The fantasy sex toy market has been growing for years. But the question nobody in the industry has answered with data is whether the Romantasy boom – Fourth Wing, ACOTAR, Ice Planet Barbarians, and the wave of titles that followed – is actually translating into consumer demand for fantasy products. And if so, when?
Emily Conway, Creative Director of Dragon Dildo®, has spent the past four years tracking exactly that. Her conclusion is striking: the industry may be underestimating how much demand is still coming.
“The fantasy toy market did not need BookTok to exist,” Conway says. “Dragon dildo and monster dildo searches were already high-volume categories in 2022, before Fourth Wing was published. These desires were already there. What the Romantasy boom has done is broaden the audience – and that audience is still arriving.”
Dragon Dildo® has been tracking Google Trends data across four fantasy toy categories since 2022. The data shows dragon dildo and monster dildo searches both at elevated levels entering 2022, then showing clear upward acceleration from mid-2023 onwards – the period when Fourth Wing’s BookTok engagement began to build and ACOTAR’s sustained platform presence was drawing consistent new readers into the Romantasy genre.
Both categories reached near their highest recorded levels by Q3-Q4 2024. But Conway says the more significant data signal is not in what has already happened.
“When Onyx Storm was published in January 2025, it sold 2.7 million copies in its first week – the fastest-selling adult book in BookScan history,” she notes. “If the pattern in our data holds, the consumer demand that publication generates for fantasy toy products has not yet fully arrived. The pipeline is still loading.”
The tentacle surge
Of the four categories Dragon Dildo® tracks, tentacle dildo shows the most dramatic growth trajectory in the dataset.
“Tentacle entered 2022 as an established mid-size category and by late 2024 had reached its highest ever search interest level,” Conway explains. “That tracks closely with the expansion of creature romance content on BookTok from late 2022 onwards. Unlike dragon, which was already dominant, tentacle appears to have been genuinely accelerated by the cultural moment.”
The alien dildo category tells a similar story – flat for years, then rising consistently from 2024 in a pattern that Conway attributes to the Ice Planet Barbarians phenomenon, with what she describes as a “measurable lag” between a title going viral and the corresponding movement in fantasy toy search data.
“The lag is real and it is consistent,” she says. “These readers are not making impulse purchases. They encounter the fantasy through fiction, they sit with it, and eventually the curiosity finds somewhere to go. That journey takes time – but the arrival is real.”
A different type of customer
Conway is clear that the Romantasy audience represents something genuinely new for the fantasy toy category, not just an expansion of the existing customer base.
“These are readers who came through fiction, not through adult retail,” she says. “They are approaching this with curiosity rather than prior community experience. They respond to editorial content and honest information – not the promotional language that works elsewhere in adult retail.”
That distinction, Conway argues, is why much of the industry is not yet positioned to capture the demand that is coming.
“The brands that will benefit from this wave are the ones already speaking to this audience in language they recognize,” she says. “The language of fantasy, of character, of desire that starts with imagination. Most of the adult toy industry is not working to that brief yet.”
