I wonder exactly which day it was that the amount of time Comedy Central had spent broadcasting The Daily Show finally caught up to the amount of time they had spent broadcasting PCU
This was supposed to be a culture war joke, in fairness on further reflection I was like “yeah but maybe put all the hours of South Park, Tosh.0, and The Man Show on the PCU side too.” Maybe the Kilborn years, even.
Okay, for the benefit of all the followers I’m getting with absurd ages in their profiles, let me explain this one.
When Comedy Central started in the ‘90s, they didn’t have much original programming, and what they did was mostly one-off (but frequently rerun) specials - filmed standup sets, basically.
So what they ran was mostly secondhand content they’d picked up rights to, and what was most common were these two movies, I swear to god I’d seen them run back to back and then over again, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the same one run twice in a row. One was Throw Momma From The Train, a Danny DeVito comedic riff on Strangers On A Train.
The other was PCU, a campus comedy in the Animal House vein starring a visibly balding Jeremy Piven. It was a lovable frat fighting the dean and his Young Republican lackeys, but (because “boat shoe and dinner jacket-wearing WASPs” were overdone and increasingly anachronistic as villains by then) there was a third faction that took the brunt of the mockery: earnest, censorious social issue activists. Thus the title. The climax involved the activists protesting the big frat party (tagline: “Everyone Gets Laid”), but then realizing “holy shit, we’re against drinking, sex, parties, freedom, and fun, we’re the bad guys” and giving up and chilling out and hooking up with the frat members.
Because obviously you were supposed to see that as the only acceptable position for anyone with any pretensions to being cool and with it. Like I said, ‘60s-derived social liberalism used to offer something for everyone.
If you don’t know who Howard Stern is, he was the foremost crude “Morning Zoo” radio DJ in the country.
Like, in the '90s, white, blue collar (or “dudebro”) tits-n-beer vulgarity was plausibly coded left/liberal/Democratic. And that’s a little disorienting to remember.
I mean hell, Benny Hill was aired in part by an official arm of the most socialist Anglosphere government ever. Benny Hill.
If you’ve never seen Benny Hill, it’s from the British “light entertainment” tradition, a little variety but kind of sketch comedy, only a lot of the “comedy” was basically dirty old man leering. Sketch leering. Episodes famously ended with sped up comedic chase scenes where Benny would try to catch and grope some pretty young girls, then turn and run away as they tried to catch and punish him.
Now by the '90s that was already a bit off, but still, it ran in reruns on Comedy Central. It ran on fucking PBS.
If you ever wonder why intelligent educated sensitive me is wary of if not actively hostile to so much of what passes for modern cultural liberalism, it’s because it pattern-matches so closely not only to the apocalypse visions conservatives were warning of when I was growing up, but to the liberals’ versions as well.
The Chad PCU (1993) clasping hands with the Virgin “Fallen Angels” by Jerry Pournelle [1991]
That’s the one where the fandom alliance launched some sorta spaceplane that dipped back into the atmosphere to collect oxygen atop a museum Titan V to fight global cooling, right? I still remember the climax where the bureaucrat villain asks for her assistant’s pistol to shoot at the takeoff but he maliciously complies with safety regulations by tediously clearing it first. You know by 1991 I guess Pournelle might well have seen Wings of Honneamise.
Is sad that future critics trying to make sense of the birth of genre SF won’t even have the faintest background sense of what it meant to be a U.S. Navy officer in the Pacific in the early 20th century
sci-fi plot: yeah and in this futuristic city he meets a woman–
producer: is she a stripper? is she a callgirl? does she get her tits out? is she a cop working undercover as a stripper? is she a sexy assassin who has sex with her victims and then kills them sexily? is she a robot stripper? is she a mystical being of pure energy who has no need for clothes and a great rack? is she a holographic beer advertisement?
I mean really the thing is most cyberpunk is a reskin of detective noir
why is LA always so fucking dark in the future, I saw a video of LA this morning and the sun was so bright it blew out my monitor
Dark LA™ always seems to be DTLA, which I guess makes sense in some weird way. However, in VtM Bloodlines, a third of the game is set in the dark and dangerous streets of Santa Monica, which I just could not take seriously.
