Is my novel epic fantasy or heroic fantasy?
You’ve written a long fantasy with battles, magic and creatures. Maybe there’s a map! (Please let there be a map.) And now you have to put a label on it, and you’re stuck between epic fantasy and heroic fantasy, also called sword and sorcery.
Often the honest answer is “both”. But a book page wants one label, so what’s the difference?
As it turns out, it has a lot more to do with plot than with length.
Heroic fantasy
Heroic fantasy started out as fun adventure stories. Conan swinging his sword through the pulp magazines of the 1930s. The main character faces obstacles on a journey, gets through some great battles, and comes out on top.
Pixar’s Onward is heroic fantasy. It pokes fun at the genre, but it still follows the conventions: two brothers go on a quest, find magic, and save the town.
Heroic fantasy is about overcoming obstacles. A character grows as a person and picks up powers along the way, and growing usually means being brave, being kind, protecting others. These stories are aspirational. They don’t ask you to be perfect all the time, just to try a bit harder.
Epic fantasy
Epic fantasy started out as history.
Epics were long poems about battles and the history of the land, sung by bards. That made sense when most people couldn’t read: long, complicated geopolitical events had to be remembered without notes, and a poem is easier to memorize. It also holds a crowd better than a list of dates.
The best-known epic fantasy is The Lord of the Rings. It tells the story of a whole world going through a crisis that hits many peoples at once (the return of Sauron) and ending up somewhere different from where it began (the elves leave Middle-earth).
It’s often told from several points of view, because you can rarely see history from just one spot. And history tends to outlive the people living through it. Look at Ned Stark, who dies in the very first book of A Song of Ice and Fire. I put the book down and stared at the ceiling for a while. The old poems did this too: in The Song of Roland, Roland dies at Roncevaux, and the story goes on without him.
But what if it’s both?
This is where most authors get stuck. A lot of stories have a character going on an adventure and growing as a person, and a world that changes.
At the end of Onward, magic starts coming back to the world. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo makes it to Mount Doom on friendship (Sam carries him the last stretch!), and the mercy he showed Gollum is what destroys the ring in the end.
So which is it?
Look at theme
And to the authors I can see wincing and quietly edging toward the exit: stay with me for a second! It’s much less literary and academic than it sounds.
Theme is what your story is about, and what it’s saying about that. So is your story about the world, or about the character? Which one matters most to you?
That’s abstract, so let’s take a concrete example: Star Wars.
Luke learns to use the Force, helps bring down an evil empire, and becomes a Jedi. Hero’s story. But the galaxy also changes and gets rid of that empire. World’s story. So which is it?
Zoom out. Star Wars isn’t just Luke’s story, it’s the Skywalkers’. Return of the Jedi is also the end of Anakin’s arc: he turns away from the dark side and fulfils the prophecy that he would bring balance to the Force. The whole saga is about how the Jedi lost their way through fear, anger and revenge, and how they come back.
It isn’t Luke’s story. It’s the story of a galaxy far, far away.
Another one: The Hobbit. Epic or heroic?
The book is heroic fantasy. Yes, it sets The Lord of the Rings in motion, because that’s where Bilbo finds the ring. But the book isn’t about how the events of The Lord of the Rings came to happen. It stands on its own: it’s about Bilbo saying yes to an adventure, and coming home.
The movies are a different animal. They add the Necromancer, the White Council, the attack on Dol Guldur, all the threads that lead to the next war. They’re about the world on the eve of The Lord of the Rings, which makes them epic fantasy.
Is the plot the same?
Once you know whose story it is, the plot follows.
The Hero’s Journey is often described as the fantasy plot. It comes from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and the version most writers use is Christopher Vogler’s twelve stages: the ordinary world, the call to adventure, the refusal, meeting the mentor, crossing the threshold, tests and allies and enemies, the approach, the ordeal, the reward, the road back, the resurrection, and the return with the elixir. One person leaves home, gets changed by the journey, and brings something back.
Now that we’ve seen the difference, though, it’s clear that epic fantasy isn’t always a hero’s story. The story of a world isn’t necessarily made of heroes. Especially in grimdark, it can be the story of villains, or of fate. So remember that the Hero’s Journey is a heroic fantasy shape.
If your epic has heroes, it can still help to shape their arcs with the Hero’s Journey. (In Mara, Cards will lay one out as a board, beat by beat.) Just don’t let the beat sheet quietly turn your world’s story into one person’s story.
So what are the beats of epic fantasy?
There’s no beat sheet for epic fantasy, and that’s part of why it’s such a plot-heavy genre. The fall of Atlantis can’t follow the same steps as a world saved from a dark lord.
But history can give you a hint.
History is continuous, but we cut it into stories to make sense of it. How Rome came to be. How Rome fell. In practice there’s no clean edge: you could just as well study Rome a century at a time, 100 BC to the year 0, then 0 to 100 AD. We don’t, because, as we saw earlier, people have always understood history as stories.
So your epic’s beats start with a choice: where does your history begin, and where does it end? The world before the crisis, and the world after it. Those two pictures are your opening and your ending, and everything in between is the story of how one turned into the other. Ask what event makes the change inevitable, what point it can’t come back from, and who’s still standing to see it.
(And then tell me who built the ruins. I’ll want to know.)
If you’re not sure what counts as a beat in the first place, here’s a whole post on that.
Conclusion
Genres and niches aren’t neat little boxes. You might write epic fantasy from a single point of view and have readers file it under heroic fantasy. You might follow the Hero’s Journey beat for beat and have readers call it epic.
These labels aren’t really a checklist of features. They’re about which story you decide to tell.