the shifting waters of sub-genres

May 20, 2014 23:19

I love fantasy... pretty much ALL kinds of fantasy (hence the Fantasy Friday posts) ... but of late I have been puzzled a bit by what seem to be shifts in the descriptions and boundaries of different sub-genres within fantasy ( Read more... )

epic fantasy, fantasy, fantasy genres, tolkien, fantasy sub-genres

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ophelialaughs May 21 2014, 16:01:26 UTC
I don't understand all the sub-genres, and frankly it annoys me. I tend to think of Tolkien-esque fantasy as Sword and Sorcery. Then there is Urban/Contemporary, and possibly magical realism. I don't consider vampires et al as fantasy at all. It's either horror or romance, depending on the dominant mood of the work.

I think Miss Snark once upon a time had a post differentiating between genre and category. That made my head hurt even worse! The more genres or categories we have, the less the words have any useful meanings, in my opinion.

Romance, Mystery, Horror, Mainstream, F/SF, Western, and Literary. That was enough for me.

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