LA was where Raymond Chandler and a big chunk of noir come from, the dark (though often rain-slicked) streets of LA are a longstanding trope
Is kind of telling about genre fiction, and maybe culture in general, how much of last decade’s SFF war between Sad Puppies and WisCon types has been obviated by amateur writers crossing it with horror and romance to ask questions like “What if our notions of self and volition were so different it was considered totally normal for our werewolf friends to rape us all the time?”
Sometimes I think about how detective (and spy) pulps were the same kind of mass-market eroticized fantasies for men that romance paperbacks were for women (consider James Bond in this light)
And how that makes the Chinatown “She’s my daughter! She’s my sister!” AND the L.A. Noire bit where late in the game your then-disgraced detective goes to interview a real estate magnate and totally ignores the 12yo in his bed, knowing there’s nothing he could do against someone so connected, into kind of elevations of a “taboo sex, isn’t this hot” tradition
I’ve mentioned “romantic fantasy” in a few recent posts, and some of the responses have made it apparent that a lot of folks have no idea what that actually means - they’re reading it as “romance novels in fantasy settings”, and while some romantic fantasy stories are that, there’s a bit more to it.
In a nutshell, romantic fantasy is a particular genre of Western fantasy literature that got started in the 1970s, reaching its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Its popularity sharply declined shortly thereafter, for reasons that are far too complicated to go into here; suffice it to say that you won’t find many pure examples of the type published after 1998 or so.
It’s tough to pin down exactly what romantic fantasy is in a few words, but you’ll definitely know it when you see it - there’s a very particular complex of tropes that defines it. I’ll try to hit the highlights below; not every romantic fantasy story will exhibit all of these traits, but most will exhibit most of them.
Romantic fantasy settings are typically “grown up” versions of settings that traditionally appeal to young girls: telepathic horses, wise queens, enchanted forests, all that stuff. Note that by “grown up”, I don’t mean “dark” or deconstructionist; romantic fantasy is usually on board with the optimistic tone of its source material, and any grime and uncertainty is the result of being a place that adult human beings actually live in. Protagonists are natives of the setting, rather than visitors from Earth (as is customary in similar stories targeted at younger audiences), though exceptions do exist.
In terms of stories and themes, romance is certainly a big presence, but an even stronger one is politics. Where traditional fantasy is deeply concerned with the geography of its settings, romantic fantasy focuses on the political landscape. Overwrought battle scenes are replaced by long and complicated discussions of political alliances and manoeuverings, brought down to the personal level through the use of heavily stylised supporting characters who function as avatars of the factions and philosophies they represent. Many romantic fantasy stories employ frequent “head-hopping” to give the reader insight into these philosophies, often to the point of narrating brief scenes from the villain’s perspective.
The “good” societies of romantic fantasy settings tend to be egalitarian or matriarchal. Patriarchal attitudes are exhibited only by evil men - or very occasionally by sympathetic male characters who are too young and sheltered to know better (and are about to learn!) - and often serve as cultural markers of the obligatory Evil Empire Over Yonder. Romantic fantasy’s heydey very slightly predates third-wave feminism, so expect to see a lot of the second wave’s unexamined gender essentialism in play; in particular, expect any evil or antagonistic woman to be framed as a traitor to her gender.
Usually these societies are explicitly gay-friendly. There’s often a special made-up word - always printed in italics - for same-gender relationships. If homophobia exists, it’s a trait that only evil people possess, and - like patriarchy - may function as a cultural marker of the Evil Empire. (Note, however, that most romantic fantasy authors were straight women, so the handling of this element tends to be… uneven at best.)
Magical abilities are very common. This may involve a unique talent for each individual, or a set of defined “spheres” of magic that practically everyone is aligned with. An adolescent lacking magical abilities is usually a metaphor for being a late bloomer; an adult lacking magical abilities is usually a metaphor for being physically disabled. (And yes, that last one can get very cringey at times, in all the ways you’d expect - it was the 1980s, after all.)
