Maria Lewis

Yeah.

Okay.

It's a trope of urban fantasy.

It's a trope of fantasy.

The one, this idea of a Neo or a Harry Potter or a Buffy Summers, that chosen being who is special and unlike all the others, that in and of itself is a bit of a stereotype, but when it's done well, I think it can be eternally rewarding and eternally engaging to

So things like that, but also comic books were a big entry point for me, particularly because you got to see women at the forefront of their own stories.

You've got to see books where female characters like, you know, birds of prey, for example,

run in the late 90s early 2000s on the main cover you have three different types of women you know a woman in a wheelchair who's like the leader of their gang in Barbara Gordon Oracle you have Huntress you have Black Canary you have an Asian Batgirl during this era it was showing me examples of stories where the kind of women that I wanted to see represented were not just supporting characters or little straws that you had to clutch at but

women who were the key drivers of narrative.

And the 90s in particular, a really great time in the pop culture sphere as a whole.

for fantasy across all different realms and specifically television because you have something like The X-Files which is a little bit of a amalgamation of you know sci-fi horror fantasy but you also have Xena you have Buffy you have so many great texts like that and so many great characters like that so many great women really coming to the fore and sort of defining all

what the genre would be in novels for the next sort of like 10, 15 years.

I mean, those archetype characters and subversions of them end up bleeding into the kind of fantasy books that we get for the next, you know, few decades, which is really exciting because then you start to get really fun twists on things that you expect, you know, that people start to subvert your expectations.

You get stuff like Gail Carriage's changeless series, right?

Which is essentially a steampunk

steampunk werewolf demon story you get something like ellison goodman's lady helen series which is like buffy meets pride and prejudice you start to get these really fun twists on genres that have been you know quite in quite conventional lanes up into that point and i think for anybody who writes within that realm but also reads within it that can be really exciting too

I think traditionally heterosexuality was a big convention of the genre.

You know, characters were straight.

They were in cis relationships and were cis characters and cishet characters.

Whereas now that is very much gone out the window as the types of authors and creators