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[roycohn]

inspired by a rant i was going on elsewhere bc someone tweeted something very stupid and uninformed about hamlet and it got my back up as someone who took two single-text-focus english literature courses in college and they were on wuthering heights and hamlet, i now put it to all of you on here:

what's "your" shakespeare play?

hamlet

macbeth

the tempest

merchant of venice

midsummer night's dream

twelfth night

richard iii

othello

julius caesar

king lear

another not listed (specify in tags) (i really just put my own top 10 here nbd)

i have no particular feelings about any shakespeare play/results tag

Voting ended onAug 11

[penny-anna]

anyway been writing omegaverse this week for the first time in uhh *checks notes* 11 years and have to say something i find interesting about it is that it's this like. frankly very normal fetish thing that's just breached containtment to a bizarre degree?

[penny-anna]

on 2 separate occasions i've had conversations with people where they've mentioned something they don't Get about omegaverse and I've been like 'well it's like that bcos it's a fetish thing' and they've been like 'it's a what??'

it gets treated as this like stock fandom AU and i'll see people like 'i don't understand why anyone wants to read this' and i'm like yes that's bcos it's pretty intense* fetish content & you don't have the right assortment of fetishes for it? there's a bunch of other similar Stock Settings that just haven't breached containment.

*intense as in like, Density of fetish content involved rather than intensity of fetish if that makes sense?

[beesechurger1909]

im alright with fetish ideas 'breaching containment' because then its less stigmatized but like its still fetish content and its a little perplexing how people could read omegaverse stuff and not realize its fetish content?

[penny-anna]

SO i think i've observed 2 separate but related things going on:

firstly the aforementioned demographic of people who have somehow genuinely failed to clock that it's a kink thing

but also a second demographic of people who seem to have taken its like. prominence in fandom spaces as a sign that they're somehow 'expected' to like it? i've not really seen this attitude with any other kink.

ppl will talk about it the way they might talk about say high school/college AUs or coffee shop AUs which are very common and i guess are sometimes presented as things that everyone finds fluffy & relatable? when in reality it's more like idk. piss kink. it'd be pretty weird to read a piss kink fic and go 'ewww why does the author expect me to find piss sexy??' well they don't. they expect people who already think piss is sexy to read the fic.

[penny-anna]

In the name of historical accuracy here is the actual origin point on omegaverse:

Obviously there was a process of development leading up to it but this kink meme prompt led to whats generally accepted as the OG. Ultimately the brain child of this anonymous poster. Have they ever identified themselves??

[penny-anna]

An important thing to remember here is that while I appreciate why some people find world building heavy omegaverse puzzling or irritating, the fact that someone is writing primarily or exclusively SFW social commentary w world building omegaverse does NOT mean it's not a kink thing for them. Maybe world building is their kink. You don't know.

[penny-anna]

this post is going around again so have an additional Thought:

the omegaverse belongs to an genre i have mentally dubbed 'speculative kink'. there are various other types of speculative kink; a well known example in fanfiction spaces is the dom/sub AU, a kind of precursor to omegaverse where the premise is 'what if everyone was biologically a dom or a sub'.

however: there various other shared speculative kink settings out there. unfortunately I cannot get into this too much without discussing some uhhh Devils Sacraments I have attended so you will have to trust me. but I'm aware of several other demographics out there doing speculative kink worldbuilding.

a major difference between omegaverse and the other speculative kink settings I'm aware of is that omegaverse takes itself much more seriously. omegaverse works are often aiming to be understood as serious commentary on gender roles with legitimate worldbuilding. in contrast other speculative kink is typically very open about the fact that the worldbuilding is complete nonsense that exists in service of getting to the kink as soon as possible.

this is something that I think really adds to the Confusion around it! to be clear I do not think it's a bad thing and the fact is, yes you can use kink to explore social themes. but there is sometimes an apparent contradiction between the implied aims of an omegaverse work (to comment on gender roles) and the basics of the setting (Turbo Gender Roles).

[o-craven-canto]

Alternate timeline in which all Greek and Latin roots are swapped:

catastrophe -> contraverse cephalopod -> capitoped chlorophyll -> viridofolia democracy -> populimpery homicide -> anthropoctony homosexual -> equigamic kilometer -> millimensure interregnum -> mesarchy magnanimous -> megapsychic manuscript -> chirography motorcycle -> ergatorote microscope -> parvovisor oxygen -> acidofex polyamory -> multierasty television -> remotoscope universe -> monostrophe

[weedle-testaburger]

for anyone who's wondering what the fuck is going on in british politics rn

[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?

[booksandchainmail]

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.

[miranda-basset]

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.)

I find it interesting that you can really see the difference in reader expectations in a book like Hunter's Moon - Melling can't rely on people already being familiar with 'standard' fairy romance tropes, so she's doing a lot more work to create and build up the surrounding mythology than you see in current publications (and basing it off a great deal of actual historical mythological and folkloric sources) - and the result is a much more grounded and compelling setting, to my eyes. Though I'd have to reread the book to verify this, my memory of Melling's series was that it owed a pretty clear debt to earlier low fantasy YA-adjacent series like Susan Collins's The Dark is Rising (about Arthuriana myths recurring in a modern urban setting; first book published in 1965), and that the author had probably also at least read some of Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry series (a portal fantasy about a group of college students getting sent to a Tolkienesque, Arthuriana-inspired high fantasy world; first book published 1984). So I would link some of the earliest versions of this trope to the growing popularity of Arthuriana retellings in a low fantasy mode.

The explosion of fae romance within YA specifically is also fairly co-terminous with the explosion of YA itself, which took off around the 2000s in large part due to tailwinds from the Harry Potter (first book 1997) and Twilight (2005) booms. (I would probably trace romantasy as a direct descendent of YA more than of any other genre.) Note that Twilight was not just urban fantasy but specifically a YA paranormal romance, which was also becoming a huge category within the adult romance industry at around the same time. The early 2000s are when you get paranormal romance novel writers like Nalini Singh, Kelly Armstrong, Patricia Briggs (who could also be fairly called an urban fantasy writer with a large dose of romance), Laini Taylor, and Kresley Cole etc all taking off; most of the paranormal romances out there began with more traditional vampire & werewolf stuff, but a lot of them start getting very eclectic and 'anything goes' with their mythological references in much the same way Jim Butcher does. (Note that the first Harry Dresden book comes out in 2002, and the first Nightside book - a very similar noir urban fantasy - by Simon R Green in 2003; these authors are all influencing each other, yes, but also all responding to the same trends at more or less the same time.)