In keeping with their narrative focus, romantic fantasy stories almost always have an explicitly political character with a strongly progressive bent. However, most romantic fantasy settings share mainstream fantasy’s inexplicable boner for monarchies, so there’s often a fair bit of cognitive dissonance in play - many romantic fantasy settings go through elaborate gymnastics to explain why our hereditary nobility is okay even though everybody else’s is icky and bad. This explanation may literally boil down to “a wizard did it” (i.e., some magical force exists to prevent the good guys’ nobles from abusing their power).
I think that about covers it, though I’m sure I’ve overlooked something - anybody who knows the subject better than I do should feel free to yell at me about it.
(As an aside, if some of this is sounding awful familiar, yes - My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic draws a lot of inspiration from romantic fantasy, particularly the early 90s strand. It’s not a straight example of the type - there are very few of those around today - but it’s not at all subtle about its roots.)
Oh, I read so much of this as a teen and young adult. It might have started a touch earlier than the 70′s with Anne MacCaffrey and Dragonriders of Pern? The most obvious example I can think of is Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books and over in the comic book medium, I think Wendy Pini’s Elfquest just squeezes in.
One thing about this genre, when I reread something from it that I loved 20 or 25 years ago, I go from extreme and affectionate nostalgia to quite literally blushing in embarrassment over some of those cringe-worthy bits you mentioned.
Yeah, Lackey’s Valdemar books are basically the platonic ideal of romantic fantasy for a lot of folks - though in spite of being arguably the most influential romantic fantasy author of her generation, Lackey herself was a relative latecomer to the genre.
As for McCaffrey, I’d hesitate to classify her Dragonriders of Pern series as romantic fantasy. I’ll grant that later entries in the series certainly develop in that direction, but especially early on it hews a lot closer to traditional heroic fantasy. Her Talent universe, however, is a dead-perfect example of the type, in spite of having an extremely variant setting.
(For those who haven’t read them, McCaffrey’s Talent books take place in a gonzo far-future space opera setting, revolving around the personal dramas of a pseudo-noble caste of godlike telepaths who enjoy their privileges as a consequence of being the setting’s only economical source of faster-than-light communication and transport. Weird stuff.)
I read so much Mercedes Lacky and Anne McCaffrey as a kid. I’d love to hear about the decline of the genre - I’m guessing that modern feminism and the lgbt movement had a lot to do with it? That is - the growth out of a lot of the more cringey tropes morphing the genre into something distinctly different?
Yeah, there were a number of different factors involved. Losing the LGBT audience was certainly part of it - not because of the inept handling of the subject matter per se, but because a lot of LGBT readers were reading romantic fantasy simply because they couldn’t get that kind of representation anywhere else, and when more LGBT authors started getting published in the mid 1990s, they had better options.
The Internet itself was another big culprit. Commercial Internet service went mainstream circa 1995, and suddenly, a lot of content that had formerly been the province of a hard core of dedicated hobbyists was accessible to everyone - most critically, online fanfic. Many folks, particularly among younger readers, found that online fanfic scratched the same itch as romantic fantasy; I recall a great deal of mid-to-late-1990s fanfic that basically applied the tropes and forms of romantic fantasy to video game settings, for example. (Chrono Trigger was an oddly popular choice - anyone old enough to remember that?)
This was compounded by mishandling by both authors and publishers. Though the new communication channels afforded by the Internet could have been a great boon to them, most romantic fantasy authors (correctly) perceived online fanfic as competing for their audience, and responded with extreme hostility. We’ve talked a bit about Mercedes Lackey; her stance on online fanfic was legendarily draconian, and often backed with litigation, to the extent that her nascent Internet fandom was basically smothered in its crib. By the time she mellowed out on the medium, it was too late. A lot of other romantic fantasy authors and publishers followed the same trajectory.
