What is Fantasy Literature Good For?

Hi! I posted this on Ask The Tropers but a friendly troper suggested I post it here, which sounded like a good idea. So, here we go!

Okay, so, this is a pretty broad and weird and vague question, and I realize I'm new here, but I didn't know who else to turn to. Long time fan of the site, first time engaging with it like this. I have a lot of spare time, and I'm reaching 30 years old, and I kind of figured... why not write a fantasy novel, yeah? Seems like a pretty good, productive early on-set mid-life crisis. But I'm the kind of guy who likes to get to the core idea of a thing before I make something of it. Like, what is the core idea of fantasy fiction? What's it good for? Is there a binding philosophy that ties all fantasy fiction - sword and sorcery and the like - together?

With Science Fiction, you can sort of elevator pitch all of it; it's speculative, it's looking towards a possible future for humanity and beyond. With fantasy though, you don't really have any pitch like that, to my knowledge. Your basic Tolkein style stuff was an exercise, as far as I can tell, in just sort of blending together various mythologies, but... why? Why go back to that well? Aside from the fact that "it's cool".

Any help in working through this brain puzzle is appreciated.

Trying to address real-life issues without actually including real life into the narrative.

Also nostalgia.

And, as you said, the "it's cool" thing.

So, from the very beginning:

The core idea is that it's possible to have a world, a setting if you may, with things that go beyond what we know as "normal" that are not based on technology but rather on something else. Sometimes that means a natural presence of something "supernatural", sometimes it merely means that you have a world crafted from scratch where lizard-people exist alongside humans; there is a lot of variety since the core of the genre is ... fairly all-encompassing, I'll say.

It's good for writing the plot you have in mind without constraints that "realistic" stories would be tied with. It's also good as an opportunity to build your own world, let your imagination run wild, focus on what you want to happen and then dress it however you want instead of getting the clothes for it first and then not being able to make the story go in a certain direction because realism.

Not really. It's a genre, because that way it is easy for people to search for things that are not wholly realistic and go in a specific direction, just as is the case with science-fiction, but if you reject "fantasy" as a defining genre and focus on what is portrayed then there actually is a lot of variety. Oh, certainly, there usually seems to be some sort of quest, mission, or prophecy that pushes the plot forward, but for one not always and for two that doesn't really make it any different from non-fantasy stories. Whatever you could write a story about, you can write a fantasy story about: action, romance, humour, coming-of-age plot, mystery, slice-of-life (for whatever reason), you name it and you get it.

A better question should be "why not?" and I feel that both have to be asked if you want to get an answer that is worth something.

I'd created, basically from scratch, a world for a tabletop RPG (not naming anything). While I'm certain that there are a lot of things the inspiration for which did not come from myself but rather from things I'd interacted with in the past, ultimately the thing that got created is my creation, and for what it's worth I am proud of it. Should I not have done it just because I may have taken inspiration from something? Why should I have abandoned it even though as a whole it is unique just because some of the elements may have already been used by those who came before me or mayhap were a part of the actual history? Why should I have not done something positive just because of my choice of genre and inspiration?

It is easy to answer the question "why?" for me, just as it is easy for just anyone to ask it: because my life experiences as a child, teenager, and young adult made it easier for me to come up with fantastical things than with real-life ones, and creating something, anything, with what my mind gives me makes me feel better about being myself, makes my days more positive. Because there were things that I'd dreamed of in the past that were beyond my reach due to other people's actions that should not have been because they were normal, and thus I got used to things being out of reach just as fantasy is out of reach of reality. And world-building, that gives me something I can focus on when I just don't want to think about reality, something I can later put to paper and have something constructive happen out of my escape rather than spend time thinking that my day sucks.

In the end, the exact reasons don't really matter, it's all a matter of preference: if you prefer to write fantasy then writing fantasy it is for you.

The constraints that "realistic" stories have are quite similar to those that fantasy writers encounter: "human beings don't act that way". Even in "realistic" stories the reality is often bended and simplified if it serves the plot. The freedom that fantasy fiction gives to writers is similar to that of sci-fi, and they're often lumped together and given the "speculative fiction" moniker. The difference is in the aesthetics.

The problem with that is that aesthetics is fluff, a superficial thing. And speculative fiction, as a whole, has a pretty bad reputation of being mere fairytales for this reason. You can't have an idea too fantastic for the readers to relate to, since they're, obviously, from the real world with all of its constraints.

On the other hand, the speculative fiction provides a way for the reader to escape these constraints and to know what it means to truly be powerful, something our chaotic world more often than not cannot provide. But this escapism aspect is also true of the "realistic" fiction.

Tolkien himself addressed the issue of escapism in his many letters and lectures. I recommend to read them. They're quite informative.

edited 6th Oct '17 1:12:03 PM by Millership

The way I see it, fantasy can be sort of a counterpart to science fiction. Where sci-fi is focused on inventions and physics, fantasy is concerned with people (or personifications) and civilizations. When done well, fantasy can borrow heavily from "speculative anthropology."

So many great fantasy works are based around myth, or cultures clashing, or anything else that has to do with people. The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia both draw from different myths (Germanic and Greek/Christian, respectively) and fantasy writers down through the decades have used that same framework. "The Elves don't understand what it's like to live the way we do." "Magic has to be reasoned with." "We need to slay the drag— oh crap, the dragon has her own motives!"

