“Cinderella” is the story that taught most of us how to view domestic chores for fantasy protagonists—namely, as a trap to escape on the road to their hero’s journey. Everyone needs clean clothes and something to eat. Children need to be watched, the sick not only dramatically healed but mundanely and conscientiously cared for, but for most fantasy novels, that’s a background process—support work for the questing party, nothing you can expect protagonists to do for themselves.
And then there’s domestic fantasy. The scope and the focus of domestic fantasy is often described as smaller than epic quest fantasy (note: these are not, of course, the only two sub-genres!), but more crucially, it’s also broader. It allows for a wider range of skills to be important, and a wider set of sources of agency through which characters can make an important difference in their worlds, by reexamining which changes and actions can be counted as important in the first place.
