Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about fantasy as a genre over the years:
How do you think the fantasy genre has changed over the years? Is there a particular time period of fantasy writing that you particularly enjoy?
I have a pretty good knowledge of some genres/eras within certain genres because I studied them, so I’m a bit scared of this question: it’s not really my area at all! I haven’t brought a lot of my academic practice to the fantasy genre at all, and it feels like my personal knowledge is coloured as much by just growing up and the natural change/growth in my interests as by real trends and changes.
Obviously there’s stuff like the rise of cosy fantasy and romantasy (though there were low-stakes fantasies before the trend, and plenty of romance in fantasy before it became a named subgenre), and the grimdark fantasy that came some years before it — but I think that it’s probably much like fashion, and some things go around and come back in later.
I can’t think of really good rigorous examples, but I also think there are things my generation loved at children that are surfacing in adult fiction. I haven’t thought this through on a serious level, but… is dark academia in fantasy perhaps a response (at least for some of us) to the magical school we may’ve loved as kids, and what’s become of that for many of us? And even if we didn’t love it, was it popular enough to weave its way though our psyches and shape what we want to write and read about anyway? I think it’s likely.
Anyway, to the point about what we enjoy, I really enjoy a lot of cosy fantasy and romantasy: there’s plenty of it that feels a bit cookie-cutter, or not polished, or naive, but that’s the nature of any trend. Standalone books are also a joy — I don’t know if I’m right that there’s been more of that and fewer automatic trilogies, though. But I’m also a fan of older fantasies like Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry, Tad William’s Memory, Sorrow and Thorn… they really had a lot to sink your teeth into. Long story short, perhaps I’m easy to please.
Overall, probably an unsatisfying answer, I’m afraid; I don’t think about things this way, it seems! At least when it comes to fantasy, unless it’s related to Tolkien or Arthuriana, I think I’ve kept my academic life out of it — helped by the fact that I finished my MA over a decade ago now, and switched away from the arts to science for a while.