Before these authors, the first genuinely popular paranormal romance writers I know of are Tanya Huff's Victory Nelson series (1991), and Laurel K Hamilton with her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series (1993). Hamilton was in turn extremely influenced by, who else, Anne Rice & her Interview with the Vampire, from all the way back in 1976. Huff herself is also writing in the shadow of Rice, but I think even more than Hamilton owes a debt to the low fantasy tradition of 'fantasy noir,' ie fantasy in the style of noir mysteries like Raymond Chandler's or Hammett's - you see this influence in 70s authors like Roger Zelazny, who was writing from the intersection of high fantasy & 'sword & sorcery' Conan the Barbarian style low fantasy, which is linked, fascinatingly, to the rise of the 'fantasy hero as hardboiled PI' trope. I've heard this can be traced to works like Leiber's The Swords of Lankmar (1968) and Cook's Garrett PI series (1987), neither of which I've read - but this is how you get Huff's hardboiled PI heroine investigating & romancing various handsome supernatural creatures in the 90s, which in turn is how characters like Butcher's Harry Dresden arrive on the scene. Anyway, Hamilton's subsequent Merry Gentry series is one of the first adult fae romances out there, & it started publishing in 2000.

Wen Spencer's 2003 Tinker seems like another key step in the development of the fae romance trend, I agree! I would suggest that Tinker in turn seems very influenced by Mercedes Lackey's SERRATed Edge series (first book published 1992), about magical Tolkien-esque elves living in modern society & engaging in hobbies like car racing, wooing mortal women, etc. (Older fantasy romance authors like Mercedes Lackey are underrated as influences in the current romantasy explosion, imo.) Charles de Lint also kicks off his Newford series with its first book, Dreams Underfoot, in 1993, which I would argue is probably one of the major influences on Butcher & other urban fantasy writers in terms of the sort of classic urban fantasy setting, ie a bunch of magical / fantastical beings from diverse & contradictory myths jostling uncomfortably together in a modern Western city. (Neil Gaiman also copies de Lint fairly shamelessly in American Gods and Neverwhere.) As far as I'm aware, de Lint is the one of the earliest authors to invent this kind of location as a permanent basis for an ongoing series. Holly Black's first book, the fae romance Tithe (2002) owes quite a bit to de Lint, and I think probably also made it to publication in part due to Hamilton's making the fae romance trend relevant via her own Merry Gentry series.

I wasn't aware of Terri Windling's 1986 Borderland series before, so I'm glad I've stumbled across it because of this post! A glance at the authors who wrote for this anthology is pretty interesting - Charles de Lint is published in it, as is Ellen Kushner and, later on, Patricia McKillip and Steven Brust, all of whom are major fantasy writers of the late 20th c. McKillip is a writer best known to me as one of the group of authors who first started to popularize the 'fairy tale retelling' as a distinct form of fantasy in the 80s and 90s, along with people like Gail Carson Levine (Ella Enchanted, 1997), Robin McKinley (Beauty: A Retelling, 1978), Patricia Wrede (Dealing with Dragons, 1990), Juliet Marillier (Daughter of the Forest, 1999), and Tanith Lee (Red as Blood, 1983).

So I would make the inference from this connection that the earliest forms of paranormal / urban fantasy are developing in relation to the popularization of the 'gritty' or 'dark' fairy tale retelling that starts to take off in this era (along with the similar but lighter 'fairy tale satire' which is more in line with what Wrede is doing, for instance; think also Shrek), and that this is directly related to the newfound popularity of writing about faeries who are tall, dangerous, inhumanly beautiful, immoral or amoral, & thus appealing love interests - as opposed to the kind of classic, bowdlerized Victorian / Disney version of fairies as small friendly cutesy creatuers with wands & flowers etc. (Terry Pratchet is doing something similar in his 1992 novel Lords and Ladies, where much of the humor derives from the contrast between the characters' expecations of elves and the unpleasant reality they encounter.) The same cultural push to create 'realistic' adult versions of children's fairy tales seems to be behind some of the earliest books about faeries in urban fantasy settings.

(I think it's also helpful to keep in mind that the elf vs faerie distinction is more or less a modern invention - these aren't really discrete categories in most of the historical mythologies they're derived from, and of course the modern concept of the 'fantasy elf' is pretty much entirely due to Tolkien, who was himself working from essentially the same body of myths that people later went back to in order to reinvent cutesy Victorian faeries as sexy fae lords. As you note above, older anglophone literature often uses 'elf' synonymously with faerie! Obviously this is a bit of a simplication & the divergences between Germanic versus Celtic folklore etc are real - but that's more a matter of interest to actual folklorists. The takeaway is, when Mercedes Lackey or Wen Spencer write about urban fantasy elves, they're often pulling from a similar mélange of source folklore as other contemporary authors writing about the fae. It's all more or less the same trope, imo.)

Anyway, then Melissa Marr's Wicked Lovely series publishes its first book in 2007, and this is, I would say, where the tropes of fae romance that are most popular today really become codified - this is an explicitly romantic YA urban fantasy series about high school girls falling in love with various faerie kings and lords, and the plot beats I think will be pretty recognizable to anyone reading contemporary books in this genre today. Holly Black's later The Wicked Prince series is definitely, to some degree, in conversation with Marr (who of course was in turn writing in conversation with Black's earlier Tithe when she created Wicked Lovely).

All of which is to say that I think it's correct to point to urban fantasy as an influence in the development of the 'fae lord' as a classic romantasy love interest today, but it isn't quite fair to call urban fantasy the 'source' of tropes about the fae - because urban fantsy itself developed in tandem with paranormal romance, which was in turn strongly influenced by straightforward fantasy authors like Patricia McKillip and Susan Collins. I would argue that the real innovation that Sarah J Maas made in turn was to take what was already, by 2015 (when A Crown of Thorns and Roses was published), the extremely well-known paranormal romance trope of the 'fae lord' love interest, and move him out of the urban fantasy setting back into a high fantasy world.

It's the combination of classic high fantasy stakes and setting (every major character is a king or a lord or a general or a royal advisor! their actions have consequences for thousands upon thousands of innocent nameless subjects! everyone bows & curtsies a lot! the continued existence of the world is always somehow in need of saving yet another time! etc) with the narrative tropes of paranormal romance, in particular (every aspect of the plot revolves around the heroine and her romantic choices & desirability! every man she meets is doomed to love her! every problem can only be solved via the correct utilization of her unique magical abilities, ancestral inheritance, piercing insight, or innate personal virtue! which i say with amusement & affection, not scorn), that makes 'romantasy' a distinct genre, imo. Romantasy is the importation of the paranormal romance plot into a high fantasy world. And that's essentially what Maas invented with her fae romance series.

So in summary, I would argue there are two threads here: one is the paranormal romance, which I trace back to originating authors like Hamilton and Huff, and which is strongly influenced by Anne Rice's take on vampires on the one hand, and by the low fantasy 'noir' trends popularized by writers like Glenn Cook and Roger Zelazny (Simon R Green is an early 90s trendsetter for this kind of thing, as well) on the other. Thus all roads lead back to Anne Rice (obviously) and also to Raymond Chandler (less obviously but more or less inevitably for any American author - and the British are not immune! look at Pratchett's Night Watch). I would classify this thread as the stylization and codification of horror, grit, cynicism, urban grime, etc in a fantastical / supernatural context - things that used to be regarded as frightening, inappropriate, ugly, unspeakable, or otherwise transgressive, like murder and corrupt cops (see: Chandler) or scary monsters from folklore committing thinly-veiled metaphors for sexual assault (see: Rice).

