The most successful fantasy series of our time is completely traditional. If you delete the violence, dying protagonists, and irregular viewpoint switches from George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, you essentially have classic fantasy in the vein of Tolkien or Robert Jordan – or even Walter Scott's Ivanhoe from 1820.

"Fantasy" is a genre that is based on medieval European literature and European folklore. While there are crossover experiments into folklores of other cultures or into other genres (such as Science Fantasy), and some of these crossovers have been highly successful at certain times and for certain demographics (such as Urban Fantasy for young adult females), the "core" genre has remained successful for the past two centuries (since its invention by romantic writers in the eighteenth centuries).

Stories with knights and damsels set in medieval worlds always sell (in countries with a population of mostly European descent). They may not always make the bestseller lists, but they remain consistently popular, like stories with spaceships and aliens or stories with murderers or stories about love.

The kind of originality that readers want lies not in breaking out of the genre, but in a reading experience that reflects their life-experience.

What was the vogue until recently is "grimdark" or "gritty" fantasy. You could interpret it as writers putting into fantasy what they see on the news: war in the Middle East, highschool shootings, terrorism, a rising insecurity in the population. This is the violence in GRRM that differentiates him from Robert Jordan.

What appears to become more popular is what agents call "own voices" fiction, that is fantasy about marginalized characters, minority groups, and intimate portrayals of characters such as in Naomi Novik's Uprooted. The genre in all these is quite traditionally employed, but the protagonists experience themselves and their surroundings in a contemporary 21st century self-reflexive way. You could say, this is fantasy about how its readers feel about themselves projected into a fantasy world. But this is nothing new either, Ursula Le Guin did this in her fantasy works in the 1960s.

The most successful fantasy series of our time is completely traditional. If you delete the violence, dying-off protagonists, and irregular viewpoint switches from George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, you essentially have classic fantasy in the vein of Tolkien or Robert Jordan – or even Walter Scott's Ivanhoe from 1820.

"Fantasy" is a genre that is based on medieval European literature and European folklore. While there are crossover experiments into folklores of other cultures or into other genres (such as Science Fantasy), and some of these crossovers have been highly successful at certain times and for certain demographics (such as Urban Fantasy for young adult females), the "core" genre has remained successful for the past two centuries (since its invention by romantic writers in the eighteenth century).

Stories with knights and damsels set in medieval worlds always sell (in countries with a population of mostly European descent). They may not always make the bestseller lists, but they remain consistently popular, like stories with spaceships and aliens or stories with murderers or stories about love.

The kind of originality that readers want lies not in breaking out of the genre, but in a reading experience that reflects their life-experience.

What was the vogue until recently is "grimdark" or "gritty" fantasy. You could interpret it as writers putting into fantasy what they see on the news: war in the Middle East, highschool shootings, terrorism, a rising insecurity in the population. This is the violence in GRRM that differentiates him from Robert Jordan, who wrote during the economical upswing of post-war 20th century.

What appears to become more popular is what agents call "own voices" fiction, that is fantasy about marginalized characters, minority groups, and intimate portrayals of characters such as in Naomi Novik's Uprooted. The genre in all these is quite traditionally employed, but the protagonists experience themselves and their surroundings in a contemporary 21st century self-reflexive way. You could say, this is fantasy about how its readers feel about themselves projected into a fantasy world. But this is nothing new either, Ursula Le Guin did this in her fantasy works in the 1960s.