What Is Happening To Genre? 📚📚📚📚

Let's talk about the state of speculative fiction genres!
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Gear:

[Chryxsillis]

I'm really liking these partially unhinged whiteboard vids. Good quality, great energy, true goblin.

[neiliusflavius]

I think a major thing is that with digital platforms, there is no need for hard boundaries. In a bookshop, the book is either shelved as genre A or genre B. Online it can be both - with as many sub genres as you want.

[JoriamRamos]

The unbreakable truth in "Alice in Wonderland: is it an YES" will keep me awake for many nights.

[Tinahgirl]

I would argue that YA is not a genre. Middle grade is not a genre. They’re marketing umbrellas for specific age groups. Within both YA and MG you will find all the genres you find in adult books. Adventure, fantasy, sci-fi, horror, mystery, magical realism, historical and everything in between. Apart from that, I think this was a fun video, and that you should use whiteboards all the time. Also, classifying Alice and Peter Pan as isekai is something I’d never thought of until today.

[GeeOff]

When it comes to this subject, I defer to the immortal lyrics of Christina Aguilera: "I'm a genre in a bottle, you gotta write me the right way."

[dustincompton]

Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” is an isekai.

[omriorgad]

Fantasy Insights with Daniel and Whiteboard is quickly becoming one of my favorite shows

[sonfoku]

I love the dichotomy between unhinged, ranting Daniel and the soft Daniel we've gotten. Especially with the outdoor review video

[trafulgerlaw]

Loving the whiteboard vids, you should get one of the big wide rolly whiteboards tho. Then it would be like I am in the good english teacher class.

[daphnea]

This video felt like I was at a friend’s PowerPoint night but they took it a little too seriously and now we are hooked, being taught something fascinating. Just me and the homies (goblins) getting educated 😈

[pattheplanter]

The Avon Fantasy Reader was first published in 1947, edited by Donald A. Wollheim. "For us there lies open the myriad pages of fantasy, the countless volumes new and ancient, and the innumerable magazines, extant and extinct, wherein may lie some vivid vision or spine-tingling tale worth the retelling." 7 years before LoTR. That was definitely a publisher's genre definition for marketing the book series. They included some science fiction stories though we could easily call most of them science fantasy.
2 years later there was the Magazine of Fantasy, which quickly became the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Horror may be dark fantasy but surely most see it as a genre of its own?
So many authors deny the fact that they write speculative/fantasy/science fiction. Magic realism is fantasy. Salman Rushdie wrote a lot of fantasy but most readers of his books would never pick up a book classified as fantasy. How many romances, crime mysteries and westerns are fantasy?

[comicbelief]

I’ve always understood speculative fiction as the genre of utopias and dystopias. Works like 1984 or V for Vendetta are often lumped into sci-fi despite having little science to them. To solve this issue, comes the label of speculative fiction. It takes the world as it is today as speculates as to the paths it might take from here, for better or worse. Fantasy doesn’t fit because it fantasy doesn’t start at a grounded, real world.

[Nasser]

Part 2 of the Goblin Council Saga continues!

[ehsanrahee]

It's amazing just how much this whole discussion and what Daniel said applies to other fictional media outside of books. I'm not a book reader, but I watch a lot of shows, movies, and play a lot of story heavy videogames. Almost everything he said applies to those mediums too. Even the music business I think. Truly fascinating topic.

[Arphemius]

Genres and trends do tend to feed back into one another. Genre conventions arise out of stories, but authors will actively play into those conventions, or subvert them, or otherwise play with them. That can be for many reasons, from marketing, to trying to fit in with a popular genre or actively not fit in/stand out as the case may be, to that simply being part of what authors themselves read and are inspired by. In any case, it is true that genres are not entirely just downstream from trends. The power of classification that does remain in the hands of publishers to a certain extent is that they can "crystallize" genres in a way, which means they still have the ability to influence trends as well through that feedback mechanism. However, you're still right that that is a fleeting power and the creation of genre is increasingly more democratized.

[redshirt]

As someone who reads a lot of lowbrow fanfiction and original fiction, I will forever fight that we already had a term for a kind of isekai fiction: self-insert. No one wanted to acknowledge that as an actual legitimate genre you could publish, though, and that's why it's called isekai now.

It's been here forever, just not as something anyone would publish. I will die on this hill.

[Cubehead]

I've been thinking about this stuff a lot this year and this little talk hit the nail on the head!

[thecrispymaster]

5:45 - I disagree quite heavily actually. Despite not being as "popular" a genre in the social media space, I'd add horror as the third integral element of speculative fiction. Some horror has no elements of the other two, but many parts of horror cross over heavily with one or both of Fantasy and SciFi.

Cosmic and supernatural horror are two of its most common types, and many aspects of stories that are sci-fi or fantasy lean into elements of horror. Anytime a fantasy story uses undead it is leveraging horror. Whenever sci-fi stories trap us in confined spaces with monsters or even other paranoid people, they're leveraging horror.

I often feel like it is the most underappreciated of the genres of speculative fiction in proportion to how important it is to it.

[otaku-sempai]

The late Harlan Ellison, who preferred and popularized the term "speculative fiction", would have had something to say to Robert Heinlein's usage. I'm not sure whether that conversation ever took place.

I tend to argue that science fiction has its roots as a a sub-genre of fantasy fiction; they can both be placed under speculative fiction (spec-fic?). Part of me loves that John Carter of Mars, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz can all be classified as isekai stories!

[davidkeithley]

What a great and well thought out video! The whiteboard is always a hit! Thank you Daniel!