How To Classify Fantasy Subgenres
How To Classify Fantasy Subgenres
And why its important to get it right.
I saw a thread on Substack Notes about categorizing fantasy, and that got my brain buzzing.
I crafted a long Note about it, but I didn’t want to get so immediately lost in the noise, so instead of a really long Note, a post.
What Not To Do
The thread I saw was about how we classify fantasy writing into its subgenres. I saw folks throwing around the usual terms—high fantasy, low fantasy, and so on.
And then I also saw the usual pitfall: people connecting these terms to what I call the “spectrum of magic”. If the piece doesn’t have much magic, it’s low. If it has elves and dwarves, it’s high.
I think this is a very intuitive and common way to understand these terms; however, I think this is a mistake and I want to clarify it to help people out.
Because what if, like most fantasy, the work is somewhere in between lots of magic and no magic? All the tropes and none of the tropes? What if there’s a lot of magic in the world but the main characters don’t use it? What if there are fantasy races/species, but only in the background, or if every single character is a vampire and we never hear about other fantastical creatures?
Classifying on a “spectrum” gets really sticky really fast, because everyone will have different ideas of comparison.
Which is why it’s not a good barometer of classification.
The good news is, to get a better measure, there are only two or three questions we need to ask.
High Fantasy vs. Low Fantasy
The first question is the distinction between high and low—and yes, they are distinct. This is not a spectrum.
Is the story set in a fictional, secondary world which has no relation to earth and our reality?
If yes, it’s High Fantasy. If no, it’s Low Fantasy. Lord of the Rings is high fantasy. Harry Potter is low fantasy.
To ask the same question in another way:
Does our real world (earth) exist in any way that matters for the characters or the story?
If earth exists in any way that matters to even one character, it’s low fantasy.1
These are mutually exclusive categories. There is, however, one category that’s in-between, and one category that subverts this question, but even then everything fits into High or Low.
The one category in-between is called “portal fantasy”—often called “crossworlds” fantasy. People from this real world go to a fictional second world. Chronicles of Narnia is a great example. It’s a second world with witches and talking animals, but the characters are from the English countryside.
Portal fantasy is technically low fantasy but it gets to function like high fantasy. And it’s different than “hidden world” fantasy where there’s a hidden fantastical world on earth (again, think Harry Potter). Both portal fantasy and hidden world fantasy are low fantasy.
All three of these categories give the author tools and impose limitations, but that’s for another time.
Note how the high/low distinction has nothing to do with supernatural or fantastical elements. Elves and magic and dragons on earth? Low fantasy. No magic, all humans, hyper-realism but in a secondary world? High fantasy.
And by the way, I’m not making up this distinction. I’m relying here on what I believe are widely-agreed-upon definitions within publishing.
(I did mention one category that subverts the question, and I call that “mythological” fantasy. This was more common a century ago, but has gone largely out of style. Think of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, or other King Arthur adaptations. Arthur is in Britain, the lords send their sons to Eton College, the Atlantic Ocean exists… but the setting doesn’t have any sense of “realism”. You could replace every proper noun with a made up one, change nothing else, and it would be 100% high fantasy. These stories grew out of real-world folktales and helped form the bridge between “old legends” and “the genre of fantasy fiction,” so this high/low distinction sort of misses them. Modern stories don’t have this problem, even when there are mythological characters. E.g. Percy Jackson is low fantasy).
What About Subgenres?
So that’s the high/low distinction, but we still need all those subgenres to classify our works.
So I offer two more questions, and you can answer one or both:
What is the tone of the story? What is the content of the plot?
This is where we get subgenres. The open-ended nature of these questions mean that subgenres are going to be very amorphous, but that is the point! These categories are not mutually exclusive.
A subgenre title is just a pre-loaded answer to your friend asking you: “so what’s the vibe? Like, what happens?”
Here are some common subgenres:
Dark fantasy has elements of horror
Urban fantasy is set is normally present-day setting, and often-but-not-always an urban environment (and is usually low fantasy).2
Romantasy is fantastical romance/erotica
Epic Fantasy is huge, sweeping world events (and is usually high fantasy)
Historical Fantasy is low fantasy that’s more like historical fiction (high degree of realism & focusing on major historical events) but with some added magic.
Hidden World Fantasy is when real-world characters discover secret, fantastical things in this world (“there are elves in the woods behind my house!”)
Magical Realism is a subgenre of literary fiction which veers into fantasy.
Sword & Sorcery or heroic fantasy, focuses on adventures and personal battles of physically strong heroes. It generally has all the classic fantasy elements of magic and monsters.
