In 2020, Rebecca Yarros was doing an interview about her Iron Flame series when she mentioned something that changed how I think about writing heroines. She said that Violet Sorrengail, who is small, fragile-boned, and enters a war college where people routinely die in training, wasn't written to be a warrior. She was written to be someone who refuses to quit. The combat skills came later, and they came unevenly, and that was the point.
Violet breaks bones. She gets knocked down in front of everyone. She fails publicly, repeatedly, in a world that punishes failure with death. And readers don't love her because she eventually becomes lethal. They love her because she was terrified the entire time and kept going anyway.
That distinction matters more than most writing advice about strong female leads will tell you. Because "strong" in romantasy doesn't mean what most people think it means.
Strong Female Leads in Romantasy Don't Need to Win Every Fight
There's a trap that's easy to fall into. You want your heroine to feel capable, so you make her good at everything. She picks up a sword and she's a natural. She walks into a room and everyone notices. She outsmarts every adversary on the first try.
The problem is that competence without cost is boring. It's boring in life and it's boring on the page. The reader has nothing to worry about, and worry is the engine of both plot and romance.
Look at Jude Duarte in Holly Black's The Cruel Prince. Jude is mortal in a world of faeries. She can't use glamour. She can't compete with their speed or their beauty or their cruelty. Every advantage she has, she built herself, through training that hurt and schemes that could have killed her. When she eventually outmaneuvers the fae court, it lands because you spent 300 pages watching her get bruised, humiliated, and underestimated.
If Jude had walked in with magic of her own, none of it works. Her limitations are the story.
Vulnerability as a Form of Courage in Romantasy Heroines
Here's where it gets tricky for writers. In fantasy, your heroine needs to be tough enough to survive the plot. In romance, she needs to be open enough to fall in love. Those two things feel like they contradict each other, and in a lot of early drafts, they do. You get a character who's all armor in the battle scenes and suddenly soft in the love scenes, and the reader can feel the writer switching modes.
Sarah J. Maas solved this problem with Feyre in A Court of Mist and Fury by making the romance itself the thing that required the most courage. Feyre had already survived Under the Mountain. She'd killed. She'd died and come back. She was, by any measure, strong enough. But opening herself up to Rhysand, letting herself trust someone after everything she'd been through, that was the thing that actually cost her something.
I'm not sure why this resonates as deeply as it does with readers, but I think it's because most people recognize this pattern from their own lives. Physical danger is scary in the moment. But the decision to let someone see you, really see you, when you've been hurt before, that kind of fear doesn't go away when the danger passes. It sits with you. It has weight.