Iris Scott, After the Snow Fell, Oil on canvas
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Iris Scott, After the Snow Fell, Oil on canvas
The Snake and Ferns, another card for Woodland Wardens! Woodland Wardens is an in-progress oracle deck inspired by flora and fauna.
Woodland Wardens FAQ
Woo, this is going to be one helluva deck! <3
Walter Crane
Untitled by ezook
The Flower Vendor (1882) - Victor-Emile Prouvé
people should just embrace jewel tones already if I see one more house entirely decorated in washed out neutral colours I’m gonna sue someone
hell is not a fiery demon pit its a never ending white and cream minimalist apartment, every time someone paints a room entirely white and adds a pale blue throw cushion for “a splash of colour” they are carrying out the work of the devil
Celebrate your chemistry with your friends. Members get $5 guest tickets to Final Fridays: Weird Science. Limited tickets are available. Reserve yours here.
“Amor Vincit Omnia (Love Conquers All),” c.1895, by Adolphe Louis Charles Crespin
This is how archaeologists hunt
you’ve gotta stat romanticizing your life. you gotta start believing that your morning commute is cute and fun, that every cup of coffee is the best you’ve ever had, that even the smallest and most mundane things are exciting and new. you have to, because that’s when you start truly living. that’s when you look forward to every day.
live your life like a ghibli movie where literally everything is charming and beautiful
Thomas Blackshear, Night and Day
The Sphinx, the Substance, and the Dreamer 14" x 16" Watercolor and Gouache
Prints:
https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/jmowry/the-sphinx-the-substance-and-the-dreamer/
“However bad life is, what’s important is to make something interesting out of it. And that has a lot to do with the physical world, with looking at stuff, snow and light and the smell of your screen door and whatever constitutes your phenomenal existence from moment to moment. How consoling—that this stuff goes on and that you can keep thinking about it and making that into something on the page.”
— Anne Carson explains an idea that she and Alice Munro have in common (attachment to the physical world and the details in life), from The Art of Poetry No. 88, Paris Review (via podencos)
I’ve mentioned “romantic fantasy” in a few recent posts, and some of the responses have made it apparent that a lot of folks have no idea what that actually means - they’re reading it as “romance novels in fantasy settings”, and while some romantic fantasy stories are that, there’s a bit more to it.
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 an aside, if some of this is sounding awful familiar, yes - My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic draws a lot of inspiration from romantic fantasy, particularly the early 90s strand. It’s not a straight example of the type - there are very few of those around today - but it’s not at all subtle about its roots.)
Oh, I read so much of this as a teen and young adult. It might have started a touch earlier than the 70′s with Anne MacCaffrey and Dragonriders of Pern? The most obvious example I can think of is Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books and over in the comic book medium, I think Wendy Pini’s Elfquest just squeezes in.
One thing about this genre, when I reread something from it that I loved 20 or 25 years ago, I go from extreme and affectionate nostalgia to quite literally blushing in embarrassment over some of those cringe-worthy bits you mentioned.
Yeah, Lackey’s Valdemar books are basically the platonic ideal of romantic fantasy for a lot of folks - though in spite of being arguably the most influential romantic fantasy author of her generation, Lackey herself was a relative latecomer to the genre.
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.
(For those who haven’t read them, McCaffrey’s Talent books take place in a gonzo far-future space opera setting, revolving around the personal dramas of a pseudo-noble caste of godlike telepaths who enjoy their privileges as a consequence of being the setting’s only economical source of faster-than-light communication and transport. Weird stuff.)
I read so much Mercedes Lacky and Anne McCaffrey as a kid. I’d love to hear about the decline of the genre - I’m guessing that modern feminism and the lgbt movement had a lot to do with it? That is - the growth out of a lot of the more cringey tropes morphing the genre into something distinctly different?
Yeah, there were a number of different factors involved. Losing the LGBT audience was certainly part of it - not because of the inept handling of the subject matter per se, but because a lot of LGBT readers were reading romantic fantasy simply because they couldn’t get that kind of representation anywhere else, and when more LGBT authors started getting published in the mid 1990s, they had better options.
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.
There were probably half-a-dozen other significant factors that contributed to romantic fantasy’s commercial decline, but those are the highlights.
I knew it was Rowling’s fault I couldn’t find “my” type of fantasy anymore! All of a sudden, everyone seemed to be trying to write the next Harry Potter. It was quite upsetting, as I had rather liked the fantasy genre the way it was before, back when it was generally agreed upon that magic ought to have actual rules :P I had no idea there was an actual name for this type of fantasy. I miss it dreadfully, though :( though, yes, certain scenes in the Mage Winds trilogy were pretty horrifying when I was ten…
Another element in the decline was related to the development of the internet, but only tangentially.
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.
There’s a reason women dominate fic.
A lot of the tropes of romantic fantasy also shifted sideways into paranormal romance. The romance element is stronger now, but basically the western ‘urban fantasy’ genre (as opposed to true magical realism, which has its roots in Latin America) contained a strong pulp strain in the 90s that hit many of the same id-points as romantic fantasy (I’m thinking of Tanya Huff, maybe as far as Charles de Lindt, but not quite so far or so masculine as Gaiman). Central female characters, high probably of magic sex, Magic that follows x number of rules, often Our Heroine has a crisis about not breaking the Rules and causing a Darkness, etc. The politics elements weren’t as marked.
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.
I suspect a lot of the current generation of queer paranormal romance writers, aside from being children of LJ fandom, are also children of the Mercedes Lackey years. If you have a magic bonding sex itch that needs scratching, look around for the right indie romance (Jordan L Hawk’s Hexworld books definitely scratch my tropey itch).
Ghibli Gardens - Sadako ‘s Garden in Arrietty (2010)
Director: Hiromasa Yonebayashi
Background Artist: Kazuo Oga
The garden is a mix between a Japanese traditional garden and an English/European garden. You can see some Japanese traditional features in it - the stone lanterns (toros), the little bridges and the tea house, but the garden isn’t perfectly ordered like most traditional Japanese gardens are. There is no definite line between the garden and the woods and the garden itself looks quite misterious and magical, like an old forest. Poppies are common wildflowers both in Japan as well as in most part of Europe and the water feature is another element that you can easily find both in Japanese and European gardens (especially in Italian and English gardens).The tea house is a key element in Japanese-style gardens, but here it has a more “European” look, resembling the tea house in Porco Rosso.
Here’s a hymn to welcome in the day, Heralding a summer’s early sway, And all the bulbs all coming in, to begin.
Fleet Foxes → White Winter Hymnal
I was following the pack, all swallowed in their coats With scarves of red tied ‘round their throats
by Scott Hotaling