This video is sponsored by WorldAnvil: 98% guaranteed to not be secretly werewolves. Now I know this may be a surprise to hear from someone who lives on the internet, but the real world is actually pretty cool. It's got its fair share of problems, but there's a lot to like about it. My only question is, where the hell are the dragons?! Urban fantasy is the term for a fictional setting that grounds itself in the real world, but augments this familiar setting with unfamiliar and/or magical elements like magic, or dragons, or mythical monsters... While urban fantasy is sometimes referred to as a genre, that's not really accurate. Genre usually tells something about what plot to expect, like thriller or mystery or romance. Any kind of story can happen in an urban fantasy which makes it more of a setting, in the same way that fantasy and sci-fi are settings for all different stories. And despite the name, urban fantasies do not have to take place in city environments, just grounded in real ones. Urban fantasy mixes the familiar with the fantastical, and most commonly takes place on an Earth where the typical rules of reality are supplemented by things like magic or a secret world of mythical creatures. It's a hybridized setting between realism and fantasy, and it's also very difficult to strictly define. Unfortunately, putting the unfamiliar in the familiar covers everything from superhero fiction to horror movies. But urban fantasy has a much more specific aesthetic than this broad description indicates. Urban fantasy stories typically focus on the interplay between the fantastical and the familiar. The heroes will be handling magic or fighting monsters, but they'll also drink coffee and ride buses and make timely pop-culture references and otherwise engage with the world the audience is presumed to be intimately familiar with. As a setting, urban fantasy holds the immense advantage that the audience already knows about most of it. The fantastical inserts will need to be explained and world-built, but the framework of the world is familiar reality. This has a unique benefit in that the audience has very little difficulty relating to the setting. High fantasy might have parts that resemble familiar settings, but fundamentally it's a totally different world and the audience is going to need it explained to them before they understand what's going on. Sci-fi is often set in the future of our world, but even if it supposedly used to be our world, things are very different by the time the story takes place. The world has changed significantly from the recognizable. Dystopias and post-apocalypses also fit this category, and due to this unfamiliarity, the world itself has to be explained to the audience before they can really get going. And while audiences can relate to a lot, giving them a fully accurate and recognizable reality to serve as the base of the world makes it easier for them to put themselves in this space. Basically, any fantastical world that's built from the ground up will only be as comprehensible as the parts the audience is explicitly shown. The audience can't interpolate because it's not a world they're familiar with. Urban fantasy has the unique advantage that a core component of the world is fully recognizable. Sure, the fantastical overlay might intersect with the familiar world in unexpected ways, but fundamentally, we know how the basics of this world works. This core relatability is seriously useful, because instead of curiosity about the world overall, the audience is more curious about how the fantastical elements intersect with the familiar world. Characters will encounter unfamiliar threats, but respond in familiar ways: phone calls, Google searches, hospital visits, whatever. It all grounds the audience in the fictional world. Now, the stereotype of urban fantasy these days is stuff like The Dresden Files or Harry Potter or Percy Jackson or roughly half of everything Guillermo del Toro has ever done. But on examination, a lot of stories fall under this umbrella, even ones we might not expect. So let's real quick run down some common urban fantasy formats. And these mostly aren't mutually exclusive. A lot of them can be mixed and matched. First and most popular is the secret world: a world that resembles reality if you're a normal person, but has a secret fantastical world hidden just beneath the surface where all the magical or fantasy elements are hidden. This is a very common basic premise for urban fantasy, and these stories often begin with a character being abruptly introduced to the reality of the secret world and then struggling to catch up. In a sense, this is the simplest form of urban fantasy, as by all outside appearances, it leaves the familiar world untouched, and you can just include all kinds of stuff as long as you justify it staying a secret. For instance: Percy Jackson has the Myst, a magical illusion that prevents normal people from noticing any gods or monsters wandering around. But some stories don't really have a clean explanation for how the secret world stays secret. I talked about this a while back when I did the magic trope talk. Now, the inverse of the secret world is the unsecret world, a world that broadly resembles