If You Loved Fourth Wing, the Fantasy Toy Market Has Been Waiting for You – and the Data Proves It
New Google Trends research shows the Romantasy boom is still building demand for fantasy products. The biggest wave hasn’t arrived yet – and this one won’t collapse like Fifty Shades did
If you have spent the last two years reading Fourth Wing, ACOTAR, or Ice Planet Barbarians, you are probably already aware that your reading habits have changed what you want. What you might not know is that the search data has been tracking you – and it tells a more interesting story than a simple BookTok spike.
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. Her conclusion challenges the assumption that trends on BookTok translate quickly and briefly into consumer behaviour.
“The pipeline is longer than people think,” Conway says. “Readers don’t finish Fourth Wing on a Friday and buy a dragon dildo on Saturday. The desire builds over time. They sit with the fantasy, they come back to it – and then months later, the curiosity finds somewhere to go. That journey is slow, but it is real and it is consistent.”
The Categories Were Already There
The first thing the data makes clear is that the fantasy toy market did not need Romantasy to exist. Dragon dildo and monster dildo searches were already established, high-volume categories in January 2022 – before Fourth Wing was published and before BookTok Romantasy had reached mainstream scale.
“These desires existed before the books,” Conway explains. “What the Romantasy boom has done is broaden the audience dramatically – introducing a completely new kind of customer who arrives through fiction and imagination rather than through existing adult retail communities. That is a structural shift, not a trend.”
From mid-2023 onwards, both dragon and monster dildo search interest show 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 most important thing to understand about the Romantasy demand wave is what it is not. In 2012, Fifty Shades of Grey went viral and drove a documented surge in adult toy sales – widely reported at the time as unprecedented. The Google Trends data tells the full story: Fifty Shades peaked to 100 in search interest in early 2015 (driven by the film release) and collapsed to near zero within two years. By 2016 it was essentially flat. The Fifty Shades moment was intense and brief.
The Romantasy wave looks fundamentally different. Fourth Wing, ACOTAR, Ice Planet Barbarians, and the wave of titles that followed are showing sustained elevated interest across multiple years and multiple titles with no collapse visible in the data. 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 is open, more people are walking through every month, and there is no sign of it closing. Sustained demand is fundamentally more valuable for building a category than a spike.”
Source: Google Trends – Fifty Shades of Grey (blue) vs Fourth Wing (red) – Worldwide, Jan 2011 to Mar 2026. Fifty Shades peaked in 2015 and collapsed. Fourth Wing shows sustained demand.
The Onyx Storm Effect Is Still Incoming
The most significant near-term data signal is not in the fantasy toy charts – it is in the publishing numbers. 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 – the fastest-selling adult book in BookScan history. Based on the lag pattern visible in the data, the consumer demand that publication generates for fantasy toy products has not yet fully arrived.
“We are projecting that wave to build through 2025 and into 2026,” Conway says. “The pipeline is still loading. If you have been curious about fantasy toys and you loved Onyx Storm, you are part of a demand wave that the data says is still coming.”
Tentacle and Alien: The Emerging Categories
Of all the categories tracked, tentacle dildo shows the most dramatic growth trajectory – reaching its highest ever recorded search interest by late 2024, acceleration that tracks closely with the expansion of creature romance content on BookTok from late 2022 onwards. Alien dildo is showing similar early signals, rising consistently from 2024 in a pattern that Conway attributes directly to the Ice Planet Barbarians phenomenon – the Ruby Dixon series that introduced millions of readers to blue alien romance and helped establish that creature desire was far more mainstream than anyone had assumed.
“Alien dildo was flat for years,” Conway says. “Then Ice Planet Barbarians happened on BookTok and the data moved. There is now a measurable and growing audience for this category that simply did not exist in search terms before 2023.”
Dragon Dildo® Tentacle Dildo – the fastest-growing fantasy toy category in Europe.
What This Means If You Are Curious
The Romantasy reader arriving at fantasy toy curiosity is, according to the data, a different kind of customer from the traditional adult retail audience. They came through fiction. They are emotionally invested in a fantasy before they are physically curious about a product. They respond to editorial content, honest information, and brands that take the fantasy seriously – not promotional language that treats desire as straightforward.
“If you loved Fourth Wing and you are curious about what comes next, you are not alone and you are not unusual,” Conway says. “The data shows that millions of people are on the same journey. The only question is whether the brands in this space are ready to meet them – and most of them are not yet.”
Dragon Dildo®’s full Fantasy Sex Toy Index – including worldwide category tracking, the Romantasy crossover analysis, the Fifty Shades comparison, and complete methodology – is published at Dragon Dildo® UK.
Methodology: Google Trends web search interest data collected worldwide, January 2022 to March 2026. Categories tracked: dragon dildo, monster dildo, tentacle dildo, alien dildo. Romantasy publishing timeline cross-referenced against Trends data to identify acceleration periods and lag patterns. Fifty Shades of Grey search data collected worldwide, January 2011 to March 2026. All scores are relative interest on a 0-100 scale. Full dataset and screenshots available on request.
