on the alberta oil sands

If you want to understand the Alberta oil sands — and everyone should, at least a little, because they are among the strangest industrial artifacts in the Western hemisphere and the standard coverage of them is almost uniformly wrong — you have to start with the fact that what's in the ground is not oil. Oil, proper oil, the stuff Saudi Arabia and Texas and the North Sea have been pumping for a century and a quarter, comes out of the ground as a liquid. You drill a hole, pressure differentials do most of the work, and what comes up is roughly pourable. This is not what's in northeastern Alberta. What's in northeastern Alberta is bitumen, which is oil that has been sitting around for a hundred million years getting its light ends biodegraded out of it by bacteria, and what's left is a substance with the consistency, at room temperature, of cold molasses or peanut butter. You cannot pump it. You cannot drill it. If you cut a chunk of oil-sand out of the formation and put it on your desk it will sit there, looking like a dark sticky brick, being the least ambitious hydrocarbon in the history of hydrocarbons.

So the entire industry is, at a physical level, a workaround for the fact that the thing they're extracting is an embarrassment to the concept of petroleum.

There are two workarounds and they both cost a lot of energy. If the deposit is close to the surface — and only about a fifth of the reserves are — you can dig it. This means you strip off the boreal forest and the peat underneath it (the "overburden," in the terminology, which is one of those words like "collateral damage" or "surplus population" that you can tell was invented to not describe something) and you run the biggest trucks and shovels in the world, actually the biggest, 400-ton dump trucks that cost five million dollars each and tires that cost the price of a house, and you mine it like coal. The oil-sand goes into crushers and then into giant hot-water tumblers that separate the bitumen from the sand the way you'd separate wet paint from gravel, with a lot of help from caustic soda and even more help from steam. The water goes into tailings ponds, which are not ponds, they are lakes, they are visible from low earth orbit, and they are full of a mixture of fine clays and residual bitumen and a lot of other chemistry that is at best dubious and at worst a slow-motion environmental catastrophe nobody in Alberta can figure out how to clean up and which, by provincial law, the operators are supposed to eventually reclaim — a promise whose timeline keeps sliding to the right and whose financial reserves, if you actually cost them out, would bankrupt most of the companies that made them. That's the mining side.

The other eighty percent of the reserves are too deep to mine. For those you use SAGD, steam-assisted gravity drainage, which works like this: you drill two horizontal wells, one stacked a few meters above the other, you blast the upper one full of high-pressure steam until the bitumen down there gets hot enough to actually flow, and then you collect the flowable bitumen out of the lower well. You are, essentially, cooking the ground. To do this you need ungodly amounts of natural gas, because steam doesn't make itself, and the natural gas is piped in from elsewhere in the province, which is why the oil sands are sometimes described (accurately) as a process for converting natural gas, which is a reasonably clean fuel, into synthetic crude, which is not, at a thermodynamic efficiency that would make a nineteenth-century millwright wince.

The net energy math on this is — fine. It works. You put one unit of energy in, you get three or four out, that's the rough ratio, less than conventional oil's old ten-to-one but more than enough to make money at any oil price north of roughly fifty dollars a barrel, which the global oil price has been north of most of the time since about 2004. So it gets done. And once you've gotten the bitumen out of the ground — whether by digging or by cooking — you still can't ship it, because at pipeline temperature it's still too thick to flow, so you cut it with condensate (a light hydrocarbon imported specifically for this purpose, sometimes from the US Gulf, shipped north, used as a thinner) until it's a mix called dilbit, diluted bitumen, which is what actually goes down the pipe. About a third of every barrel of dilbit leaving Alberta is diluent. You are paying to ship the thinner.

This is, I want to stress, the normal operation of the industry. None of this is scandal. This is the regular Tuesday.

The scale of it is the part people don't absorb, because the numbers are all in units nobody has intuitions for. Canadian oil sands production is running around 3.5 million barrels a day as of 2025, which is more than every OPEC producer except Saudi Arabia and Iraq, which is almost half of all oil produced in Canada, which accounts for most of the difference between Canada being an oil-exporting country and Canada being a quiet resource backwater with a per-capita income that looks more like Ireland's. The industry is about thirty percent of Alberta's GDP. It is the entire reason Alberta's per-capita GDP is what it is. Until the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion came online in May 2024 — after twelve years of construction, at a cost of 34 billion Canadian dollars, after the federal government had to buy the project from Kinder Morgan because no private company could eat the political risk — basically all of it went to the United States, which meant Canadian producers had exactly one customer and priced accordingly, at whatever discount to WTI the American refiners felt like imposing. This was annoying to Canada in the way that having a single customer is always annoying to a supplier, and it's the thing the pipeline was supposed to fix, and fixing it is already looking like it wasn't as much of a fix as promised because production keeps growing faster than egress capacity can keep up.