reality but has some overt fantastical elements that are integrated into those realistic elements, like non-human characters, magic, etc. This is usually played something like an alternate Earth: a what-if scenario with Earth developing alongside some kind of fantastical element that changed it from what we know, but not too much. Your barista might be an elf, your boss might be a centaur, but you know, you still have baristas and bosses. In some cases, the fantastical elements are actually a recent development. Some stories have magic returning to the world in the modern era after having been gone for after having been gone for centuries or millennia. There's also cases like Gravity Falls where the fantastical stuff is very blatant, but highly localized. So it's locally not really a secret, but probably wasn't something the characters expected to find when they arrived. The unsecret world is not as common as the secret world, probably because it's harder to convincingly world-build. Some movies, like Bright, take the approach where they don't really world-build there's just centaurs and orcs and orc racism and... I mean, I'm sure some people liked it. But anyway. Another incredibly common urban fantasy variant is, it's reality, but all the myths are true. This produces a world like the recognizable one we know, with the added factor that on some level, all the folkloric figures, mythical gods and heroes, every story you heard as a kid and every nightmare under the sun, are real things that can show up at random and cause problems. This one has the benefit of being incredibly easy to set up if you don't think too hard about it. You don't need to pick and choose anything. You don't even need to explain yourself beyond a generic, "All stories have a grain of truth to them" or whatever. What's in this world? Everything's in this world! I refer to this variety as "kitchen sink urban fantasy." Because it contains everything but the kitchen sink. Neil Gaiman's Sandman follows this approach with the simple explanation that stories hold power and belief sustains gods. Basically if people think it's real, it's real. This is also sometimes a background approach to more specific brands of urban fantasy. Your story might spend most of its time focusing on a very small cast of very specific fantastical people, but in the background, there's all kinds of weirdos running around. Related to the kitchen sink approach is the more specific sub-variant, "monsters are real", a subcategory of urban fantasy where the only explicitly focused-on fantastical elements are the scary nightmare ones the heroes have to fight or hunt, like ghosts, vampires, werewolves, demons, etc. This format is popular for monster-of-the-week stories for self-explanatory reasons. The heroes usually hunt the monsters, but sometimes the heroes also are monsters. When it overlaps with the secret world, the heroes are usually secret protectors of the ignorant humans who don't even know monsters are real. When it's the unsecret world version instead, you tend to get something more like a vampire apocalypse where monsters are everywhere and it's just a real bad time. There's also "magic is real and struggling to adapt", wherein magical fantastical beings live among us, but are struggling to find their place in a world that's familiar to us, but wildly unfamiliar to them. Maybe they're a refugee from a magical Otherworld. Maybe they're a time-displaced folk hero. Maybe they're a God denied their worship. But whatever the explanation, they're not having a great time. Sometimes this includes the implication that they've only recently started hiding their magical nature and trying to pass for human, and all the old legends came from a time when they didn't have to be discreet. This can also be used for some major allegorical purposes, as it's basically an immigrant story where the immigrants are magic. Another structural variant is the "reality bookend" variety, where the characters begin in a familiar world, travel to an unfamiliar one, and return to familiarity in the end. This one is actually a little tricky, because not every reality bookend story is urban fantasy. The distinction is basically how familiar the unfamiliar world is and how our heroes engage with it. The animated miniseries Over the Garden Wall feels like urban fantasy because the otherworldly woods our heroes are transported to mostly have the aesthetic of historical Americana, with just enough unnerving weirdness to hit that fantastical threshold. And the heroes never lose track of the fact that they're trying to find their way home. In the first episode, Wirt even talks about looking for a phone or seeing if someone will drive them home, which really helps keep this otherwise fantastical setting grounded in familiarity. On a similar note, the animated miniseries Infinity Train takes place in a magical slash super-advanced-technological train, that's kind of its own dimension. And while that's definitely unfamiliar, the main character is a very grounded Midwestern girl who basically spends the whole time trying to figure out the rules of the place so she can get home. So again, it keeps it grounded. It helps that the characters we're following