I made a prior post inspired by a BookTuber named EverymanReads where he argued for that.
There we were talking just in the context of Prose Novels. Looking beyond that the case becomes even stronger.
For movies we have Hook, Army of Darkness, Peter Jacksons' LOTR Adaptations and the first two Star Wars Prequels to name just the first that easily pop into head. For TV we had Hercules and Xena, that Sam Neill Merlin miniseries. And Urban Fantasy was largely defined by shows like Forever Knight and the Buffyverse and Charmed and Anime like Witch Hunter Robin.
Speaking of Anime and Manga, this era had classics like Berserk and Escaflone and forgotten classics like Maze, and adaptations of some of those LNs I talked about, and most of the most defining entries of the Magical Girl Warrior subgenre as well as Battle Shonen.
But Video Games is where things were even more genre defining. It'd almost be easier to name what Video Games aren't either Fantasy or Sci-Fi in some ways, the defining franchises of the medium like Mario and Sonic and Kirby and Pokémon are distinct Fantasy settings that only Gaming as a medium could come up with.
But even if we limit ourselves to Games that feel more inline with conventional Fantasy there is still a lot. For Zelda this period includes A Link To The Past, Link's Awakening, Ancient Stone Tablets, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, The Oracle Games, The Winder Waker, Four Swords, Four Swords Adventures and The Minish Cap. All those genre defining JRPGs of SNES and PlayStation that were important to prior post of this blog are this era, as well as much of the PS2 and Game Cube era. Then there's Casltevania and lots of classic Star Wars Games.
And spinning off from that are Visual Novels like YU-NO: The Girl Who Chants Love At The Bound Of This World, Higurashi, Tsukihime and it's sequels and Fate/Stay Night.
For Otaku media I almost want to shift it a year to be 1991-2005. I don't even know much what I'd be loosing dropping 1990, but I know I'd be gaining Fate/Hallow Ataraxia, Mai Otome, the second seasons of Nanoha and PreCure, most of the Shuffle Anime Adaptation. Or heck maybe even 1992-2006.
Going back to Star Wars, even EverymanRead's reading list doesn't include all English language fantasy novels form this era, it for examples includes a few Star Wars EU novels. This era includes all the Bantam books and the first 5 years of Del Rey which includes the New Jedi Order series containing the Yuuzhan Vong War and the earliest Prequel Era novels. Maybe for Star Wars we could move the era a year since nothing notable came out in 1990 but 2005 has Revange of The Sith and a number of EU novels tying into it directly including the Dark Nest trilogy in the Post-Endor saga. Or with an April 91 through March 2006 timeframe we could include Timothy Zahn's Outbound Flight.
The late 90s also includes the three Willow novels by Chris Claremont.
Why limit myself to 15 years per era? Because it feels like that's the average for the pretty agreed upon language for talking about eras of American Superhero Comic Books.
And speaking of which the 90s and early 00s is when most of my favorite DC Comics came out as well, most of which have some degree of Fantasy in them.
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