I think part of the Tudor appeal is in Henry VIII claiming religious independence for England combined with well-documented soap opera combined with the early days of European world discovery/conquest, with a soupçon of residual Renaissance Superiority.

I'm really grateful for your comments on Fantasycon. As someone who reads more fantasy than SF by default, I recently found myself a little confused to realize I've been involved in science fiction conventions whose relationship to fantasy is ambiguous. Does it include fantasy? Often. If so, why are there separate fantasy organizations in this country? Did they split at some point? Did they develop in parallel? (But if horror, rather than fantasy, is symptomatic of them, that does reduce my interest and my feeling that maybe I was doing something wrong by not going.)