Rare Air - A New Breath for Fantasy

There is a paradox at the heart of fantasy literature, one that reveals itself the moment you ask what the genre actually is.

The usual answer involves dragons and dark lords, quests and chosen ones, landscapes that bear an uncanny resemblance to medieval Europe. But this is a trick of marketing, a sleight of hand performed so deftly over the past century that we've come to mistake the package for the thing itself.

Fantasy, understood correctly, is not a subgenre at all.

Every story is shaped by the perspective of its teller — by their culture, their lived experience, their understanding of the world and the worlds beyond it. This subjectivity is inherently fantastical. It is imaginative, speculative, irreducibly human. Before there were genres, before there were categories and classifications, there was simply the act of imagining. And from that act—that primal human impulse—all storytelling emerged.

The Default

Fantasy did not emerge from fiction.

Yet at some point, through a process both gradual and oddly systematic, fantasy contracted. It became a box—narrow, meticulously defined, constructed almost entirely around a single tradition. A tradition drawn from European mythology, medieval history, and the literary inheritance of a small constellation of Western authors.

To say "fantasy" now is to summon, for most readers, a specific visual vocabulary: castles and swords, magic systems and monarchies, narratives that unfold in settings suspiciously reminiscent of pre-industrial England. This is not because fantasy is inherently European, or because the European mythic imagination holds some monopoly on the fantastic.

It is because the genre, as it has been packaged, marketed, and popularized across generations, has been filtered through a European lens so consistently that the filter has come to seem like the form itself.

Fantasy is vast. It has always been vast. Over time, it has branched and evolved into a rich ecosystem of subgenres, each with its own conventions, tones, and concerns:

Epic. Dark. Science. Historical. Romantic. Superhero. And many more.

Each of these represents a different way of engaging with the imaginative, the mythical, and the supernatural. Each carries its own weight, its own history, and its own relationship to the cultures that birthed it.

And yet, when people speak of fantasy — when they reference the genre in conversation, in criticism, in popular culture—the word "fantasy" almost invariably collapses into a single variant.

To understand why fantasy has become so narrowly defined, we must understand the conditions that shaped it.

The literary tradition that dominates global publishing, film, and media is, by and large, a Western one. The myths, legends, and folkloric traditions that became the raw material for modern fantasy — dragons, elves, dark forests, ancient prophecies — are drawn overwhelmingly from European sources: Norse mythology, Celtic legend, Greek and Roman traditions, and the medieval European imagination.

This is not a judgment. These are rich, profound traditions with centuries of storytelling behind them. But they are not the only traditions. They are not even the oldest.

Across the globe — in Africa, in Asia, in the Caribbean, in the Americas, in the Pacific Islands — there exist mythological and folkloric traditions of extraordinary depth and complexity. Stories of creation, transformation, spirits, and supernatural forces that are just as vivid, just as profound, and just as fertile as anything in the European canon. And yet these traditions have been, for the most part, absent from the mainstream fantasy conversation. Not because they lack power or richness, but because the structures of publishing, storytelling, and cultural consumption have historically centred one tradition above all others.

Globalisation has begun to shift the ground. As the world becomes more connected — as stories, ideas, and cultures flow more freely across borders than ever before — the assumption that European mythology is the default reference point for fantasy is no longer sustainable. It is no longer even logical. The audience for fantasy is global. The sources for fantasy should be too.

Opening the Windows

Rare Fantasy is a genre born from this understanding.

It is not defined by what it rejects. It is defined by what it centres.

Rare Fantasy draws its mythology, its themes, its cosmology, and its narrative traditions from the Global South — and specifically, in the case of DMG, from the rich and layered history of Afro peoples across the world.

This is not limited to a single geography or a single identity. It is an expansive, diasporic tradition — one that spans continents and centuries, from the ancient civilisations of the African continent to the complex cultural landscapes forged through the African diaspora: Afro-American, Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Asian communities, each carrying their own stories, beliefs, and ways of understanding the world.

These are not secondary sources. They are not footnotes to a European narrative. They are primary mythological and cultural traditions in their own right — traditions that have shaped entire civilisations, philosophies, spiritual systems, and understandings of humanity's place in the universe.

Rare Fantasy takes these traditions seriously. It draws from them not as decoration or as a gesture toward diversity, but as the foundational material from which its worlds, its characters, and its conflicts are built. The themes are drawn from history, philosophy, ecology, spirituality, and lived experience — layered and woven into stories that feel both ancient and deeply alive.

Why "Rare"?

The name is deliberate.

In a landscape dominated by a single aesthetic tradition, anything that departs from that tradition is, by definition, uncommon.

Rare Fantasy is rare not because it is lesser, but because the conditions that have shaped the genre have made it so. It is rare in the way that any genuine alternative is rare when one tradition has held the centre for so long.

Stories belong, first and foremost, to the people who make them.

In an age of globalisation, where content is consumed across cultures and communities at an unprecedented rate, questions of identity, ownership, and meaning become more urgent, not less. Who gets to define what a story is? Who gets to decide how it is categorised, received, and understood?

These are not merely academic questions. They have real consequences — for how cultures are represented, for what stories are told, and for whose traditions are honoured or erased in the process.

Creators of a work should have agency over the identity of that work. Not absolute control over how it is received — stories, once released, belong to their audiences too — but a meaningful say in how they are framed. A story rooted in Afro mythological traditions should not be flattened into the conventions of European Epic Fantasy simply because that is the most familiar category. It should be understood on its own terms.

This is why the work DMG produces will be received as Rare Fantasy. Not as a subgenre of European Epic Fantasy. Not as a variation on an existing theme. As its own thing — with its own rules, its own traditions, and its own place in the larger story of what fantasy can be.

The Future

The internet has made the world smaller in many ways. Culture, ideas, and stories cross borders with a speed and ease that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. This is, in many respects, remarkable. It means that stories from every corner of the world are, for the first time, genuinely accessible to a global audience.

But accessibility without plurality is hollow.

If the stories that reach a global audience are still, overwhelmingly, drawn from a single tradition — if the myths, the aesthetics, the assumptions remain rooted in one culture's imagination — then globalisation has simply extended the reach of an existing hierarchy rather than disrupting it.

Rare Fantasy is, in part, an act of disruption. It is a deliberate effort to widen the field, to introduce into the fantasy conversation traditions, perspectives, and imaginative worlds that have been long absent from its centre.

It is not the only genre that needs this kind of expansion. But it is one where the need is acute, the potential is enormous, and the stories waiting to be told are inexhaustible.


DMG — Rare Fantasy. Stories from the edges of the world. for the pros.