Over ten years ago I wrote a post that ended up being one of my most read of all time. I had just come out of tutoring a course on genre fiction, and I was frustrated by the fact that when I looked up fantasy subgenres online I would get one of three things: a detailed look at a few specific subgenres that ignored all the others, a breakdown of someone’s own very personalised way of categorising things, or an epic three-digit list of every fantasy sub-genre under the sun, many of which I’d never heard of.

What I couldn’t find was a list of the most common sub-genre terms I saw being used regularly, with definitions, examples, and acknowledgement of the fact that people sometimes use the same term to mean different things, or use multiple terms to refer to the same type of story. Genres are, after all, not the rigid categories we would often like them to be, but constantly shifting, blurry-at-the-edges labels shaped by our nebulous collective understanding, the books that gain popularity, and the whims of marketing teams.

So back in 2015, I decided to do some research and write a list myself, in large part to clarify things in my own mind. Funnily enough, the resulting post – 18 Common Fantasy Subgenres – turned out to be helpful to more than just me, with visitors arriving regularly from search engines and links on educational sites.

Over the years I made a couple of minor updates to it, figuring that if school kids were landing on it I ought to ensure it wasn’t terribly outdated. Now, however, ten years later, a more substantial overhaul was needed. So I set to work… and then realised this would be an interesting opportunity to examine what has changed in the fantasy genre since I first wrote that list. What popular subgenres have risen or fallen? How has the use of terms changed? Here’s what I found:

Fantasy romance becomes romantasy

This is probably the obvious one that comes to many peoples’ minds, due to the recent surge in the popularity of romantasy.

Interestingly, in my original list I already included fantasy romance, even though the adult version of it was more niche at the time, because it was what I happened to be writing myself, and because I noticed that a lot of the popular young adult (YA) fantasy novels I enjoyed at the time could be categorised this way, as well as a few adult ones. In my philosophy, a book can “use” several genres at once, so the same way you can have a “YA fantasy romance” you can have an “adult fantasy romance”.

So what changed since then? Well, the term, for one. I first noticed the romantasy label cropping up at the end of 2023 when I was querying for my novel and looking at agent wish lists. When I realised this was just the new term for fantasy romance, I promptly changed the label in my query letters from “epic fantasy romance” to “epic romantasy”. I got more requests, though possibly that was just due to the genre’s rising popularity in general, regardless of the label, and the year after, I signed with my agent, and she has since been submitting my novel to all sorts of new romantasy-focused imprints that have appeared in the mean time.

Interestingly, I think due to the sheer popularity of romantasy and the eagerness of everyone to get on the band wagon, I’ve seen books I would have previously labelled as paranormal romance being put under the romantasy umbrella. I suspect romantasy is becoming, or perhaps has already become for some people, the supra-genre term for all fantasy with romance it in, be it high fantasy romance set in a secondary world, or paranormal romance set in our world with magical elements and supernatural beings.

I should perhaps note that in addition to romantasy, the term fantasy romance does still get used, as does romantic fantasy, and while some people define these as being different depending on whether the book is romance-first or fantasy-first, I feel like I mostly just see the three terms used interchangeably.

Young adult fantasy cedes some limelight to adult romantasy

Ten years ago, it was mostly YA fantasy authors like Laini Taylor, Leigh Bardugo, Kristin Cashore, Maggie Stiefvater, and Sarah J. Maas where I was getting my romance + fantasy fix (at the time Maas was still categorised as YA) plus a few adult authors such as Anne Bishop (Daughter of the Blood), Grace Draven (Master of Crows), and Jacqueline Carey (Kushiel’s Dart) where the content was just too adult and explicit to be slapped with a YA label. Now, it feels like the focus has very much moved to the adult space, with new adult or adult characters and, of course, more spice.

Don’t get me wrong, young adult fantasy is still a big subgenre and YA books are still very popular, but I’ve noticed the hype has shifted more to adult titles in the romantasy space.

Cosy fantasy emerges

This was a new entrant into my list, having emerged as a distinct sub-genre over the last ten years with popular books like Legends & Lattes and The House in the Cerulean Sea leading the way.

Back when I wrote my list, grimdark fantasy with its brutality, grim worlds, and morally grey characters, was already well established and seeing a surge, with books like Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns, Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora and George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones capturing attention. The Game of Thrones TV show premiered in 2011 and ran until 2019, and its massive popularity no doubt influenced this.

I feel like cosy fantasy (spelled cozy fantasy in the US) was perhaps the natural flip side to this as people looked for more uplifting and comforting stories, especially after the COVID pandemic and increasingly divisive politics and online discourse.

