Why Reading Fantasy Is Good For You

Why Romantasy is Secretly Brain Fuel

Here’s the thing: I know defending romantasy, those sprawling sagas where dragons battle above crumbling citadels while soulmates exchange fiery banter, is a funny hill to die on. It’s a niche-within-a-niche genre, so deeply drenched in melodrama, abs, magic, and improbability. And yet, here I am, armor on, ready to joust anyone who says my love for magical slow burns is unserious.

The stereotype goes like this: nonfiction is for serious people. Booker Prize fiction is for serious readers. Fantasy romance? That’s for teenagers, daydreamers, and people who need to “grow up” and read something “real.” It’s all dragons and heaving bosoms. A guilty pleasure. Pure escapism.

Except, and here’s the plot twist, romantasy might actually be one of the best genres you can read if you’re in the business of inventing the future.

And I don’t mean that in a squishy, “follow your dreams” way. I mean in a measurable, neuroscience-backed, brain-rewiring kind of way.

Neuroscience says dragons are good for your brain!

Let’s start with the big guns. Functional MRI scans show that reading fantasy activates the brain’s default mode network, the same neural circuitry responsible for creative thinking, future planning, and social cognition. These aren’t just the areas that light up when you imagine a dragon swooping through the skyline of New York City. They’re the same areas you use when you’re scenario-planning a product launch, anticipating a competitor’s move, or designing an entirely new category.

Even more interesting? The mirror neuron system, the part of your brain that helps you understand and predict other people’s thoughts and feelings, fires more in fantasy readers than in nonfiction-only readers. This isn’t some vague “empathy is good” platitude. Mirror neuron activation is a critical part of customer intuition. If you want to build something people actually want, you need to know how they think and feel, even when they can’t articulate it. Fantasy readers, as it turns out, get more reps at this skill than you’d expect.

I’m personally convinced I learned more about emapathy from Sookie Stackhouse than anyone else in my life.

And then there’s cognitive flexibility, the ability to adapt your thinking to new circumstances. This is the mental jiu-jitsu that founders use to pivot a failing product into a breakout success. It’s also the skill your brain uses when it has to reconcile impossible-but-internally-consistent scenarios, like “What if magic returned to the modern world?” or “What if an immortal warlord fell in love with the librarian meant to kill him?” Medical students with higher cognitive flexibility scores not only perform better in research settings, but they also report fewer perceived barriers to innovation. And guess what consistently boosts those scores? Immersive, imaginative fiction.

Romantasy, by its very structure, is a cognitive flexibility bootcamp. Every book asks you to accept a counterfactual premise (“What if love could literally save the world?”), Then, it builds rules around it and challenges those rules. To keep up, your brain has to be elastic. You’re not just reading, you’re running complex “what if” simulations and mapping them to emotional stakes.

If the people building rockets, trillion-dollar companies, and defense tech are feeding their brains with epic sagas, why exactly are we pretending your Kate Daniels binge is frivolous?

Now, some literary purist will inevitably sniff, "But surely you can't compare Asimov's Foundation to Sarah J. Maas's A Court of Thorns and Roses. One is serious science fiction that explores psychohistory and the fall of civilizations. The other is... fairy smut."

This objection misses the cognitive point entirely. From your brain's perspective, both books are doing the same fundamental work: forcing you to process complex counterfactual scenarios with internally consistent rules. Asimov asks you to imagine a galactic empire spanning millions of worlds, then work through how statistical psychology could predict its collapse. Maas asks you to imagine a human girl navigating fae court politics while developing magical powers, then work through how those powers affect ancient treaties and territorial disputes. Both require you to hold elaborate fictional systems in your head, track intricate cause-and-effect relationships, and reason through hypothetical scenarios that don't exist in reality.

The difference isn't cognitive complexity, it's cultural prestige. Foundation gets intellectual credibility because it's dressed in the language of mathematics and sociology. But Kate Daniels navigating post-apocalyptic Atlanta where magic and technology are in constant conflict? That's requiring the same mental gymnastics: understanding how two opposing systems interact, predicting how power structures shift when the rules change, and following a protagonist who has to innovate solutions to problems that have never existed before. SJM's Rhysand building a centuries-long strategy to protect his people from an ancient evil while maintaining complex political alliances? That's essentially the same strategic thinking Hari Seldon uses in Foundation, just with more emotional stakes and better relationship dynamics.

