The scope of Low Fantasy

From this ATT query, it's been suggested that Low Fantasy has an unclear definition problem, where it seems like any fantasy that's dark or weird or has little/no magic seems to "count". The description even says that there's "no complete list of defining features". If so, how exact should the definition be? I do question the inclusion of Grey-and-Grey Morality or Black-and-Grey Morality as a part of its definition. I get why it's there, the moral compass of a work can inform its tone, but in this unclear definition it can mean any fantasy with grey morality could also be included, even if it falls under another fantasy subgenre.

I've always questioned The Witcher's inclusion. Especially the video games.

This is a world where there are so many different kinds of monsters literal books are written about them, where dwarves, elves and humans can all coexist in the same city. Where the main character is a superhuman mutant whose love interests are two powerful witches and whose adopted child is a extra special chosen one.

I think some people just conflate "dark fantasy" with "low fantasy." "It's grim and gritty and our heroes don't always win", which really has nothing to do with low fantasy.

Maybe "low fantasy" doesnt have an exact rigid definition by literary critic standards, but this is a wiki, not an encyclopedia. There needs to be an agreed upon set of criteria for what a trope is, or it might as well not be a trope.

And if we're ruling that Low Fantasy doesnt count as a trope per se, then it would need to be pulled from a good number of work pages.

It's a genre, not a trope, so the criteria for "what makes a good trope" don't necessarily apply.

Wikipedia defines Low Fantasy as "magical events intrude on an otherwise-normal world", as opposed to works set in a magical secondary world. If we were to adopt this definition, a lot of works would have to be moved :)

Even on Wikipedia there's discussion on how unclear the definition is, so they aren't sure either.

And even though it's not fully a "trope", I do think it's still worth asking if a genre label is meaningful/defined enough to count as one, and if it's worth covering as its own thing. I obviously don't wanna impose any Wikipedia-style notability restrictions, but it's not as if any random user here can just make up a new subgenre on their own without discussion first.

Most genre labels can end up being fairly flexible depending on the individual work (which is why we have Genre-Busting, Genre Roulette and others), but this also means the genre definition remains important to cover what other genres do not. High Fantasy is the counterpart to Low Fantasy, so both are fairly important to grasp the differences.

I would say the key aspect of Low Fantasy is that the fantastical elements are considered rare or fading from relevance, which typically involves a dominance of human cultures over the exploration of other fantasy races like elves, dwarves and goblins. It feels more like a fictional version of actual historical cultures with a few fantasy aspects, versus High Fantasy showing kingdoms of elves, dwarves and goblins of almost equal importance to humans. Whether or not one is more cynical than the other is relative, though I can understand perceiving Low Fantasy skewing slightly more cynical.

Probably part of the issue is that Fantasy works typically involve a gradual decline of a world of gods to a world of demi-gods to a world that questions they ever existed. So a setting can start with High Fantasy and be treated as Low Fantasy in another installment.

Low Fantasy is a term that's defined by what it isn't rather than what it is. When someone calls a story Low Fantasy, they're saying that it's the opposite of High Fantasy. But there are many different things that make a story High Fantasy (secondary world setting, plentiful magic, epic scope, good vs. evil setup), and generally a story only needs to be the opposite of one of those things to get the Low Fantasy label.

The definition as is seems to suggest that Low Fantasy is in some ways a Deconstruction of typical fantasy works, which I don't really think is the case. Not to say they can't have deconstructive elements, but a fantasy work that deconstructs tropes of the genre is a very separate thing.

It implies the same thing about Dark Fantasy, which also seems wrong.

Wikipedia acknowledges two definitions , but I don't think that's what we would want in this case, right?

That's my take on it too. I've always read Low Fantasy as "fantasy that is not Lord of The Rings". Of course, that's still a very broad and nebulous definition.

Edited by Nightwire on Sep 26th 2023 at 8:28:41 AM

I actually think Lord of the Rings itself could count as Low Fantasy, since it's technically Earth in the ancient past, and the (already rare) magic is fading as the elves head off and usher in the age of man.

You could maybe make an argument that Middle-Earth is a low fantasy setting, especially in the fourth age.

But The Lord of The Rings as a work is very much not a low fantasy piece of storytelling.

Taking into consideration the history of the genre the argument can be made that the fantasy genre was more Low Fantasy by default. Fantasy stories were akin to fairy tales, things like Sleeping Beauty or A Midsummers Night Dream where it is a fairly realistic setting except the characters are bothered by The Fair Folk. LOTR is treated as the iconic High Fantasy standard because Tolkien set out to borrow from numerous other mythologies, especially Norse, to create a uniquely English Mythology. In that sense he also codified the Constructed World as a literary concept.

