Godwin famously discovered that as the length of a discussion on the internet increases, the probability that someone will compare another person to Hitler approaches 1.
Here’s Yora’s Law: “As the length of a discussion somehow related to Sword & Sorcery increases, the probability that it will turn into a debate on the proper definition Sword & Sorcery approaches 1.”
If for some inconceivable reason, it takes more than 10 posts to reach that point, that’s already amazingly impressive.
The problem is Elric and Conan are both considered Sword & Sorcery and the books are very, very different. We really need new terms like Weird Sword & Sorcery to divide out the Weird Tales stuff from Elric. Or High Magic Sword & Sorcer versus Low Magic Sword & Sorcery or something.
That’s because Elric was Moorecock’s conscious attempt to turn the S&S paradigm on it head.
I wouldn’t say that Elric is an anti-S&S series, though. More a push to take many of the key features of Conan stories and expand them beyond just Conan-clones.
And it was only after that that a discussion began on creating a name for this new genre. A single series and its knock-offs is not a genre yet.