This becomes the standard spooky, gritty, cynical, hardboiled vibe for a lot of early books in the paranormal line. The prevalent attitude is basically 'you thought werewolves were a silly children's story? jokes on you! this werewolf is about to eat your face &/or attempt to sexually assault you' (and of course, in the explicitly romantic books especially, this is all highly eroticized). As happens with all tropes, the original transgressive sources of these vibes are eventually lost until only the vibes remain, and we end up with things like the trope of the paranormal PI main character with no clear explanation for why except that 'it's paranormal, of course you need a PI hero' or 'it's paranormal, of course you need a vampire love interest.' Faeries thus become incorporated here as another instance of the seemingly harmless child's story that are, in the story's mythbusting 'reality,' highly dangerous, scary, & socially liminal figures, & thus capable of filling essentially the same narrative role as the vampire or werewolf lover.

The other thread is the urban fantasy setting itself, which is what revitalizes the modern concept of the faerie as a potential style of love interest in the first place, and this I would trace to late 90s - early 00s YA like Melling's faerie series, which draws from Arthuriana and Celtic mythology - and again, dating to 1993, is the earliest publication of explicitly romantic fae novels that I know of (as in the romance is a large chunk of the main narrative, and not just a subplot). (The separate but related notion of dropping your characters into a hodgepodge of conflicting myths and enjoying the chaos as a storytelling method I think is also coming into popularity at the same time via authors like K.A. Applegate in her very underrated 1999 Everworld series, a truly and delightfully insane YA portal fantasy involving, yes, dangerous faeries.) Melling is writing in turn at the same moment that Charles de Lint's urban fantasies are coming out, and both authors are influenced by the popularization of the 'fractured fairy tale' retelling taken up by many major female fantasy authors of the late 20th c. - all of which blend together in a lot of interesting weird ways in the 90s and then play a major role in shaping the YA boom of the 2000s. The role of Arthuriana retellings in the works of writers like Susan Collins and Guy Gavriel Kay I think is also important (both of whom have also, amusingly, admitted to being directly influenced by Sir James Frazer's iconic 1890 work of late Victorian anthropology, The Golden Bough, thus confirming my personal conspiracy theories re: all modern literature. But that's beyond the scope!)

The style of love interest that emerges from this thread is, at least originally, somewhat more in line with much older legends about faeries taking mortals as lovers - that is, these are highly aestheticized and romanticized narratives (as opposed to the 'grit' of early paranormal) that nonetheless derive most of their tension and suspense from the impossibility of any mortal truly being able to trust or rely on a faerie, who are depicted as inherently capricious, inhuman, unfeeling, and unreliable lovers. (Think of the faeries playing games with the mortal characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream - not quite actively malicious, but certainly high-handed and careless enough to feel that way to their victims.)

In the hands of 2000s and 2010s writers like Holly Black, Julie Kagawa, and Melissa Marr (all of whom I would read as some of the direct antecedents to Maas, especially Marr) this narrative merges with the tropes of the paranormal romance to create a kind of gritty fairy tale romance, with fae love interests who take on the narrative role traditionally played by vampires in, for example, Twilight - powerful and compelling supernatural figures who, because of their fundamental nature, pose a danger to the female heroine they are inevitably in love with. (Vampires inherently want to drink your blood! Werewolves inherently want to eat you! Faeries inherently want to fuck with you just for the sake of it! Which makes a human woman attempting to romance any of them inherently fraught & dangerous, & therefore a structurally interesting premise for a romance novel. And, of course, the metaphors for the difficulty of regular human heterosexual romance abound.)

The appeal of the faerie lover specifically over the vampire or werewolf is, I think, that the faerie still retains some of the wondrous, fanastical, romantic glamor by which we tend to define high fantasies and classic fairy tales more generally - they can be magical, capital r Romantic figures in a way quite distinct from the gritty, noir-coded, 'realistic' supernatural appeal of the vampire as depicted in paranormal romance. So the resurgence in popularity of fae lord love intersts today over the vampires or werewolves of the previous decades we might put down to a broader cultural turn away from a kind of emphasis on realism, cynicism, low fantasy 'punk' aesthetics etc, and towards a desire for more idealistic or romantic (or, in the cynical view, more sanitized) narrative figures - which is also, perhaps, echoed in the current parallel surge of the popularity of romantasy over the older paranormal romance.

I think there's also something worth unpacking in the transition from the popularity of socially liminal paranormal love interests like vampires, werewolves, etc - all of whom, in urban fantasy / paranormal settings, tend to explicitly exist in various underworlds, demimondes, on the margins of real or normal society, & so on - to today's version of the romantasy fae lord, who has been transformed from his original urban fantasy character (where, again, he essentially fulfills the same narrative function as the vampire - mysterious, dangerous, liminal, beyond the bounds of the real) into sort of the opposite of a socially marginalized role. Instead of living in the fantasy demimonde & concealing his true nature as a faerie from society etc, the romantasy fae lord (who in most romantasy I've seen - ie the Maas version - is functionally just a pop version of a Tolkien elf; there's very little of actual faerie mythology remaining in these depictions) is fully socially integrated into his world, & inhabits a role of overt social & political power - he's literally a feudal lord. So what's being eroticized & romanticized is no longer transgression or 'the outsider' in any sense, but rather a much more traditional (some might argue regressive) figure of inherited, established (& necessarily masculine) authority. It's a really interesting shift, anyway!

*post script: I'll also add that the various permutations of 'soulmates' and 'mated lovers' & the relentless tendency to call people 'males' & 'females' etc in romantasy I believe comes almost entirely from Maas, who in turn is getting it pretty exclusively from older high fantasy paranormal mashups like Sherrilyn Kenyon's Hunter Legends series (1999) and Wilson's Lord of the Fading Lands series (2007). (So for example the Wilson series is, to the best of my memory, about an immortal shapeshifting dragon king & his romance with his reincarnated true love / fated soulmate, a human woman; I do acknowledge that I read it a very long time ago & so may be wildly misstating the plot - the jacket summary calls him a 'Fey King,' which I simply don't remember at all, but seems even more suggestive!) Anyway, these are all popular tropes in this kind of fantasy romance, & as far I'm aware don't really have much to do with the incorporation of faeries as love interests specifically - it's just a sort of intersection of Maas's particular writing habits & the paranormal romance tradition that shaped them.

*post post script: a little more browsing led me to Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, published 1987, which according to Wikipedia is in fact one of the earliest instances of urban fantasy & is also, serendipitously, a faerie romance. Cool! Anyway this seems relevant for those interested in the timeline; I haven't read it myself & thus can't especially comment on its role in the development of the genre, however, beyond noting the fact that it too seems to be taking much of its fantasy & fae references from pre-existing Celtic & British folklore.

[mask131]

There we go! I found back the group of authors I talked about in my previous reblog of this thread! I kept thinking of them as the "New Inklings" but this got me nowhere. Luckily I got back the article I discovered the group's existence through. It was written by A.F. Ruaud for an encyclopedia of fantasy: it was the Scribblies, also called the "Minneapolis school".