Yeah, if you were an average denizen of Middle-Earth near the end of the Third Age, you'd probably go your whole life without seeing anything magical. However, the plot of Lord of the Rings is structured so our heroes are constantly going from one supernatural incident to the next.

I think that's an important distinction to make, because genre and setting can often be different and if we're going to structure the description for Low Fantasy to focus on what it is, a genre and not a setting, that difference needs to be made clear.

I've been thinking on this a bit, and I feel like the difference comes down to the scale of the story rather than prominence of fantastical elements.

Specifically, I'm thinking about Renk, a comic in a couple of recent 2000 AD Regended issues. Renk, the title character, is a one-armed dwarf who works as a private investigator. He's good at his job, but tends to be the guy you turn to after exhausting all other options. He lives and works in the run-down part of a run-down city, in which magic is common and all sorts of fantasy races coëxist.

What makes it low fantasy, in my opinion, is the scope. The first story is a missing persons case; the second is a stolen property. There are plot twists in both - in the first, the princess wants to kill the people she hired Renk to find in order to secure her right to the throne. In the second, the thief was actually trying to pull an insurance scam. But neither of these involve any flavour of Dark Lord, nor is there any existential threat to the world or to civilisation. They have many of the trappings of high fantasy, but are small stories about individual people.

So I offer the following criteria:

• Scope: Low fantasy stories are small-scale, without repercussions beyond the local town.
• Magic: If present, magic is not awesome (by awesome, I mean in the older sense of awe-inspiring, not the modern sense of really great). If magic is present, it's widely available, can be learned by anyone, and is used for mundane things. In high fantasy, magic might be used to summon lightning to strike down demons; in low fantasy, it's used for burglar alarms.

Edited by VampireBuddha on Sep 30th 2023 at 6:50:37 PM

That's one of the ways Low Fantasy is defined, but there are others.

That's the thing, if Low Fantasy was a trope name we created, it'd never get through the Launch Pad with such a mess of conflicting definitions - or, if it did, it'd be earmarked for the Trope Repair Shop very quickly.

But we didn't coin the name Low Fantasy. The name comes from outside the wiki, and had already entered wide use and acquired its muddle of definitions long before TV Tropes existed. So we don't get to decide what the trope means, only describe how it's used outside the wiki - and if people use it to mean a lot of different things, then our trope description has to reflect that.

This is exactly the same problem that afrofuturism has. I started to think that having this type of genre trope is probably not a good idea.

As Raven says, both Low Fantasy and Afrofuturism are existing terms applied to genres, so we kind of have to have pages on them.

For the specific case of Low Fantasy, maybe we could split off the workable tropes into individual pages and turn Main.Low Fantasy into something between a def-only and a disambig page. It would list the various (sub)tropes to which the label is applied, but also have a proper writeup explaining the term and how it is used in various different ways.

I think that's a good solution.

Yes I agree, a disambig is a good idea.

Low Fantasy has a nebulous definition, so making it a def and disambig page would work.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Oct 1st 2023 at 11:36:35 AM

So as I figure it, there are at least three things commonly described as Low Fantasy:

1. Fantastical stuff breaking into the real world. Heavily overlaps with Urban Fantasy, but in urban fantasy, the fantastical stuff may be familiar and widespread.
2. A constructed fantasy setting with little to no magic.
3. A fantasy story on a relatively small scale. The repercussions of the plot don't usually extend beyond one town.

Have I missed any? All of these should be TLPed before we rework Low Fantasy (an act which itself I'm pretty sure will need a TRS).

It may actually be better to TRS Low Fantasy first, to see if other patterns emerge in the wick check, if a specific usage is most common, and if the page warrants a re-tool instead of a different change.

I agree both Low and High Fantasy should be an exampleless supertrope listing the various criteria and tropes that qualify both, listing only a few influential Trope Codifiers.

I agree, just throwing everything out without looking at anything would be a bad idea.

The problem with low fantasy is that high fantasy is also poorly defined. High fantasy originally had little to do with the setting. I believe Lloyd Alexander coined the term and at one point Wikipedia listed The Well at Worlds End as the first high fantasy novel. Lot R, Alexander's works and Well at the World's End have lot of things in common, but the settings and use of magic/fantasy aren't that similar. It is more synonymus with Epic Fantasy.

However a lot of people use it just to mean the setting, so a slice of life novel about hipster orcs running a coffee shop is called high fantasy.

This development is in part because of the expansion of types of fantasy that has lead it to become more a flavour than a literary genre.

So I guess the choice is between a multifaceted, but perhaps more meaningful definition and one that is more clear cut but only skin deep.