The Standard Urban Fantasy Setting

Happy day after the day after Thanksgiving!

I have a few books I’m reading, but I am hoping that around Christmas, my schedule and my Discworld read-through will have allowed me to have gotten to Hogfather. I still have to get through Feet of Clay, though. 

Trying to get through Dragon Age: Inquisition, but there’s so much to do! Gah!

The Standard Urban Fantasy Setting

If you’ve dipped into speculative fiction at all, you’re probably familiar with what’s labeled the ‘Standard Fantasy Setting’, though you may not have heard it called that. When people refer to something as a Standard Fantasy Setting, they generally mean it’s a created world, based heavily on medieval Europe, in which humans, dwarves, and elves coexist and probably fight against a race of orc stand-ins. The dwarves aren’t even strictly necessary for this to fit.

Yahtzee had a whole Thing about this in his review of Dragon Age: Origins:

“…there's something terribly weird about the standard fantasy setting, not least of which the fact that the phrase "standard fantasy setting" can be uttered without irony. Look at this, we're a civilization so steeped in escapism that we've managed to find mundanity in something that doesn't exist and never will, whatever your Otherkin friend might say.”

Although to be fair, he goes on to list some stereotypes that I don’t think quite fit Dragon Age at all. He’s not exactly known for being generous and paying too much attention to story details, as much as being hilariously negative about everything. That simplification doesn’t cover things like the Mage-Templar conflict, the Grey Wardens, or the Fade. I think his point still kind of stands, though, that we have expectations about fantasy when technically, fantasy could be just about anything at all.

I shouldn’t complain, as someone who tries writing fantasy that uses common tropes. And again, that simplifies things too much as a criticism. Inheritance Cycle, Obsidian Trilogy, The Elder Scrolls, Dragon Age, and The Witcher all fit under the umbrella of ‘Standard Fantasy Setting’, but they’re all unique in different ways.

But that is not what the Note is about! So! Moving on!

Something I think is often overlooked, is how the same thing kind of applies to urban fantasy. There is what we might call an ‘Standard Urban Fantasy Setting’, though it gets less attention, probably because urban fantasy is generally less noticed at all by the mainstream.

Refresher: Urban Fantasy is fantasy that is set in a modernish world like our own, but includes fantasy elements. Dresden Files is probably the biggest obvious example, being that it stars a wizard in modern day Chicago, fighting monsters and evil sorcerers. Percy Jackson, Hellboy, Artemis Fowl, Mortal Instruments, Shambling Guide to New York, Iron Druid Chronicles, Anita Blake, and Supernatural all fit this bill. In general, Anita Blake and Dresden Files are considered the giants of the genre in literature.

Like with the ‘Standard Fantasy’ examples, these are all different works of fiction! They have noticeable differences between them! That being said, there is a lot of overlap in many of them: city settings where the main fantastical creatures represented are vampires, werewolves, demons, and fairies. Sometimes it’s just boiled down to vampires and werewolves. Maybe mythological deities show up?

I remember there’s a bit in the first Iron Druid Chronicles where the protagonist knows that the attractive bartender at his favorite pub is a supernatural being of some sort, but he can’t figure out what, and tells us that she’s not a vampire, werewolf, demon, or faerie, so he assumes she must be some sort of goddess. Given that this is a world in which any mythology can be true, and that there’s a butt-ton of shapeshifters in folklore around the world, that he has such a narrow list of options is surprising to me. Of course, though, in Standard Urban Fantasy Settings, those cover all the basics.

Also, Iron Druid Chronicles isn’t very good. It tends to run on ideas of ‘Standard Urban Fantasy’ and expects you to know what these are without explaining. The werewolves, are, for instance, immortal, weak to silver, telepathic within their packs, and have a grudge against vampires, but none of these things are explained, just thrown at the reader.

This is a subgenre that can do so much! Percy Jackson and Artemis Fowl prove that–one sticks to a specific mythology, and the other includes science-fiction elements in its fairy setting. And even examples that go with the ‘Standard Urban Fantasy Setting’ can be absolutely brilliant. Dresden Files evolves over the course of the series to have complex inter-factional politics, and large-scale stories unafraid of challenging the status quo.

Urban fantasy can be so much more than just, “Here’s the real world, but with vampires and werewolves (and some demons and fairies, if you want).” I am not suggesting that you can’t write a story with those elements, as long as you make them interesting. Which is done by developing the world, thinking about how all these things work and interact with each other, and asking questions about it. If vampires and werewolves exist, why haven’t they taken over the world? Or maybe they have, I don’t know–which raises all kinds of other interesting questions that the writer can use to make a setting stand out.

It’s not bad to be inspired by what came before, only to not build on it because you have no ideas of your own. That applies to urban fantasy as much as high fantasy.

—