Everyone keeps talking about how there’s no media (books/tv/movies) that mention the pandemic or how no one *wants* media that addresses it but like…do you think the rise of dragon popularity has nothing to do with grief over being powerless? Maybe we’re just not looking hard enough idk.
They have! But they’re experiencing a HUGE surge in popularity right now, particularly in fiction, as is paranormal in general. Dragons are cool, they’ve always been cool, but they’re not always so present in popular culture.
I’m not doing a study or anything; the dragons were more of a representation of the point that fiction about the pandemic is not always going to look like direct discussion of the topic or having people get sick on page. More of an invitation to think about what we might be missing.
Sorry if that wasn’t clear, I was in the middle of reading a book that was making me think about it and didn’t really refine my point I guess. A book which does not have dragons, ironically 😂.
She did not tell you this but she's also 3d printing dragons for bookstores that are moving 100s a month. 😂 It is a bananas demand in romance right now.
Lol they aren’t fiction so I didn’t think they counted for these purposes, but yes I sell dragons in several different mediums and the demand is quite high ☺️😂
I mean, they sell IN bookstores though, specifically. LOL And while I literally did just write a whole post about how dragon romance has been around forever... the MOMENT we are having right now is intense!
I actually appreciate it when a piece of media is honest about the pandemic. I’m someone who it drove permanently inside, so seeing all of our media just pretend it never happened at all is…something
I am also that someone, so I absolutely appreciate this, but I also don’t know if many abled writers are in a position to tackle the pandemic in a way that would make me feel seen in any case, so I feel kind of conflicted about it.
One example I think handled it well was The Bear. They would mention it and not dwell on it or talk about what it did to people but at least they acknowledge that it happened.
I think I actually prefer stories that act like it never happened, because it's easy to say that's an alternate universe where it didn't, over stories where it happened but it's over and nothing changed for anyone
So far the most popular I’ve seen are ones that had Covid as less of a focus but is there. An example of an extreme case is Glass Onion but more subtle ones I’ve seen were Saltburn, Drive My Car, and The Curse
The pandemic is instrumental to Ann Pratchett’s Tom Lake! It’s also reflected on frequently in Erin Kelly’s The Skeleton Key.
I think it’s like The Great Depression. People want escapism during, but after it becomes just another historical piece.
at the beginning of the pandemic i remember there being so many pandemic "we cant see each other" romance novels
granted it died off cause so many of them were trying to make the forced isolation "romantic yearning of being apart"
One time I said monster/horror fiction was always in some way about disability and someone told me they couldn’t imagine what zombies gave to do with disability and I turned into this GIF lmao
There was a spate of pandemic novels by big American authors a couple years ago. The Sentence by Louise Erdrich. Anne Tyler’s French Braid. And the most pandemic-centric of all, Wish You Were Here by Jodi Picoult. I read them when I was writing my own novel that, in part, addressed the pandemic.
