Fantasy with Friends: Over the Years

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…