are from our world and have a very familiar perspective on things most of the time. But something like Narnia or The Wizard of Oz doesn't quite feel like urban fantasy, because the other worlds are purposefully very unfamiliar and separated from reality and the heroes undergo all kinds of crazy adventures very specific to the fantastical parts of the world. Another factor is that both of those stories are rather older. Even if the characters would have been relatable at the time, by now, they're basically old-timey and that's already a degree of separation from the modern audience. Both of those stories feel a lot more like high fantasy with a framing sequence, and the characters usually aren't that stressed about trying to get home, which would help keep them grounded in reality, which would help with the urban fantasy tone. On that note, you also sometimes get historical fantasy as a variant, where the familiar real world setting is actually a historical one instead of a modern one, but the fantastical elements are integrated as normal. Now while this is what happens naturally to urban fantasy stories as reality moves on, uh, sometimes they also do this on purpose. Assassin's Creed really likes doing this integrating fantastical elements into historical settings. And so does Castlevania, especially the Netflix series. It's not uncommon to blend this with a kitchen sink approach to make a hybrid setting that's mostly historical, but contains mythical or folkloric elements alongside of the historical ones. It seems like it's kind of the rule that if you're doing a story set in ancient Greece, you have to do it this way. Oddly, some superhero stories qualify as urban fantasy. This is another tricky one, because if you take the rote definition of familiar setting, fantastical content, technically every superhero story would qualify. But a handful of superhero stories actually focus on how those fantastical elements interact with the real world, where most superhero stories are content to just hit things with the fantastical stuff. Neil Gaiman's Sandman does this really well, interweaving familiar reality with the unfamiliar, endless with the half familiar superheroics of the DC Universe. John Constantine is also archetypical for this, existing in the DC Universe, but mostly dealing with personal-scale threats like demonic possession. It's really a matter of scale. The urban fantasy superhero stories are the ones that actually scale down and let us see the familiar in the context of the unfamiliar, rather than just focusing on the bombastic superheroics. I mean Thor is a literal Norse God engaging with the modern world, which seems like peak urban fantasy, but his stories almost never feel like urban fantasy because he rarely actually deals with that familiar modern world. Instead, he's usually hitting supervillains, tangling with Loki, or losing his hammer. It's unfocused from the familiar, which kind of precludes reaping the benefits of urban fantasy. In contrast, there's the superhero world of Astro City, which very much resembles Marvel and DC, purposefully so, but the stories almost entirely focus on the real human elements. And not in a edgy grimdark Watchmen kind of way, but like, what would it actually be like for the normal people who live on this Haunted Hill that's protected by this hanged man entity or maybe this vampire Batman figure or what. And because of that angle, because of the real human angle on all of these superheroics, most of the stories end up feeling very urban fantasy. Also, I just highly recommend reading that in general. It's really, really good. But you know what? Not everything needs to be deep. A staple of kids' adventure stories is "magic is real, pathos be damned": a variant of urban fantasy where the heroes' mundane lives are interrupted by some kind of magical thing happening and this thing serves as an inciting incident for a magical adventure of some sort. This is a very simple, very chill kind of urban fantasy, and it sort of falls into the common kid attitude of, "I don't know how the world works yet, so magic could be real." It's appealing in its simplicity and makes for good light-hearted entertainment. It's not uncommon for the kid heroes to encounter some kind of magical MacGuffin which then facilitates a string of low stakes adventures. These stories usually don't put much focus on the implications of the magical or fantastical Otherworld; the whole point of this variant is, "This is magic. Let's roll it." The scale of the adventure will usually be smaller, like exploring the exact parameters of the magic item they found or using it to travel to interesting but otherwise mundane settings. Authors E. Nesbit, Edward Eager and Eva Ibbotson all wrote a lot of books like this. And, uh, if you remember the Magic Treehouse series, that's basically this too. So with all the major setting variants out of the way, now we hit the main three urban fantasy subgenres. First on the ticket is paranormal romance: a story where the exploration of this fantastical world is entirely centered on a romance: typically between a normal human and some variety of fantastical being. The human serves as the audience's inroad into the secret world, while