{"id":24596,"date":"2014-02-27T06:30:02","date_gmt":"2014-02-26T17:30:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=24596"},"modified":"2014-02-27T09:33:17","modified_gmt":"2014-02-26T20:33:17","slug":"what-wrong-with-epic-fantasy-puzzled-but-also-curious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2014\/02\/27\/what-wrong-with-epic-fantasy-puzzled-but-also-curious\/","title":{"rendered":"“What’s ‘Wrong’ With Epic Fantasy?”: Puzzled, But Also Curious…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, SF Signal <\/a>ran another of their fabulous Mind Melds<\/a>, this one on the topic “What ‘Wrong’ With Epic Fantasy?”<\/a><\/p>\n

The range of contributing opinion is well worth a look as always—but I must admit I couldn’t help wondering why this question is asked so consistently in relation to epic fantasy (since I know the reason da Signal asked it is because it is<\/em> topical!)\u00a0 Yet my perception is that I rarely see posts that ponder: “What’s wrong with…”<\/em> Fantasy (generally), say, or Steampunk, or Dark Fantasy, or even Paranormal Urban Fantasy…<\/p>\n

Similarly, I rarely see crime fiction afficionadoes, again for example, worrying over “What’s wrong with…”<\/em> the police procedural, the psychological thriller, the courtroom drama, the noir novel…<\/p>\n

In both these cases, there seems to be a far greater acceptance that: Yup, it’s a genre\/subgenre and as a reader I either like its tropes and what it offers in general, or simply vote with my feet and read another subgenre or style of fiction altogether. Generally though, readers don’t seem to spend a lot of time reading and analyzing what the genre does<\/em> offer if it’s not to their taste.<\/p>\n

So I guess I’m puzzled, but also curious as to why epic attracts such an intensity of scrutiny. (I will not say “naval-gazing”…Oops, just did! \ud83d\ude09 )<\/p>\n

Is it because of its origins in epic literature (e.g. The Illiad<\/em>, The Morte D’Arthur<\/em>) that as readers we feel it should somehow offer “more” of “something”? Or is it simply that more people are passionately committed to this genre than any of the others mentioned and so it occasions more nit-pic—I mean<\/em>, debate! Alternatively, maybe it’s that the genre is so closely associated with Tolkien, who was an Oxford professor, that followers feel it should achieve a higher literary standard, or conversely, that there must somehow be something inherently pretentious about the genre, that means it must be constantly examined and re-examined?<\/p>\n

Questions, questions… My own view on the ‘wrongness’, or otherwise imho, was also canvassed on SF\u00a0 Signal, in a 2012 post titled “Making Epic Fantasy New: Do We Need To?”<\/a><\/p>\n

I am still of the same view—but also wonder if genres may not be a little like plants: if we’re forever pulling them up and examining the roots to see if they growing ‘properly’, then they’re probably not going to develop, let alone evolve, terribly fast, if at all!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recently, SF Signal ran another of their fabulous Mind Melds, this one on the topic “What ‘Wrong’ With Epic Fantasy?” The range of contributing opinion is well worth a look as always—but I must admit I couldn’t help wondering why this question is asked so consistently in relation to epic fantasy (since I know the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epicfantasy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24596"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24732,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24596\/revisions\/24732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}