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Myths, legends, religion and history are heavily utilized when creating the stories found in all genres of anime. Dozens upon dozens of myths and legends were used to build the characters and plot of Jujutsu Kaisen , for example, and this anime is far from the only example. Fate/stay night is rife with mythological, legendary, and historical figures. First things first. This article is going to focus on Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works . Yes, I know, I know. This means we won’t be diving into the video games, the other anime installments in the Fate series, or any of the myriad of spinoffs. Related: The Folklore Behind Megumi Fushigur's Shikigami in Jujutsu Kaisen It’s probably no surprise that Unlimited Blade Works is absolutely chock full of characters based on people from myths, legends, and history. Many of the streets shown in the anime can be walked in Japan as well,...

This is a guest post from Gabriela Houston, the London-based Polish author of Second Bell, a Slavic fantasy debut described as a cross between His Dark Materials and The Bear and the Nightingale. You can find out more about the book here.

Historically speaking, the fantasy genre has a thorny relationship with motherhood. Technically, it’s acknowledged that the protagonists must have sprung from somewhere. But it is often solely their paternity that is seen as important—while the mothers, if mentioned at all, are usually either dead of irrelevant: unmentioned or languishing in a convent somewhere. If the mothers (or stepmothers: a different type of a mother-figure) persist in being alive into their children’s adulthood they are most often presented as an obstacle to their child’s self-actualisation/quest, or, as is most common with the stepmother archetype, present an actual threat to the protagonist.

Since mainstream fantasy as a genre was Eurocentric,...

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When Lavie Tidhar set out to write his own Arthurian legend, he wanted to cut through the nationalistic myth-making into the bone of the original stories.

“It’s supposed to be about chivalry and honor, and it’s . . . it’s not!” He told Clarkesworld. “Everyone else was doing the story the way we’re told it goes, not the way it actually goes.”

The way it goes, in Tidhar’s By Force Alone, is as a bloody, bawdy gangster story where heroes are con men and England isn’t worth fighting for. Some of the ideas he uses appear in the original myth, while others give new context to familiar characters. The idea of Arthur’s return to usher in a golden age for England is still a familiar cultural touchstone, layered with irony, context and mystery that have also been part of the story from nearly the beginning.

The following contains spoilers for Netflix’s Cursed. Read our spoiler-free review of the series here.

While Netflix’s Cursed focuses primarily on the story of Nimue, a young girl with a magical gift and a dark destiny as the future Lady of the Lake, it asks its audience to engage with the traditional tropes of Arthurian legend in new and interesting ways.

Cursed’s Merlin may also feel a bit strange to viewers who are only familiar with the character as the legendary wizard from film adaptations like Disney’s The Sword in the Stone, or the famous T.H. White novel it’s based on, The Once and Future King. In these – and most other – retellings, Merlin is a figure of great power and wisdom. His magical abilities are substantial and he’s generally depicted as a sort of all-seeing sage, who engineers the birth of Arthur and the...