Why is fantasy more "standardized" then science fiction?

Nope.

It's very easy to deny. You haven't read very widely in the fantasy genre or else you wouldn't have made this thread.

edited 20th Mar '12 5:20:42 PM by MildGuy

Because the equivalent of a no true scotsman is really going to contribute to thread.

Give examples or something at least.

Nous restons ici.

Nope. You want me to be a librarian, then pay me. I didn't start the thread, I didn't make the initial argument. That's on OP. Let him/her provide the examples if they want me to take this seriously. Because statements like this:

Yeah. Maybe ask what influenced Gygax and D&D besides Tolkien. Edit: hell, look into what influenced Tolkien. Read Beowulf, read Norse and Greek myth and the 1001 Nights. Read Gilgamesh. Realize that the glut of Tolkien ripoffs that flooded the market in the nineties North America are not the end all, be all of the fantasy genre.

Hey giaz! Sci Fi is all space squids and rocket ships. Why's Sci Fi so standardized?!?!?!

Spoiler: Science Fiction isn't that standardized. Who knew?

edited 20th Mar '12 5:33:26 PM by MildGuy

So citing stuff from 1850 or before is a valid argument about the current state of the genre.

I think not.

Indeed, it becomes more clear you didn't read the OP's actual argument the more you rail against it. This is a discussion of trends of behavior over time; an assertion that fantasy tends to standardize models in a way that scifi does not. The existence of the Tolkien clones makes a good argument that this actually happens; that they are not the whole of the genre was never an issue of contention, that they occupy a huge portion of it is.

You're railing against a straw man of total conformity. We're discussing a trend to follow the leader. They're not the same thing.

Nous restons ici.

Mild Guy, please dial back the aggression.

Unless you're going for the irony award for mismatch of username and behavior, but that earns you a ban sooner or later.

A brighter future for a darker age.

I think the point being made is not that all fantasy is this standardized, it's that most popular and successful fantasy in the last 30 years or so fits within that mold — which is an accurate accusation. It's not even saying that those books are bad because of that — just that the genre as a whole is not as adventurous as one might have assumed, given its stated scope.

I think my argument that most fantasy is inspired by (a) history, (b) myth, and (c) other works in the genre, explains the reasons quite well. A genre defined as history+myth, and filtered through the expectations built up by other works — that's what most recent fantasy is, one way or another.

A brighter future for a darker age.

It's a mix of a lot of writers being rather uncreative for the genre being named "Fantasy", and Dn D Settings overshadowing high/medieval fantasy more than any other genre in the minds of both the writers and and the fans.

to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee

I wouldn't exactly say "uncreative", though — many of them are wondrously creative within the standard fantasy template.

And part of it is based on what they think will sell, of course. Professional authors write to pay rent and buy food, y'know.

A brighter future for a darker age.

This might sound like a stupid question, but does this apply to Japanese works? At the very least, Fullmetal Alchemist doesn't seem like it matches any other fantasy setting.

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

I don't think that Japanese works are generally under the same set of genre assumptions as English-language ones, though I'm sure there are equivalent pressures. From my never-having-read/watched-it point of view, FMA doesn't seem a million miles away from e.g. the setting of Girl Genius, for instance, but neither of them is the standard Western Fantasy Setting we're talking about here.

A brighter future for a darker age.

Thank you for pointing this out - that matches my observations. It's not so much that all fantasy is formulaic as that it tends to stick within a certain set of what you aptly call "templates". There's a lot of different things written inside those templates, but not many works tend to go outside them.

As for Japanese works, I honestly don't know enough about them to say. There's definitely a lot of standardization among the "action fantasy" works I see on here, and anime/manga seems to be one of their bigger influences, but I don't know whether the standardization is because of that (I think it rather traces to the fact that they're written by tropers, personally). My observations were largely meant in regards to Western works.

edited 20th Mar '12 6:52:41 PM by nrjxll

I don't think I've ever seen a setting in a Japanese fantasy that fully matches the Standard Fantasy Setting. I believe a lot of Japanese-published fantasies fall under the umbrella of Urban Fantasy. I've seen Japanese fantasy based off of lore from both east and west, other real-world cultures, and sometimes nothing in particular. It's a varied bunch.

"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."

Keep in mind, when I'm talking about standardization I don't mean just the Standard Fantasy Setting. Most subgenres are also pretty standardized - for instance, there's a distinctive template for most urban fantasy today. So the real question is, if most Japanese fantasy is urban, does it match that standard?

Mind you, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if it didn't. One of the things that seems to keep coming up here is that Western fantasy has so much Follow the Leader because there have been such iconic leaders in the first place. From what little I do know about Japanese fantasy, there's never been any real Tolkien-equivalent or the like, so it would only make sense for there to be a lot more variation.

edited 20th Mar '12 7:21:31 PM by nrjxll

Bear in mind that Fantasy has existed in one form or another in the popular consciousness for a looooong time. Be it myth or legend or fable, it existed. The Illiad and the Odyssey are both, for example, fantasy. Science fiction? It wasn't until the 19th century that we got anything close to what we have in the modern day.

"Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person that doesn't get it."

Mr AHR and Morven are on to something here, and I don't think anyone has mentioned about it so far.

Think of genres as boxes. Science fiction is based on whatever is the newest tech at the time, so it goes in the box. However with new scientific discoveries older ones are proven false, so the new science replaces the old in the box. Now of course most science fiction fans enjoy following the latest trends in science, so they would protest if the science fiction writer used an outdated theory. This means that the "standard" of science fiction is in flux.

Fantasy, unlike science fiction, has outside sources that do not change. These sources are, as Morven mentioned, myth, history, and other books. Now most of the myths are fossilized and history in general has the same patterns with minor changes, so they tend to be rather static. Also since other books tend to use those same myths and histories, books based on other books tend to be copies of copies. This is not necessarily a bad thing as certain stories are excellent. It is just that we have made that box and all of the external devices are inside it. That is why fantasy tends to follow certain standards.

However if people desire to make fantasy as dynamic as science fiction, then they must use an internal source, the writer's imagination. You can combine something old with something old or new. Sure good writers of other genres can use that same tool, but great fantasy uses that tool in its purest form. Fantasy comes from the Greek noun phantasia, "a making visible". Imagine a place where reality and imagination coexisted. New sights, new sounds, and new experiences come alive and become a part of us. We see ourselves as part of the story and part of the characters' lives to the point that fiction becomes reality. There are some writers who don't use this, but there are some that do.

Breathe life into your story and capture the hearts, minds, and souls of your readers!

Has ADD, plays World of Tanks, thinks up crazy ideas like children making spaceships for Hitler. Occasionally writes them down.

Fantasy as a genre appeals to the unconscious on the level that myths and fairy tales once did. One of the central conventions within heroic fantasy is the Hero's Journey, illustrating the cycle of the hero to defeat the villain in a "Cave" and return home a victor. That is an archetype, which can be applied from the Lord of the Rings to Star Wars (Original Trilogy), and which has stood the test of time for the audience's yearnings.

One of the things I've observed with contact with some of current Western SF and Fantasy - is that there tends to be a focus on plot planning and world development over other caveats of storytelling - the authors concern themselves with "How will I match Plot Event X with Plot Event Y?" and world-building over expressing a unique literary voice through the text. It's a new kind of pulp.

Perhaps as a result, I notice a prevalence of "masculine" (lack of a better word) elements in some mainstream SF/Fantasy. I can't really describe it; it is as if these things like pure curiosity and pure tenderness were to be snuffed out in favour of sterile technology/magic against some disgruntled faction. You know what I mean?

I would like SF/Fantasy to provoke awe about the unrealisable and stir that unconscious yearnings. They can be great genres to evoke atmosphere in. If there were to be innovation, the current batch of safety-net conventions must first be forgotten so new, more unique venues can fill the vacuum.

edited 20th Mar '12 9:50:59 PM by QQQQQ

Please don't make soapbox posts.

I'll have to agree with what someone said earlier.

Science fiction has new scientific advances to draw on, which happen all the time. They might not be very big scientific advances happening that often, but often they're enough to stir the pot.

Fantasy however is often based on stuff we're not getting new information on all the time, so it's much more prone to follow the leader. Also in fantasy that takes place in an earlier time like the generic fantasy setting there's even less of an impetus to move than even contemporary fiction because the time period is unchanging.

However I do not think that just because something seems like a mideval setting makes it boring. I think a lot of fantasy authors are just not using what they know. Like, the Chalion and ASOIAF books use the setting to an advantage rather than a background to presumably more "interesting" things. I also think this element is more grating in fantasy than in sci-fi, because sci-fi settings tend to be speculative so it's harder to pin down whether it's inaccurate or not.

I don't imagine Fantasy (for a standard medieval setting) is in a stasis because the general time period is frozen. If you look at the Western genre for example, one of the the standard takes on it used to be something like Good Sheriff doing the long walk down main street to face the high noon of outlaw duelling, while out of the Last Chance saloon drifts the theme song, "See what the boys in the backlash will have and tell them I'm having the same."

But over time, the idealistic viewpoint is turned out in favour of more subversive stories, Spaghetti Westerns in film and then some utterly brutal Westerns like Blood Meridian - you wonder which of the Natives or Whites can come to more savagery.

You have a point in that changing views of a historical period can change the nature of fantasy set in a facsimile of that period. But the periods themselves rarely ever change. Medieval European fantasy may vary in its tone from heavily romanticized to even worse then reality, depending on how we see that era, but it's still set against the same generic medieval backdrop as opposed to, say, 1700s European fantasy.

