Fantasy

Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving supernatural or magical elements, often including completely imaginary realms and creatures. Magic or the supernatural usually works as a main plot element, theme or setting rather than decoration, and the genre's freedom is definitional: fantasy does not have to rely on history or nature to be coherent, so worldbuilding carries the load that realistic fiction assigns to research. The genre draws openly on real-world folklore and mythology, and it leans on the reader's suspension of disbelief.

The border crossings are worth knowing exactly. Toward science fiction, the split is plausibility: science fiction may deal with the unlikely while staying scientifically grounded, where fantasy narratives "construct the impossible". Toward horror, the difference is intent, since horror primarily evokes fear. The modern genre is usually traced from George MacDonald's Phantastes (1858), widely considered the first fantasy novel written for adults, through William Morris to Tolkien, whose books carried fantasy into the mainstream in the late 1960s. Its named shelves include high fantasy, low fantasy, sword and sorcery and web-native branches such as LitRPG.

For web-serial writers fantasy is the largest tag ecosystem on serial platforms, and it is canon-heavy: every rule of magic stated once binds every later chapter. See how to write fantasy and the umbrella genre fiction entry.