Okay. That's the industrial situation. Here's the part that actually matters.

Fort McMurray is not a city in any sense that the word normally carries. It is a town of maybe 75,000 permanent residents, up near the 57th parallel, surrounded by boreal forest and muskeg, to which is attached — and the word "attached" is wrong, the word needs to be something more like "grafted" or "hosting" — a second population of roughly 35,000 workers who live in what are called camps. The camps are the actual operational engine of the industry. A camp is a cluster of prefab dormitory buildings attached to a cafeteria and a gym and maybe a movie room, plopped down in the bush near a mine or a SAGD plant, with capacity for anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand workers. Workers fly in from everywhere in Canada — Newfoundland, Cape Breton, New Brunswick, whatever backwater the post-industrial labor market has stranded them in — on two-week-on two-week-off rotations, work twelve-hour shifts, live in a room the size of a cell, and fly home to spend two weeks with their families before coming back. The term of art is "shadow population." The official census counts them separately.

And this arrangement is not incidental to how the industry works. It is the industry. You cannot run a facility the size of Syncrude's Mildred Lake mine with a labor force of people who live in the nearest city and commute to work. There is no nearest city. The nearest city is eight hundred kilometers away. You have to import the workforce, and because you have to import the workforce, you have to house them, and because you have to house them cheaply, you put them in camps, and because the camps are miserable, you pay the workers a lot of money, and because you pay the workers a lot of money, they put up with the camps, and the whole system is stable as long as the oil price is high enough to subsidize the discomfort premium. It is an entire industrial operation structured around the fact that nobody would voluntarily live where the bitumen is, and so the industry has to buy the labor's tolerance of not-living-there, over and over, shift after shift, for however many decades the deposit lasts.

Which brings me to Kate Beaton.

Beaton is from Mabou, Cape Breton, which is one of those Canadian places that the twentieth century was mostly unkind to. Cape Breton had coal, and Cape Breton had steel, and Cape Breton had fishing, and Cape Breton lost all three of these industries in the space of about forty years, and what it has now is diminished. The island's culture, which is Gaelic-inflected and absurdly musical and which has produced a shocking amount of art per capita, has as one of its load-bearing assumptions the idea that you will probably have to leave to make a living, and that this leaving will be sad but necessary, and that everyone you know will do it too, and that it's been going on since the Highland Clearances, and will go on after you. This is the Cape Breton structure of feeling. It predates the oil sands by about two hundred years. The oil sands are just the current destination.

So when Beaton graduated from Mount Allison in 2005 with an arts degree and a pile of student loans, she did what her cousins and the boys from her high school had already been doing for a decade, which was get on a plane to Alberta. She went to the camps. She worked tool cribs, she worked supply offices, she worked at Syncrude's Long Lake and at Shell's Albian Sands and at a couple of the smaller operators whose names I can't remember off the top of my head, and she kept a notebook, and eventually — many years later, after she'd become internet-famous for Hark! A Vagrant, which is a different story — she turned the notebook into a graphic memoir called Ducks, published in 2022 by Drawn & Quarterly, which won pretty much every prize available to graphic novels and landed on Obama's list that year, and which is, I think, the single best book anyone has written about what the oil sands actually are, which is a very specific kind of social machine.

The book is called Ducks because in 2008, while Beaton was there, 1,600 migratory ducks landed on a Syncrude tailings pond and died in it, which became briefly a global news story and got Syncrude fined three million dollars, which is roughly the kind of money Syncrude made every forty-five minutes that year. The ducks were the visible atrocity. The book is about the invisible one.

The invisible one is that the ratio of men to women in the camps was, depending on which camp and which shift, somewhere between 30-to-1 and 50-to-1. Beaton spent two years as one of the maybe two or three women at any given installation surrounded by several hundred men who were working twelve-hour shifts, living in single-occupancy dorms a hundred meters from hers, drinking heavily when off-shift because there was nothing else to do, doing cocaine at a rate that surprised even her, isolated from their wives and girlfriends and mothers and daughters, and — this is the part the book builds very patiently and very devastatingly — slowly losing the ability to behave like the people they used to be when they were still at home. The book is not a condemnation of the men. It is explicitly not that. The book's most painful move is that it keeps humanizing them, keeps showing how they're also trapped, also miserable, also being used up by the same machine, even as they do the things they do to her. Which, without getting into the specifics — read the book — include the full range of what several hundred isolated men will do to two women when the HR function is a phone number in Calgary that nobody is going to call.