And of course, nothing about the nature of the fantasy genre makes it so limited as only to focus on real-life historical eras in the first place.

Q, you've never read and contrasted any brutal and idealistic mideval fantasy?

Anyway. If it helps fantasy's case any, I feel like science fiction can scoot by a lot on an idea or a gimmick easier than fantasy because of this lack of creativity when it comes to certain story elements.

I have to say that I find this inherently unbelievable, for many reasons, but let me provide a concrete example.

While the original Star Trek was running, so was the Vietnam War. And so were the first starlight scope night vision devices. (Active infrared night vision has technically existed since at least 1939, too; both the German and US armies deployed personal active infrared night vision devices during the Second World War.)

TNG ran concurrently with the First Gulf War, where the ability of coalition forces to fight at night when their opponents could not, and the advantages this accrued them, was discussed repeatedly on international news programs and that it was actually possible to see people in the dark better than you could during the day was firmly impressed on the popular consciousness.

Despite this, a member of Starfleet would not use a personal night vision device until Enterprise, more than 57 years after the first practical ones were developed and more than a decade after the popular consciousness had these devices' existence impressed on it sharply. To this day, there are dozens of sci-fi novels put out a year where someone could really, really benefit from a Vietnam-era starlight scope but nobody has them, while the full advantages of these or infrared sensing technology are almost never considered outside military sci-fi. (Hell, the most recent BSG had some episodes where the Colonial Military could have really used some.)

edited 21st Mar '12 2:44:05 AM by Night

Nous restons ici.

I don't have that much to say here, but I firmly disagree that there's any paucity of history or myth, or even interpretations of such, to choose from when creating fantasy. And on the other hand, while there's plenty of new technology to explore when creating science fiction, only really hard sci-fi actually cares about it as such. Medium to soft science fiction is more or less implausible things happening on a scientific basis, and only mines actual science when it wants a cooler way of explaining the implausible things. (I prefer soft sci-fi, but I bear no delusions of its similarity to reality.)

Another thing just occurred to me: it might have to do with copyright laws. In both genres it's popular to include types of animals and people that don't exist in Real Life; fantasy stories have magical beings while sci-fi stories have aliens. However, while there's a plethora of public domain creatures they fantasy writers can draw upon (elves, dragons, vampires, werewolves, gods, giants, fairies, unicorns, trolls, etc.), other than The Greys and some of the earliest sci-fi stories, most fictional depictions of aliens are currently under copyright. Someone who's a fan of Anne Rice can write their own book about vampires, but someone who's a fan of Star Trek can't write their own book about Vulcans. If nothing else, having to make your alien creatures unique enough so that you don't get sued is going to discourage standardization.

edited 21st Mar '12 4:59:14 AM by RavenWilder

On the topic of non-Tolkeinian fantasy:

If there's one thing I've learned from Dominions*

that's not related to pre-gunpowder warfare, it's that non-Western mythology is a woefully untapped source of inspiration. Their stated "no Tolkein" design rule led to a lot of very distinctive nations. Looking up the mythological behind for them while waiting for other players to hand me my miserable ass finish their turns was enlightening. (I'd go into detail, but this is neither the time nor the place to pimp my own writing.)

From an opposite end, A Song Of Ice And Fire. Despite being mostly Western-inspired (if non-Tolekinian), it's made a hell of a name for itself. It perfected some fantasy tropes, and tore others asunder by means of Reality Ensues. The series is not about the world-building, of course, it's about the characters. But it would not be what it is if these characters did not move about in a world that can endure should they die suddenly and brutally — as they often do. It is a world with its own life, a world that need not rely upon pretty distractions to fascinate its audience. But neither is it dependent upon the web of myriad factions it weaves. All the factions, all the unflinching darkness... they're just catalysts. Essential catalysts to make the world unique, but catalysts nonetheless. It's really about the humanity of its inhabitants, form the lowest to the mightiest. And it is a world where good need not triumph... so it's all the more meaningful when it does.

The Witcher also managed to create its own feel, despite having its elves and dwarves. Much of what I said on A Song Of Ice And Fire about its world applies to it, but it also pulled another trick, borrowing from Eastern European mythology. At first close enough to be familiar, yet alien in its own way, encounters such creatures as Lady Midday make the world just that bit more memorable.

Tolkein was an incredible author, don't get me wrong. If you wish to honor him, don't imitate what he created, but create as he did. Create a world with character, but only while remembering that it's nothing but an exercise in self-gratification without the characters within it. (And remember also, lest you take the wrong message away from my ramble, that a world of darkness without a single candle of hope is as absurd as any amateur Sugar Bowl ever written.)

edited 21st Mar '12 5:54:42 AM by KillerClowns