If you thought from the title that this is going to be a Wikipedia-like post on the different sub-genres of fantasy, then unfortunately, that’s not what I’m going to write about today. Instead, I’m going to write about a potentially unpopular opinion I have about the sub-genres of fantasy. Which is that I’m not quite keen on it, as a reader. Actually, I’m not keen on subgenres. Full stop. But I’m not especially not keen on subgenres of fantasy, being that it’s my main staple.
Now let me qualify this opinion a little bit, by saying that I fully see why sub-genres are useful on Amazon and such. I see that. It just doesn’t have much application for me, who predominantly reads borrowed books, which doesn’t go by sub-genres anyway.
So, the reasons why I’m not keen on subgenres of fantasy:
- I came from the old days where I can still tell people I read fantasy and stop at that. And I just miss the old days.
- Despite all my broadening horizon and curiousity/craft reads, let’s face it, I tend to have fairly fixated taste in reading anyway. My subgenres have remained epic fantasy, followed by sword&sorcery/high magic fantasy, with the occasional dabble in YA fantasy, historical fantasy and fantasy mystery (which, as far as I know, is not even an actual sub-genre. It’s something I made up to group a particular type of books that span over the two genres).
- This is a lesser reason but most of the time I have my own classification of books into sub-genres that might or might not coincide with the actual official definition. To be very honest, except for epic fantasy which I have a very clear concept in my head, what I group into the other sub-genres are basically my system of classification, not what the publishers or author put their book under on Amazon and other places. And sue me, but that’s how I remember a particular book by and refer to it if ever I talked about it with friends and other people I know about that book.
Ta-ta for now and I hope I don’t get too much hate-mail in comments 😛
Moonlake's Fiction Space 