And the thing Beaton sees, the thing she sets up with complete economy and then lets the rest of the book bear out, is that the machine is designed to produce exactly this. It's not a bug. The camp structure produces isolated men away from their social networks in exchange for money. Isolated men away from their social networks, given enough money and enough boredom, will do predictable things, and those predictable things are accepted by the operators as part of the cost of doing business, the way a mine accepts that a certain number of miners will get silicosis. It's a function of the design. Nobody up the chain at Suncor or Syncrude or Shell wants the women in the camps to be harassed. It's just that preventing the harassment would require reorganizing the entire labor-rotation structure of the industry, which would raise the cost per barrel, which would make the operation uncompetitive, and so the harassment is priced in as an externality. The women are told they have a bad attitude. The men are told to knock it off. The rotation continues. The oil flows.

What makes Ducks extraordinary, and what makes it a book about the oil sands rather than a book about harassment — though it is also that — is that Beaton also sees the men. She sees the welders from Cape Breton she grew up around, except here they're trapped in a way she recognizes because she's trapped in the same way, a way her dad would recognize from his own generation going to Boston or Toronto, a way her grandfather would recognize from the mines. The Maritime out-migration has been happening long enough that it has a folk repertoire, a whole tradition of songs about leaving, and the men in the camps are inside that tradition whether they know it or not. Some of them are actively dying inside it — there's a running count in the book, not emphasized, just there in the margin, of young men who die on the highway between Fort McMurray and Edmonton, or who kill themselves in their dorms, or who disappear. The mortality of the rotation is ambient. It's baked in. Nobody makes a particular fuss because making a particular fuss isn't what anyone there has the cultural equipment to do.

And the thing I keep coming back to, reading that book, is how precisely it maps onto earlier Canadian industrial extractions. Cape Breton exported its own men to its own mines in the 1890s and they died of black lung. Newfoundland exported its men to the Banks and they died drowning. The cod collapsed in 1992 and those men went to Fort Mac. There is a temporal rhyme here that Beaton doesn't belabor but that sits underneath the whole book: this is what Canadian industrial history is, a series of extractive operations that consume the bodies and social networks of men from places the previous extractive operation already hollowed out. The oil sands are just the current iteration. When the oil sands go — and they will go, either because the world stops buying the product or because the bitumen that's economically recoverable runs out or because a carbon regime finally prices the externalities — whatever comes next will be staffed by the grandsons of the men who died at Fort McKay, who were themselves the grandsons of the men who died at Glace Bay. Same as it ever was.

The industry knows all this, by the way. None of it is secret. The oil companies have sociologists on retainer. The turnover statistics are studied. The mental health crisis in the camps is a line item, it has a budget, there are contractors whose entire business is running crisis-response services for a workforce they know is coming apart. The 2016 wildfire — which evacuated 88,000 people from Fort McMurray in the largest wildfire evacuation in Canadian history, which burned down 2,400 homes, which briefly shut down most of the industry — revealed in passing that the regional municipality's shadow population was around 40,000 people at that moment, people who lived here but didn't live here, who were uncounted in most of the news coverage because they weren't from there, they were from somewhere else, and they all went back to their somewhere elses during the evacuation and some of them simply never came back. The 2018 post-fire census found the shadow population down fifteen percent. The oil didn't care. The oil kept flowing. The rotations restarted.

And the Indigenous piece, which I've been circling without saying directly, is that all of this is happening on land that belongs, by every reasonable reading of treaty and prior occupation, to the Athabasca Chipewyan and the Mikisew Cree and the Fort McKay First Nation and the Métis communities of the region, who have been variously co-opted, partnered-with, sued-into-submission, paid-off, or simply bulldozed over, depending on the decade and the specific negotiation. Some of the bands have significant ownership stakes in the operations now, which is a development the 1970s activist version of this story did not predict. Some are still in active litigation over water quality and cancer clusters downstream on the Athabasca River. Both things are true. The oil sands produce billionaires and elders dying of bile duct cancer and they produce them in the same watershed and if you want a tidy story about which is the real one you'll have to write it yourself because the ground doesn't offer one.

