eldritch internet entity

The Snake and Ferns, another card for Woodland Wardens! Woodland Wardens is an in-progress oracle deck inspired by flora and fauna. 

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The Sphinx, the Substance, and the Dreamer 14" x 16" Watercolor and Gouache

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In a nutshell, romantic fantasy is a particular genre of Western fantasy literature that got started in the 1970s, reaching its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Its popularity sharply declined shortly thereafter, for reasons that are far too complicated to go into here; suffice it to say that you won’t find many pure examples of the type published after 1998 or so.

It’s tough to pin down exactly what romantic fantasy is in a few words, but you’ll definitely know it when you see it - there’s a very particular complex of tropes that defines it. I’ll try to hit the highlights below; not every romantic fantasy story will exhibit all of these traits, but most will exhibit most of them.

Romantic fantasy settings are typically “grown up” versions of settings that traditionally appeal to young girls: telepathic horses, wise queens, enchanted forests, all that stuff. Note that by “grown up”, I don’t mean “dark” or deconstructionist; romantic fantasy is usually on board with the optimistic tone of its source material, and any grime and uncertainty is the result of being a place that adult human beings actually live in. Protagonists are natives of the setting, rather than visitors from Earth (as is customary in similar stories targeted at younger audiences), though exceptions do exist.

In terms of stories and themes, romance is certainly a big presence, but an even stronger one is politics. Where traditional fantasy is deeply concerned with the geography of its settings, romantic fantasy focuses on the political landscape. Overwrought battle scenes are replaced by long and complicated discussions of political alliances and manoeuverings, brought down to the personal level through the use of heavily stylised supporting characters who function as avatars of the factions and philosophies they represent. Many romantic fantasy stories employ frequent “head-hopping” to give the reader insight into these philosophies, often to the point of narrating brief scenes from the villain’s perspective.

The “good” societies of romantic fantasy settings tend to be egalitarian or matriarchal. Patriarchal attitudes are exhibited only by evil men - or very occasionally by sympathetic male characters who are too young and sheltered to know better (and are about to learn!) - and often serve as cultural markers of the obligatory Evil Empire Over Yonder. Romantic fantasy’s heydey very slightly predates third-wave feminism, so expect to see a lot of the second wave’s unexamined gender essentialism in play; in particular, expect any evil or antagonistic woman to be framed as a traitor to her gender.

Usually these societies are explicitly gay-friendly. There’s often a special made-up word - always printed in italics - for same-gender relationships. If homophobia exists, it’s a trait that only evil people possess, and - like patriarchy - may function as a cultural marker of the Evil Empire. (Note, however, that most romantic fantasy authors were straight women, so the handling of this element tends to be… uneven at best.)

Magical abilities are very common. This may involve a unique talent for each individual, or a set of defined “spheres” of magic that practically everyone is aligned with. An adolescent lacking magical abilities is usually a metaphor for being a late bloomer; an adult lacking magical abilities is usually a metaphor for being physically disabled. (And yes, that last one can get very cringey at times, in all the ways you’d expect - it was the 1980s, after all.)

In keeping with their narrative focus, romantic fantasy stories almost always have an explicitly political character with a strongly progressive bent. However, most romantic fantasy settings share mainstream fantasy’s inexplicable boner for monarchies, so there’s often a fair bit of cognitive dissonance in play - many romantic fantasy settings go through elaborate gymnastics to explain why our hereditary nobility is okay even though everybody else’s is icky and bad. This explanation may literally boil down to “a wizard did it” (i.e., some magical force exists to prevent the good guys’ nobles from abusing their power).

I think that about covers it, though I’m sure I’ve overlooked something - anybody who knows the subject better than I do should feel free to yell at me about it.

As for McCaffrey, I’d hesitate to classify her Dragonriders of Pern series as romantic fantasy. I’ll grant that later entries in the series certainly develop in that direction, but especially early on it hews a lot closer to traditional heroic fantasy. Her Talent universe, however, is a dead-perfect example of the type, in spite of having an extremely variant setting.

The Internet itself was another big culprit. Commercial Internet service went mainstream circa 1995, and suddenly, a lot of content that had formerly been the province of a hard core of dedicated hobbyists was accessible to everyone - most critically, online fanfic. Many folks, particularly among younger readers, found that online fanfic scratched the same itch as romantic fantasy; I recall a great deal of mid-to-late-1990s fanfic that basically applied the tropes and forms of romantic fantasy to video game settings, for example. (Chrono Trigger was an oddly popular choice - anyone old enough to remember that?)