If anything, romantasy might be doing more cognitive work because it's training your brain in both systematic thinking AND emotional intelligence simultaneously. Musk learned to think about civilizational collapse from Asimov, but he didn't learn how to manage the interpersonal dynamics of actually building SpaceX. Kate Daniels readers are getting the complex systems thinking AND the relationship navigation skills. The founders building the future aren't just going to need to envision new technologies, they're going to need to build teams, manage conflicts, inspire loyalty, and navigate the messy human elements that make or break ambitious projects. On that score, the person who's spent years following Celaena Sardothien's political maneuvering while maintaining friendships and romantic relationships might actually be better prepared than someone who only knows how psychohistory works in theory.

And here’s a piece nobody talks about: Romantasy is stealth scenario-planning practice. Readers aren’t just following a love story; they’re navigating complex political systems; fae courts with shifting alliances, vampire hierarchies with centuries-old grudges, dragon rider academies with rigid caste systems. You’re tracking factions, incentives, betrayals, and reforms in real time. If you can model power flows in the Night Court, you can model them in a Fortune 500 boardroom.

Startups? D&D? Game of Thrones? Basically the same thing.

There's also the pattern recognition angle. Romantasy readers are tracking character arcs across multiple books, political machinations that span entire series, and world-building details that pay off thousands of pages later. You're essentially training in long-term pattern recognition and systems thinking, the same skills founders use to spot market trends, anticipate technological convergence, or notice behavioral shifts that others miss. When you can remember that the throwaway line in book two becomes the key to defeating the villain in book seven, you're practicing the kind of dot-connecting that turns observations into insights.

The truth is, romantasy doesn’t just entertain, it trains. It rehearses your imagination in high-stakes, high-creativity scenarios, giving you mental blueprints for thinking beyond what is, into what could be. And in a world where innovation is everything, that’s not escapism. That’s professional development.

The Founders Who Read Dragons (And Why History Proves Them Right)

If you think I’m exaggerating when I say fantasy is founder brain fuel, let’s look at the receipts. The most successful technologists on the planet? Fantasy nerds. Not “read one book on vacation” nerds, deeply committed, build-your-life-philosophy-around-it nerds.

Take Elon Musk. Love him, hate him, or think he’s one bad week away from a Marvel supervillain arc, the man has shaped multiple industries. And he’ll tell you, without prompting, that Asimov’s Foundation series wasn’t just a favorite. It defined his worldview. He devoured sci-fi and fantasy for over ten hours a day as a kid, training his mind on galactic-scale “what if” scenarios. SpaceX’s entire “prolong civilization” mission? Direct lift from Asimov. And in a display of on-brand drama, Musk literally launched a copy of Foundation into space aboard the Tesla Roadster. That’s the kind of stunt you pull when your inner 12-year-old fantasy reader is still in the driver’s seat.

Jeff Bezos? Same story, different shelf. His obsession is Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, a utopian/post-scarcity vision of spacefaring civilizations governed by benevolent AI. Mark Zuckerberg cites it too when talking about AI ethics and advanced societies. Peter Thiel? He named his companies after Tolkien artifacts: Palantir and Anduril. Reid Hoffman, Thiel, and a handful of other PayPal founders spent an entire weekend unpacking Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash before building the company. That book gave us the very word “metaverse”, and Silicon Valley spent the next two decades trying to make it real.

This isn’t a recent fluke. It’s a 150-year pattern. Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea didn’t just entertain future submarine pioneer Simon Lake, it directed his career. Lake’s autobiography literally opens: “Jules Verne was in a sense the director-general of my life.” H.G. Wells’s The World Set Free so captivated physicist Leo Szilard that he conceived the theory of nuclear chain reactions the year after reading it. Star Trek communicators? Martin Cooper used them as the design blueprint for the first handheld mobile phone. Snow Crash inspired Second Life’s founder, and Neal Stephenson’s vision still drives Facebook’s metaverse team. Apple’s original iPad patents cite Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 newspads as prior art.