Beaton's book ends, more or less, with her going home to Cape Breton, having paid off her loans. She is permanently changed. She does not know if she is changed in a way she can live with. The book came out fourteen years after she left the camps and you can feel in it the time it took her to process what she'd seen, which tracks — it takes that long, usually, to figure out what a thing was, and sometimes you never figure it out, you just get old enough to stop being wrecked by it. She is one of the very few people who went through those camps and came out with the specific combination of linguistic ability and patience and moral seriousness to write about them. The others — the welders and the mechanics and the engineers and the heavy-equipment operators — mostly did not. They went home. They drank. They worked the next rotation. They raised kids who, statistically, also went to Alberta, because the Maritime economy did not improve. The book is as much about them as it is about her, and the fact that their version of the book doesn't exist, and won't, is part of what the book is finally about.

There is a thing you learn if you read enough industrial history, which is that the machine doesn't need you to understand it in order to keep running. Understanding the oil sands does not stop them. Beaton writing Ducks did not stop them. The 1,600 ducks in the tailings pond did not stop them. The 88,000-person wildfire evacuation did not stop them. The carbon math does not stop them. The Chipewyan cancer clusters have not stopped them. The only thing that will eventually stop them is the price, and the price is set in a market that does not weight any of the inputs I have just listed, and so the bitumen will keep coming out of the ground until it doesn't, and the men will keep flying in, and the women who work among them will keep being what they have to be to survive the rotation, and somewhere a Cape Breton teenager is right now considering her options and thinking about student loans.

I don't think I quite have the words to describe how breathtakingly disrespectful it is to take a genuine work of passionate and life-wrenching creativity like Ducks, dealing with these huge issues of abuse and violation on multiple different axes, and just stick it in the plagiarism machine because you couldn't be bothered to say anything about it yourself. Jesus Christ.

good night blog

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Equiping an armor tutorial

texas tech's quartback, brendan sorsby, was investigated for sports gambling. i know sports betting is all the rage right now, but athletes themselves are not allowed to do it. it is Rule Number 1 and it is the highest priority rule for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), who governs all athletic programs at about 1,100 colleges in the US.

the invesitagetion of sorsby revealed that, not only did he place more than 9,000 sports bets when he himself was a collegiate athlete, but 40 of those bets were AGAINST HIS OWN TEAM when he was playing at indiana university. immediately, this threatens the integrity of the sport, and especially because indiana is the hottest team right now as the defending national champion.

the NCAA, which is largely a sham organization these days (they've truly lost their grasp and college athletics are the wild west now) actually enforced their Number 1 Rule and told sorsby his career is over, that he would never play college football again (and, subsequently, that he would never get drafted into the NFL because his college career was cut short).

well, because the NCAA is a husk of its former self, sorsby and texad tech immediately took this to court. MANY athletes have learned these past few seasons that if you can find a judge who's a fan of your team, you can get any NCAA ruling overturned. that's exactly what texas tech did. they filed a suit in Lubbock, where the university is located and where every judge is an alum of texas tech. so sorsby was granted an injunction and will now only be suspended for the first 2 games od the 2026 season (which are alwayd against no-name teams that will be destroyed regardless of who's suspended).

every other school in the country immediately went on the defensive because this is a very clear integretiy issue. so nebraska and georgia (sic em dawgs) released statements saying that all currently-scheduled competitions witb Texas Tech in ANY sport will be canceled and there will be no future schedulings. at least 3 of the major conferences (SEC, Big 10, Big 12) , who account for almost all division 1 sports teams in the country, are also in discussions about cancelling comtests. Texas Tech is part of the Big 12, and there is serious talk of all other teams in the conference shutting texas tech out.

now would probably be time where i say that texas tech is one of the wealthiest programs in college football becaise there is a single billionaire alumnus pouring money into the program with hopes of essentially buying a championship. so texas techs integrity has always been questionable. anyway, the university president put oit a statement that he doesnt care that sorseby violated regulation and that texas tech will sue any school that refuses to play them because it jeopardizes their championship prospects if they're umable to play any games.

[Footsteps] Dot: “Sorry, miss.”

Kawase Hasui(川瀬巴水), Night Sea, 1930 (possibly a detail)

Fae Romantasy comes down to Sarah J. Maas. Maybe (probably) there was more of it going on before her, but she mainstreamed it and got to define the tropes. From that we get fae as sexy, powerful, sort of primal people referred to as males and females, who have soulmates, often look down on humans, use magic, and have an elaborate structure of monarchy and nobility. Sarah J Maas had a successful YA fantasy series that abruptly pivoted in book 3 to include fae, and then her next series was fae romantasy from the start, and also caused incredible discourse due to having explicit sex scenes in a book marketed as YA.

But where did she get this fae archetype from? My argument would be that prior to being romantasy characters, fae were urban fantasy characters. Jim Butcher gets mentioned here for possibly codifying the summer/winter court structure, and also just having a bunch of humanoid human-sized fae nobles in his Dresden Files books. But IMO the stronger connection would be Holly Black.

