I find myself sad again to see all of the women& #39;s fantasy from around the 80s through the 00s I grew up with erased from history, so much of it made an honest stab at unremarked gender equality (and even, frequently, queer-normativity) but it got cut off by grimdark "realism" https://twitter.com/say_shannon/status/1316344942965526529">https://twitter.com/say_shann...

(There were also a rash of "questioning the origins of patriarchy" novels in the 80s-90s featuring good matriarchal witches versus bad patriarchal monotheists (sometimes explicitly Christians in historical settings) and... I did not really enjoy most of the ones I tried fwiw)

I should mention that these novels were mostly by white women with similar problems with race, disability, and depraved queer villains to white men& #39;s fantasy at the time, so it& #39;s not like they were perfect, but I still wish fantasy hadn& #39;t taken the two steps back of "realism"

Clarification that this is directed at fan discourse where these kinds of titles don& #39;t get recommended and absolutely NOT at Samantha Shannon personally for posting this (I did not take her post as intentionally erasing these titles and she confirmed it wasn& #39;t her intent to!)

I should probably mention that I have a free and public completed series of 50+ reviews of older fantasy (mostly by women, lots of queer books) on my Patreon that you can read too if you& #39;re interested in recommendations (no Patreon pledge required!) https://www.patreon.com/posts/23685315 ">https://www.patreon.com/posts/236...