Urban fantasy as a genre and the effect films like Twilight has had on it…
Authors like Stephanie Meyer and JK Rowling have had huge success with their Twilight and Harry Potter series. Along with the film adaptations of the books, these have brought the urban fantasy genre into the forefront of publishing.
No matter how many of the die-hard fans disapprove, this has been good for the genre. Twilight especially has made reading popular for many teenagers who probably hadn’t picked up a pick that they didn’t have to read in years. Harry Potter has done the same for a whole generation of children who have grown up reading them. This has to be a good thing.
I hope that these readers will continue down their reading path and look for similar books like PC and Kirsten Cast’s House of Night series or Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy series. As their tastes become a bit more mature, they will hopefully move on to Kelley Armstrong’s amazing Urban Fantasy series Women of the Otherworld and similar authors like Kim Harrison.
TV Shows also helped with the build up to what Urban Fantasy is now, with the likes of Charmed about three young witches and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, about well a vampire slayer. This had a spin off called Angel, in which both shows had a huge cult following. There were numerous shows of this calibre about at this time. I think this kick started the genre when Twilight was just a twinkle in Stephanie Meyer’s eye.
Charmed helped make witches an acceptable main character and not something old, wicked, and green, with a wart on the end of their nose. Harry Potter fuelled this. Now we have witches, vampires, werewolves, reapers, demons, and various other supernatural beings taking the main stage in books and the media.
Strong female characters are all the rage; Bella who can hold her own and isn’t scared from a lusting vampire, Zoey who is a goddess in training and has taken on her fair share of enemies, Buffy well lets just say you wouldn’t want to meet her in a dark alley if you were wearing a long black cape. These characters are all good role models for us girls, even if they do fall for a guy you wouldn’t want to take home to meet the parents.
Twilight, Vampire Diaries and some other vampire TV shows and films are like an updated version of the Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Forbidden love with death mixed in. They have a lot in common with teenagers with their surging hormones and vampires surging bloodlust. I think this is what appeals to teenage girls.
One negative point on the recent vampire phenomenon is that all subsequent books published containing vampires, get compared to Twilight even if the author hasn’t read them. I think each book should be based on his own merit. All books can be said they were copies of something previous, eg. JK Rowling could have based Harry Potter on Jill Murphy Worst Witch series, or Twilight may have been based on LJ Smith’s Nightworld. When both authors may have never even heard of the past works.
I think we should encourage the Twilight minded people, they are helping expand the Urban Fantasy genre, making it not only popular in the world of books but in the media as well. Giving us, long term fans a wider choice and it’s not as geeky as it once was to be into science fiction.
This post is protected under copyright. SusankMann 2009 – 2014
Kerrianne says
24th September 2010 at 9:16 amHere, Here……. I couldnt agree more whole heartedly! Kerrianne xx
Mom-on-a-Wire says
24th September 2010 at 9:57 amI agree with many of the points you've made. I gave my Twilight Saga books to my brother and he read all four one after the other. For him reading was practically a swear word before he started them.Also, I have always had a secret fantasy involving vampires so I say bring it on . . . ;-}. I loved Anne Rice way before vampires became fashionable, so their growing popularity is great because there is so much more available now.
elainescott77 says
24th September 2010 at 11:05 amI agree too, love urban fantasy and I wish all books were not compared to twilight etc. Great post xx
Danielle says
24th September 2010 at 2:53 pmBeautifully said. I couldn't have said it better myself.
SusanKMann says
24th September 2010 at 3:27 pmThanks for all the comments. xx
LMW says
27th September 2010 at 3:23 amGreat article Susan! Bel and I were having this very discussion the other day! We, as readers, need to let each book stand on its own merits instead of trying to compare it to other books. When you use like species/races for chaaracters in a book there are bound to be some type of comparison, but it is up to us to not let that sway us and let the author take us on the journey which they intended! Twilight was not the first in this genre, nor will it be the last, but the exposure it has brought to reading is a wonderful thing to behold! Wonderful insight!:)
SusanKMann says
27th September 2010 at 10:33 amThank you Lacey x
Casey (The Bookish T says
27th September 2010 at 6:45 pmI think you make some really good points. Twilight has been getting a bad rap ever since it became so popular – but it really has done for Young Adult readers what Harry Potter did for kids. No, it's not high literature, but it opens up a whole new world of possibilities for previously reluctant readers. It's also given a whole genre a major kick start. Maybe I was just oblivious, but before Twilight there didn't seem to be nearly so many YA fantasy reads – and now that's practically all I see hitting the market. Yes, some of them seem like Twilight rip-offs, but a lot of them are really amazing novels. Great post! What show/book is Zoey the goddess-in-training from?
Carolina Valdez Mill says
4th October 2010 at 6:27 pmWell said, Susan. Twilight and Harry Potter have done marvelous things for UF. How funny that we both highlighted the same two series in our posts on UF as a genre!!! Love it. But I think it goes to show you how influential they have been in attracting reader to the genre. But, too, I think they have attracted readers that might not have ever read anything, period. So I think they've done a lot for reading in general, too.