In 2018, post Sarah J Maas fae romantasy wave, Holly Black publishes a YA fae dark romance which has many many elements that seem recognizable to existing fae romantasy. A human girl raised in the fae realm, a fae prince who hates her even as he can't resist her, lots and lots of court politics and power dynamic swings. The difference here is that Holly Black has been writing these kinds of books since 2002 (which makes her earlier books old enough to have been influences on the beginnings of fae romantasy). She's maybe best known for her Spiderwick Chronicles series of children's books, which feature all kinds of creepy and gross fae creatures, which feels similar to older folklore. But at the same time she's also writing the Modern Tales of Faerie series, which are YA dark romances about humanish girls and the powerful (but vulnerable) fae boys they meet. Notable here is that the fae here are not monolithic in species: you've got humanish fae (iirc most main characters are in this category), sure, but also more classic creatures like trolls (I remember there being others but not the specifics).

Notable for these books is that they aren't secondary world fantasy: iirc the Modern Tales of Faerie books are set in New York. There's also a sensibility about them that I want to describe as punkish? The protagonists aren't relatable everywomen, or destined princesses: they're mostly homeless teenagers, squatting in subways and trying to survive on the edges between fae society and human society.

And so let's go one step further back. What influenced Holly Black? And here we have a definite answer, because she was co-editor of a Welcome to Bordertown, a 2011 remake/tribute to the Bordertown series, done as a collaboration between some of the original authors and younger authors, like Holly Black, who had grown up with them. The original Bordertown books were a 1980s series of anthologies, with each chapter a short story by a different author. They were set in Bordertown, a city founded on the edge of our modern world and a resurgent magical one, full of strange magic meeting modern technology, populated largely by outcasts and runaways. The summary I have pulled up describes Bordertown as "a place of half-lit neighborhoods of hidden magic, of flamboyant artists and pagan motorcycle gangs", which should give you an idea of the vibe.

This is very clearly the predecessor to Holly Black's Fae books. Only this is published in 1986, and so the magical world that Bordertown sits at the edge of is Elfland. And that's where I think the root is, taking folkloric elves, making them sexy feudal intrusions on the world, and then to avoid confusion with the better known elves of Tolkein, pivoting the name to fae. After all, older sources use the two interchangeably: if you look at variants of Tam Lin some of them have a Queen of Fairies, some an Elfin Queen.

I find it interesting that you can really see the difference in reader expectations in a book like Hunter's Moon - Melling can't rely on people already being familiar with 'standard' fairy romance tropes, so she's doing a lot more work to create and build up the surrounding mythology than you see in current publications (and basing it off a great deal of actual historical mythological and folkloric sources) - and the result is a much more grounded and compelling setting, to my eyes. Though I'd have to reread the book to verify this, my memory of Melling's series was that it owed a pretty clear debt to earlier low fantasy YA-adjacent series like Susan Collins's The Dark is Rising (about Arthuriana myths recurring in a modern urban setting; first book published in 1965), and that the author had probably also at least read some of Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series (a portal fantasy about a group of college students getting sent to a Tolkienesque, Arthuriana-inspired high fantasy world; first book published 1984). So I would link some of the earliest versions of this trope to the growing popularity of Arthuriana retellings in a low fantasy mode.

The explosion of fae romance within YA specifically is also fairly co-terminous with the explosion of YA itself, which took off around the 2000s in large part due to tailwinds from the Harry Potter (first book 1997) and Twilight (2005) booms. (I would probably trace romantasy as a direct descendent of YA more than of any other genre.) Note that Twilight was not just urban fantasy but specifically a YA paranormal romance, which was also becoming a huge category within the adult romance industry at around the same time. The early 2000s are when you get paranormal romance novel writers like Nalini Singh, Kelly Armstrong, Patricia Briggs (who could also be fairly called an urban fantasy writer with a large dose of romance), Laini Taylor, and Kresley Cole etc all taking off; most of the paranormal romances out there began with more traditional vampire & werewolf stuff, but a lot of them start getting very eclectic and 'anything goes' with their mythological references in much the same way Jim Butcher does. (Note that the first Harry Dresden book comes out in 2002, and the first Nightside book - a very similar noir urban fantasy - by Simon R Green in 2003; these authors are all influencing each other, yes, but also all responding to the same trends at more or less the same time.)

