Pop Fantasy or Popular Fantasy

If generic means a work of art that is typical of a genre, where genre means a style or category of storytelling, then consider the following:

Fiction may be considered fantasy or a subgenre thereof when it has ANY supernatural stuff present (example Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Once you define the limitations of the supernatural stuff, the rest is assumed to be similar to our real world as a point of reference.

Another way to think about it is Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction where we take an idea, such as "what if there were magic kings on Earth," and we speculate on the idea in story form.

Given the above, the scope of Fantasy as a genre is very, very broad. Generic Fantasy is oxymoronic. I think what one might intend when they say generic fantasy is what the perceive to be popularly consumed by a casual audience, or a core audience. So, pop-fantasy is probably a better term. Pleb or Plebeian Fantasy or Pedestrian Fantasy if you wanted to be de derogatory.

But this is still not clear enough because I don't know what you think is pop fantasy, and I don't expect you to know what I think is pop fantasy.

Monsters in Fiction

What is a monster? Monsters are the personifications of things we fear and the unknown. They are not people. They are not intended to be or represent people. Monsters are placed into stories that try to describe things that go bump in the night and to evoke some macabre thrill, fear, or disgust in the audience. Monsters are dangerous and opposed to mankind. Either they're malevolent or simply indifferent to our suffering. They are characterized by extreme vices, strange powers, and mysterious weaknesses. They are meant as obstacles for the brave or wise to overcome, avoid, or flee from. Sometimes, the innate inhumanity they represent reinforces our humanity.

In the context of literature, a foil is a type of character who is used to contrast another character, and the effect of using a foil is to emphasize specific characteristics of one or the other character. Simply put, a good character's goodness is emphasized when compared to a bad character's badness. Monsters are the foil of humanity, and so it is inappropriate to humanize them. To humanize the monster is to make it into a new variety of a human with a variation on human morality and human thinking and human feeling. It suggests that on some level, every thinking thing is similar or the same. To do this is reductive to the purpose of monsters. Humanizing monsters takes away from their potential for mysteriousness and alienness, and it minimizes the horror of the unknown that they represent. The audience is meant to hear the pitter patter of its nails in the dark or its grim laugh, and to see the signs it left behind, not to learn about its complex social order and psychology. For some audiences or gamers, this is the premise of monsters that we desire. If you want to treat monsters as people, you ruin this premise of monsters for the rest of us, and you are a spoil sport. 

Were I to write my own TTRPG with a monster book, this is the text that would precede the rest of the book. I would elaborate with this. The lore of a monster is what is known about it, or thought to be known, by people in the setting. Lore is therefore incomplete and not guaranteed to be true. The Game Master or GM, being the curator of their game and setting, may change lore to suit it. The characters in the setting may be assumed to have no knowledge of the lore, and so they have to consult with experts. The characters must seek out and arm themselves with knowledge in preparation for their confrontation with danger. Lore is therefore earned by a process of discovery, and may require significant effort or cost or sacrifice. The stat block is a way of mechanizing the monster for play. Monster stat blocks remove the abstraction and mystery, and so they are metaknowledge, and not to be used as knowledge known by any ordinary character. In general, it is not within the spirit of the game to play your character using knowledge that you have that your character doesn't have, and is in effect cheating or spoiling the game as one might spoil the ending of a film for yourself or others. Players fear what they don't know. If fear and discovery would enhance a portion of your game, then the GM is encouraged to create their own monsters and to never use monsters as they are purely presented in the rules.

The reason why I would write a monster book for a TTRPG is so that I could write it with my desired premise built in. When you play a TTRPG such as D&D 5e for instance, it's fair to say that you can modify it however you want, but it's also fair to say that people have expectations for individual games, and when they're invited to play 5e, their expectation is to play with the 5e material as it is presented, and so they might be averse to any changes. The introduction to my monster book would be intended to prime my readers for my concept of monsters rather than theirs. If they agree to play their game using my monster book, they are agreeing to my premise, not theirs. I would explicitly address that my conception of monsters might be incompatible yours. If you try to seduce the dragon, it will automatically fail and for that turn, you will be vulnerable to dragon meaning you don't benefit from your armor or saving throws.

Modernity Ruined Monsters

I perceive there to be a problem with monsters in modern media. I believe the word 'monster' should be reserved for something truly terrible or else we trivialize the word and diminish its meaning. In essence, I think that my culture has ruined the word by misusing it, and they've taken something away from us that we can't easily get back. Monster should be a word to describe something that is the mortal enemy of mankind, but is a word that can describe something that is so ugly it's kind of cute, something that's misunderstood and just needs a second chance, or it can be an ironic term as in a term of endearment. I don't know where this trend began. Was it Shrek? Was it Monsters Inc? Was it Boo Berry Cereal? Some other television program intended for a participation ribbon generation? I don't like it when a story promises me a monster and I get a something suitable for a Hannah Barbera cartoon. So as a rule, I will not use the word monster in vain. When I use the word monster, I want the audience to have a visceral reaction. I want the addition of only the word to a story to signal to the audience that there are stakes and they will be ugly.