Ruaud describes this group as having caused a "quiet revolution" in fantasy literature in the 80s. This is a bit off topic from the original subject so I will put it under a cut but here is what Ruaud has to say about the group:

Minneapolis, which he describes as a sort of "giant real-life Twin Peaks" became in the 1980s the center of North-American fantasy, it was were a renewal of the genre was born. The Scribblies were formed out of a small group of fantasy and sci-fi enthusiasts putting together a writing workshop (which was back then very popular in the USA, with the Clarion Workshops for example which had an influence on the shifts in the sci-fi genre). However unlike the Clarion Workshops (which caused a unification and a "cleaning" of the sci-fi genre into a more "neo-classical style"), the Minneapolis group was merely to help six individuals with very different styles and tastes to refine their writing.

Of the six only one of them never wrote any books: it was Nathan Bucklin, who rather became a songwriter. But the other five became writers: Patricia C. Wrede, Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Pamela Dean and Will Shetterly. They formed the Interstate Writers Workshop, aka Scribblies, jokingly named after the Industrial Workers of the World aka "Wobblies". In parallel to the formation of the group, Ellen Kushner began her career in New-York with the anthology Basilisk reprinting old texts mixed with new ones - John Harrison, Ursula Le Guin and Alan Garner are in the same pages as Joan D. Vinge,R.A. Lafferty, Michael Bishop and Elizabeth Lynn. Ellen Kushner, with her anthology, wanted to point out how a "traditional" fantasy was starting to dominate the industry, as opposed to a more uncommon, out-of-the-usual fantasy - and Ellen Kushner promptly collaborated for Basilisk with a freshly-beginning fantasy artist known as... Terri Windling, who even replacd Kushner as a fantasy editor later (she dropped this in 1981 to either write her own texts or do radio shows).

Terri Windling was (as said above in the previous posts) the woman behind an enormous part of the fantasy of this era. She created the anthologies Elsewhere and Faery! with the idea that "fantasy" was not a "minor" genre, and she was versed in fantasy works outside of the Tolkien and post-Tolkien. She pushed for the re-printing of authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sylvia Townsend-Warner and Angela Carter, and she was the advocate for a fantasy that would become a more common-day part of literature. Because, despite the works of people like Lin Carter and Donald A. Wollheim in the 70s, "fantasy" was still a marginal genre. While sci-fi could get its own specialized collections, fantasy was usually mixed with other genres or bound to the "youth and kids" section of bookshops. Terri Windling changed this - for example by convincing some youth authors to start writing for adults (like Jane Yolen).

And of course there were the Scribblies.

Patricia C. Wrede began her career with youth fantasy, by her cycle of Lyra, sold to Terri Windling for Ace Books. The other Scribblies followed: Pamela Dean with the Secret Country trilogy, Will Shetterly with Cats Have No Lord (influence by Goldman's Princess Bride) plus The Tangled Lands. But these authors were still "classical" in their handling of the genre, still set within the post-Tolkien wave of fantasy. This was not so much the case of Steven Brust and Emma Bull. Brust, following the paths of Leiber and Zelazny, was the most prolific and diverse of the Scribblies - the Vlad Taltos series, To Reign in Hell, his The Sun, the Moon and the Stars, Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grill, and his The Gypsy, one of the early urban-fantasies, written in collab with Megan Lindholm.

As for Emma Bull, she actually created one of the very first books that formed the genre we know today as "urban fantasy" - as said in the post above, 1987's War for the Oaks, the cult-classic deemed precursor of the entire subgenre. And, under the direction of both Emma Bull and Will Shetterly, the Scribblies created their shared universe known as "Liavek" - where they could write all sorts of stories in an urban yet pseudo-medieval enviroonment. Slowly other authors joined the Scribblies: John M. Ford, Jane Yolen, Gene Wolfe, Alan Moore. Charles de Lint and Megan Lindholm (later known as Robin Hobb) both made their debuts with the Scribblies.

Charles de Lint also had his career propelled by Terri Windling. After publishing a fantasy collection for young readers, "Magic Quest", which reunited the works of Diana Wynne Jones, Tanith Lee and Jane Yolen, Windling created a shared universe for a teenage audience: the famous "Bordertown" which has been talked about above. Windling wanted with this universe to develop the recent "urban fantasy" style - so she imagined that the fairies returned to modern day, colonized a city of North America that they moved to the frontier of Faerie, and this resulted in a cohabitation of technology and magic, elves and humans. But the theme was not so much merry or humoristic as "harsh, punk and fascinating". Bordertown was not a commercial success, but it became a cult classic like so many other works tied to the Scribblies - Scribblies who gained more members with Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, Charles de Lint and Midori Snyder.

There were four Bordertown volumes from 1986 to 1998, with three other novels set in the city and released in the 90s - Elsewhere, Nevernever (both by Will Shetterly) and Finder (by Emma Bull). Ruaud claims that in hindsight the entirety of the "Bordertown" project was the precursor of what we call today the "Young Adult" books - and a new book was even released in 2011, Welcome to Bordertown.

Terri Windling then went on to create two more collections. One was the Ace Fantasy Specials (based on the Ace Science Fiction Specials of Terry Carr) but only gathered three books: Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, M. Lucie Chin's The Fairy of Ku-She, and Delia Sherman's Through a Brazen Mirror. The second collection was the "Fairy Tale" collection begun in 1987 with Steven Brust's The Sun, the Moon and the Stars. It focused on reinterpreting fairytales into folk-fantasy adult novels: Charles de Lint's Jack the Giant Killer, Kara Dalkey's The Nightingale, Patricia C. Wrede's Snow White and Rose Red, Pamela Dean's Tam-Lin, Jane Yolen's Briar Rose, Tanith Lee's White as Snow and Gregory Frost's Fitcher's Bride.

Later Windling left Ace for Tor, where she began a new fantasy line to which Steven Brust and Charles de Lint participated. She also continued her series of fairytale-themed books - alongside Ellen Datlow she notably created a large collection of fairytales rewriten by fantasy authors - which began with 1985's Snow White Blood Red (a collection which Ruaud claims was, again, "precursor" to what American television would be obsessed about just a few years later, pointing out the success of TV shows like Grimm and Once Upon a Time). The article also mentions some other noticeable anthologies of her - the annual The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror or her four mythical-fantasy books illustrated by Charles Vess (The Green Man, The Faery Reel, The Coyote Road, The Beastly Bride) - as well as her own novels, her own writings, of which Ruaud claims The Wood Wife is the masterpiece, in a style close to Robert Holdstock and Charles de Lint.

