Well, now that we’ve spent six weeks exploring some common fantasy races, we can start to look at fantasy trends instead.
If you guys are familiar with fantasy, you know it goes through trends. We’ve been in an urban fantasy trend in general, lately, but then there are trends within urban fantasy, usually dependent on which race is big at the moment.
Early on in urban fantasy, faeries and related fae were the main race. Then we switched to vampires, and then angels, and there was a bit of a mermaid surge, and it seems like we’re just finishing up a zombie trend. And there’s werewolves in there somewhere.
So I’m a bit interested to see where urban fantasy turns to next. Will it cycle back around? Will we run out of humanoid-esque creatures and head on to even weirder things? Personally, I’m hoping for kracken. Small kracken, lurking in creeks in city parks, waiting for people to wander too close to the edge…
(And then, invariably, one kracken falls in love with an average-looking teenage girl and then the whole thing devolves from there.)
Rumor says, however, that epic fantasy is going to come back into the forefront of the genre. Man, I hope so. I love epic fantasy, and sometimes it’s hard–especially recently, it seems–to find good, original, character-driven epic fantasy. So I love the idea.
Heard anything about upcoming fantasy trends, Squiders? Have anything you’d personally like to see? Anything you don’t want to see?
