#only half joking lksjfgdh;fslg

[la0hu]

like now i’m thinking about this old wattpad story i had formulated when i was 12 that was your typical run-of-the-mill paranormal werewolf romance, but i spent the entire prologue (which was the only piece of the story i ever actually wrote) explaining how the world received the news of the existence of werewolves, witches, and vampires and the immediate bigotry and political issues that sprung up in the aftermath, and thinking back to that impulse now, it’s really crazy because that’s usually the area where paranormal romance writers fail the most abysmally with their world-building. how come that genre doesn’t explore more the logistics of how our everyday would react or adapt to the existence of paranormal beings? one of the only urban fantasy series i respect does a great job handling worldbuilding (kate daniels), but every other one is like “i dunno they turn into wolves on command and have mates and have hot animalistic sex” and if there isn’t that, then we have J.K. “Werewolves have AIDS” Rowling.

and i think the reason why urban fantasy and paranormal romance is more interesting to me than your typical high fantasy or scifi is because the former genres are taking our current, real world and introducing magical, supernatural elements to it, rather that discarding our reality wholesale to make a completely new one. like i love my fair share of fantasy novels (and a FEW scifi), but i think too often authors take the typical atmosphere of a fantasy novel and build their story off that, so all the dialogue and styling and even stuff as major as political worldbuilding feels stale. like why are there always monarchies? why does everyone seem like they speak with a british accent? why are we perpetually in medieval england? (seraphina is probably the best example of why fantasy can get incredibly boring if you copy-paste the typical formula and have nothing new to offer). obviously paranormal romance and urban fantasy suffers from similar issues of tropes and formulaic writing, but at the very least they kind of play into the question of “wouldn’t it be cool if this stuff was real?”

even harry potter, which in one fell swoop boosted all genres of fantasy to the mainstream while encouraging an entire generation of the most insufferable nerds to be even more unbearable, dealt with this question of “what if there was a magical world within our own?”, though the way it answered this question was maybe the weakest point of rowling’s worldbuilding (and that’s saying a lot because she was really awful at it). but at least that question was there! there’s something very compelling about reading characters that look and talk and think like you, that grew up in a world very close to your own, except now there’s magic. there’s this crazy tech or some other fantastical element they are also dealing with, and i think it’s a harder job to write a modern-day character handling out-of-this-world stuff than it is to write your typical high-fantasy scifi-soldier type dealing with the same things -- but for me at least it’s more rewarding, because it feels less remote.