The pattern extends beyond tech. Walt Disney built his empire after steeping himself in fairy tales and fantasy stories, then reverse-engineering reality to match their emotional logic. His approach to world-building, character development, and immersive storytelling came directly from studying narrative structures that most adults dismissed as children's entertainment. Today's entire entertainment industry runs on 'what if' scenarios: every movie pitch, every series bible, every theme park attraction starts with someone imagining an impossible world and then figuring out how to make it feel real.

Imaginative fiction isn’t predicting the future, it’s building the scaffolding for it. Entrepreneurs read these worlds, internalize them, then reverse-engineer reality to match. It’s counterfactual thinking turned into product strategy.

And that’s the point: fantasy is systematic counterfactual training. Every Kate Daniels book asks you to imagine a post-apocalyptic Atlanta where magic and tech fight for dominance and then solve problems inside that impossible-but-consistent framework. Eragon invites you to consider how a teenager and his dragon could lead a rebellion against an immortal tyrant. Interview with the Vampire forces you to ask how centuries of immortality would warp a person’s morality, relationships, and self-concept. None of these are “practical,” but all of them stretch your ability to hold complex hypothetical scenarios in your head and reason through them. That’s the same skill founders use to design go-to-market strategies for products that don’t exist yet.

Academics have a name for this: upward counterfactual thinking: imagining better versions of reality and figuring out how to get there. Research in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice shows entrepreneurs who excel at this skill have higher self-efficacy, spot better opportunities, and recover from failure faster. In other words, they’re better builders. And fantasy forces you to practice it on every page.

Even children show the effect. Studies find they transfer problem-solving skills more effectively from fantastical stories (where characters solve impossible problems with realistic strategies) than from realistic fiction. The brain disruption of an “impossible premise” breaks your pattern-matching autopilot, forcing you to think beyond the obvious. That’s the essence of innovation: questioning not just the solution, but the premise itself.

There’s also the genre-crossover phenomenon. Romantasy isn’t just converting YA readers, it’s pulling people from literary fiction and business books into its orbit. These are readers who might have been grinding through Booker Prize lists or leadership manifestos, suddenly hooked on sprawling fantasy-romance sagas. Why? Because they scratch the same cognitive itch: rich world-building, layered conflicts, intricate problem-solving. The difference is, romantasy delivers it with emotional stakes that hit as hard as the intellectual ones. The fact that Fourth Wing is being passed between MBA classmates and book club literati tells you something: people are hungry for this kind of complex, emotionally-charged cognitive work.

So when you see a founder curled up with a romantasy paperback, don’t assume it’s downtime. They’re doing reps. They’re rehearsing their ability to see around corners, imagine alternate realities, and then reverse-engineer the path to get there. Fantasy isn’t the opposite of work, it’s pre-work.

Escapism Is Not a Crime (And Definitely Not a Weakness)

One of the laziest criticisms of fantasy, especially romantasy, is that it’s “mere escapism.” As if the only respectable reason to open a book is to grind your soul against The Harsh Realities of Life until it comes out sad and wise. As if finding joy in a world of magic and improbable love stories is childish, unserious, even cowardly.

You can almost hear the tone: “Sure, I read sometimes… biographies of wartime prime ministers, literary fiction about post-industrial malaise. Not… dragons.” This attitude assumes escape is a dereliction of duty. That it’s the mental equivalent of skipping gym class to smoke behind the bike shed.

Here’s the reality: escapism is not inherently bad. It’s a tool. And used well, it’s one of the sharpest tools you can have.

This is how you can usually find me between meetings, BTW.

Norwegian psychologist Frode Stenseng breaks it down in his research on leisure and motivation: there are two types of escapism. Self-suppressing escapism is when you use a hobby to numb yourself, avoid feelings, or dodge reality indefinitely. Think endless doomscrolling. But self-expanding escapism is different. It’s when you immerse yourself in another world to grow. To gain perspective. To recharge so you can re-engage with reality more effectively. And reading fantasy sits squarely in this self-expanding category. It doesn’t shut your brain off, it gives it new terrain to explore.

Romantasy in particular hits the sweet spot. You’re not just escaping to gawk at pretty landscapes and battle scenes. You’re watching people (yes, sometimes immortal vampires or were-lion shapeshifters) navigate love, loyalty, betrayal, and sacrifice. You’re emotionally investing in their triumphs and failures. You’re stretching your empathy, your imagination, and your tolerance for complexity. That’s not withdrawal from reality, it’s training for it.

