In 2019 I finished writing a novel that I considered good enough to be published. It was a meta fairy tale I wrote with the Fantasy genre firmly in mind. But when I showed the story to beta readers, I had feedback telling me it sounded like a Young Adult (YA) Fantasy. At the time, I was confused and more than a little frustrated because I very specifically had a protagonist over 18 and I had no desire to write for children, so I couldn’t understand why I would get that feedback.

Yet, during the same time, I found more and more often that the books I enjoyed reading were not in the Fantasy section I aspired to be published in, but in the YA Fantasy section. When I found books in the Fantasy section, I enjoyed them, but they weren’t quite the books I craved and enjoyed the most. And the dichotomy confused me.

For a while I was content that I was finding the books I wanted to read, until I realized it wasn’t just me having this issue. It was becoming more and more common for women in their thirties and beyond to look for, and find, the fantasy books they wanted to read in the YA Fantasy section. After years of reading, writing, going to conferences, and discussions with female authors and others in the publishing space, I started to realize why.

The truth of the matter is, these books that adult women are finding and enjoying are not actually YA Fantasy. Sure, they’re published and marketed as YA Fantasy. They might have even been written as YA Fantasy, but that was only because female fantasy authors are being guided, if not outright pushed, into writing or publishing their fantasy novels as YA Fantasy whether or not that’s what their stories actually are.

Digging Deeper

When I was a child, there was no distinction for children’s books, much less the different sections there are now. The main difference tended to be the length of the book, which continues to be a main differentiator among books for the different age groups. Picture books, chapter books, middle grade, and young adult, each has its own restrictions on length, language, and protagonist age. The YA genre exists to provide teens with books that are about protagonists from 14-18 and focus on the problems of growing up and fitting into a world where they’re not quite adults. There is a distinctive ‘YA Voice’ that is often first person or a very close third. Fantasy then adds magic and sometimes secondary worlds into this mix.

Yet, as I claimed above, the books I commonly pulled and enjoyed from the YA Fantasy were not actually YA Fantasy. Why would I claim this when the protagonists are young, the books are short(er), and there is that ‘distinctive’ YA voice?

Because I have been reading in the fantasy space for over 20 years and have been specifically looking at the differences between books published in Fantasy vs YA Fantasy for over five years. If I had to boil the differences down to one thing, which I did, it’s that fantasy novels tend to have more focus on world-building or the magic systems, while YA Fantasy novels tend to be more character-focused. The YA Fantasy published novels that I claim shouldn’t be published here are stories of characters dealing with the world and the magic therein, solving problems, finding their motivations, and becoming better people with no real regard or relation to their age. They are just stories.

I remember reading the first book in Sarah J. Maas’ The Throne of Glass series and completely tripping over the age of the protagonist. She was trained to be an assassin, gained notoriety as an assassin, got caught and spent a year in prison, and then was brought out to be a part of the events of the story as an 18-year-old protagonist. And all of this happened with no lingering psychological damage for a person whose brain had not yet finished developing, and yet whose entire life was spent training to be an assassin, the actual killing of people, capped off by a year in a brutal prison. But the main character is a happy-go-lucky outgoing teen who loves reading and sleeping in late.

I came to find out that this series was originally posted on the Internet before it was ever traditionally published, and that the character there was in her twenties, which while still unreasonable is far more believable. Somewhere on the road to being traditionally published, Maas was either nudged toward or straight-up told it would be published as YA Fantasy, and thus she merely slapped the age of 18 onto the protagonist and called it a day. Like I said, those few extra years really would’ve made all the difference for the character’s believability, but that simply wasn’t an option because it ‘needed’ to be published as YA Fantasy.

One of my favorite series is Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows duology. While her previous series in this world, Shadow and Bone, actually reads like the YA Fantasy as which it was published, Six of Crows does not. While there are a few references to how impressive it is that the characters have done so much at their respective ages, the story has nothing to do with the difficulties of being a teenager. There is a rumor that Bardugo was encouraged to age down these characters because she was already published in the YA Fantasy space.

This issue has extended to reports, on multiple occasions, of finding Mary Robinette Kowal and Fonda Lee’s very-much-not-YA books shelved in the YA section in Barnes & Noble. Kowal’s Lady Astronaut series is an alternate history where a meteor hits the earth in 1952, forcing women into the astronaut program to help humanity flee the dying planet. Lee’s Green Bones Saga is about the leaders of warring clans in a secondary-world Japan and their Jade-granted abilities. Both of these series are about adults, dealing with very adult problems. I would love to know what went into the shelving decision, and whether it was anything more than the pervasive assumption that women only write books for kids.

Why is this a Problem?

