Fantasy is a very vast and broad genre that includes many things within its scope. Many subgenres of fantasy are intriguing, engaging, and include a lot of interesting concepts. Of course, within fantasy, there is a high value placed on politics, epic battles and military strategy, court intrigue, and more. There are two subgenres of fantasy that I want to focus on for today’s post and they are military fantasy and political fantasy. They may sound relatively the same, but there are some fundamental differences that allow for them to be ultimately different subgenres.
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What is Military Fantasy?
Military fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy that focuses more specifically on warfare and the ideas associated with warfare, contextualized within a fantasy setting. Military fantasy often details the lives of soldiers, battles, military tactics and strategies, and usually centers around some sort of war.
Military fantasy tends to focus on themes like honor, duty, sacrifice, and the harsh realities of war and what war does to both soldiers and ordinary people alike.
A big thing in military fantasy is including a good amount of detail on the military aspect of the story. You need to put effort into aspects like the hierarchy of the military or the chain of command. For instance, there are soldiers, generals, lieutenants, captains, commanders, mercenaries, etc… These things are important for a military fantasy story.
Furthermore, the strategy you present is going to be important. You want to think about how a military would plan battles, move troops, position themselves strategically and more. I recommend conducting research on actual military formations from successful armies across history and if you want to learn more about how to conduct research, check out this post!
If you want to learn how to write epic battles in fantasy stories, then check out this post!
Military fantasy also tends to push towards being gritty and dark and having a more realistic tone. Even if the story is a fantasy with an intensive magic system, at the end of the day, books under military fantasy tend to edge towards being more grim.
A lot of military fantasy stories also fall under the grimdark fantasy subgenre, as grimdark often includes military intrigue and things like mercenaries. A big example of this would be something like Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence, or my series, The Fallen Age Saga. There’s also The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson, which is a perfect example of a military fantasy story that is often labeled as being grimdark.
What is Political Fantasy?
Political fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy that focuses on politics, political struggles, political intrigue, power struggles, and more. Obviously, a political fantasy is set against a fantasy backdrop and the main focus of the story revolves around politics. A lot of political fantasy books deal with things like rulers, nobles, or other political figures and include tons of things like deception, betrayals, coups, schemes and more.
Political fantasy concentrates heavily on power and how power operates in the world the story is set in. You have characters that are driven by politics, rulers that rise and fall, and the shifting of allegiances.
Political systems must be detailed in a political fantasy and the reader needs to understand precisely how the government of this world works, how laws are made, how power is divided and how the government impacts the people.
Furthermore, political fantasy has the themes of power, corruption, manipulation, deception, and control. There’s a lot of themes related to power and how power is gained and lost. This is why many political fantasy stories will have people vying for the throne or things like coups where someone takes control. There’s a lot of deception and manipulation involved in politics in political fantasy and that definitely plays a big role in the plot.
Where military fantasy tends to focus on the experience of soldiers at arms, political fantasy tends to be more character driven and focuses on the motivations, desires, schemes and more of individual characters.
Political fantasy, on the other hand, is a subgenre that focuses on the intricate workings of political systems, power struggles, and the manipulation of political forces within a fantasy setting. The narrative often revolves around the maneuverings of rulers, nobles, or other political figures as they navigate a complex web of alliances, betrayals, and schemes.
The Cruel Prince by Holly Black is a great example of a political fantasy (and it has been unfortunately mislabeled as a romantasy). The Way of Kings is also a fantastic epic fantasy that is pretty similar to a political fantasy. If you want something a bit darker, A Song of Ice and Fire is a great political fantasy series to pick up.
Genre Collisions
Military fantasy and political fantasy often intersect, especially when it comes to books written as epic fantasies like The Way of Kings. You get aspects of both in many stories where both warfare and political intrigue play a major role in the plot of the story. You get a lot of political consequences associated with military events and a lot of the military aspects will be driven by detailed political decisions.
Military Fantasy vs Political Fantasy
Military fantasy and political fantasy tend to be quite different in a number of ways either way. Military fantasy focuses on wars, battles, and the strategy and experiences associated with those. Political fantasy tends to focus on internal conflicts within a system of politics, with power struggles, court intrigue, and more.
Military fantasy typically includes more action than political fantasy (though political fantasy has lots of action), but the action in military fantasy is more associated with large scale battles and wars while political fantasy may include assassinations and regicide.
Military fantasy also tends to include themes of duty, honor, sacrifice, what it means to serve one’s nation, and it tends to dip into grim territories. Political fantasy explores more of the things that happen behind the scenes, with power, corruption, ethics, and more being explored instead. When the two genres intersect, you might get characters involved in different parts of this sort of story.
For military fantasy, you should be focusing your research more on military tactics, battle strategies, wars that have happened and who won and why they won. You also want to research how soldiers feel in war and what the harsh realities of war are like. Most people reading military fantasy are expecting a darker story because war is not a happy topic.
For political fantasy, you want to create complex political systems so you should do research on real political systems and the governments of empires and countries in the past. You also want to look into historical settings where there is a lot of corruption and court intrigue for inspiration because it makes it easier to see how these things played out in real life. You also want to think a lot about ethics and morals in political fantasy and how the main characters are willing to do the most to get what they want.
Which Subgenre Should You Write?
I would say that you should write military fantasy if you tend to enjoy stories about war, brotherhood in war, and battle strategy. This is definitely a genre for you if you enjoy reading about feats of strategy in war and you like to read about how empires rise and fall.
Political fantasy is great if you enjoy a more psychological approach to storytelling and you enjoy writing about deception and moral ambiguity as well as political corruption.
Ultimately though, both genres are absolutely fantastic and you can easily combine them if you feel that both appeal to you as a writer and as a storyteller.
Before you head on out, be sure to check out my series, The Fallen Age Saga and don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter so you can get updates on all my WIPs, book release, posts and more!