There are countless others: paranormal, gothic, dystopian, steampunk, grimdark, political, military, even including things like fables and folklore… the point is, these are all fuzzy categories meant to give an impression to a prospective reader.
In many ways, these are marketing labels. Like your friend asking “what’s the vibe?” these subgenres are a way for readers to quickly sift through what they want or don’t want to read. And for writers to be able to tell them what’s what.
I like high epic fantasy, magic or no magic. I do not like paranormal gothic romance. Lots of people are the opposite. These labels—fuzzy as they are—help me and other readers find what we really love reading.
Do’s and Don’ts For Writers
On The High/Low Distinction
I think it’s worthwhile for writers to understand the limits and obligations that high, low, and portal fantasy settings impose. Earth exists and matters in your world, or it doesn’t. It’s a binary, and that question will create problems for you if you don’t know how to answer it. There’s more I could say here, but its beyond the scope of this post (and others have already unpacked that elsewhere on the web).
Basically, this label should matter to you because it matters for narrative. It will help you write.
Most of the time, people answer this high/low question implicitly anyway, so it’s not worth losing sleep over.
On Subgenres
Since subgenres are so amorphous, and since some of them overlap to a crazy degree, there’s no value in trying very hard to classify your work as “accurately” as possible.
First, you could very well end up with a running list of six or seven adjectives in front of your work, which does not help your readers find you. And readers finding you is the point of subgenre labels.
Instead, pick one or two that you know you want to write in. You probably already know which of these are most important to you, so just go for it.
Second, you could be wrong or you could be missing labels. So instead let your readers give you all those labels. Subgenres are for readers (and by extension, for publishers and retailers), so just go with the flow.
I didn’t set out to write “dark fantasy,” but a lot of readers labeled some of my short stories (For Want of Safe Harbor and Ash and Death on a Dangerous Road especially) as “dark fantasy.”
It wasn’t my goal. I’m just writing whatever I want to write.
Only later did I think “yeah, I guess that one description of the guy getting eaten by that monster was pretty gnarly.”
But you know what, I’ll take it! Because it means if people are looking for dark fantasy, they’ll find me.
It helps me reach an audience.
I wouldn’t have described my most popular short story (One Head as Tribute) as “pulpy” but a bunch of other people did. And that label was part of the reason it got shared around among fans of pulp fantasy fiction and bam! I gained a bunch of fans.
Write whatever the heck you want to write, focus on making worthwhile art, and don’t worry about subgenre. It will sort itself out! Let it.
So basically: Describe. Don’t prescribe.
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Alright. That’s it. What do you think? Hit me in the comments or on Notes.
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Why Hard & Soft Magic Systems Matter
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Note that there are some cases where a “secondary world” is kinda-sorta meant to be earth. Robert Jordan, for instance, has said that the world of The Wheel of Time is set on earth in a post apocalypse, but you’d never actually know it from the story whatsoever. It’s not like Hunger Games, where it’s clearly earth. No one thought Jordan’s world was earth, and indeed, no one could. Except that Jordan said so, outside the context of the story. That’s why I ask whether it matters to the story. Earth does not matter to The Wheel of Time in any way whatsoever.
This “modern” addition was helpfully made by
, who also points out that the “when” of a setting matters for these definitions as well. This is true for low and high fantasy. We can see that with tags like “gothic” or the various “punk” labels: steampunk, cyberpunk (technically sci-fi), etc.
Very thought provoking. You put forth numerous ideas in this essay worth considering, from the binary perception of high and low fantasy to the malleability of subgenres. I think the most important points come at the end, though:
1) Picking only one or two subgenres to label our stories as, so as to avoid confusing our readers. (A lesson I learned years ago but which I still occasionally slip up on.)
2) Drawing from your audience's interactions with and reactions to the story in order to pin down your primary subgenre(s).
I think many of us speculative/genre fiction writers have a tendency to get caught up in our own heads when it comes to describing our work in definitive terms. We're tempted to draw from as many angles as possible because that's often how we write, but that works directly against the goal of describing our work in simplest terms. And that's what those genre descriptions have to be - simple. If we overcomplicate them, we'll just confuse people and drive them away.
Decisiveness, then, becomes key in presenting our stories in genre terms. I write dark fantasies with a touch of mystery to them. There's technically more to my stories than those, yes, but they tend to be the primary subgenres, so that's how I classify them. (The Castle on the Hill being an exception as a romantic fantasy adventure.) Keeping genre descriptions simple is the best thing we can do for ourselves. We need to be mindful of this.
Interesting article. I typically don't think about these things when writing fantasy. It's good to know