Before these authors, the first genuinely popular paranormal romance writers I know of are Tanya Huff's Victory Nelson series (1991), and Laurel K Hamilton with her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series (1993). Hamilton was in turn extremely influenced by, who else, Anne Rice & her Interview with the Vampire, from all the way back in 1976. Huff herself is also writing in the shadow of Rice, but I think even more than Hamilton owes a debt to the low fantasy tradition of 'fantasy noir,' ie fantasy in the style of noir mysteries like Raymond Chandler's or Hammett's - you see this influence in 70s authors like Roger Zelazny, who was writing from the intersection of high fantasy & 'sword & sorcery' Conan the Barbarian style low fantasy, which is linked, fascinatingly, to the rise of the 'fantasy hero as hardboiled PI' trope. I've heard this can be traced to works like Leiber's The Swords of Lankmar (1968) and Cook's Garrett PI series (1987), neither of which I've read - but this is how you get Huff's hardboiled PI heroine investigating & romancing various handsome supernatural creatures in the 90s, which in turn is how characters like Butcher's Harry Dresden arrive on the scene. Anyway, Hamilton's subsequent Merry Gentry series is one of the first adult fae romances out there, & it started publishing in 2000.

Wen Spencer's 2003 Tinker seems like another key step in the development of the fae romance trend, I agree! I would suggest that Tinker in turn seems very influenced by Mercedes Lackey's SERRATed Edge series (first book published 1992), about magical Tolkien-esque elves living in modern society & engaging in hobbies like car racing, wooing mortal women, etc. (Older fantasy romance authors like Mercedes Lackey are underrated as influences in the current romantasy explosion, imo.) Charles de Lint also kicks off his Newford series with its first book, Dreams Underfoot, in 1993, which I would argue is probably one of the major influences on Butcher & other urban fantasy writers in terms of the sort of classic urban fantasy setting, ie a bunch of magical / fantastical beings from diverse & contradictory myths jostling uncomfortably together in a modern Western city. (Neil Gaiman also copies de Lint fairly shamelessly in American Gods and Neverwhere.) As far as I'm aware, de Lint is the one of the earliest authors to invent this kind of location as a permanent basis for an ongoing series. Holly Black's first book, the fae romance Tithe (2002) owes quite a bit to de Lint, and I think probably also made it to publication in part due to Hamilton's making the fae romance trend relevant via her own Merry Gentry series.

I wasn't aware of Terri Windling's 1986 Borderland series before, so I'm glad I've stumbled across it because of this post! A glance at the authors who wrote for this anthology is pretty interesting - Charles de Lint is published in it, as is Ellen Kushner and, later on, Patricia McKillip and Steven Brust, all of whom are major fantasy writers of the late 20th c. McKillip is a writer best known to me as one of the group of authors who first started to popularize the 'fairy tale retelling' as a distinct form of fantasy in the 80s and 90s, along with people like Gail Carson Levine (Ella Enchanted, 1997), Robin McKinley (Beauty: A Retelling, 1978), Patricia Wrede (Dealing with Dragons, 1990), Juliet Marillier (Daughter of the Forest, 1999), and Tanith Lee (Red as Blood, 1983).

So I would make the inference from this connection that the earliest forms of paranormal / urban fantasy are developing in relation to the popularization of the 'gritty' or 'dark' fairy tale retelling that starts to take off in this era (along with the similar but lighter 'fairy tale satire' which is more in line with what Wrede is doing, for instance; think also Shrek), and that this is directly related to the newfound popularity of writing about faeries who are tall, dangerous, inhumanly beautiful, immoral or amoral, & thus appealing love interests - as opposed to the kind of classic, bowdlerized Victorian / Disney version of fairies as small friendly cutesy creatuers with wands & flowers etc. (Terry Pratchet is doing something similar in his 1992 novel Lords and Ladies, where much of the humor derives from the contrast between the characters' expecations of elves and the unpleasant reality they encounter.) The same cultural push to create 'realistic' adult versions of children's fairy tales seems to be behind some of the earliest books about faeries in urban fantasy settings.

(I think it's also helpful to keep in mind that the elf vs faerie distinction is more or less a modern invention - these aren't really discrete categories in most of the historical mythologies they're derived from, and of course the modern concept of the 'fantasy elf' is pretty much entirely due to Tolkien, who was himself working from essentially the same body of myths that people later went back to in order to reinvent cutesy Victorian faeries as sexy fae lords. As you note above, older anglophone literature often uses 'elf' synonymously with faerie! Obviously this is a bit of a simplication & the divergences between Germanic versus Celtic folklore etc are real - but that's more a matter of interest to actual folklorists. The takeaway is, when Mercedes Lackey or Wen Spencer write about urban fantasy elves, they're often pulling from a similar mélange of source folklore as other contemporary authors writing about the fae. It's all more or less the same trope, imo.)

