NekoCatSidhe t1_jedj0ch wrote on March 31, 2023 at 5:58 AM

Of course. Literary genres and tropes are more fluid and arbitrary than most people realise.

For example, I have started reading Japanese fantasy light novels a few years ago and the subgenres in it are completely different from western fantasy : the biggest one is for example the isekai genre, which is a mix of reincarnated / summoned to another world stories and litRPG stories. You also have quite a few book series of Chinese court drama with a fantasy bent, and also book series about interacting with yokai, the supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore. It is very different from the mix of epic fantasy and urban fantasy we associate with the fantasy genre in the West.

So I would not be surprised if new genres and subgenres were to suddenly appear in the West as well. It is enough to have one well-written book doing something new that suddenly becomes popular, and then you will have a bunch of other books imitating it, and then you get a new subgenre. This is what originally happened with the Lord of the Rings : most fantasy books before it was published were Sword and Sorcery, but epic fantasy then became the dominant subgenre in fantasy after the publication of the Lord of the Rings, even though that subgenre did not exist at all before.

storytroupes t1_jee1505 wrote on March 31, 2023 at 10:13 AM

Is it accurate to say epic fantasy didn’t exist before LotR? What about classics like the Odyssey (all the Greek myths, tbh), Beowulf, etc? Wouldn’t those classify as epic fantasy?

Emergency_Revenue678 t1_jeef8cq wrote on March 31, 2023 at 12:40 PM

Epic Fantasy will almost always refer to a work that takes place in its own secondary world. There would be a lot of appropriate genre tags for Greek Epics, but Epic Fantasy ironically isn't one of them.

NekoCatSidhe t1_jefearu wrote on March 31, 2023 at 4:43 PM

I see those more as mythology and epic poetry, even if they inspired modern epic fantasy through Tolkien. And the people who originally created these myths probably did not see them as being fantasy or even fiction, but as reality, because they believed that gods and spirits and other supernatural creatures actually existed. That is quite different from the modern fantasy genre.

DiagonallyStripedRat OP t1_jegenx6 wrote on March 31, 2023 at 8:43 PM

This is a different topic but I can't help the feeling that ancient people didn't take their myths as literally as we think they did. Ever heard modern religious people say ,,oh the Bible/Quoran/Tora isn't to be taken literally, God isn't an old guy with a beard sitring on a cloud, these are all metaphores and paralels and parables that speak of an idea etc"?

What if ancient Greeks were like ,,oh the myth of Persephone isn't to be taken literally, I mean, she didn't ACTUALLY collapse beneath the crust of the earth! It simply meant, that..."