the other one serves as their guide through the unfamiliar. The main plot is of course a romance, often complicated by the fact that our star-crossed lovers are worlds apart by nature of the aforementioned mundane fantastical split. While most people probably default to thinking of Twilight for this, there's actually a huge number of shapeshifter romances that basically fill this sub-genre. No, I haven't read any of them, but yes, all their descriptions are hilarious. Good for dramatic readings at parties, too. Next up is urban horror, where the fantastical elements are explicitly real spooky. Oddly, a lot of horror movies, again, technically fall into this category, as, if the threat of the week is a spooky ghost or an unkillable murderer of some kind, it implies a fantastical element to an otherwise uncomfortably grounded setting. But again, if this fantastical angle isn't really focused on, it doesn't quite hit that aesthetic sweet spot of urban fantasy. On the other hand, cosmic horror frequently does, as the horror of the unknown is explicitly highlighted by its contrast with the familiar. The eldritch fish god may be fantastical and otherworldly, but the sleepy New England town harboring its cult is creepy specifically because it feels so grounded. Stephen King thrives on this. So does Stranger Things and most modern Lovecraft adaptions. Honestly, if you're looking for this specific brand of horror, I recommend the podcast The Magnus Archives, because it does a really good job integrating these really, really creepy cosmic horror elements into very, very realistic grounded lives mostly because it's basically a series of just anecdotes from people who experience the weird shit, being read by a person who works at an institute that collects these stories, and it's really effective horror because it kind of builds this slow dread tension. Also, the more you listen, the more you start putting together what's actually going on, and the greater scope cosmic horror of it all, and it's honestly— I just really recommend it. Give it a shot. And then, there's urban noir. It's surprisingly common for urban fantasy stories to be mysteries! Now this might be because urban fantasy already contains an element of secrecy and uncovering hidden facets of the world, which resonates well with espionage and dark, noir-style mystery solving. The Dresden Files is kind of the archetypical example for this sub-genre, But the concept really got started all the way back in 1964 with the Lord Darcy series, an alternate history by Randall Garrett where magic is real and the main character is a wizard detective. Carnival Row also took this approach, with the minor change that the world that show takes place in isn't Earth at all, it just kind of looks like it. Urban noir is very fun because mysteries are fun, and these are mysteries that have magic in it, and also it's a very useful way for the writer to show off their world to the readers, because of course the detective is likely to be investigating in all kinds of weird places which the writer can then show off. So it really synergizes very well. So! That was a lot of categorizing, but as you can see urban fantasy covers a lot of ground. There's a bunch of ways to approach "Earth, but with fantasy stuff". We've already discussed the major benefit of urban fantasy as a setting: that the familiar base of the world guarantees the audience has a good frame of reference to handle the less familiar fantasy elements. There's also honestly just something really fun about seeing something you're familiar with made cooler by the inclusion of Greek gods or dragons or wizards. It just - feels good, you know? And writing urban fantasy is especially fun because you get to figure out how these fantastical elements interact with the real world. Pick a real-world location you're familiar with, and explore the potential of extending it into unreality. Cool old house with a portal in the upstairs closet! Public park where the statues come alive at night! Places you really don't want to get lost or you'll end up elsewhere without realizing! This specific appeal might be while urban fantasy is an increasingly popular setting for role-playing games, since that's an excellent medium for a grounded, familiar setting you can explore to find the crazy fantastical bits hidden underneath. CollegeHumor did this in their Dimension 20 series with a season called The Unsleeping City (that I highly recommend!) that takes D&D and sets it in modern New York. It works way better than I expected. This is also a lot of the appeal of games like Call of Cthulhu for the urban horror variant. Critical Role did a one-shot for it called Shadow of the Crystal Palace that I also recommend. But for all its fun quirks and great immersion value, there is a unique pitfall writers face when dealing with urban fantasy. See, a lot of the time the fantastical elements of the urban fantasy world are primarily drawn from real world mythology or folklore. This helps keep the world grounded in familiarity, as, if the writer is keeping their new world-building to a minimum, their urban fantasy world won't actually be introducing any unfamiliar concepts. It's just suggesting that for