Charmain Kading

If you look closely at classical gothic fiction, at, at those sprawling, crumbling estates and dark, endless corridors, you realize something pretty fast. The architecture itself was built to enforce boundaries. It was designed to keep certain people safe inside and push everything else out into the shadows. And for a long time, the rules of who got to survive those hallways depended on which gothic tradition you were reading. You had Ann Radcliffe and the Female Gothic tradition, which was all about interiority, confinement, and a heroine slowly finding her own agency while navigating a world designed to trap her. But then you had Matthew Lewis and the Male Gothic, which leaned hard into epic transgression, outward horror, and tragic, violent ruin. And, and the thing is, if you want to write or even just deeply read gothic fantasy today, you have to ask the core question. Who actually held the power in those old stories, and what happens when we intentionally turn that power on its head?

Charmain Kading

Because it all starts with the setting, right? Setting in gothic stories is never just background decoration. It is practically a character doing massive emotional heavy lifting. Think about how a decaying mansion or a fog drenched moor makes you feel unsettled. It is not just that it is old or spooky. It is because it operates as a liminal space. A liminal space sits on that porous, uncertain threshold between past and present, inside and outside, or life and death. It puts the reader in a state of unresolved tension where nothing is quite solid or safe. And when you combine that with chiaroscuro, that intense visual contrast between deep shadow and sudden light, you start externalizing what the characters are suffering inside. You are taking psychological fragmentation, madness, and that visceral sense of abjection, that feeling where identity itself gets disturbed and disrupted, and you are painting it directly onto the walls of the room.

Charmain Kading

And that brings us to the most fertile ground in the whole genre, which is the figure of the monstrous stranger. The monstrous other. Historically, mainstream gothic narratives coded queer desire directly into monsters. Vampires, tragic doubles, creatures lurking in the dark. These figures carried coded meanings that marginalized readers recognized, even when society treated those desires as something horrific to be destroyed. But when you subvert that trope, when you stop treating the monster as an object of terror and start writing them as an active subject with real agency, desire, and emotional depth, the entire moral framework shifts. The monstrous other is no longer a warning label. They become the empathetic protagonist. The monster becomes the lens through which we see the story clearly.

Charmain Kading

I keep coming back to how practical this is for plotting. Take a classic trope like the isolated woman trapped in a dangerous, claustrophobic house. If you just leave her there terrified, waiting for help, it is a clichéd damsel story. But if you layer a second trope onto it, say, a forbidden romance or a secret form of knowledge, you instantly transform that confinement into agency. Her isolation becomes the very pressure cooker that forces her to investigate the truth. Suddenly, her perceived madness is not a pathology at all, but a heightened form of perception that lets her see what everyone else ignores. That is why modern gothic fantasy feels so urgent right now. The genre was never actually neutral. It was always about the uncomfortable truths society refused to look at directly, whether that was feminine rage, inherited trauma, or marginalized identity. When we reclaim those monsters, we are not rewriting the gothic. We are finally telling the truth about what it was built for all along.

Charmain Kading

That's it for this footnote. Thanks for tuning in, and until next time... keep writing with intention.