When done well, fantasy can comment on the world we live in, on how we interact, in a way that no political or historical drama set in the real world could ever do. It has zero baggage. There's nobody to offend (unless something goes horribly, horribly wrong in your worldbuilding and you happen to be a closet racist). Obviously it helps to understand real-world cultures and sociology, but you use that knowledge to inform your writing, not to dictate it.

Hope that helps!

EDIT: Heh. Millership and I had similar ideas.

edited 6th Oct '17 1:24:09 PM by AwSamWeston

What you just described is also true of the "Social" kind of sci-fi. And revered sci-fi works are often could be classified as this kind.

There's a difference between "Social Sci-Fi" and straight-up Fantasy as I described it above. Social Sci-Fi focuses on an invention or a shift in how technology is used, and shows how it affects the world it occurs in. Fantasy, meanwhile, focuses on the people — technology, if there is any, often takes a backseat and acts as window dressing.

Let's take Star Wars as an example. If it had been constructed with the Social Sci-Fi lens, Star Wars would be about the lightsaber, how it developed, how it affects the lives of the people who use it... The Force would be examined as a law of physics.

But Star Wars is Space Fantasy: the lightsaber is just a Cool Sword because the focus is on the Jedi and Sith. On the Republic, the Empire, and the Rebellion. It's got wise old masters who teach the young students how to use the Force and not (aside from one dumb scene which we will not mention anymore) on how the Force operates. We don't look into the plight of the clones or the droids, we just accept that they're feeding the massive armies fighting for good and evil.

That's the difference between Social Sci-Fi, as Asimov described it, and Fantasy.

It's true of the original trilogy, which is a pure, almost bare-bones example of Space Fantasy (it's also an example of Adventure Sci-Fi, by the way). It was also made decades ago, and they've started to explore these themes in the sequels and EU (they often did not do a good job of it, but still). The line between Social Sci-Fi and Fantasy got blurrier with time (look at the Bioware games: say, Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, despite technically being a Sci-Fi and Fantasy, respectively, and both having a focus on the individuals, also explore the ramifications of having "magic" in the world and its effects on the society), because that was the consumer demand. Or the later Discworld novels, with their "fantasy" stand-ins for real-life technology and its effects. Or Gattaca, which portrays the individual struggle of non-modified person.

Point is, the focus is always on the people, be it a group of them or single individuals.

The line gets even blurrier in the Cyberpunk genre and its derivatives.

edited 6th Oct '17 2:27:57 PM by Millership

My own view is nothing so grand as Kazeto, Millership, and AwSamWeston. My immediate thought on seeing the question was one word: Escapism. On more consideration, you ask what fantasy literature is good for, but what is any literature good for?

To my mind, any given work of fiction has, or should have, one core thing in mind: To entertain. You can have all the messages, themes, and parallels you want; if the story isn't entertaining or engaging none of that will matter. On the flip side, a completely shallow story that does nothing but entertain the masses can become a best seller at best, or even a cult classic at worst, even if it's written poorly. Sometimes because it's written poorly.

You can tell a fantasy story, a sci-fi story, a noir story, but the key word in all of these things is "story".

That's just my own opinion though, take it for what it's worth.

edited 6th Oct '17 4:50:07 PM by sgamer82

Personally, I view Fantasy as "Speculative Mythology" or "Speculative Anthropology". Well-written Fantasy will ask questions like: "If humanity co-evolved with orcs and elves, what impact would that have on our development?", "If dragons existed, how would society deal with them?" and "if magic existed, what impact would that have?"

I would suggest that fantasy has no core idea other than the way it uses metaphor and a sense of wonder.

Here's a quote by author Ken Liu which runs along those lines:

edited 6th Oct '17 10:03:32 PM by editerguy

My perspective aligns with what sgamer82 said.

I write fantasy because I want magic in the setting, magic that is indisputably real ; I don't even like The Masquerade because it allows for people to say magic isn't real, and that's not what I want in my storyverse - people in my storyverse KNOW magic is real, just as we IRL know electricity is real, and some people know how to make use of magic, but not everybody wants to be an electrical engineer, even if you can do cool things with it.

It's fun.

That's it.

Maybe something about the wonder of things that could never happen in a million years.

Mostly it's just for fun.

For me, I write because it's fun, but I also adore the inherent themes of "change." Fantasy allows a hell of a social commentary when it's done right, and Urban Fantasy by its nature deals with " how would traditional themes and creatures adapt (or refuse to adapt, or have no real problem adapting) to modern-day society."

My story Moonflowers deals with "an Asian-American family getting hunted down by The Fair Folk," which initially started because I wanted to see Asian-AMERICANS in the white-dominated fantasy genre, and I keep ending up thinking about a lot of little things that "traditional European fantasy" doesn't. My 11th-Hour Ranger goddess came around because I forgot to research Filipino deities until 75% of the story's draft was done... so I had the goddess in question be extremely weakened by the centuries of Filipino Catholicism, and it's also hard to ask someone for help if you don't even know she EXISTS.

And then my story The Crocodile God deals with what happens when the Death of the Old Gods is treated less as the End of an Era (remote and often hard to relate to for average people), but more like the loss of your community. And in the protagonists' cases, the loss of your family, especially the loss of your children.