All right. Confession time, people.
Podcastle is going to be my first real introduction to a regular zine dealing with fantasy short fiction. Granted it hasn't gotten out of its initial stages of editorial definition, but after listening to the selection already posted to the site, I began to pinpoint a certain trend streaming its way through all the tales, and I began to wonder if fantasy shorts always took themselves so seriously and presented themselves on a socio-political kind of sounding board (save for the first episode, which was rockin')?
Obviously, the tastes of the editors will make themselves known fully in time, but what I was really after in this post is the reaction of fantasy readers, since I figure the majority of the board readers here will be of that kind.
What makes good fantasy? Are the rules bendable when dealing with certain creatures of this genre, or is painstaking study required? Does speculative fiction play a part in fantasy or is it its own creature all together, and should I expect my spec to continue at EscapePod, having no place at Podcastle? Must each story be some fiction that has deeply moved its reader at the core, or can it just be fun, strange, disturbing, merely engaging?
I know many of the statements here could be considered overly stringent and arguable, but please just see that they've been put forth just to start objective conversation.
Let's see where this goes.