mask131:
miranda-basset:
booksandchainmail:
st-just:
I have exceptionally limited interest in reading anything branded as ‘Romantasy’ I’ve heard of but I am honestly kind of curious what’s happening with the apparent hammering of 'fae’ into a coherent and instantly understood sort of fantasy-creature-archtype (ala vampire, werewolf, etc) over there. Like I feel like the chain of transmission would be interesting to read about in a media history sense?
I am very talking out of my ass here, just going with books I’ve read rather than any actual research, but my theory:
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.
A coda: I think Wen Spencer’s 2003 book Tinker is illuminating here. It starts an unusual but modern young woman who meets a powerful, domineering elfin lord when he is uniquely vulnerable, then struggles between her attraction to him and the political and magical dangers he brings. The love interest here is very in line with romantasy fae males! But it’s 2003, so he’s still an elf, and the book is largely set in Pittsburgh.
I love when people start doing this sort of thing for genre literature! I feel compelled to jump in here and add that while, yes, Holly Block is probably the most influential writer of fae romance novels of the past few decades, she really cannot be considered the initiator of this subgenre - fae romance was already an increasingly common and popular style of romance in the late 90s and early 00s. The earliest one that comes to mind for me is O.R. Melling’s Chronicles of Fae series, starting with Hunter’s Moon, which was published in 1993; this was back when romantic YA marketed explicitly to teen girls / young women was just beginning to become a popular category. I also have to note that Butcher is not the codifer of the Summer & Winter Court motif in modern fantasies about faeries - this is an older preexisting trope that shows up in Melling as well (the second book of her series is The Summer King, for example, published in 1999), and can probably be traced back to New Age & contemporary pagan / Wiccan ideas about older Celtic mythologies (which itself likely has at least some loose basis in historical ancient druidic religions etc, but I fear I don’t have the necessary scholarly background to assess precisely how much.)
Keep reading
I think that role-playing games might have to be thrown in there too. I mean, when it comes to the “punk, gritty urban fantasy” and the “modern fae” genre, and the choice of monsters for the “paranormal romance” traditional cast, I can’t help but feel that the World of Darkness games had some impact at one point or another (Vampire the Masquerade, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Mage the Ascension, Changeling the Dreaming…
(The same way, while one can be dismissive of Gaiman’s works due to being merely a “chain” in the process plus the recent scandal, it is inaccurate to say his writings did not play a big part in giving a new wave of fae-perception in the 90s and 2000s. His Sandman and Stardust did play an influence on later works, The Dresden Files for example as I vaguely recall Butcher credited Gaiman as an inspiration. Gaiman also pushed forward for the reconsideration of older works like Lud-in-the-Mist and kept name-dropping Briggs’ Dictionary of Fairies as his main source. The Dictionary was well-known by the fae authors before Gaiman, it was part of the 60s-70s Folklore Revival that the older authors talked about above were part of, but there is definitively a new generation of people that got introduced to it by Gaiman)
I can’t add anything more to the topic because I am lacking knowledge in this, but I do recall that the generation of authors spoken about, that were part of the “dark fairytale” retellings, and of what I would call the Folklore Revival following the Tolkien-mania, and also crucial to the foundations of the urban fantasy genre… I remember reading an article about them and about the specific group they formed, as in an actual literary team, hence their frequent collaborations and the overlap in their writings. But I do not recall it exactly - it might have rather been a retrospective group formed by literary critics rather than the authors themselves?
I will check the book I read it all about and return with more info
What a gorgeous tracking of genre evolution.
I especially loved the tribute to Terri Windling as an editor, bringing back Sylvia Townsend Warner to the people, as Judy Lyn del Rey republished The Princess Bride (which was previously a flop) to great success. Editors can reshape fantastical landscapes!
Diana Wynne Jones, Labyrinth and L.J. Smith (who did vampires but also an erlking) also spring to mind as shaping the current moment. It’s also interesting to think of how those shapes recur. I hadn’t thought of the outsider vampire lord becoming a fae lord in possession of feudal power, but that’s almost what happened to genre in a microcosm in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles where Lestat goes from presumed and presumptuous peasant infiltration, to in the second book the secret lord rock star hero, to in later books prince of all the vampires. George RR Martin has the Targaryen dragonlords, inspired by Moorcock’s Elric the last emperor and his vampiric sword. There’s so much about lineage here, which makes sense with the genre that comes from lais and legends.
I love to see Holly Black given her influential due! It’s also interesting that Holly Black’s Cruel Prince remains in a liminal space. The action takes place largely in the lands of faerie, but the heroine comes from and at one point is banished to the mortal world. It can be seen as a portal fantasy in the same way as Narnia or the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The sense of liminality does not disappear, and the provocative is not lost by being inscribed with mainstream power.
It makes me consider the other/outsider as a queer analogy and to wonder about what is lost there. Is to de-liminalise a space to de-queer it? I don’t know the answer - it’s a vexed question, as I also don’t want to demonise women’s power fantasies: that is too often done.
It makes me consider what I write: as an Irishwoman, my attitude to the fey can be summed up by Terry Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies and Peadar O Guilin’s the Call: I cannot write them as sexy. But I am part of that tradition and with Long Live Evil I was considering how to make the modern development of epic fantasy, inflected by Malory and TH White and Martin and Moorcock and Robert E. Howard but also passing through the gates of YA and urban fantasy, punk again. It makes me wonder how Ilona Andrews, a veteran of urban fantasy, did it with their portal fantasy. It makes me think of the energy of isekai and light novels and lit rpgs and what is to come - what may be flattened or electrically charged. Or both.
And it reminded me we sing on the shoulders of giants: that creating art is a chain of influence, which is something I love to think on.
A young writer I know told me C.S. Pacat’s queer provocative fantasy of manners work was her favourite and most influential on her own writing. I asked had she read Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, because I knew it was a big influence for Cat. She hadn’t, but then she did, and she loved it and it made her think about her own work differently.
I had dinner with Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman in Paris in June, and we talked about chains of influence. I was in the room where art happens. And it’s always a gift, but this reminded me what a privilege it is, and an inspiration.
In 2007 I read Emma Bull’s 1986 novel War for the Oaks, in which a lady’s in a rock band with a faerie aristocrat who uses glamour on her, protected from the faerie queen by a lower-ranking faerie who reminds our heroine extremely of the musician Prince. I loved it: it made me understand the American attitude to faeries. That moment in time is as far away from now as the publication of War for the Oaks was from then.
Holly Black recommended the book to me.
The thing that was very clear when I was reading all the above genre fiction in the 90s-00s, was that the real distinction between urban fantasy and paranormal romance was that urban fantasy was mostly written by fantasy authors who were now also emphasizing romantic plots and some sort of clash or combination of the fantastical and contemporary city-life, while the paranormal romances were exactly that, romance authors adding more fantastical elements to what were still on a structural level romance novels first, and I think romantasy is a romance genre before it’s a fantasy genre, even if it obviously takes influence from both.
Anonymous