This was compounded by mishandling by both authors and publishers. Though the new communication channels afforded by the Internet could have been a great boon to them, most romantic fantasy authors (correctly) perceived online fanfic as competing for their audience, and responded with extreme hostility. We’ve talked a bit about Mercedes Lackey; her stance on online fanfic was legendarily draconian, and often backed with litigation, to the extent that her nascent Internet fandom was basically smothered in its crib. By the time she mellowed out on the medium, it was too late. A lot of other romantic fantasy authors and publishers followed the same trajectory.

Lastly, the final nail in romantic fantasy’s coffin was basically J K Rowling’s fault, believe it or not. During the period in which romantic fantasy literature enjoyed its peak popularity, YA fantasy literature was in a low ebb; there wasn’t much of it coming out, and most of it wasn’t very good, so a lot of kids were reading romantic fantasy (in spite of its subject matter often being wildly inappropriate; I’ve mentioned in the past how many books about teenage girls having sex with dragons I ended up reading!). That youth demographic ended up being the last bastion of romantic fantasy’s mainstream readership - then the YA fantasy renaissance of the late 1990s stole that audience wholesale.

In the late 80s and early 90s, anime and manga began to be licensed more and more in the Americas and Europe. At first, most offerings were male-focused and had a narrow audience, but with the shift from bbs and rec.alt. to free personal webpages (thank you Netscape!), information about series from Japan spread much faster. At this point, the fansub community boomed (no really, boomed to the point where there were distributors in countries all over the world, not just in college clubs), due to the ability to publish their catalogs and contact information more easily. This brought a variety of shoujo and josei series to the attention of a wider audience, specifically of women, and suddenly female geeks who formerly had been following Romantic Fantasy found out that entire swaths of television and comics were already dedicated to them in Japan. (You can thank Sailor Moon for the explosion of shoujo that decade. No, really. I’m serious.)

1995 was a big turning point. In a single year, while Sailor Moon was finishing up season S and moving on to Super S, the following powerhouse anime were released: Fushigi Yuugi, Magic Knight Rayearth, Wedding Peach, Gundam Wing, Evangelion, and Slayers. Of these, the first 3 were shoujo; Fushighi Yuugi was an ancient China-themed portal anime that pretty much nailed the Romantic Fantasy genre right down the middle, Magic Knight Rayearth was a mecha portal magical girl series, and Wedding Peach was a real world magical girl series. As for the others, Gundam Wing was intended as a shounen SF war story to reboot the Gundam franchise, but it ended up with basically a yaoi fanbase dominated by women (fandom-wise, it was the Supernatural of its day, but with more lead characters and less incest). Evangelion was a groundbreaking grimdark apocalyptic disaster as notorious as it still is famous, and its audience was pretty well split in every way imaginable, including on whether they hated it or not. The only unmitigated success of the year not to draw most of its fanbase from among women was Slayers.

The impact of that year and the following (1996 was the year of Escaflowne and Hana Yori Dango) was immediately obvious if you went to SF&F cons in the US. The cosplay shifted, the panels shifted, there was a lot of sudden interest from women in what had been presented as a mostly male genre often erroneously equated with porn. Many women I had formerly discussed Bradley, Lackey, McCaffrey, and Rawn with were now discussing CLAMP and Takeuchi-sensei and the best places to get reasonably-priced import manga.

So yeah: internet fanfiction, Rowling/Duane/the YA crowd in general, books by queer authors who didn’t encourage us to think of ways to die heroically, anime & manga, and of course Supernatural Romance. Romantic Fantasy was a genre so tenacious that it took that many blows for it to mostly fall (and I would argue that it still informs fantasy television today). Or, conversely, you can think of the need that women have to see fantastical stories that reflect us as so powerful that for over 2 decades it drove an incredibly diverse group of women to all converge on a genre that didn’t entirely satisfy most of them but on which they were totally willing to spend money, because it was a genre women were actually producing for ourselves, and nobody else was listening.

Cue the late 90s/early 2000s Harry Potter driven YA boom. That drew a lot of readership, and definitely kept the political elements. What’s the alternative?

Twilight. And then the Twilight-driven paranormal boom. Long story, but I once read a completely mad series about werecats because the cover mentioned Chaucer. It had all the bonkers orgy energy of Anne McCaffrey, combined with the ‘reluctant ruler’ trope only in the body of a young 20-something woman who’d rather read Chaucer than unite her family and make more baby werecats. Also they were hideously racist (the Enemy were pillaging werewolves from Mexico I kid you not), so I don’t actually recommend them. But if you’re looking for weird Tropey magic sex and powerful women, paranormal is where it’s at.

Ghibli Gardens -  Sadako ‘s Garden in Arrietty (2010)

Director: Hiromasa Yonebayashi

Background Artist: Kazuo Oga

Fleet Foxes → White Winter Hymnal