Something has shifted in fantasy.
If you’ve been paying attention to what’s selling, what readers are actually reaching for, and what’s getting talked about online, the texture of the genre has changed in the last few years.
The brutalist nihilism that defined fantasy from roughly 2005 to 2020 is no longer the dominant note.
The doorstop grimdark epic isn’t dead (Abercrombie still sells, Lawrence still sells) but it isn’t where the cultural energy is any more.
Something else is rising in its place, and naming it properly matters, because we’re going to be reading and writing in this new register for at least the next decade.
This post is about what’s shifting, why, and where I think the genre is going.
The short version: we’re moving from grimdark to nobledark, and the shift is being driven by something larger than literary fashion.
What Grimdark Was, and Why It Dominated
Grimdark didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was the natural literary register for a particular cultural moment.
The genre’s grimdark era roughly coincides with the years after 9/11 and especially after the 2008 financial crisis.
These were the years when institutional trust collapsed in real time. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated that the old certainties about righteous causes weren’t going to hold. The banking crisis demonstrated that the people running the economy didn’t know what they were doing (or did know and didn’t care). The political class on both sides of the Atlantic looked increasingly hollow.
The fantasy genre, which had spent the previous half-century in various forms of Tolkien-inflected heroism, started writing books that reflected the new mood.
Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself arrived in 2006. Mark Lawrence’s Prince of Thorns in 2011. R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing trilogy had started in 2003. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (already running since 1996) became culturally dominant in this period and reached its televised peak in the early 2010s. The Witcher books found international readership in English translation.
What these works shared was a basic posture: heroism is a lie, institutions are corrupt, the people in charge are venal or worse, and any character who believes otherwise is naïve and probably dead by chapter ten.
That register made sense in its moment. Fantasy was doing what good fantasy does. It was taking the underlying anxieties of the culture and giving them mythic form. The bleak chuckle of an Abercrombie protagonist was the appropriate literary response to a world that had stopped believing its own institutional myths.
But that moment is passing.
The Fourth Turning Lens
There’s a sociological frame worth bringing in here, because it explains the shift better than any purely literary analysis can.
Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning thesis, published in 1997, argues that history moves in roughly 80-year cycles consisting of four phases—a High of institutional confidence, an Awakening of cultural rebellion, an Unravelling of institutional trust, and a Crisis of collapse and reformation. The Crisis phase, by their account, is when the existing order can’t sustain itself any longer and a society has to reach back to first principles to find what it actually believes.
You don’t have to buy the theory wholesale to find the diagnostic useful. The grimdark era of fantasy maps onto what Strauss and Howe would call the late Unravelling—the phase where institutional trust is collapsing and the dominant cultural mood is ironic, distrustful, and exhausted.
That’s exactly the types of books we were reading from 2005 to 2020.
What we’re in now is something different. By Strauss and Howe’s reckoning we’re somewhere deep in the Crisis phase, and Crisis phases have a different cultural signature. They produce appetite for first-principles narrative. They reach back for heroic archetype not out of nostalgia but out of need.
The institutions can’t be trusted, so the question becomes: what do you trust instead?
Your own moral code. The bond between you and the people you love. The duties you choose to honour. The cost you’re willing to pay to do the right thing.
This isn’t a return to pre-grimdark heroism. The brutal world that grimdark insisted on hasn’t been disproved. Readers in a Crisis era don’t want to go back to a pastoral Tolkien-era register where everything works out and the orcs are clearly delineated from the elves.
They want fantasy that acknowledges the grimdark world and then tries to live morally inside it anyway. That’s a different register, and it deserves a different name.
The Markers of the Shift
You can see the shift in what’s getting commercial traction.
John Gwynne’s career arc is one of the clearest signals. His Faithful and the Fallen and Of Blood and Bone series are gritty—Norse-coded, brutal, properly dark—but they aren’t nihilistic.
Loyalty matters. Friendship matters. The decent characters are decent without being naïve.
Gwynne has overtaken many of the original grimdark writers commercially, and he isn’t doing grimdark. He’s doing something else.
The Conan revival is another signal. Robert E. Howard’s original stories are seeing a genuine cultural resurgence—new comics from Titan, new film projects, Heroic Signatures’ careful stewardship of the property.
Conan is pure first-principles myth. A man, a sword, a corrupt civilisation, a personal code that operates outside institutional law. That isn’t nostalgia for the 1930s. That’s a culture in a Crisis phase reaching for the archetypes it needs.
The cosy fantasy boom is part of the same shift, even though it looks different on the surface. T. Kingfisher, Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes, the explosion of low-stakes warm-tone fantasy—these books are also rejecting the grimdark register, just from a different angle. They’re saying: actually, kindness is the interesting thing now. Decency is the rebellion.