Why do I care? I live in a time when there are very nasty, strong words that get repeated ad nauseam. Those words are fascist, racist, sexist, homophobe, etc. I don't want to diminish the meaning and severity of such words with overuse and misuse, and so I personally don't use these words unless I mean to. For example, I have heard that George R. R. Martin has said that the reason why he cannot finish his books is because of fascism, but I didn't read the news story about how storm troopers or myrmidons kicked in his front door and burned his rough draft and beat his hands with sticks so he couldn't write. I've heard people have defended Amazon's series The Rings of Power by describing fans of Lord of the Rings who are disappointed with the Amazon series as fascist for having expectations for Amazon to make a series that is faithful to the source material. But fans merely boycotted the series and gave it bad reviews at worst, they didn't show up at the studio and threaten to dispatch the producers with violence unless they re-wrote orcs like this and elves like that. These are flagrant misuses of the English language. People who do this are guilty of crying wolf, and if the day comes that they are eaten, they will have earned it. We should use these words to describe people who are truly bad. They should be reserved for people who truly meet the definition. I think people should have more respect for the words in our language, just as we don't scream help unless we are in serious or deadly danger. If you call everyone a fascist, there will come a day when people look at you like you're a misbehaved child then carry on with their day. Someone should sit you down with a history book and teach you what real fascism means.

Playing Dungeons & Dragons sucks and this is partly due to the other people who play the game who think that it's racist to treat all goblins as evil or who think that orcs are people too. The Great Cthulhu has plushies where he wears a cut little fez. Count Dracula had concubines and drank people's blood while they were still alive, but rip-offs of his likeness teach children their numbers on a tv show and market chocolate flavored cereal during the commercial breaks. Maybe my culture has been ruining monsters for longer than I realize. When I think of monsters, I think of Kentaro Miura's Berserk; Monsters don't get more horrifying than that. When I think about Berserk, I think about a story that doesn't pull its punches. When Berserk says monster, it delivers. The Firefly series had some villains called Reavers, and when characters in the show described Reavers, they didn't describe them as people, they didn't describe them as green, they didn't describe them as horned or winged or fanged or clawed. The Reavers were described as "they'll kill you, eat you, and rape you, and if you're luck, in that order." That is a horrifying opponent. That is a monster.

First, let's establish some rules. Definitional rules.

1. Monsters are always opponents. Monsters are not rivals or competitors or begrudging allies, they are always opponents. They oppose us. They are an enemy to humankind because they oppose us, and they oppose everything we believe in and everything we love. Not only are monsters just opponents, but they are our mortal enemies. The final boss for humanity to defeat will be a monster.

2. Monsters are deadly. They don't show mercy, and they don't spare people or let people live except to do more cruel things to them before killing them later. If you encounter a monster, it is kill or be killed, unless you can outrun it. Monsters ultimately cannot be reasoned with. They want death.

3. Monsters are destructive. Monsters do not and cannot live in balance with nature. They cannot find harmony with nature or other creatures. They are only destructive. They take. They cannot grow things, they cannot heal things, they cannot save things. We cannot live in a world with too many monsters.

4. The tone or mood of a story is always scary when monsters are involved. Monsters should be serious, not silly. There should be no light-heartedness, no jokes, and pretentious messages or sanctimonious morals of the day about how maybe humanity is the real monster (refer to my next rule). 

5. Monsters are not people. Monsters do not represent real-world or historic groups or individuals. Monsters represent things that go bump in the night, and they represent our deepest, darkest, and ancient fears, and they represent the things that we pray that a good god does not permit on Earth. I don't intend to humanize monsters in my stories, and I think humanizing monsters is one of the ways that modernity fails at monsters.

You'll notice that in my rules, I did not describe monsters as cruel or vile. I don't need to. You're probably already imagining something that is intrinsically cruel or vile. I also didn't need to describe them as ugly or filthy, but you might be imagining such a creature. I didn't describe monsters as things that lurk and stalk, and I didn't describe monsters as things with this kind of power or as lacking this kind of ability. I didn't describe them with this vice or that vice, with this weakness or that, or some flaw. or shortcoming. I tried to write these rules in such a way that the rules are clear, and that my intent or meanings would not be disputed or subject to interpretation. Vile and cruel are too colorful and perhaps not as clear as deadly, destructive, non-human, opponent who should be treated with severity.

Are there exceptions to these rules? Maybe there could be. But I caution that if you make exceptions to these rules, that you may no longer have monsters in your story or game. You may now have something that merely resembles a monster. A monster in name only is not a monster. Barney the Dinosaur is not a dinosaur because the creators made too many exceptions to the rules of what makes a dinosaur. If your expectation is tyrannosaurus-rex, maybe you should watch Jurassic Park instead, and we should have the conversation "is this intended to be a real dinosaur, or is this intended to resemble one?" 

I suppose the point of all this is that I am an adult, and sometimes I want my monsters to be monsters, and there's nothing wrong with this. I think maybe society likes to infantilize and coddle people, or maybe people with a product to sell want to make sure it's suitable for a mass market for maximum profit. As a consequence, good monster stuff is really niche, and the niche creators who make it are more likely to be the types of creators who take it to eleven, but I'm happy with the dial set to eight or nine or ten. It's like our choices are either spooky scary skeletons for kids, monster girls for internet deviants, or gore-sploitation movies from a time before professional film studios had rules. The state of things sucks.