Anyway, then Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series publishes its first book in 2007, and this is, I would say, where the tropes of fae romance that are most popular today really become codified - this is an explicitly romantic YA urban fantasy series about high school girls falling in love with various faerie kings and lords, and the plot beats I think will be pretty recognizable to anyone reading contemporary books in this genre today. Holly Black's later The Wicked Prince series is definitely, to some degree, in conversation with Marr (who of course was in turn writing in conversation with Black's earlier Tithe when she created Wicked Lovely).

All of which is to say that I think it's correct to point to urban fantasy as an influence in the development of the 'fae lord' as a classic romantasy love interest today, but it isn't quite fair to call urban fantasy the 'source' of tropes about the fae - because urban fantsy itself developed in tandem with paranormal romance, which was in turn strongly influenced by straightforward fantasy authors like Patricia McKillip and Susan Collins. I would argue that the real innovation that Sarah J Maas made in turn was to take what was already, by 2015 (when A Crown of Thorns and Roses was published), the extremely well-known paranormal romance trope of the 'fae lord' love interest, and move him out of the urban fantasy setting back into a high fantasy world.

It's the combination of classic high fantasy stakes and setting (every major character is a king or a lord or a general or a royal advisor! their actions have consequences for thousands upon thousands of innocent nameless subjects! everyone bows & curtsies a lot! the continued existence of the world is always somehow in need of saving yet another time! etc) with the narrative tropes of paranormal romance, in particular (every aspect of the plot revolves around the heroine and her romantic choices & desirability! every man she meets is doomed to love her! every problem can only be solved via the correct utilization of her unique magical abilities, ancestral inheritance, piercing insight, or innate personal virtue! which i say with amusement & affection, not scorn), that makes 'romantasy' a distinct genre, imo. Romantasy is the importation of the paranormal romance plot into a high fantasy world. And that's essentially what Maas invented with her fae romance series.

So in summary, I would argue there are two threads here: one is the paranormal romance, which I trace back to originating authors like Hamilton and Huff, and which is strongly influenced by Anne Rice's take on vampires on the one hand, and by the low fantasy 'noir' trends popularized by writers like Glenn Cook and Roger Zelazny (Simon R Green is an early 90s trendsetter for this kind of thing, as well) on the other. Thus all roads lead back to Anne Rice (obviously) and also to Raymond Chandler (less obviously but more or less inevitably for any American author - and the British are not immune! look at Pratchett's Night Watch). I would classify this thread as the stylization and codification of horror, grit, cynicism, urban grime, etc in a fantastical / supernatural context - things that used to be regarded as frightening, inappropriate, ugly, unspeakable, or otherwise transgressive, like murder and corrupt cops (see: Chandler) or scary monsters from folklore committing thinly-veiled metaphors for sexual assault (see: Rice).

This becomes the standard spooky, gritty, cynical, hardboiled vibe for a lot of early books in the paranormal line. The prevalent attitude is basically 'you thought werewolves were a silly children's story? jokes on you! this werewolf is about to eat your face &/or attempt to sexually assault you' (and of course, in the explicitly romantic books especially, this is all highly eroticized). As happens with all tropes, the original transgressive sources of these vibes are eventually lost until only the vibes remain, and we end up with things like the trope of the paranormal PI main character with no clear explanation for why except that 'it's paranormal, of course you need a PI hero' or 'it's paranormal, of course you need a vampire love interest.' Faeries thus become incorporated here as another instance of the seemingly harmless child's story that are, in the story's mythbusting 'reality,' highly dangerous, scary, & socially liminal figures, & thus capable of filling essentially the same narrative role as the vampire or werewolf lover.

The other thread is the urban fantasy setting itself, which is what revitalizes the modern concept of the faerie as a potential style of love interest in the first place, and this I would trace to late 90s - early 00s YA like Melling's faerie series, which draws from Arthuriana and Celtic mythology - and again, dating to 1993, is the earliest publication of explicitly romantic fae novels that I know of (as in the romance is a large chunk of the main narrative, and not just a subplot). (The separate but related notion of dropping your characters into a hodgepodge of conflicting myths and enjoying the chaos as a storytelling method I think is also coming into popularity at the same time via authors like K.A. Applegate in her very underrated 1999 Everworld series, a truly and delightfully insane YA portal fantasy involving, yes, dangerous faeries.) Melling is writing in turn at the same moment that Charles de Lint's urban fantasies are coming out, and both authors are influenced by the popularization of the 'fractured fairy tale' retelling taken up by many major female fantasy authors of the late 20th c. - all of which blend together in a lot of interesting weird ways in the 90s and then play a major role in shaping the YA boom of the 2000s. The role of Arthuriana retellings in the works of writers like Susan Collins and Guy Gavriel Kay I think is also important (both of whom have also, amusingly, admitted to being directly influenced by Sir James Frazer's iconic 1890 work of late Victorian anthropology, The Golden Bough, thus confirming my personal conspiracy theories re: all modern literature. But that's beyond the scope!)