Ruaud then returns to the Scribblies, mentionning that while was but an informal group they did have a chart - or rather some sort of manifesto - which created what they called the "Pre-Joycean Fellowship", claiming to be against elitism and modernism when it came to literature, defending a style without hypocrisy but filled with humor and a deep attraction to the ancient myths. But, as Shetterly explained in interviews, it was mainly a joke based on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, just an excuse to gather, drink and read books - though they did want to break down the wall that had been built to split "popular fiction" from "proper literature", as they wanted to create books with stories appreciated by ordinary readers and a style that would please more sophisticated audiences. In retrospective he deemed they should have called it the Pre-Jamesian Fellowship instead, as he feels Henry James embodied better the "splitting" of literature. The Scribblies and the Pre-Joycean Fellowship had several common members, but did not entirely overlap. (And the Pre-Joycean Fellowship later morphed into the "Young Trollopes" but that's another story).

Ruaud concludes that three main literary currents were born of the shared work of Terri Windling and the Scribblies:

1- A "return to the origins", a "return to the sources" current, which paid homage to the Victorian and Edwardian tales of fairies, ghosts and other worlds, the era in which "fantasy" began to emerge. It is the current of authors wanting to write fantasy as if Lord of the Rings never existed, to get out of the crushing shadow of Tolkien, to find back the "fresh childhood of the genre", to reconcile fantasy with its past. Examples include John Barnes' One for the Morning Glory, Patrick O'Leary's The Gift and Neil Gaiman's Stardust.

2- Manierist fantasy, a term coined for Ellen Kushner's first novel Swordspoint, but which also applies to her second novel, Thomas the Rhymer. The trilogy Sorcery and Cecelia by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer belongs to this sub-genre, John Crowley's Little, Big could be considered a precursor of it, and the book that truly placed it under the spotlight was Greer Gilman's Moonwise. One of the most recent best-sellers of this current is Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel. Ruaud also mentions another Scribblies work here - the Emma Bull and Steven Brust's collab Freedom & Necessity, which he deems to mix the imaginary Renaissance of manierist fantasy with the Victorian reimagining of the steampunk genre, while also belonging to the "return to the sources" current, and forming one of the rare Marxist fantasies around.

3 - Finally, as said above, urban fantasy, which can be considered the main "product" of the Scribblies' creations.

[sarahreesbrennan]

SORRY this was the one I meant to reblog but got lost in the genre evolution sauce and should not transpose my previous essay! But shared again for the full story on Terri Windling and the Scribblies.

And really fae urban fantasy cannot be considered completely reflected on unless we consider Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue. OK done this time for real!

[byjove]

*hits the joint* In the Harry Potter universe, Merlin is canonically a Hogwarts alumni and a Slytherin, which is impossible because Merlin predates the existence of Hogwarts by centuries. Of course, JK Rowling didn’t know that because she is a dumb bitch. I’m sorry. Misogynistic phrasing. She is a willfully ignorant and hateful, deeply unlikable and ill-informed, untalented and unspeakably cruel…..person. Seriously, how could you write a series about British wizards without truly understanding THE British wizard. Anyway, Merlin would never be able to attend any sort of organized schooling. He’s definitely self-taught in every universe because he’s the most powerful wizard ever AND he’d have been expelled from any institution before he stepped through the door. The only reason they haven’t escorted him away from Camelot is because he can see the future and he is kind of like the king’s dad. I was so disappointed by BBC Merlin. I turned it on and I was like “What the fuck is this shit, where is my perverted old man?”

[pedrocomicreviews]

Absolute Green Arrow #1

“Are these our options now? Ignore the monsters we work for… or throw watch parties for their executions?“

Holy fucking shit. Spoilers.

Dude he ripped his dick off!

Yeah, this is the introduction I’m giving this book, because it’s basically the second or so thing that happens. And that’s really something, isn’t it? Every other Absolute title has given us a tone-setter that, I think, all of them have succeeded in keeping up with. Green Lantern was a bit meandering and slow, but highly original and fascinating. Flash was like a teenager’s panic attack, confused and jittery and chaotic. Batman was violent and fucking sick and metal and awesome and badass and sick.

So when Absolute Green Arrow’s tone-setter is this:

I have to kinda applaud the entire team, because this is as much fun as I’ve had with an introductory issue to this line.

Onto actual discussion, I need to do a slight tangent: I always maintain that adaptations of eternal products that don’t look like the original are kinda fated to fuck up the original somehow, because it established an entirely new kind of fan that isn’t going to have anything quite like their entry point after that thing is done.

Like, take Ms. Marvel for instance. Back when I was in high school, she was a legacy character planned out after Carol Danvers finally graduated into Captain Marvel, and she was very specific in how she looked, acted and fought. She was a Muslim New Jersey girl with deep-seethed confidence issues who got given powers that, essentially, made her monstruous. Her first act of power is to literally make herself into a white, blonde version of herself.

And then she goes on to not do that again, she goes on to start to respect and like herself, and the weird ways her body is changing start to actually accommodate her. She goes from thinking her embiggening powers make her take up too much space to thinking her powers make her cool, and bravely starts being the new greatest hero of her generation.

Then comes the TV show and fucks that all up because her powers are now Green Lantern stuff, and they’re impressive and sparkly and she doesn’t really have any specific relationship to them. She’s also a mutant and her parents’ relationship to her is flipped, and the visual identity of the whole thing is fucked, and her relationship to the other Captain Marvels is different, etc, etc, imagine being a fan of the Ms Marvel show and then picking up a comic book and realizing it’s literally all different. It doesn’t make you want to continue reading if that’s all you wanted, and that’s the problem.

The only way to really make her into a character like the show is to fully reboot her, and they’ve tried a half-measure that everybody hated, and now she doesn’t have a book anymore. This is what happens when your adaptation is far more visible than your original book, it doesn’t make new fans of the thing, it makes new fans of the adaptation. And if the adaptation ends or doesn’t come out often, well, then the fans most of the time aren’t going to care about something different.

All this to say, it’s very funny that this is just CW’s Arrow.

Green Arrow has been reinvented once or twice before; he went from your regular Batman clone with a gimmick to a walking, talking opportunity to write about politics and call rich people assholes. And that’s very fun, but he’s also a bit of a joke because of that; Al Ewing’s written him for a little bit twice now, and he keeps hammering on his catchphrase of the moral cancer of society! as something to laugh at, even though I am very sure he agrees that rich people suck.

And that’s usually the vibe Green Arrow brings, except when you’re talking about 2012’s Arrow. Love it or hate it, but Fake Batman With Arrows was very popular, and it introduced new fans to a version of the character that was essentially a serial killer. A Punisher-type anti-hero who was going around town murdering rich people in cold blood for personal reasons, a recluse that forsake his own social life and hedonistic lifestyle to go after those who were threatening the heart of his city, a vigilante wearing dark clothes who hid in a dark containment place for his expensive toys and probably voted correctly, but didn’t really make a big deal out of it. It ran for like a decade and spawned an entire universe that was just as good, for better or worse, and it was fucking impossible to escape.

It was also impossible to adapt into Green Arrow comics. This is just not what the character is, and the extended cast was also just not what the regular versions of those characters were; sometimes they weren’t even from the comics, and never quite made seamless transitions into the comics either. Very few characters make the show -> comics jump elegantly. Honestly, maybe it’s just Barbara Gordon who did it, because she’s the perfect woman.