Even the romantasy boom, often dismissed as commercial confection, is part of the same shift.
Underneath the spice and the dragon-bonded mates is a fundamentally hopeful register. The bad guys lose. The morally serious choices matter. Love is real and worth fighting for. That’s a Crisis-era register too, even when it’s wearing very different clothes from John Gwynne.
What all of these have in common is that they’re rejecting the grimdark assumption that heroism is a lie. They aren’t pretending the world is gentle. They’re insisting that meaning is recoverable inside a brutal world. That’s the cultural energy of a Crisis era, and it’s the energy fantasy is now running on.
Naming the New Register
I’ve been calling this nobledark, partly because the existing taxonomy doesn’t quite catch it.
Grimdark is dark in a particular way: the world is brutal and heroism is a lie. The two go together. Heroes get killed or corrupted, decent characters are revealed as fools, and the moral arc bends toward nothing. Whatever else you say about grimdark, it has an honest internal logic.
Noblebright is the opposite—the world is broadly hopeful, heroes are mostly good, evil is identifiable and defeatable, and moral effort is generally rewarded.
This is the arena Tolkien works in (with complications) and the register that dominated fantasy before grimdark arrived. It’s still alive—it isn’t extinct—but it doesn’t catch what’s happening now either.
The new register isn’t asking us to forget the grimdark insight that the world is brutal. It’s asking us to live morally inside that insight.
Nobledark is the register that holds both. The world is as brutal as grimdark said it was. Heroism is as hard as grimdark said it was. Institutions are corrupt, power is venal, decent people get destroyed by forces larger than themselves.
But—and this is the bit grimdark refused—moral commitments still matter, decency is still possible, hope is real even when it costs you everything to keep it alive. The world bleeds, but the bleeding doesn’t conclude the argument.
You can see this all over the books I named in the previous section. Gwynne does it. The Conan revival does it. The cosy fantasy boom does it from one angle, romantasy from another. Even some of the grimdark writers themselves are drifting toward it—Abercrombie’s The Heroes and his Age of Madness trilogy have noticeably more weight on the moral commitments of their characters than his earlier work.
What nobledark refuses is the easy ironic detachment that defined grimdark. It refuses the bleak chuckle. It refuses the implied authorial position that all of this is grim and pointless and isn’t it interesting how much of it I can wallow in. The Crisis era doesn’t have time for that posture any more.
What This Means for Writers and Readers
If you write fantasy, the shift matters because the readers you’re writing for are no longer the readers of 2010.
The reader who wanted Prince of Thorns in 2011 wanted a confirmation that the dark world they suspected they were living in was the real one.
The reader picking up new fantasy in 2026 wants something else. They’ve already accepted that the world is dark. They want to know what to do about it. They want characters whose moral effort is taken seriously by the text. They want costs that mean something. They want hope that has paid for itself.
If you read fantasy, the shift matters because it explains why your taste might have moved without you realising it. If you used to love grimdark and have noticed that recent grimdark releases feel slightly off—not bad, just somehow not landing the way the old books did—that isn’t because the books got worse. It’s because you’ve moved, and the broader cultural moment has moved with you.
In the Ravenglass Universe, what I’ve been trying to do—what the whole King of Nobledark framing has been about—is write fantasy that lives in this cultural shift honestly.
Ragnar in Ravenglass Legends lives in a brutal world that crushed his family and saw him adopted by his enemies. Maja lives in a court that survives on manipulation and threat. Soren in Dawn of Assassins lives in an empire that’s actively collapsing around him.
None of these are gentle worlds. But all of them have characters who choose, repeatedly, to act morally inside brutal circumstances, and whose choices cost them real things.
That’s nobledark, and it’s what I think fantasy is going to be doing more of for the foreseeable future.
Where Fantasy Goes Next
I don’t think grimdark is going anywhere—the books are good, the readership is loyal, and the genre will continue to produce strong work. But it isn’t going to be as dominant over the next decade. The cultural moment that gave grimdark its weight has passed.
What’s coming next is fantasy that takes the grimdark world seriously and then asks the next question. What do you owe the people you love when the institutions can’t be trusted? How do you act morally when the law is corrupt? What do you choose to honour when no one’s making you? How do you keep faith—in anything—when the world has given you every reason not to?
These are Crisis-era questions, and fantasy is uniquely equipped to answer them because it can build the worlds that make the questions visible.
The next decade of fantasy is going to look different from the last one, and the writers and readers paying attention can feel it already.
The age of grimdark is winding down. The age of nobledark is starting now.h