Think about Interview with the Vampire. On the surface, it’s a moody gothic about immortal blood-drinkers in lace shirts. But it’s also about identity, morality, and the curse/blessing of longevity. Escaping into that world doesn’t make you less able to face your own, it gives you a fresh lens. Or Eragon: yes, it’s a teenage dragon rider’s hero’s journey, but it’s also a study in leadership, resilience, and learning under pressure. Even Kate Daniels, with its snarky mercenary heroine in a magic-ravaged Atlanta, is about navigating shifting power dynamics while holding on to your personal code. That’s not “avoiding” reality. That’s running high-speed simulations of it in a funhouse mirror.

These books are masterclasses in resilience through failure. Romantasy protagonists don't just stumble once and recover. They fail spectacularly, repeatedly, often losing everything that matters to them before finding a way forward. As a reader, you're emotionally invested in watching characters bounce back from devastating setbacks, process grief and betrayal, and rebuild stronger. You're rehearsing the emotional and strategic patterns of recovery, over and over, until they become instinctive.

There’s also a psychological load-management angle. Harvard Business Review calls out that leaders need deliberate “mental offsites” to maintain clarity and creativity. The catch? If you’re a founder or operator, a weekend in the woods thinking about your business is not an offsite, it’s just work with trees. Fantasy, on the other hand, is a true mental relocation. It breaks your brain’s repetitive loops. That’s exactly what Boston Consulting Group was getting at when they found 71% of companies using imagination-based techniques reported increased employee engagement, and 85% saw improved creative output. Your quarterly OKRs aren’t going to unlock that; a high-stakes fae court romance might.

Healthy escapism also helps with resilience. Resilience isn’t just defined as grit, it’s recovery speed. When the world kicks your ass (and it will), you need ways to refill the tank. Reading for pleasure, especially immersive fiction, lowers cortisol, slows heart rate, and physically relaxes the body. That’s why a University of Sussex study found six minutes of reading can cut stress by up to 68%. Six minutes! And you don’t have to be reading Tolstoy for it to work. A spicy romantasy will do just fine.

So no, reading fantasy romance isn’t shirking responsibility. It’s changing your altitude so you can see your life from a different perspective. It’s running emotional drills in impossible scenarios so you can improvise better in the possible ones. And it’s doing it in a way that feels good. Which matters. Because if your only mode is “grind,” you’re not a hero, you’re a cautionary tale.

Escapism isn’t weakness. It’s a feature. And for a founder, operator, or anyone trying to build something in the real world, self-expanding escapism might be the difference between burning out and breaking through.

The Spice Is the Point: How Romantasy Teaches Relationship Skills You Won't Learn in Business School

Let's address the elephant in the room, or should I say, the dragon in the bedroom. Yes, many romantasy books are explicit. Yes, there are detailed intimate scenes that would make your grandmother clutch her pearls. And yes, this is precisely one of the reasons the genre gets dismissed as "trashy" or "frivolous." But here's what the critics miss: those steamy scenes aren't just titillation. They're relationship education.

Modern romantasy is quietly revolutionary in how it depicts consent, communication, and sexual agency. In Helen Hoang's The Kiss Quotient, Stella hires sex worker Michael to teach her about intimacy. When they first get together, Stella can only handle cuddling, and Michael doesn't push. He respects her boundaries completely, provides emotional support, and only progresses when she's ready. The entire relationship is built on enthusiastic consent and clear communication about desires and limits.

This isn't an outlier. Contemporary romantasy consistently models healthy relationship dynamics that mainstream culture often fumbles. Characters negotiate boundaries, discuss birth control, check in during intimate moments, and communicate their needs directly. A 2009 study of romance readers found that 75.5% reported their reading had positively impacted their sex lives, making them more likely to engage in sexual activity and try new things, but with better communication and boundary-setting.

Compare this to how most people actually learn about relationships and intimacy: through a combination of porn (which notoriously models terrible communication), pop culture (which romanticizes dysfunction), and trial and error (which can be devastating when you get it wrong). Romance novels, especially modern romantasy, fill a crucial educational gap by showing what healthy intimate relationships actually look like.

