Genre: Fantasy

Here on Mibba, a fantastical element is a part of most stories and the fantasy genre is even broken up into smaller genres such as paranormal romance. The genre is all at once a big component in a lot of stories on Mibba, yet it is still often overshadowed.

Fantastcial Elements

In the fantasy genre, there have to be the fantastical elements. You can't have fantasy if it's pure contemporary. Stories in the genre usually consist of mythological and folklore-inspired elements, magic, and other supernatural elements and multiple gods (though polytheism is being less and less viewed as fantasy, due to polytheistic religions). A lot of stories here on Mibba contain vampires and werewolves, which spawned in ancient folklore and mythology.

History

Fantasy has been used constantly throughout history and it would be very difficult to list the title of many of the works. Some of the most popular modern stories that fit in the genre are JRR Tolkien's the Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars movies, Alice and Wonderland,and Rick Riordan's the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

Subgenres

Paranormal Romance

In paranormal romance, the story/plotline features a character who--in some way, shape, or form--has fantastical characteristics and someone falls in love. They can fall in love with any type of being, human or not. In Amanda Hocking's The Hollows series (currently a duology; no further books planned) she uses Zombies as a fantastical element to spawn the paranormality in the story. This is okay, too. The paranormal elements don't have to be attached to the characters within the romance.

Sci-fi Fantasy

Science fiction fantasy generally sums up itself; the story has the components of a fantasy and a science fiction combined. Though there are a lot of people who combine the two genres as if they can't be separate, they are indeed two very different genres and can be combined. You can read more about science fiction here.

Dark Fantasy

In dark fantasy, the story combines fantasy and horror/thriller/mystery to create a magically-intertwined storyline with ghost, ghouls, mages, and dragons. Many stories here on Mibba are mixtures of dark fantasies and paranormal romance, though most of the combinations are with vampires, the horror stored behind them, and a love interest, which isn't a bad thing. Vampires are cool!

All-in-all, fantasy is a great genre that is used a lot but very unrecognized by the creative writing/literature community.