example, the Greek gods you know from the myths are physically real and just full of interpersonal issues. Or that vampires and werewolves walk among us in disguise, or that the fair folk never went away, they just live among us in hiding or whatever. But the tricky part comes when selecting what to include. Because if you try and draw any kind of hard line between folklore and mythology and cultural praxis and religion - you can't. It's all one big gray area, a space of stories in a society, and while repurposing fun bits of folklore for narrative oomph is all well and good, rewriting someone's cultural heritage or religion isn't such a fun casual thing. One person's folklore is another person's deeply held belief system. Every folklore came from somewhere, and sometimes it's very important to someone. So at what point does the historical mythology of a culture become public domain for you to screw with, and is there a hard line for what you shouldn't screw with? Here's an example of the difficulty here. Some urban fantasy written by white people likes throwing around terms like skin-walker or wendigo in their lore. The first is usually used to mean shapeshifter, while the second is your classic big scary monster. (Sometimes also some kind of creepy elongated deer headed humanoid being or whatever.) But the terms get used instead of the generic ones because it adds that spice of mysticism or exoticism or whatever. The problem is, the skin-walker is very specifically a Navajo term for a harmful witch that is very specifically malevolent, and more importantly, they don't talk about them with non-Navajo! It's private! Yeah, the term sounds cooler than shapeshifter, but it doesn't mean shapeshifter, and it's someone else's thing. Using it in your story potentially has a much more negative impact than just using "shapeshifter" and it'll get all the nitpicky nerds like me on your ass for mythological inaccuracy. And the wendigo, which isn't even pronounced like that, is an Algonquin cannablistic monster that's usually a very direct allegory for the monstrosity of human greed, but since it's cannibalistic and snow-related, it usually just gets used to mean Yeti or sometimes big elongated deer-headed humanoid thing. These terms have bled into pop culture and get treated like folkloric public domain, but they're not, and using them willy-nilly in your story without regard for their origin is dubious at best. Now since this is a matter of cross-cultural information flow and potential appropriation and stuff, this is a very tricky space to navigate and unfortunately, there is no clean universal solution to any of it. Nothing is ever 100% fine. The fact is, any bit of cool mythology or folklore you might want to use has the potential to be incredibly important to someone, and messing with it for fiction purposes could hurt them. Now, how responsible an artist is for the impact of their art on their audience is another very complicated gray area, and I'm not gonna pretend to be the magical chosen one who can fix cultural appropriation and death of the author in one fell swoop. But that said, there are some common-sense techniques you can use to help avoid catastrophic goofiness in your writing. First off, when examining someone else's folklore, mythology, and other culturally anchored narratives it's most important to remember that context is everything. Religions, mythologies, and folklore are all anchored in the culture they came from. If there's one thing I've learned from my mythological deep dives into the histories of gods and folk heroes, it's that the time, place, and society of origin of a story all have incredible impact on it. When Astarte was brought to Greece by the Phoenicians, the Greeks took away her War God status and turned her into Aphrodite because of some local social context that made a goddess of both love and war seem ridiculous, but then later when the Romans worshipped her as their Genetrix, she regained some war associations because she was used as a symbol of their military might. Dionysus was a Mycenean god of madness and death until the Romans partied too hard and decided to focus exclusively on how good his booze was. The stories of a society are anchored in multitudes of cultural context, a lot of which is un-obvious or potentially lost to history, and without that context, the story is incomplete. So many Greek myths make zero sense on paper until you pull back and contextualize. Why did Athena, a notoriously level-headed goddess of wisdom, tactics, and the arts turn Arachne into a spider in a fit of furious jealousy over her prodigious artistic skill? Well, because Ovid, who wrote that myth down, had a well-documented grudge against authority due to his own mistreatment, and the rest of his work is also dedicated to casting the gods as unreasonable tyrants and the mortals they punished as unappreciated geniuses. Without the context, it just feels weird or out of character. With the context, the full picture begins to appear. And if this exact thing is your bread and butter, then watch Blue's History Maker series, because it goes into exactly this. So since context is what really makes a myth or folk tale, if you're taking something from someone