What Killed Urban Fantasy?

I like Urban Fantasy as a genre quite a lot. I like the blending of fantasy elements with modern trappings. I like the deep diving for weird monsters from around the world. It was booming a decade ago, and now nobody really talks about it. Why?

My introduction was Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. Great book. Probably his best that isn't Good Omens. But its a standalone. It doesn't need a sequel or a series. American Gods was okay, but the ideas it played around with were better than the text itself, which tended to wander aimlessly in the heartland for chapters on end. I remember finding Anansi Boys to be much more entertaining, but oddly enough, more forgettable. Still, I wanted more.

From there I moved on to Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. It kicks ass. Can't recommend it enough.

I wish most of the rest of the genre wasn't garbage. Something From the Nightside was pretty terrible (Sorry, Mike!) but that's for another day. Suffice it to say, I drifted away from the genre because it turned into a boom of clones sitting on shelves that all have the same covers of a man or a woman standing in a generic static pose, possibly holding a weapon. If there's a background, its a street at night. I started to write my own (which turned into a trilogy that's not quite ready for prime time, but Soon™)

Today I discovered an essay written in 2008 by Lilith Saintcrow, who's a leading name in that genre. I have not read any of her works, but her name is familiar, and she's a prolific working author with a cool name. I respect that. I've also found out that I'm blocked by her on Twitter without ever having interacted with her, so...I don't feel too bad about critiquing a decade old essay on Urban Fantasy by someone who might be using a blockbot.

This is the essay: 

There are some things I agree with in the essay. Notably that UF carries a lot of heritage from old pulp detective fiction. I agree that the “Literature” and “Mainstream Fiction” genres get too much respectability from people who tell you their opinion on literature is important.

That's kind of it, though.

I disagree that “lowbrow” is something negative. I disagree that Paranormal Romance is considered lowbrow and trashy because it its female. Its considered lowbrow and trashy because it doesn't try to be anything more than simple entertainment. Sci-Fi and Fantasy are usually considered trashy and lowbrow for that same reason. So are old comic books. So are old detective novels. I've come to respect works of fiction that get a reputation for being “trashy and lowbrow” because that's become an accurate code for “doesn't shove the author's message down your throat.”

I have never heard of anyone referring to Tom Clancy novels as “serious” literature before this essay, because the last time I checked, thrillers were in the same “trashy and lowbrow” ghetto with the rest of the fun books. Its all explosions, action and technology porn, which is fine for the audience that consumes it. Just like masturbatory fantasies about humping sexy vampire lords is fine for the audience that consumes it. My mother read a LOT of Harlequin Regency Romance books while I was growing up. The covers and back of the book blurbs were all effectively identical. My mom knew they were simple entertainment that wasn't going to change the world. They served an audience that loved them and kept buying them, respectability be damned.

“Respectable Literature” is a trap for anyone who pursues it.

Its also insulting to female writers and characters of the past that to say Urban Fantasy is socially groundbreaking for making female action leads the protagonists. C. L. Moore's (a female author who absolutely outclasses most modern male authors) Jirel of Joiry armored up and went into Hell so she could take revenge on someone who conquered her kingdom in 1934. Dejah Thoris has been kicking ass and taking names since BEFORE WORLD WAR I.

They keystone of the essay though, and the part that I disagree with the most is that the key to the success of Urban Fantasy back in its 2008-era boom, was Moral Ambiguity.

What does respectable literature have by the bushel? Moral Ambiguity. What does post-modernist thought have in copious amounts? Moral Ambiguity. What does pink slime fantasy and science fiction shove down the throats of people who showed up for magic and spaceships? Moral. Ambiguity.

Guess what rising genre bubble crashed less than a decade after its big boom?

Oh right: Urban Fantasy. In 2016. 

Moral ambiguity drives audiences away, male or female. What makes Harry Dresden work is that he is a flawed but fundamentally good man trying to save people and punish evildoers at great personal cost. The reason I tossed Something from the Nightside aside after reading it was because John Taylor is a smug, selfish, unlikable asshole antihero.

That's what happens when you take an antihero, give them special powers, and then unleash them on a morally ambiguous setting. You have assholes on power trips who don't have to answer to anybody.

Villains, really.

I'm honestly surprised that an essay that lauds Raymond Chandler as an influence would sing the praises of moral ambiguity. Chandler's fiction is set in a dark, gritty urban environment, true, but Philip Marlowe is himself a rigidly moral hero. Not anti-hero. Hero. Sure he drinks and smokes and occasionally sleeps with women, but these are minor flaws. Like his spiritual grandson Harry Dresden, Marlowe is working class hero who's operating in slums he really doesn't belong in, but he crawls through the crime and muck helping people who probably don't deserve it and bringing justice to villains who absolutely do.

“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” 

Chandler wrote that sentence in his essential essay “The Simple Art of Murder.” Its the core of the noir hero's appeal. Take a dark setting and throw an unflinchingly moral hero into the mix like a grenade.

What killed Urban Fantasy? Moral Ambiguity.

Addendum: Eagle-eyed readers will notice a lot of words in that essay from 2008 that sound awfully familiar in [Current Year]. Make of them what you will.