These smaller-scale more personal-stakes stories provide the comfort and optimism of down to earth characters and every day pleasures, and an escape into the cosy vibes tea shops and fairy cabins in the woods. They also often focus on found family, community, diversity and inclusivity, especially of LGBTQI+ characters, offering stories of acceptance, togetherness and joy.

Dark academia gains popularity

This was another interesting new addition to the list. It could be categorised under a pre-existing subgenre – namely gothic fantasy – but it’s unique enough and has gained enough popularity that I feel it now merits its own category.

Interestingly, dark academias don’t have to be fantasy books – the defining characteristics of this subgenre are the focus on academic institutions and scholars paired with the dark gothic aesthetic and tone, often involving murder mysteries, dark secrets, and corruption, but not necessarily magic. However, popular examples often are fantasies.

Books like Olivia Blake’s The Atlas Six, R.F. Kuangs Babel, and Naomi Novik’s A Deadly Education have contributed to the rise in popularity of this subgenre in the last ten years, but novels published much earlier are often seen as “seminal” works of the genre, such as Donna Tart’s 1992 novel The Secret History, which is not a fantasy.

Speculative fiction shifts in meaning

This was a more subtle shift I noticed, and perhaps some will disagree with me on this point, but ten years ago, “speculative fiction” seemed to be exclusively an umbrella term to encompass the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and everything in between – achieving something similar to the abbreviation SFF or SF&F.

Now, I often see “speculative” used as an adjective to describe a certain kind of “grounded” science fiction or fantasy, I guess you could call it “fantasy-lite”, where a story is set in the real world or adheres more to the conventions of non-SFF genres, but still contains supernatural elements, strange phenomenon, or an impossible premise – think The Midnight Library, The Time Traveller’s Wife, The Power, or Piranesi.

These types of stories have of course been around for much longer than a decade, but I guess having a term for it helps to signal when something is not hard-core epic fantasy or space-faring science fiction but involves a more subtle dose of the impossible.

I’ve sometimes seen magical realism used for the same stories, and there’s definitely overlap, though I would tend to stick by my original definition of magical realism as a story where the magical elements could be figments of the characters’ imaginations or merely allegorical, rather than something that is real and having real consequences in the story beyond the psychological.

Again, this was something I noticed when perusing agent wish lists, as it it affects my own work: I’m currently editing a novel I originally dubbed “science fiction” for want of a better term. Set in the real world, it’s about a linguist investigating an inexplicable phenomenon related to an ancient language. However, I struggled with the fact that it’s not very “sci-fi-esque” and is more like a mystery with sci-fi and fantasy elements. For the moment, I’ve decided to call it a speculative thriller… but we’ll see how that bears out when it comes to publishing and marketing it.

Dark fantasy remains confusing

This particular confusion hasn’t cleared from when I first wrote my list: people still sometimes use dark fantasy to mean a gothic fantasy with typical horror and gothic elements, and sometimes to mean a grimdark fantasy with gritty settings, violence, and morally grey characters… and to be fair, there is sometimes overlap there.

The confusion is, however, further compounded by a new combination I’ve sometimes seen being used, “dark romantasy”, which leaves people not entirely sure if what they’re in for is a dark fantasy + romance, or dark romance + fantasy (quite different things!), or darkness on both fronts.

Diverse representation and author identity

Another thing that has increased over the last decade across several genres, but especially in fantasy, is books by authors from traditionally underrepresented communities, as well as books that include representations of a broader range of cultures, sexualities, genders, disabilities and experiences. Of course, diverse books and authors existed ten years ago too, but I feel like they are getting more attention and distribution, and hopefully that will continue and increase in future.

Readers now regularly shelve and describe books with labels like LGBTQI+, queer, neurodivergent and own voices. I haven’t included these as subgenres of fantasy in my list, because the terms can be applied to non-fantasy genres, and because I’m not 100% sure whether these are “genres” in the traditional sense, but it’s worth noting that readers are using them in similar ways to describe and recommend fantasy books, and I’m curious to see how this will evolve in future.

Most subgenres are still the same

Apart from the above changes I highlighted, however, it seems to me that not a whole lot has changed over the last decade. Yes, new books have been written that put new twists on old traditions, and yes, some subgenres have gained more popularity and attention (e.g. romantasy, cosy fantasy, historical fantasy, gothic fantasy) while others now get less limelight than they used to (e.g. YA fantasy, grimdark fantasy, children’s fantasy), but the way we divide fantasy into subgenres seems to have remained fairly stable, all things considered.

__________________________

Have you also noticed any of the above changes? Do you see them the same way? Or are there any changes you think I’ve missed? Drop your thoughts in the comments.