Is the Fantasy genre mainstream?

[Bullgrit]

Is the Medieval Sword & Sorcery / Warrior & Wizard / Tolkien & Conan Fantasy genre "mainstream" nowadays? Is it a common aspect of our greater popular cultures? More so than 10, 20, 30, 40+ years ago? Or is it [still] a small subculture?

If so, what has had the biggest influence on moving it into the mainstream? How much influence has D&D had with making Fantasy mainstream?

Bullgrit

 

[Salamandyr]

Not to the extent cop stories are, but now that I think about it, yeah, a little. Some of the biggest properties in fantasy have recently been made into theatrical or television properties that have a fairly wide appeal, a large number of people are conversant with the typical tropes of fantasy, and it at least seems ubiquitous enough to warrant parody (the recent "Your Highness" for instance).

I think the reason is conglomeration of factors, the biggest of which is probably how the geeks and nerds that grew up haunting the fantasy section of the bookstore and playing D&D are now the people writing the television shows and greenlighting the movie productions. Another big factor is that fantasy has finally been embraced by women in a big way. There have always been women interested in fantasy, but their options tended to be limited. Nowadays, entire swathes of fantasy literature are aimed directly at them, especially in the urban fantasy genre. Urban fantasy actually creates a field of relatively affordable material for movie and television treatment (since sets and costumes are a whole lot cheaper), and that opens up the field for more ambitious properties involving your typical swords, spells and flying monsters.

It also doesn't hurt that the LOTR movies were really good.

 

[Umbran]

Whe you put it that way, I'm tempted to say the question is ill-formed.

A genre is a category of a particular media, art, or cultural element. So, there's jazz music, fantasy literature, and Tex-Mex food. The art-form is often implied, but it must be present. That's because a genre is defined by qualities and themes of the works within the genre. Consider: there's modern Japanese food, and modern Japanese architecture - both reasonable genres. But they have no reasonable overlap in their expression, being completely disparate media - they couldn't share aspects of their execution*. There is no "modern Japanese" genre that encapsulates both.

So, there's fantasy image-art, fantasy literature, fantasy computer games, and fantasy movies, but I'd question if there's an overall "fantasy genre" that encapsulates them all.

IMHO, anyway.

But, that being said, define what qualifies as "being mainstream", and maybe we can tell you something useful anyway. It seems to me that pretty much everyone born in the US knows what a dragon is, what a fairy is, and what witches, ghosts, wizards, unicorns, vampires and werewolves are - those are all elements of fantasy genres. We've been inundated with Disney's versions of various fairytales for decades, everyone knows of King Arthur and Merlin.

So, if that's what you mean, then yes, fantasy is mainstream. It has been mainstream for longer than "literature" has existed as we know it today, honestly. D&D doesn't have much to do with it.





*Unless you're building a structure out of food, I suppose.

 

[Beginning of the End]

Is the Medieval Sword & Sorcery / Warrior & Wizard / Tolkien & Conan Fantasy genre "mainstream" nowadays? Is it a common aspect of our greater popular cultures? More so than 10, 20, 30, 40+ years ago? Or is it [still] a small subculture?

The significant shift was in 1977 when Star Wars fundamentally changed movie-making and made SFX-ladened films the tent-pole of the industry. Fantastical video games have also helped push fantasy and SF more into being an "every day" sort of thing.

But these were only shifts. A decade before that, "FRODO LIVES" and Stranger in a Strange Land were important parts of '60s counter-culture. A decade before that, movie theaters were filled with SF/fantasy B-films. A couple decades before that, pulp fantasy and SF magazines were selling millions of copies.

 

[Leatherhead]

It's not so much fantasy being mainstream as it is people noticing that nerds have money.

General Nerdsploitation is on the rise, with stuff like "geeky" TV shows, movies about comic books and fantasy novels, and of course video games (like the obvious cash cow, WoW). That doesn't mean that the culture at large has accepted and integrated it (and they haven't, judging by portrayals), just that the media will put out anything so long as there is enough money involved.

 

[Bullgrit]

It's not so much fantasy being mainstream as it is people noticing that nerds have money.

And, apparently, a lot of money.

Or maybe more of the general population is nerds/geeks than ever known, before?

Bullgrit

 

[Ariosto]

The biggest influence on making it mainstream was making it a genre.

 

[pawsplay]

Certainly, literary high fantasy is a genre. To the extent I don't hardly read it any more. I never really got into detective fiction; I love detective stories, but that genre had been long solidified before I was born. I think as of the late 90s, fantasy has gotten equally hackneyed. There is still good stuff out there, but there is so much more that is published for an easy buck... not that the authors probabably aren't, in many cases, sincerely creative, but the gatekeeping process is very different for a well-entrenched genre. It's mainstream enough that are probably ten times as many people reading D&D novels as there are playing D&D.

I think, with the Harry Potter movies and LOTR, cinematic high fantasy just became a mainstream genre, with Eragon as an example of a genre-formulaic film (naturally, also based on a novel).

 

[Umbran]

I think as of the late 90s, fantasy has gotten equally hackneyed.

I don't think it has to do with the passage of time. It isn't as if fantasy was magically all good when it was young.

From Sturgeon's Law:

The first written reference to the adage appears in the March 1958 issue of Venture, where Sturgeon wrote:

"I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.

Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms."

According to Philip Klass (William Tenn), Sturgeon made this remark in about 1951, at a talk at New York University at which Tenn was present.

The hackneyed nature of literature seems to have been consistent for more than a half-century. Probably forever.

 

[ThirdWizard]

The hackneyed nature of literature seems to have been consistent for more than a half-century. Probably forever.

Another way to put it is, it's easy to listen to a 70s Rock radio station and think, "Man, they really made good music back then. Everything is awesome!" if you don't think about the fact that they're not playing all the crap that was made back then.