The style of love interest that emerges from this thread is, at least originally, somewhat more in line with much older legends about faeries taking mortals as lovers - that is, these are highly aestheticized and romanticized narratives (as opposed to the 'grit' of early paranormal) that nonetheless derive most of their tension and suspense from the impossibility of any mortal truly being able to trust or rely on a faerie, who are depicted as inherently capricious, inhuman, unfeeling, and unreliable lovers. (Think of the faeries playing games with the mortal characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream - not quite actively malicious, but certainly high-handed and careless enough to feel that way to their victims.)

In the hands of 2000s and 2010s writers like Holly Black, Julie Kagawa, and Melissa Marr (all of whom I would read as some of the direct antecedents to Maas, especially Marr) this narrative merges with the tropes of the paranormal romance to create a kind of gritty fairy tale romance, with fae love interests who take on the narrative role traditionally played by vampires in, for example, Twilight - powerful and compelling supernatural figures who, because of their fundamental nature, pose a danger to the female heroine they are inevitably in love with. (Vampires inherently want to drink your blood! Werewolves inherently want to eat you! Faeries inherently want to fuck with you just for the sake of it! Which makes a human woman attempting to romance any of them inherently fraught & dangerous, & therefore a structurally interesting premise for a romance novel. And, of course, the metaphors for the difficulty of regular human heterosexual romance abound.)

The appeal of the faerie lover specifically over the vampire or werewolf is, I think, that the faerie still retains some of the wondrous, fanastical, romantic glamor by which we tend to define high fantasies and classic fairy tales more generally - they can be magical, capital r Romantic figures in a way quite distinct from the gritty, noir-coded, 'realistic' supernatural appeal of the vampire as depicted in paranormal romance. So the resurgence in popularity of fae lord love intersts today over the vampires or werewolves of the previous decades we might put down to a broader cultural turn away from a kind of emphasis on realism, cynicism, low fantasy 'punk' aesthetics etc, and towards a desire for more idealistic or romantic (or, in the cynical view, more sanitized) narrative figures - which is also, perhaps, echoed in the current parallel surge of the popularity of romantasy over the older paranormal romance.

I think there's also something worth unpacking in the transition from the popularity of socially liminal paranormal love interests like vampires, werewolves, etc - all of whom, in urban fantasy / paranormal settings, tend to explicitly exist in various underworlds, demimondes, on the margins of real or normal society, & so on - to today's version of the romantasy fae lord, who has been transformed from his original urban fantasy character (where, again, he essentially fulfills the same narrative function as the vampire - mysterious, dangerous, liminal, beyond the bounds of the real) into sort of the opposite of a socially marginalized role. Instead of living in the fantasy demimonde & concealing his true nature as a faerie from society etc, the romantasy fae lord (who in most romantasy I've seen - ie the Maas version - is functionally just a pop version of a Tolkien elf; there's very little of actual faerie mythology remaining in these depictions) is fully socially integrated into his world, & inhabits a role of overt social & political power - he's literally a feudal lord. So what's being eroticized & romanticized is no longer transgression or 'the outsider' in any sense, but rather a much more traditional (some might argue regressive) figure of inherited, established (& necessarily masculine) authority. It's a really interesting shift, anyway!

*post script: I'll also add that the various permutations of 'soulmates' and 'mated lovers' & the relentless tendency to call people 'males' & 'females' etc in romantasy I believe comes almost entirely from Maas, who in turn is getting it pretty exclusively from older high fantasy paranormal mashups like Sherrilyn Kenyon's Hunter Legends series (1999) and Wilson's Lord of the Fading Lands series (2007). (So for example the Wilson series is, to the best of my memory, about an immortal shapeshifting dragon king & his romance with his reincarnated true love / fated soulmate, a human woman; I do acknowledge that I read it a very long time ago & so may be wildly misstating the plot - the jacket summary calls him a 'Fey King,' which I simply don't remember at all, but seems even more suggestive!) Anyway, these are all popular tropes in this kind of fantasy romance, & as far I'm aware don't really have much to do with the incorporation of faeries as love interests specifically - it's just a sort of intersection of Maas's particular writing habits & the paranormal romance tradition that shaped them.