Alas for the Fantasy genre. As a branch of speculative fiction, it’s meant to be a wild playground for the imagination. The genre of myth, magic, monsters, and all sorts of unreal things… has been concentrated, codified, and reprocessed into focus-group friendly form, so that finding something creative and different when the only limit is the creator’s imagination is just as hard as finding it in more grounded genres, if not harder.
In the land of Anime, when the word “fantasy” is uttered these days the first of these ultraprocessed bricks of content to come to mind is no doubt the Shounen Power Fantasy Harem Video Game Isekai Fantasy, and while at times I have defended that good things can come out of even such an overplayed formula, I’ve also dredged up enough of the dreck of the genre combination for the time being.
But there is another repeatable demographic that I’m sure marketing teams love that also exists within the Fantasy space of the Anime sphere: the shoujo fantasy romance. It still takes place in what’s usually a quasi-period setting almost but not quite entirely unlike Europe, but rather than the ages of knights and heroes, it’s more the ages of ball gowns and courtly intrigue, a world in the style of Louis XIV’s Versailles rather than the Dragon Quest series. The stories, rather than being about “the strongest” trouncing monsters, demons, or anyone whose face he doesn’t like with some ultimate cheat power, will instead usually focus on the leading lady in some troubled relationship (whether it has trouble forming or trouble maintaining), with high rank and prestige on one side if not both, ranging from Cinderella stories to the sordid polygons of the Otome Games that call this particular portion of Fantasy home.
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