So now we’re here, right? They have to reinvent Green Arrow, and he has to be a little fucked up. So the pitch of “what if it’s just Arrow, but a lot more violent?” fits like a glove, and the result is really fun to go through. Especially right now, for obvious reasons we don’t have to write and incriminate ourselves over!

Especially funny is the fact that the writer, Pornsak Pichetshote, basically spearheaded the fucking Arrowverse over at CW alongside Geoff Johns. This is a very specific pitch from a very specific guy, and I think he made it work far better here than it ever could work as a show. The “No Trick Arrows, No Mercy, Absolute Hunter” tagline doesn’t quite translate the feeling that this book has: it’s a horror book where the monster happens to be a guy.

Parallel to that, we have Absolute Dinah Lance, aka Black Canary, and she’s kind of a mess. In general, I’m always sad when we have a Black Canary without Oracle, but I get it— Barbara is not that character in this universe, and the Birds of Prey will likely not form; or if they will, it won’t be for a while. She’s not even a superhero and/or a metahuman in this, which is fine by me. Dinah is a very tall, very buff, incredibly depressed young woman who’s having to do security for assholes to help pay the bills.

It’s the main theme of the book, really— the idea that the upper class is entirely parasitical to the middle and lower ones, yet it treats them like insects who can be squashed and replaced at any point. Oliver Queen, the regular Green Arrow in everything else, is dead because of the events of Absolute Evil, but that’s also mostly because we were led to believe he wouldn’t play ball with the billionaires in their entirely fictional horrific freak-off island, where they Do Something With Kids.

It’s a book that rewards being read right now, I think. If, by a miracle, the world is significantly better in 20 years, I doubt it will feel as poignant and interesting. Fact of the matter is, society is collapsing and it’s the fault of about 120 people with a lot of numbers in some digital accounts. We have no recourse to actually prosecute most of them, and they have scammed the world into thinking they’re superior because of where they were born or who they enslaved.

Of course, we’re still talking about the comic book— in this world where evil reigns, it was kind of odd that most of our heroes were nice people. Bruce Wayne is very violent and has a lot to prove, yes, but this is more what I thought these reinventions were going to be. Heroes who are de-facto not doing the right thing, which the story very much expects you to understand and say out loud…

… and then the story expects you to smile, shake your shoulders a little bit and go “however,” while you enjoy the spectacle.

I feel like I’m making it seem like a very shallow wish-fulfilment story, and in some ways you can definitely argue that. But I do believe the execution of it all, Rafael Albuquerque’s incredible art, the dialogue not holding back any punches as it goes through the motions of this kind of story… it all mixes very well, it’s a remarkably solid package that I am looking forward to reading more of. I just think it’s useless to pretend a lot of the appeal of this isn’t the fact that it’s being published in the year of our lord 2026. When things could be a bit better. If only.

[thecorpsethatwalks]

re-watching the original trilogy is great because you really get a sense for how weird luke skywalker is, just how quickly he becomes that weird AND how quickly he commits to it. Like he's honestly pretty chill in a new hope, but the absolute INSTANT he figures out he can move shit with his mind he goes full send on the cryptic off-putting bullshit. Walking around in full black robes, speaking in riddles, aura farming and backflipping whenever physically possible. He's clearly annoyed when he first meets yoda in empire, but he dismisses that pretty quickly in favour of ALSO becoming an over-dramatic space wizard. The combination of his two teachers being yoda and obi-wan kenobi and him being the son of anakin and padme creates the single most intense and fundamentally kind force sensitive perfectly embodying the heart of the jedi order whilst also serving egregious amounts of cunt and being bizarre to be around. He would have THRIVED as a jedi master during the high republic. he would have been every padawan's favourite and every other master's worst nightmare

[elli-incarnate]

SkyJade fans: we don't talk enough about how absolutely deranged the year 10ABY was for Mara Jade specifically.

Because at the end of the Thrawn campaign (~9.5ABY), Luke gives her his father's lightsaber.

Which he treats as a normal coworker interaction / gentle encouragement to join his Jedi Academy.

This is, for the record, COMPLETELY INSANE behavior.

Sir. This woman VERY recently had an inescapable psychic kill command for you lodged in her skull courtesy of the Emperor. And your response to resolving this situation is apparently:

“Here, take my dead father’s laser sword.”

:)

Luke is operating on spiritually earnest farmboy logic here, but Mara — who is bad at emotions in general and especially bad at affection directed at herself — is nevertheless, like many women, dimly aware of this thing called BOUNDARIES and decides maybe she should not immediately go do Jedi training with the incredibly intense blond man handing her meaningful family heirlooms after one shared military campaign.

Now, the Doylist explanation for all of this is obviously that the EU authors in this era were barely coordinating.

But the Watsonian result is hysterical.

Because while the rest of the cast is dealing with assorted disasters at the Imperial Civil War and Dark Empire Trilogy, Mara quietly kriffs offscreen to pursue Jedi training.

Not with Master Skywalker.

No.

With Kyle Katarn.

And if you know the timeline, this is SO funny because circa 9.5–10ABY Kyle is basically an independent-study self-certified Jedi Master whose primary qualifications are:

surviving

owning a lightsaber

and aggressively tomb raiding Sith ruins

This is peak Jedi Knight era Kyle. His entire educational and life philosophy is basically, “I found this in a crypt and it probably won’t kill me.”

So Mara, in an effort to avoid one emotionally complicated Jedi, accidentally apprentices herself to another Jedi whose emotional range is approximately that of a very honorable brick.

And naturally this culminates in Mysteries of the Sith, where Kyle immediately gets too cocky poking around Sith artifacts on Dromund Kaas and falls to the dark side.

Which means poor Mara spends her gap year dragging THIS IDIOT back from corruption.

(Should this perhaps have given her an early warning sign about the Exar Kun situation brewing at Luke’s Academy in the Jedi Academy Trilogy? You would THINK.)

But WAIT. Because this is ALSO the year of Dark Empire, my very favorite and absolutely deranged year of the Legends timeline.

So imagine this from Mara’s perspective.

You flee the emotionally earnest not-quite-love-interest Jedi by going to study under another Jedi who immediately starts having Sith Artifact Problems.

And then somewhere in the middle of this nonsense you get the news bulletin:

“By the way, Luke Skywalker got yoinked away by some kind of inexplicable Force storm and has apparently resurfaced as the military commander of the Reborn Emperor’s Operation Shadow Hand.”

And Mara’s just standing there like:

“... the REBORN WHAT.”

So during the events of Mysteries of the Sith, Mara successfully drags Kyle back from the dark side through what is, functionally, the Power of Friendship.

Like yes there are Sith artifacts and Force visions and actual mechanics involved, but emotionally the plot is basically:

“Kyle, stop licking cursed tomb walls.”

“No.” *lick*

“Kyle PLEASE.”

And somehow it works.

So Mara presumably exits this experience going:

“Great. Wonderful. Fantastic. I have now personally managed one emotionally constipated Jedi man having Sith Problems. Time to go talk down or put down Skywalker.”

