Parker's Devices & Desires or Ricardo Pinto's The Stone Dance of the Chameleon which feature no magic whatsoever but take place in an alternate, pseudo-historical world, are still classified as fantasy. However, even magic itself isn't a required element, as novels such as Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint, K.J. When wizards are immortal, they don't need to train successors, and may not be able to. It may be taught through a master and apprentice system, or in a magical university, when it can be taught at all. Magitek usually lies at the extreme end of this scale. Its frequency varies from the stuff of legend, through to rare but available to the well connected, up to a ubiquitous part of everyday life. It might be either respected, feared, persecuted, or simply not believed in. Magic and Powers - Functional Magic is almost always present, though its role in the world can vary widely.There are some fantasies, however, which either deliberately take the opposite stance or present a more balanced worldview. Even urban fantasies will quite often depict cities as blots on the landscape, whose denizens are blinded to what really matters by material ephemera. Appeal to a pastoral ideal - Much genre fantasy, of all genres, appeals to the pastoral ideal, one reason for the pseudo-medieval settings.See Standard Fantasy Setting for the, er, standard fantasy setting. The inhabitants can be anything from human only, or include other species (or 'races' as fantasy likes to call them) of intelligent peoples such as elves, dwarves and orcs. It could be the remote past or future, or simply a-historical. A secondary world - A world whose connection with our present day world ranges from nominal to non-existent.And so on.Ĭommon features of the fantasy genre include: Religiously inspired works, like the Left Behind series, can have a basic good versus evil plotline that would fit well in High Fantasy, but few would place it there. The boundary with Science Fiction is notoriously ambiguous and the boundary with horror is often no less fuzzy. While the core of the fantasy genre is clear enough, there is no succinct definition that encompasses it all. Fantasy: it's stuff with magic in it, not counting Psychic Powers, or Magic from Technology, or anything meant to frighten, or Magical Realism, or anything strongly religious, or the technology behind the magic that is Magitek, or - where did that clean-cut definition go?

Fantasy anime landscape