The explicit content serves a specific function: it normalizes conversations about desire, pleasure, and boundaries that many people struggle to have in real life. Research on sexual consent communication shows that many individuals know they should communicate about consent but struggle with how to do it in ways that feel natural and sexy. Romance novels demonstrate exactly this: characters who negotiate desires, establish boundaries, and communicate throughout intimate encounters in ways that enhance rather than diminish the experience.

Fighting for the right to fun, joy, and pleasure.

These books are teaching interpersonal skills that business schools don't cover: how to advocate for your needs, how to read nonverbal cues, how to navigate power dynamics with grace and intention, and how to have difficult conversations with empathy and honesty. If you want leaders who can build inclusive cultures, communicate with emotional intelligence, and create psychologically safe workplaces, maybe start with people who've learned relationship dynamics from books that take consent and communication seriously.

Studies show that romance readers demonstrate higher interpersonal sensitivity: they're better at recognizing facial expressions and emotions than readers of other genres. A 2021 Nature study found that contemporary romance readers described the genre as more "emancipated, feminist, and progressive" than critics assumed, with explicit content serving primarily to model healthy relationship dynamics rather than simple sexual arousal.

Even the business world is catching on. Harvard Business Review explicitly calls for leaders to develop better emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills. Relationship communication research consistently shows that the ability to navigate intimate conversations, set boundaries, and read emotional cues directly correlates with leadership effectiveness and team performance.

So when someone side-eyes your romantasy collection because it's "spicy," remind them: you're not just reading smut. You're developing interpersonal fluency, relationship intelligence, and communication skills that translate directly to professional settings. You're learning how to have honest conversations about needs and boundaries, how to create safe spaces for vulnerability, and how to navigate complex emotional dynamics with skill and empathy.

The explicit content isn't a bug, it's a feature. It's relationship education that happens to be wrapped in dragons and magic, delivered in a way that feels engaging rather than clinical. And in a world where most people are terrible at communicating about difficult topics, that's not just entertainment, it's essential professional development.

In Praise of Trashy Joy (Or, Why Fun is a Strategic Asset)

Let’s talk about the word “trashy.” Few genres get hit with it harder than romance, and within that, romantasy. It’s meant to be a put-down. A reminder that your book, be it A Court of Silver Flames or Kate Daniels, isn’t “serious literature.” That it’s a “guilty pleasure,” emphasis on guilty.

But here’s the thing: I like trashy. I like fun. And I’m done pretending either needs an apology.

I’m so very tired of The Human Condition.

We live in a culture that’s hellbent on intellectualising everything we do for pleasure. You can’t just cook. You have to meal prep for peak performance. You can’t just paint. You have to monetize your Etsy shop. And god forbid you read something without a productivity payoff. If you can’t slip it into a TED Talk anecdote about leadership, was it even worth it?

Romantasy blows that whole mindset up. It’s excessive. It’s indulgent. It’s melodrama and magic and people falling into bed after fighting side by side against ancient evil. It’s a genre that wears its tropes like a ball gown, proud, sparkly, unapologetic. And that’s exactly what makes it powerful.

When I’m deep into Black Dagger Brotherhood (vampire warrior clans, improbable names, torrid oaths) I’m not thinking about quarterly revenue targets. When I’m tearing through the Immortals After Dark, I’m not parsing P&L sheets in the background. I’m somewhere else entirely. And that’s the point. “Fun” is not a dirty word. Pleasure, joy, immersion, these are valid ends in themselves.

Fun is strategic. In a culture obsessed with efficiency, choosing to do something purely because it delights you is a small act of rebellion. It’s a refusal to treat every waking hour as a productivity input. And paradoxically, it often makes you better at the so-called serious stuff. The downtime your brain gets from trashy joy isn’t wasted, it’s consolidation time. It’s when insights sneak in sideways. It’s when burnout gets interrupted.

The “trashy” label also says more about bias than quality. Romantasy is a genre dominated by women: female authors, female protagonists, female readership. And historically, anything women enjoy en masse gets dismissed as frivolous. Men can binge entire Warhammer 40K novels without being told to “read something serious,” but heaven forbid you devour Interview with the Vampire for the fifteenth time. A spaceship battle is “genre,” but a fae courtship is “fluff.”

