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.

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 methods of worldbuilding:

Sometimes people talk about fantasy as allowing readers to see or realize things about our real world that they would not otherwise have seen (that is, they argue that fantasy can more effectively help us see reality than realistic fiction or even nonfiction can). Has this happened to you? Is there something you think about differently now because you were initially inspired to by a fantasy story?

I guess my answer is… not really. At least, not anything I could specifically point to.

I’ve definitely had realisations re-enforced by fantasy, for instance (and I’ve written about this before) the whole thing in Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea where Ged learns that he has to turn and face his shadow in order to be free of it. It makes a stunning metaphor for anxiety, honestly, and probably other mental health stuff. Once one comes face to face with what one fears, and looks at it closely, there’s often less to fear than one imagined — and while I don’t think anxiety is my superpower or anything like that (I hate that kind of faux-positivity about my mental health issues), the fact that I have this knowledge does help my everyday life significantly!

Also, despite the fact that it’s blatant Christian allegory, C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle ends with a man who worshipped Tash being accepted into Aslan’s Country, because though he worshipped Tash, he did good all the same. Again, the series is blatant Christian allegory so I don’t actually think Lewis would be on the Unitarian Universalist train with me, but I suspect all the same that that’s a part of what made me interested in Unitarian Universalism: the suggestion that all those who are good will go to the right place in the end, that perhaps there is no wrong god to worship as long as you live well. It’s a kind view of things, and that’s perhaps inevitably attractive to me.

(I don’t go in for discussing politics or religion much in detail on here, so it isn’t really the place to get into what exactly I believe now; I’ll just leave here the reminder that UUs can believe in more or less a Christian God, or the Muslim Allah, or anything else, or indeed be atheist, agnostic, humanist, etc. You can assume precisely nothing about what I believe in other than the Seven Principles, and I’d rather any comments don’t try to get any deeper than that.)

Otherwise, I can’t think of much… though perhaps when I see other people’s posts I’ll immediately realise there’s so much else I could’ve talked about.