

A staggering number of people share her hyperfixation.

Manacled drew more than 10 million views on the fanfiction site Archive of Our Own, or AO3, and got more than 100,000, 5-star ratings on Goodreads. And now a revamped and retitled version of Manacled, by author SenLinYu, is poised to become one of the year’s biggest debuts in romantic fantasy, the genre that is keeping the fiction market afloat.