else's mythology and separating it from its context to use it in your story, You need to be really aware of what you're doing, because stripped of context, most of these stories lose most of their meaning. For instance, American Gods pulled this decontextualization off quite well, because they did it deliberately. In-story, the gods are stuck in America, having been brought there by their worshipers and then slowly abandoned, so they have been physically removed from their original context, and so these gods that would be thriving in their home cultures are struggling to survive in this new one. Because this is explicitly a factor in the plot, It's nowhere near as jarring to the audience, even in the face of pretty drastic character changes. Odin in the legends is a trickster, a warrior, a seeker of knowledge and an all-around pretty cool dude, where in American Gods, he's been reduced to sleazy con artistry and is actually kind of
an antagonist. This is a very bold move. But in-universe it makes sense. The Greek gods in Percy Jackson are also canonically established as having changed alongside Western civilization, with Olympus even relocating to New York to follow it, which acknowledges the weirdness of recontextualizing the ancient Greek pantheon in modern America. But meanwhile, like I mentioned before, if you take a term like wendigo and pull it out of its very specific cultural context of hunger, greed, cannibalism in the cold heart of winter, you get something that doesn't resemble itself at all. At that point, just don't use the term. What's even the point? Basically, always make sure you understand the context of what you're drawing on, even if you're gonna decontextualize it in your story. And more broadly, if you don't know what you're talking about, don't put it in your story. This is basically what "write what you know" means. It doesn't mean you're not allowed to write stuff if you don't intimately understand it. It means do your research before you put it in a book forever. Anyway, it's also good to take a minute to consider if you're punching down or not. Now punching down is a term from comedy used to refer to making jokes at the expense of a less powerful or more marginalized group, and while this isn't comedy, pulling out someone's cultural heritage and messing with it for narrative kudos can be similarly invasive or irreverent. This is basically just a common sense consideration to avoid being unnecessarily rude or hurtful. If you're looking to use the mythology of say an enormous and thriving ancient empire like Greece, Rome, Egypt, China, or Scandinavia, that's probably not punching down. But things like Jewish folklore and Native American or Australian Aboriginal concepts might be better left alone, unless you specifically belong to that group, just for the sake of politeness. Honestly, most of these tips are just me restating be polite. And it's amazing how controversial that is, isn't it? Another quick thing to consider is if your portrayal of this fantastical thing or belief system includes a portrayal of practitioners of this belief system. Messing with ancient gods is one thing, but once you start messing with the portrayal of a group of people who worship that God, you're stepping out of the fantasy zone and into the stereotyping zone, which is always a bit of a spicy area. For instance Rick Riordan is big into reimagining classic Greek mythology, gods and monsters alike, but he specifically apologized for stereotyping modern Hellenism in the early Percy Jackson books because he genuinely didn't know it existed. While rewriting the gods was all right, directly sassing the people who worshipped them was dubious. And on a related note, you probably want to check if the stuff you're messing with is part of a still-living religion. This is actually a bit tricky to define, since there's been all kinds of revivals and neo-paganism and stuff in the last few decades, but some religions have actually persisted contiguously for centuries or millennia, and if the ancient myths and gods you're looking to mess with or adapt are still actively part of someone's belief system, then playing around with them is rather more weighty than one might think. For instance Hinduism has been continually practiced for thousands of years. So an enterprising urban fantasy author who looks at the old stories of, say, Kali and thinks "Gee, she's cool, I wonder how I can use her in my work!" might want to remember that those stories and gods are still part of an active religion that is very important to quite a lot of people. In contrast, while there have been neo-pagan revivals of worship of the Greek and Egyptian gods, these were both reconstructed in the '70s and '80s after the original religions all but died out in the third and fourth centuries. The ancient myths are not contiguously connected to the modern practice and the disconnect from the ancient cultural context is so extreme that we'll never know what the original religion was really like. I mean, obviously. It's a reconstruction. By definition, it's a modern narrative created by pulling together disparate elements from an ancient source In short, it's doing exactly the same thing an urban fantasy writer