The idea of the alpha wolf in animal behavior studies turned out to be a fantasy: it happens in an artificial environment, something deliberately walled off from the larger, wilder world wolves usually inhabit. People have created the space in which the alpha wolf appears (or appears to appear, but let’s not get ourselves more tangled than we have to). But like wild wolves, captive wolves still need to eat — and that food comes from the real world. The real world feeds the fantasy.

A book or trope or genre like romance is also an artificial environment, and like wolf sanctuaries or zoos it is an environment created by people. Though we call it a fantasy, we can’t simply declare it walled it off from real life: we have to feed the fantasy with real stuff. Sexism, gendered social roles, abuse dynamics, personal politics, religious beliefs, axes of oppression and resistance — these things and others have a way of sneaking in. You may disagree, but you must first explain why else none of Charles Dickens’ characters ever uses a telephone or sends an email. Our real world is inevitably tied up with our fiction.