Sub-Genres

If you've not seen it, TIM has released genre guides. At the moment it's all pretty high level and there's just Fantasy (you can check how appropriate and adjust as necessary from Your Books).
But if it were to be useful, how many Sub-genres of Fantasy should there be? (Science Fiction aside it has it's own!) - books can be in multiple genres, so there's no need to argue where Star Trek goes.

Ones I can think of:
Epic Fantasy
Portal Fantasy
Low
High
Urban Fantasy
Sub-genres of UF: Paranormal Romance, LitRPG
Wizard School

I'm sure there are more! Please add, and then we can start the campaign to get TIM to recognise them.
I'm not sure where the dividing line between tropes and genre is. I think Coming-of-Age are more of a trope/plot than a genre, but what about Faerie? or Dragons?

I feel stupid, but what's TIM? Something here at LibraryThing?

>2 Niko: TIMspalding is the owner and chief developer. His post is at the top of https://www.librarything.com/topic/333142 introducing the GenreThing.

While talking about subgenres is always fun, tying it to GenreThing is a total misrepresentation of what GenreThing is supposed to be doing and is designed for...

I don't mind if they add a tag of some kind, so it could be separated out, but I'd rather have the overall discussion remain in one forum; I hope that's what's intended.

>3 reading_fox: Oh, okay... I was aware of GenreThing. I misunderstood what you meant by "genre guide". I was reading that as something that would give recommendations of books that were representative of a particular genre.

Speaking of which, the fantasy subreddit has a fairly good starter set of subgenres that I think keeps it fairly high level: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/wiki/index/a-to-z-genre-guide .

>6 Niko: Is there anywhere where it gives definitions or descriptions of these subgenres? I am fairly confused by some of them, and if I haven't read the books listed, I'm none the wiser. What makes mythic fantasy mythic fantasy? What on earth is LitRPG? What makes Weird fantasy Weird? And I do think that they miss some obvious groupings. Portal fantasies, as mentioned by >1 reading_fox:, are a more distinct subgenre than many of the ones listed. I'd love more explanation of these subgenres.

On the other hand, people often use genre descriptions in very contradictory ways -- low fantasy and magical realism are two that spark a lot of disagreement -- so that makes them poorly suited to categorization systems, in my mind. Even tagging isn't always helpful, because if someone calls a book I haven't read urban fantasy, I'll want to know what other books they consider typical urban fantasy before I know how to interpret their designation. And that's not even getting into the whole low vs. high fantasy debate. So I find the example of a guide where people list prototypical examples very intriguing. Explaining subgenres is helped by having descriptions and prototypical examples (where LT tagpages only supply the latter).

LitRPG is one I came across literally last month a gamer's wish inserting an RPG element directly and explicitly into the storyline, along with stats etc. Not set in a RPG world like dragonlance but as if the characters were part of an RPG game with an awareness of the GM and their own Level requirements. I found it uniquely interesting and different - and my first though was that Tim wouldn't give it a genre of it's own. I believe the author also has an SF version, I've no idea how many other authors are writing in it.

I agree with your differences between tagging and genres - in that tagging is utterly freeform, whereas even with sub-genres, genres are fixed and limited in scope and require some form of consensus and maybe explanation to those who don't commonly venture into them, as different eras of history/philosophy/science would have to be explained. The expectation has always been that books could be in multiple genres, so it isn't too much of an issue if only one person assigns something to Paranormal Romance and everyone else thinks it is purely Urban.

>8 reading_fox: Huh, interesting. Would something like Heir Apparent count, or would that be disqualified because it's a portal fantasy where the main character comes from a "real" world and is explicitly in a game for the main portion of the book?

>9 Kanarthi: well it is also Portal, but I'd allow it in both, but maybe another gaming sub-genre may be a better option along with the dark realm