would, only it made a religion instead of a YA novel. This is a case where the old myths have a much more tenuous connection to a modern audience and repurposing them isn't quite as spicy as, for instance, writing reimagined urban fantasy lore based on the Bible. Which is actually a good example to use here because it helps demonstrate that this is not actually a hard deal-breaker. Dante's Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost are both highly acclaimed works of Bible fanfic that seriously reimagine some core tenets of the original text, and they were both pretty well received. And more recently, Good Omens is a work of urban fantasy where all the repurposed fantastical source material was drawn from the Bible. Some people got upset, but the story still worked. Your source material being part of a still-living religion doesn't actually preclude you from getting creative with it. Like I said, there's no clear-cut answers here Just a lot of stuff to take into consideration. Not all stories are equally malleable without consequence, but that doesn't mean you should avoid everything that might upset your audience. And when in doubt, you might just want to get a sensitivity reader. Screening for hot-button issues is kind of their job. But with all that said, the most important thing to remember when doing any sort of artistic project is that perfection is unattainable. It's an unfortunate truth that no matter how careful you are or how good your intentions may be, your art will hurt someone. It's just a fact of life. And unless that's actively what you're setting out to do, you can and should probably try to minimize that, but unfortunately, the only guaranteed way to not upset anybody is to never have existed and if you're so hung up on sanding off all the rough edges and making sure your art doesn't upset anyone you will never be able to finish it. So do your best, use common sense, be polite, but don't drive yourself to distraction trying to make sure absolutely nobody is upset by your work. Aim for a good-faith effort to do your best. Research thoroughly, think critically, write creatively, apologize if necessary, and you'll produce the best work you can reasonably hope to. That's all any of us can do. It's kind of drifted away from urban fantasy... Uh, good genre. Interesting stories. Surprisingly a bit of a minefield to work in. Still my favorite genre, so... Yeah! And thanks again to WorldAnvil for sponsoring this video. Long time viewers probably already know that WorldAnvil is a dope browser-based world-building software that lets you organize your world-building all in one place. Along with its tools for world maps, plot and story timelines, and custom wiki databases for major people, places, and events in your world, They've also got a full customizable calendar and, the most recent addition, family trees! Great for keeping track of your secret werewolf lineage or magical sorcerers bloodline. And of course, you can keep your world private if you want, or make it publicly visible if you really want to show it off. WorldAnvil is constantly being upgraded to add more features and make it more streamlined and easier to use. If this all sounds useful for you, the good news is that all those base features are free. And if you want to spring for bonus bells and whistles, you can get 20% off a Master or Grand Master membership with the promo code overlysarcastic.
For anyone who doesn't follow OSP, Trope Talk is basically all those "Your favorite example of..." threads in video essay form and it's great.
How is it that every one of my pop culture and internet interests end up on this sub? It's bewildering
I have wanted to know who came up with the Wendigo having antlers for the longest time, but I still don’t know where that trend started. I thought it might have been a 00s phenomenon, because of media like Lost Tapes. Then I discovered an illustration for Algernon Blackwood’s The Wendigo with the antlers. Of course this was no doubt illustrated way later, and Blackwood’s story makes no mention of the creature’s appearance, but unless this was drawn in the last twenty years in a very retro art style, I think it shows this idea forming even earlier in American pop culture.
Originally, it seems like the Wendigo was either a giant with an infinite or constantly growing stomach or an invisible spirit that entered people depending on the indigenous nation you ask. That seems to have metamorphosed into people becoming monsters, which results in the unfortunate tendency of Wendigos being used as knockoff werewolves.
One week Woolie will bring up OSP and then it will be OSPposting week. I can't wait.
Bright is such a weird movie in urban fantasy genre. Fantasy races appear 1000 years ago, nothing really changes in the world with these fantasy races being coded in known stereotypes of our world.
And now I have a whole new list of things I need to check out, while waiting for the next Dresden novel.
A lot of japanese mangaka and LN writers need to watch this video.
I just want to point out that Blue said the word Blorb during the Hollow Knight stream.
The really interesting thing about Cop Craft is the way it pretends to be dubbed from english to japanese.