These so-called trashy books are often just as technically skilled, narratively tight, and emotionally complex as the “respectable” stuff. They’re just prioritising different pleasures. Romantasy leans into emotional stakes, relationship arcs, and character growth. It takes the inner lives of women and queer characters, and outsiders, seriously, even if it wraps them in magic and banter. That’s not lesser. It’s just a different vector of value.

And even when a book is pure popcorn? That’s fine. You don’t need to intellectualise every page you turn. The refusal to commodify your joy is reason enough. It’s why the “guilty” in guilty pleasure is such a scam. It implies you owe someone a justification for being happy.

So, yes, I will read Kate Daniels bicker with Curran through six near-apocalypses and consider it time well spent. I will follow a vampire love triangle into absurdity and not regret a single plot twist. Because the function of fun is not to be efficient, it’s to be fun. And in the bigger picture, a mind that knows how to play is a mind that knows how to invent.

The sooner we stop apologising for the joy in our reading lives, the sooner we get to reclaim it as the asset it is. Trashy joy isn’t the enemy of serious ambition, it’s one of its secret weapons.

The Future Is Built by People Who Imagine Dragons

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably noticed a pattern. Every section of this argument comes back to the same point: romantasy isn’t just some frothy indulgence. It’s brain architecture work. It’s entrepreneurial cross-training. It’s mood regulation. It’s an act of cultural refusal. And yes, it’s fun.

Let’s rewind. Neuroscience first: reading immersive fantasy lights up the default mode network, the same neural system you use for creative leaps, scenario planning, and social cognition. You’re not just consuming a story. You’re running simulations in your head: “What if magic returned?” “What if an immortal fell in love with a mortal?” “What if love and loyalty were the only things standing between a city and destruction?” That’s counterfactual thinking in action, the same skillset founders use to envision products, markets, and futures that don’t exist yet.

Empathy second: fantasy readers activate the mirror neuron system more strongly than nonfiction purists. In a market-driven reality, being able to intuit how others think and feel is the foundation of good product design, strong leadership, and persuasive storytelling. Every time you walk alongside Mercy Thompson as she navigates loyalty, betrayal, and impossible moral choices, you’re rehearsing that skill.

Cognitive flexibility third: research ties adaptability to better innovation outcomes, faster recovery from setbacks, and lower perceived barriers to creativity. You train it by working through structured impossibilities, exactly what every romantasy doorstopper is built on. Each book forces your brain to hold two realities at once: the impossible premise and the logical consequences. That mental elasticity is rocket fuel for anyone trying to do non-obvious work.

Healthy escapism fourth: Frode Stenseng’s research nails it. Romantasy sits in the “self-expanding” camp of escapism. It doesn’t numb you; it renews you. It’s an immersive, voluntary change of mental scenery that leaves you sharper, calmer, and more imaginative than when you went in. The University of Sussex’s stress-reduction study? Six minutes of reading can cut stress by 68%. Six minutes. That’s less time than it takes to make bad coffee in a startup kitchen.

And finally, joy. We’ve over-optimized our lives to the point where even hobbies need ROI. In that climate, choosing something purely because it delights you is a quiet rebellion. The so-called “trashy” label says more about ingrained bias than actual merit, and rejecting that stigma forces you to think better. A brain that knows how to play without guilt is a brain that can connect dots no one else sees.

And this isn’t anti-intellectual. I’m not saying “throw out your Baldwin” or “skip the Booker longlist.” Serious books matter, and you should read them. But the fantasy/romance combo might be uniquely powerful brain fuel. It blends the strategic complexity of speculative fiction with the emotional intensity of romance, forcing your mind to juggle systems thinking and deep interpersonal intuition at the same time. That’s not a downgrade from “serious” reading, it’s a different upgrade path entirely.

So the next time someone raises an eyebrow at your romantasy habit, remember: you’re not just killing time, you’re building cognitive infrastructure. You’re shaping the mental muscles that let you see around corners, connect unlikely ideas, and imagine realities worth chasing. You’re feeding the part of your brain that can think beyond quarterly reports and status quo constraints.

Romantasy isn’t the opposite of ambition; it’s one of ambition’s raw materials. It’s the blueprint for thinking in layers, dreaming at scale, and holding impossible beauty in your mind until it becomes possible. The future will not be built by people who only know “what is.” It will be built by the ones who’ve spent years living in the “what if.”

And if your “what if” happens to include a sarcastic dragon and a forbidden romance? Even better.