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I find myself sad again to see all of the women'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
(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's fantasy at the time, so it's not like they were perfect, but I still wish fantasy hadn't taken the two steps back of "realism"
Clarification that this is directed at fan discourse where these kinds of titles don'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'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're interested in recommendations (no Patreon pledge required!) https://www.patreon.com/posts/23685315