And she’s probably mentally preparing herself for the world’s worst intervention road trip.

Like:

“Apparently if I don’t supervise Jedi personally they start freebasing Sith artifacts within thirty business days.”

Except then she gets back and —

Oh.

Luke already came back with his sister's help.

Apparently it was a phase.

Wonderful.

Excellent.

I DON’T have to solve every problem myself.

But then the VERY NEXT YEAR, 11ABY, the New Republic looks at this man — this VERY RECENTLY RECOVERED FROM A SITH APPRENTICESHIP man — and decides:

“Yes. We should give him government support to found a religious boarding school for Force-sensitive children.”

Insane institutional decision-making.

And Luke, who has learned absolutely nothing about normal interpersonal pacing, immediately circles back around to:

“Hey Mara :)

“do you want to come train at my Jedi Academy :)”

SIR.

From her perspective you vanished into evil hyperspace weather, joined your dead fascist dad’s evil wizard cult, and got government funding to open a school less than a year later.

And maybe the craziest part is that she STILL eventually marries him. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

ok mood thank u emily dickinson relatable queen

[iwontknowyouanymore]

this trend of shitting on peer-reviewed academic studies in favor of tweeting “we already knew this was happening” is so soul-crushing. not to be an elitist cunt, but we have got to open the schools again. people genuinely seem to have forgotten that their personal lived experience isn’t indicative of the larger population, AND IF IT IS…… then you need researchers to support these assertions from a relevant data pool instead of a blog post from 2013 💀

[iwontknowyouanymore]

i just wanted to clarify that this post was referring to studies in childhood ptsd and the AI boom’s relationship to wealth and poverty, but it can go for literally anything, so i IMPLORE YOU ALL to PLEASE get into reading research texts bc it is the only way we’re gonna free ourselves as a community. research helps to drive policy, civic engagement, court decisions, etc. PLEASE do not disregard someone’s study just bc you’ve lost faith in humanity. not all of us live life without hope.

[smoke-in-the-winds]

Me, talking to Paul of Tarsus whom I brought to the present: so, the Calvinist stance, called double predestination, follows that Christ only died particularly for the elect, who are unconditionally saved. The Arminian stance, however, argues that elect are only foreseen by God, but that Christ still died for all people who are saved conditional on their independent faith.

Paul: What do you mean it’s been two thousand years?? And he hasn’t come back yet?

Me: Yeah, anyways, see the thing is both sides use your writings as proof of their arguments, and I was just wondering what you actually meant, especially in Romans where you wrote-

Paul: Wait, are you sure you guys didn’t just miss him?

[dunsparr0w-deactivated20260722]

Who's the greater warrior?

Dassem Ultor

Karsa Orlong

Goku

Voting ended onMay 4

[sarumanthemetal]

Okay so this got me Thinking. Truly a brilliant poll. Now the word you used is warrior, not fighter. Now, to be so cliche but I think helpfully, here is the definition of warrior, at least according to Google which will serve for now:

One who is engaged in or experienced in battle.

One who is engaged aggressively or energetically in an activity, cause, or conflict.

A man engaged or experienced in war, or in the military life; a soldier; a champion.

So, I’m actually gonna first cut Goku, if it was strongest fighter, it’s goku, but greatest warrior does not work for Goku.

Now between Dassem and Karsa is really interesting. TTH pretty heavily implies that Dassem, as Traveller, was also a more skilled fighter than Karsa. And certainly Dassem has more experience of a military life, a soldiers life, than Karsa. Don’t get me wrong, I think Karsa is very close and maybe by the time of the Witness books he might be there. But I’m giving edge to Dassem on this one. I prefer Karsa as a character, and reader bias does lean Karsa since we see his journey so much more clearly. But Dassem gets a lot of lore suggestions that give him an edge I think.

[gondorosi]

I'm close to constructing a shrine in honour of Dan Watters.

There's a bitter irony to Nightwing becoming more popular in the last few years - it's mostly a result of Taylor's abysmally saccharine and bland characterisation. A fondant version of DG - all sugar, no complexity of flavour, no nutritional depth. Like many other long time readers and DG fans, I have been starved for a truly stellar representation of Dick since Flashpoint.

Enter Dan Watters.

First there's this interview, which made me weep with joy.

I had forgotten it was possible for people to praise Dick without putting down Bruce. And while it may seem that Watters is painting Bruce as unempathetic, all you need to do is read one single issue of Dark Patterns to know that he most certainly does NOT think that. What he is talking about is the way Bruce and Dick approach detective work differently - which is absolutely correct.

More importantly - "He grew up knowing he was loved. That's what Batman gave him that Batman didn't have."

Utterly perfect assessment, and borne out in full in Nightwing #137 (2026) this week.

Nightwing is accused of causing a pileup on the Bludhaven bridge which led to nine deaths. So of course, in true Bat fashion he is beating himself up in guilt and trying to figure out what happened - but he's not the only Bat on scene.

There's immediate defensiveness in typical Dick fashion.

There's Dick being reckless with his life and Bruce panicking out of his skin.

(Hey Dickie, remember THE LAST TIME YOU GOT SHOT IN THE HEAD IN FRONT OF HIM?????)

There's Dick actually being COMPETENT and SMART again, not just some performative cheerleader cutout who gives a speech and is then inexplicably hailed as a great leader and hero without actually proving it on panel.

There's Bruce's usual concern (this scene is so clearly Bruce in a Batsuit and not simply Batman).

(On a related note I'd tell Bruce to practice what he preaches but that's never going to happen with ANY Bat, let alone the prime Bat.)

Then there's Dick crashing out at him - the usual way he processes his guilt and stress.

And this is where Watters' understanding of the Bruce and Dick relationship is so clearly outlined - Dick is able to rage and crash out at Bruce BECAUSE he knows he's loved. And Bruce lets him crash out and weathers it - acknowledges Dick's feelings without once taking it personally. An outlet Bruce himself never had, no matter how much lore-deficient writers like Taylor and Williamson try to retrofit Alfred into a role and pedestal that never existed.

THIS is what the Bruce and Dick relationship has been for the longest part of post Crisis DC history ever since Prodigal cemented the reconciliation. This is what Batman and Nightwing were under the best Bat editorial tenure.

And of course there's the pot-kettle panel, where Bruce pulls a Dick and Dick pulls a Bruce. Also a cornerstone of their relationship.

[prokopetz]

I've had a couple of people ask for a digestible version of the whole "the real problem with Dungeons & Dragons is false advertising, not anything that's present in its text" thing I keep alluding to, so here's the bullet point version of that argument:

Dungeons & Dragons is owned by Hasbro. Yes, the same Hasbro that owns Monopoly and My Little Pony.

Hasbro wants D&D to be the only tabletop RPG that anyone plays.

In order to accomplish this, Hasbro needs D&D to be a universal entry-level game.

D&D is not a universal entry-level game.

All game rules are opinionated about how the game ought to be played, and as tabletop RPGs go, D&D's rules are more opinionated than most. This is not a flaw, but it's not what Hasbro needs.

