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When you think<\/span> of SeaWorld<\/a>, you most likely think of orcas, school trips to the aquarium, or eating chicken fingers while contemplating the ethics of marine mammal captivity. But this Halloween<\/a>, the theme park franchise wants to make SeaWorld synonymous with something else entirely: BookTok<\/a> smut<\/a>.<\/p>\n On September 11, SeaWorld Orlando officially opened its annual Howl-O-Scream event<\/a>, an after-hours Halloween-themed immersive experience featuring various \u201cscare zones\u201d in the park. Scattered between the more expected spooky fare, such as a haunted \u201cWoodrot Hollow\u201d forest and an I Know What You Did Last Summer<\/em>\u2013themed haunted house is Just One More Chapter, a BookTok-inspired zone featuring the hunky tortured bad boys of romantasy lore.<\/p>\n In videos<\/a> posted by Orlando-based influencers who got an early look at the park, young men with masks, floppy hair, and painted-on abs gallivant around wearing black denim, loitering next to brick walls, beckoning to park attendees, and gifting them with roses. And on Instagram, influencers posed around a central set piece, an oversized book open to a chapter called \u201cThe Cathedral,\u201d emblazoned with the slogan \u201cGood Girls Go for the Bad Boys.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of the TikToks from the scare zone went viral, garnering mixed reactions. \u201cBooktok dark ‘romantasy’ cancer is RUINING heterosexuality,\u201d wrote<\/a> one X user, \u201cevery little tasteful drop of eros has to be squeezed out of everything so it can be refined into pure concentrated fucking CRINGE.\u201d The fact that the event took place at SeaWorld, an amusement park franchise that is perhaps most closely associated with a harrowing documentary<\/a> about an orca, also lent to the absurdity.<\/p>\n But I did speak to one content creator present at the scare zone who had an entirely different reaction. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say it was scary,\u201d said the creator, who declined to provide their name because they did not want to \u201cjeopardize their relationship with SeaWorld.\u201d \u201cBut it did leave me with a good feeling\u2014I guess you could say a sexy feeling, in a way.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Jessie Kinsey, the art director at SeaWorld Orlando, that was precisely the point. She came up with the idea for the event last year, after seeing romantasy bestsellers like Lights Out<\/em> and Haunting Adeline<\/em> go viral on TikTok. She knew that a dark romance-themed scare zone was not necessarily \u201csomething that you would expect from a traditional horror event,\u201d but she had a feeling it would resonate with the BookTok girlies. \u201cI remember texting my production manager, saying, \u2018Don’t judge me, but I have an idea,\u2019\u201d she tells WIRED.<\/p>\n A fiction writer in her spare time (she actually wrote the text for the oversized book set piece at SeaWorld), Kinsey came up with the narrative for the zone: It would be set in a crumbling Gothic cathedral, built in a town run by a wealthy family called the Blackthorns. \u201cThese roses grew up around it, and created this beauty out of destruction,\u201d Kinsey puts it. \u201cWhich I thought was kind of fitting for the themes of these books.\u201d<\/p>\n Romantasy, or romance and fantasy, fuses mythology and supernatural figures such as faeries or demons with explicit sex scenes, exemplified by books like Rebecca Yarros\u2019 Onyx Storm<\/em> and Sarah J. Maas\u2019 A Court of Thorns and Roses<\/em> series. The genre has exploded in popularity thanks to BookTok, with Bloomberg reporting<\/a> that romantasy pulled in an estimated $610 million in 2024 alone. The male antiheroes of the genre, such as the \u201cshadow-daddy\u201d Rhysand in Maas\u2019 A Court of Mist and Fury<\/em> and dragon rider Xaden Riorson from Yarros\u2019 Fourth Wing,<\/em> are tortured, dangerous, (at best) morally complex, and egregiously hot.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n