There are several reasons that this is a problem, mainly the fact that you have two different types of books in the same genre. The point of a genre is to help readers find the books they want to read. More and more we have teens looking for books that speak to their experience and complaining when those books are ‘too adult’, and adults who are looking for character-focused fantasy, but are tired of reading about children. Both of these groups are looking in the same YA Fantasy section.

This puts female fantasy authors in a bind, because the industry assures them they should be published in YA Fantasy, and white males surreptitiously look down their noses from the Fantasy throne. Yet female authors want to write stories with adult characters, more mature themes, and they’re having to find ways to not be published in YA Fantasy.

This, likely, led to the creation and rather quick disappearance of the New Adult genre, because the industry was like ‘here, older protagonists’ and women replied ‘25-year-olds are still children’. Even more recently is the rise of ‘Romantasy’ where Sarah J Maas sits rather proudly. However my theory is this is simply a way for some women authors (remember, Maas didn’t write YA Fantasy in the first place) to pull out of YA Fantasy by writing, well smut, which is not acceptable in that genre. Once again, women have been ‘allowed’ to go into a ‘women-approved’ genre, romance.

Now new genres gaining popularity is not bad, but this highlights the biggest problem with this situation, in that the industry is actively dictating what stories women authors can tell. We’ve already gone through all of recorded history with women’s stories being forgotten or overwritten or ignored. I wrote an article about it. Women being limited by the YA Fantasy genre restricts the stories we can tell, it restricts the characters that can exist, it restricts the struggles they can face. All those stories continue to be repressed and lost every day. And that is unacceptable.

How did we get here?

The short, easy answer is because the publishing industry is a HUGE ship steeped in tradition that does not easily change. As we know, tradition means misogyny. It helps that women have been successful in YA Fantasy: Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Twilight to name a few. Nothing changes tradition faster than money.

In fact, I would not be surprised if JK Rowling (who chose that name to hide the fact that she was a woman) who wrote the most successful YA Fantasy series of all time, played the largest part in ‘proving’ to the industry that women can write books boys like. This was the genesis of the cyclical reality that YA Fantasy has a ‘distinctive’ feel/voice, which is feminine, because female authors are so often published in YA Fantasy, so female authors are pushed to publish there because their writing voice sounds like YA Fantasy, so YA Fantasy has that certain voice…

I ran into this problem throughout my writing career, talking to so many women who would say things to the effect of ‘I found my YA voice’ or that they write YA because they were told their voice/story ‘sounds YA’. But this is not what should indicate what books are YA Fantasy. What really matters is the protagonist, their story, motivations, what they learn and how. The voice can be a part of that, but a small part, that should certainly not be used to dictate which genre women should write.

So What Can We Do?

Dismantle the publishing industry and rebuild it with entirely female and non-binary leadership.

I’m kidding.

Probably.

Because, fact of the matter is, Fantasy is, and has always been, dominated by white male authors, and inertia is the strongest force in the universe. Truthfully, I don’t want to start writing my books to Fantasy restrictions either. I don’t want to edit my stories or hide my name for the (often loud) men who don’t want to read books written by women. So literary revolution aside, it’s time for a new genre.

Did you know chess has a women’s league? It’s not for the knee-jerk reason that women aren’t allowed to compete against men. That hasn’t been a thing since the seventies. Haha. The reason for this separate league is literally because women were not getting the attention or recognition that men did. The women’s league was created specifically to raise up women chess players and encourage more women to start playing chess by keeping themselves from being buried in a sea of men.

That’s what I want, a Fantasy genre distinct from Fantasy. A genre that adopts all those character-focused fantasy stories women are reading from the YA Fantasy section without the restrictions. For a long while I tried to come up with a clever name for this new genre a la ‘cozy mystery’, ‘space opera’, or ‘romantasy’. The first one I came up with was simply Character-Focused (CF) Fantasy, because, as above, ’adult’ fantasy tends to be world/magic-focused and YA fantasy is character-focused.

I was hesitant to use it because I didn’t want to promote the ‘fantasy has characters too!’ argument, but I have lost interest in placating potential hurt feelings. My goal is simply to create a space for these character-focused stories to be told in the way their authors want to write them.

At the same time, I am only one person. I am talking specifically about the plight of women authors, because that’s what I can speak to, but I know this is an issue for POC and LGBTQIA+ authors as well and I want your input too. Thus I want to invite you to read more on the CF Fantasy website, or join our Discord.

Whether or not CF Fantasy ever becomes a section in a bookstore, I wanted a place where authors, readers, agents, editors, and anyone else interested in CF Fantasy can come together and discuss it. A place to talk about the stories that already exist in CF Fantasy, but weren’t published or promoted that way. I want CF Fantasy to be a community to encourage and support the CF Fantasy stories of now, and that will be created in the future.