D&D is also on the high end of complexity as far as tabletop RPGs go, and it's complex in a way that strongly rewards system mastery, so it's pretty far from "entry level".

Hasbro could produce a version of D&D that's at the very least less opinionated and more entry-level than it presently is, but they don't want to, because they've determined that certain rules features which run counter to both of those goals are critical to D&D's brand identity.

They also don't want to produce multiple versions of D&D tailored for different audiences, because they want every single D&D group to be a potential purchaser of every single D&D product; they'd be effectively competing with themselves for their own customer base if the published game was actually modular in any meaningful way.

So how does Hasbro square that circle?

Simple: they lie. They insist that D&D is in fact a universal entry-level game in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and back their advertising up with sponsored thinkpieces and podcasts and such to "prove" it.

Further, they've spent decades fostering a culture of play which conceals the gap between the game they're advertising and the game they're selling by ascribing any appearance that D&D isn't a universal entry-level game to the incompetence or malice of individual GMs.

The game the rules want to produce disagrees with the game the group wants to play? Nonsense – even the rankest beginner should be able to produce any experience of play using any set of rules, and if your GM can't, they're a Bad GM.

The game is hard to learn? No, it isn't – your GM is merely gatekeeping you. This wouldn't be a problem with a Good GM.

The upshot is that the published rules are more or less irrelevant with respect to achieving the desired experience of play, because they're operating within a culture of play which dumps 100% of the work of making that desired experience of play happen on the GM.

Indeed, much of what modern D&D presents as GMing best practices are really methods of working around the fact that the rules you're using disagree with you about what kind of game you're playing.

(It's not a coincidence that D&D's entrenched culture of play also insists that it's normal for GMs to be miserably overworked and treats GM burnout as a big funny joke, then turns around and loudly wonders why there's a constant GM shortage.)

The trick is, because you're still at least notionally using the rules of D&D, the fruits of all that GM labour are perceived as the product of "playing D&D", not of the GM's hard work.

In essence, Hasbro's business model for Dungeons & Dragons is selling you your own GM's labour with a D&D sticker on it.

It's a very neat trick, if you can pull it off.

Now, at this point some readers may be asking: well, sure, but not all GMs are doormats. What about "killer" GMs who do gatekeep and railroad their players and otherwise act like complete tyrants? I hear horror stories about them all the time.

That's the second trick: these are not opposites. The GM as human Xbox and the GM as tyrant of the table both represent the GM doing all the actual work of making the game happen. The latter isn't the outcome that Hasbro wants, but it's a logical conclusion of the position they want the GM to be in.

[prokopetz]

I've seen a few folks in the notes respond "okay, but if that's true, why is D&D so much more flexible than most indie RPGs?", and the answer is that it's not. That's part of the sleight of hand I've talked about where the GM's labour is framed as part of the product. To break it down:

As noted above, all game rules are opinionated about what kind of game they wanted to produce. This isn't just a matter of setting (though setting-neutral games are often misleadingly called "universal" games), but also a matter of the basic structure of the narrative which emerges when you follow the rules.

The rules of Dungeons & Dragons are not less opinionated than those of your average indie RPG, and in fact are more opinionated than most. (Again, having strongly opinionated rules is not something that's wrong with D&D; it's merely something that's inconvenient for Hasbro's marketing goals in a way they're unwilling to address.)

In brief, D&D really, really wants your game to be a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl. If the GM is using the framework of play furnished by the rules at all, or if the players are responding to the rules' player-facing incentives even a little bit, it's going to squish your game into something dungeon-crawl-shaped.

(This should not be surprising; it's literally in the name!)

The rules of D&D being opinionated in this way tends to fly under the radar for a couple of reasons, one less problematic and one more so.

The relatively benign reason is that many popular RPG premises are not done any great violence by being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.

A cyberpunk smash and grab caper? Basically a dungeon crawl already.

A special forces op in a modern military game? That doesn't need to be shaped like a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl, but it can be shaped like one and remain intelligible as what it's supposed to be.

Gritty logistics-driven survival horror? Not inherently dungeon crawl shaped, but the two genres are compatible – a game can be both at the same time, as video games like Fear & Hunger and Look Outside demonstrate. (Indeed, Look Outside's apartment building follows the structure of an old school D&D megadungeon nearly beat for beat!)

Thanks to D&D's pervasive cultural influence informing what people expect a tabletop RPG to be, as long as this kind of compatibility is present, many folks won't even notice their intended premise is being squished into the shape of a sword and sorcery dungeon crawl.

If your chosen premise isn't compatible in this way, or if the group notices what's happening and decides to push back against it, though? That's where the sleight of hand I alluded to above starts to come into play.

Remember: a Good GM™, even a total novice, ought to be able to use any set of rules to produce any desired experience of play, right?

So get to work!

i.e., just as much of the game's putative approachability is the product of Hasbro selling the players their GM's labour in a D&D-shaped box, much of D&D's putative flexibility is the product of the GM being sold their own labour in a D&D-shaped box.

To be clear, this is not militating against homebrew content or rules. Homebrew is perfectly cromulent, and certainly, some games are more or less structurally amenable to it (though modern D&D tends to fall on the "less" side).

The problem is that what we've got on our hands is a culture of play that wants to have its cake and eat it too: when doing extensive homebrew is treated as part of the GM's basic, entry-level responsibilities, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the product of that labour as merely being a feature of the game.

Which is, of course, exactly what Hasbro's marketing ghouls want.

[prokopetz]

(I feel I should emphasise for the folks going "yeah, D&D sucks!" in the notes that at no point in either of these breakdowns have I said anything for or against D&D as a game. These problems would still exist even if D&D was the best game in the world at being the kind of game that it is!)

[inkoutsidethelines]

Spin the wheel to find out your fate!

How do you feel about your new fate?

I accept my fate

I will hunt you for sport

Voting ended onApr 24

[acertifiedgeek]

'Haunting the narrative' but it's Anakin Skywalker in the first ever Star Wars film A New Hope. Luke longing to go because he is called by the Force, because he is meant to one day save his father. Beru commenting about their similarities and Owen worrying about it. Obi-Wan Kenobi telling Luke and the audience about his friend, about his skill and companionship.

Anakin Skywalker, the catalyst for the world they live in now, the terror at night, weilder of the dark side. Anakin Skywalker, destined to bring light to the Force once more. Literally the chosen one! And he's just. Already dead.

'Your father this, your father that. Anakin, Skywalker, etc., etc...'

Meanwhile. Vader is just. Existing. And neither the audience nor Luke nor Vader know the twist they're in for. That the person haunting the narrative is only doing so metaphorically, and is in fact, within the narrative, just not under the name of Anakin. As in, Anakin Luke'sfather Skywalker.

The funniest thing is that not only is Anakin haunting the narrative in everyone else's pov, but also Vader's. Man's as dramatic and haunted by the ghost of his former self as anyone else. More so maybe, because deep down Anakin can still come back.

Anyways. Top tier execution for the haunting the narrative trope. At least I think so.