Lastly, the final nail in romantic fantasy’s coffin was basically J K Rowling’s fault, believe it or not. During the period in which romantic fantasy literature enjoyed its peak popularity, YA fantasy literature was in a low ebb; there wasn’t much of it coming out, and most of it wasn’t very good, so a lot of kids were reading romantic fantasy (in spite of its subject matter often being wildly inappropriate; I’ve mentioned in the past how many books about teenage girls having sex with dragons I ended up reading!). That youth demographic ended up being the last bastion of romantic fantasy’s mainstream readership - then the YA fantasy renaissance of the late 1990s stole that audience wholesale.
There were probably half-a-dozen other significant factors that contributed to romantic fantasy’s commercial decline, but those are the highlights.
I knew it was Rowling’s fault I couldn’t find “my” type of fantasy anymore! All of a sudden, everyone seemed to be trying to write the next Harry Potter. It was quite upsetting, as I had rather liked the fantasy genre the way it was before, back when it was generally agreed upon that magic ought to have actual rules :P I had no idea there was an actual name for this type of fantasy. I miss it dreadfully, though :( though, yes, certain scenes in the Mage Winds trilogy were pretty horrifying when I was ten…
Another element in the decline was related to the development of the internet, but only tangentially.
In the late 80s and early 90s, anime and manga began to be licensed more and more in the Americas and Europe. At first, most offerings were male-focused and had a narrow audience, but with the shift from bbs and rec.alt. to free personal webpages (thank you Netscape!), information about series from Japan spread much faster. At this point, the fansub community boomed (no really, boomed to the point where there were distributors in countries all over the world, not just in college clubs), due to the ability to publish their catalogs and contact information more easily. This brought a variety of shoujo and josei series to the attention of a wider audience, specifically of women, and suddenly female geeks who formerly had been following Romantic Fantasy found out that entire swaths of television and comics were already dedicated to them in Japan. (You can thank Sailor Moon for the explosion of shoujo that decade. No, really. I’m serious.)
1995 was a big turning point. In a single year, while Sailor Moon was finishing up season S and moving on to Super S, the following powerhouse anime were released: Fushigi Yuugi, Magic Knight Rayearth, Wedding Peach, Gundam Wing, Evangelion, and Slayers. Of these, the first 3 were shoujo; Fushighi Yuugi was an ancient China-themed portal anime that pretty much nailed the Romantic Fantasy genre right down the middle, Magic Knight Rayearth was a mecha portal magical girl series, and Wedding Peach was a real world magical girl series. As for the others, Gundam Wing was intended as a shounen SF war story to reboot the Gundam franchise, but it ended up with basically a yaoi fanbase dominated by women (fandom-wise, it was the Supernatural of its day, but with more lead characters and less incest). Evangelion was a groundbreaking grimdark apocalyptic disaster as notorious as it still is famous, and its audience was pretty well split in every way imaginable, including on whether they hated it or not. The only unmitigated success of the year not to draw most of its fanbase from among women was Slayers.
The impact of that year and the following (1996 was the year of Escaflowne and Hana Yori Dango) was immediately obvious if you went to SF&F cons in the US. The cosplay shifted, the panels shifted, there was a lot of sudden interest from women in what had been presented as a mostly male genre often erroneously equated with porn. Many women I had formerly discussed Bradley, Lackey, McCaffrey, and Rawn with were now discussing CLAMP and Takeuchi-sensei and the best places to get reasonably-priced import manga.
So yeah: internet fanfiction, Rowling/Duane/the YA crowd in general, books by queer authors who didn’t encourage us to think of ways to die heroically, anime & manga, and of course Supernatural Romance. Romantic Fantasy was a genre so tenacious that it took that many blows for it to mostly fall (and I would argue that it still informs fantasy television today). Or, conversely, you can think of the need that women have to see fantastical stories that reflect us as so powerful that for over 2 decades it drove an incredibly diverse group of women to all converge on a genre that didn’t entirely satisfy most of them but on which they were totally willing to spend money, because it was a genre women were actually producing for ourselves, and nobody else was listening.
