Tropes and Clichés in Epic Fantasy: Is It Time To Move On?
T. O. Munro
I just finished Diana Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland first published twenty years ago, but still accurately satirical in the shots it takes at the more recognisable “issues” in…
tropes
Monthly Short Story Winner: Plot Twists
Xiagan
Plot twists are often a specialty of short stories and you find them there more often than in other forms of writing. The most famous examples I can think of…
Gender and Stereotyping in Fantasy – Part Three: Balance
Leo Elijah Cristea
Last time we focused entirely on characters drawn from the YA SFF spectrum, visiting authors from Cassandra Clare to Maggie Steifvater and Meagan Spooner/Amie Kaufman. Whilst we’re still not done…
Gender and Stereotyping in Fantasy – Part Two: Switching Roles
In the first part of this series we began to explore a couple of points, not least of all the idea that we are creating a new kind of gender…
Maoyu Mao Yusha – Anime Review
Rebekah Loper
For fifteen years, the demons and humans have been at war, and both sides have profited from it, but at the expense of those less fortunate. Maoyu Mao Yusha begins…
Gender and Stereotyping in Fantasy – Part One: Strong Women
The problem with the new and yet very important desire to portray realistic, strong women with agency, is that some people fixate entirely on the first part of this –…
Monthly Short Story Winner: Fantasy Clichés
We’ve been getting such good feedback for the short stories our members have submitted in our Monthly Short Story Competition that we have decided to post them on the main…
The Truth About Tropes
Adrian Faulkner
Every genre has its own tropes, those signature metaphors seen time and time again across multiple unconnected books by multiple authors. Fantasy, however, has more than its fair share. So…