[hildea]

As I mentioned in the SF/Fantasy thread, I have a tendency to start to draft answers, and then never getting around to posting them because I want to answer all points I find interesting in the thread. I'll post this even if it isn't complete:

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia and the Dragonlance Chronicles all seem like they would fall under your above noblebright definition. So I wouldn't say that is a good signal of books to avoid.

Sounds about right for me, then

(I'm glad to have read LotR and the Narnia books, as they're foundational to the genre, but they're pretty far from what I prefer to read these days.)

I guess in the end, it just comes down to my feeling like noblebright and the various '-punks' are just terms made up by people on twitter that are not useful in a real book store/library/whatever.

All words are made up. Terms which are made up in conversation between readers and authors today are more likely to be useful for readers than terms made up between readers and authors forty years ago. I remember the terms "hard science fiction", "low fantasy", and "high fantasy" from when I was a teenager. They aren't terribly useful when I'm looking for books now.


I'm reminded of this blog post about discovering a genre, by Sarah Rees Brennan:

So my agent, the Lovely Kristin, had given up on getting me to write anything popular, because I am a monster who destroys all in my path! Or… I march to the beat of my own drummer, or something.

KRISTIN: So what’s this… thing that you want to write, then?
SARAH: Oh gosh okay wait till I tell you! It’s going to be awesome. You’ll see. It’s about a lady reporter who lives in a tiny English town.
KRISTIN: Always England with you…
SARAH: But this is different! Lexicon was cities. This is in the country, and that’s quite a different feel. You know what Stephen King called ‘The Peculiar Little Town’? Secrets. Beautiful surroundings. Oppressive feelings. And on the hill above the town, a house…
KRISTIN: Oh you’re writing a Gothic novel.
SARAH: … Beg pardon?
[ ... ]
KRISTIN: You know, Gothic novels. A girl trapped in a house… not sure if her surroundings are sinister, or sure who she can trust…
SARAH: Wait, like Rebecca? Oh hang on, wait, I’ve read tons of books like that! Huh. You know, I never put it together that all those books with a similar theme were a genre and not, you know. A weird coincidence. Gothic novels! How about that.
KRISTIN: They were very popular… in the eighties. You want to write a kind of book that was popular thirty years ago. This is a terrible idea.
SARAH: Terribly awesome.

...and then she went on to read a lot of gothics, and wrote about the conventions of the genre, and which ones she chose to use in her own book, and how and why she chose to use them. You don't need to know anything about the gothic genre to enjoy Brennan's Unspoken, but having read a lot of them when they were popular in the eighties, it was fun to see her take the tropes of genre apart and put them together in a new way.





On the answers to haertig's "LGBTRXQWZ+ group":

Adding a lot of nonsense characters to LGBT+ seems awfully like mocking to me. If I'm wrong, and that's a real acronym, I'd appreciate a link to help me learn better. Google didn't find it.

I'll try not to stray over into Politics & Religion territory, but this is a good parallel to the genre discussion: Noone's demanding that everyone know all of the intricacies of gender identity and sexuality. Some people find the rare terms useful, that's great for them. The rest of us can ignore the details, and just stick to some easy rules of manners (address people as they want to be addressed, basically). If someone finds it helpful to use a term I don't understand to describe themselves, that's no skin off my nose.

I'm probably skating close to white-knighting here, but the rights of transgender and non-binary people are currently under attack in my country, and mockery has been followed by more concrete harm (reduced access to health care).