Fantasy with Friends – hosted by Pages Unbound – poses questions each Monday about fantasy, either as a genre as a whole or individual works.
As I only started doing the fantastic Fantasy With Friends recently, I thought I’d go back and take a look at some of the older questions that I missed, starting with this one from 5th January.
Fantasy With Friends
Is Fantasy Taken Seriously?
I think there’s a huge split within the genre itself. I think fantasy is taken more seriously now, but only a specific type of fantasy – usually penned by cis het white men. Partly because of the adaptations we’ve seen over the last decade or so, starting with Game of Thrones. Wheel of Time and Witcher may have fallen off, but their first seasons hit with a bang, and I do think it had a positive impact on the perspective of epic fantasy.
Despite this, I do think outside the genre there’s still a slight misrepresentation of the ‘typical’ fantasy fan, and this image is very much stuck in the past, with people struggling to get over the idea of a ‘typical’ fantasy fan being likely overweight, bearded, and a fan of Dungeons & Dragons. Or a skinny non-athletic pale socially awkward lad. Don’t get me wrong, these fans do exist, but they exist alongside literally almost any other demographic you can think of! Like horror and sci-fi, women have always been involved in fantasy. And now we’re seeing more diversity in the folks who are creating fantasy, we’re getting a wider range both in terms of representation and fans.
And with that comes judgement from within the genre itself. We’ve see it over and over, whether it’s for a specific franchise or a genre as a whole, people love to gatekeep. When you are used to seeing yourself as the ‘default’, any shift away from that, no matter how small, feels like an attack, like something is being taken away from you, and unfortunately, there are too many out there who don’t care to actually examine their own bias and work beyond it. So when fantasy bursts into the mainstream and attracts fans who maybe never felt represented before, it comes with the previously represented fans looking for any reason to criticise it, even if the ‘expanded’ fanbase have always been there and always dealt with a lack of representation and put up with it.
So, while ‘mainstream’, epic fantasy may not be as looked down on as it was previously, there is definitely snobbery when it comes to other subgenres. Fantasy Romance has always been present, Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance are close cousins, but the ‘rebrand’ of Romantasy and the rise in popularity has drawn a lot of snobbery. Arguably, this is in hand with the lack of seriousness in general that Romance tends to face as a female majority genre, it’s just popular to hate on it right now, despite the fact Romance has always been one of the most successful genres in all aspects of publishing.
Personally, I think discounting whole genres because they’re popular or because you don’t think they’re your cup of tea (without actually giving them a go) is narrow minded. Books are incredible and there is a huge variety in each genre. Maybe you tried the popular Romantasy and disliked them, but you wouldn’t judge all vampire books on Twilight, and there are some excellent Fantasy Romances out there that are hugely different from books that have become the ‘face’ of the TikTok favourite subgenre.
My response is the same as most things in life – people are allowed to enjoy things. People are also allowed to dislike things, and liking or disliking something says nothing about morality or quality, we simply have different tastes, because quite frankly the world would be incredibly boring if we didn’t.
