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Which is better? Absolute fantasy worlds, or "Secret Underbelly" fantasy worlds?

Which is better?


  • Total voters
    19

Helen

Inkling
My point stands. Frodo's ordinary world is still a piece of the fantasy world he lives in, and he knows it from the start. Harry, if we're keeping with the comparison, has to learn of his wizard heritage, and by extension the entire wizarding world, when Hagrid shows up. Also, more to the point, LOTR is an entirely fabricated world (unless you believe it to be a mythological retelling of our world's history), and the Muggle world of HP is clearly our own.

Are you suggesting that LOTR is not hero's journey?
 

Helen

Inkling
I didn't say that. I'm saying that LOTR is "absolute fantasy", and that HP is the "hidden underbelly" type of fantasy, as in the original post. That is the be-all and end-all of my argument. Let's not drag this out unnecessarily.

I'm not trying to drag it out at all. Just trying to synch to what you are trying to say.

That's more or less the distinction the OP made - he classed one film as one type and the other as another type.

And he asked which works better.

And I said that both are very similar when you get down to it.

So what's your point?
 

Ireth

Myth Weaver
I was just trying to clarify what I thought was a mistake about the distinction between the two types mentioned in the poll. That's all. Apologies if I assumed anything incorrectly. I'll bow out now if I'm not accomplishing anything more; I've said my piece a few times over.
 

Devor

Fiery Keeper of the Hat
Moderator
When you mess up with a fantasy world, it just feels like you messed up. When you mess up with the "underbelly" fantasy, it sometimes feels like the underbelly idea itself is to blame. It's easy for readers to start asking things like "People really don't know about this?" or "You expect me to believe this kind of stuff is happening all over the world throughout history?" It's a much bigger suspension of disbelief that you're asking of your reader.

I love Harry Potter. But you've got to admit that Rowling gets away with the underbelly side of her story by making it into a running gag, by using it for comic relief. That's brilliant, on her part. People have an easier time suspending disbelief when there's humor involved. But in her story there's also a tremendous divide between the wizarding world and the muggle world that only crosses over at specific points in the story. There's also a thinner vein of comic relief that runs throughout the story, making the comedy feel less out of place.

That may not be so easy to replicate; the bigger the magic, the more the impact it would have on the world, the more it plays into the plot, and the better your explanation needs to be. There's a whole slew of go-to horror fantasy tropes with built in explanations, of course. Vampires, werewolves, monsters, Cthulhu. But it's a challenge as you try to be more original or draw upon more traditional elements.
 
I think the standard excuse is the "Salem Witch Trial" one. All us muggles are bound to be afraid of anyone who is different, and therefore we will inevitably seek to exterminate them. So beings with magical powers or other abnormal traits have to hide themselves away from us, lest they risk a genocide of their kind.


Still doesn’t make sense if there is magical beings apart from humans, or if the “wizards” are more powerful than humans.
 
I vote Underbelly, solely because it's still somewhat unexplored territory, compared to epic fantasy.

At one time, it seems, underbelly was the standard way of doing children/YA fantasy: Alice's Adventure in Wonderland, Little Nemo, Peter Pan, Narnia, The Neverending Story. I think underbelly still carries this YA expectation. Harry Potter didn't help any.

I have been trying to list all the underbelly stuff I could come up with. Probably not of much interest here are the Danish Alex på Eventyr and Krøniker fra Kvæhl, so I won't mention those. But here's some stuff, in no particular order:

Un Lun Dun (China Miéville)
Makes fun of YA tropes and goes for Alice in Wonderland wackiness while maintaining a consistent world. I think underbelly works really well when the fantastic is taken to such extremes; we have a protagonist with whom we can share our distance to the weirdness.
They set off under the early light of the UnSun, leaving the utterings to bicker and bargain with each other and chaotically start to make decisions. Deeba, Hemi, Curdle and the book walked out of the Talklands to look for a forest in a house, accompanied by the words Cauldron, Diss and Bling.

Spirited Away
The Labyrinth

A girl enters a strange world to retrieve some lost family, and learns something along the way.

The Matrix
Like pretty much any other VR-themed movie, it plays with the idea that what we see as reality is simply a simulation.

The Legendary Moonlight Sculptor
Korean light novel series. the other world is a virtual reality MMORPG. Lighthearted low-brain entertainment, which nevertheless gives a solid sensation of living inside a VR game.

The Cannibals of Candyland
The relative normality of the "real" world gives contrast to Candyland.

The Mall (Downside #1)
In search for a lost child, an unlikely pair ends up in a grotesque underworld beneath a mall. While there is some consistency to the world, we only gets snippets of understanding. This is a great strength in underbelly, I think; since we see the world through the eyes of a protagonist who is just as clueless as ourselves, the author can get away with withholding information and keep things mysterious.
 
I love the "secret underbelly" better when it's done well because it's very easy to mess up. I've read books/watched movies and thought to myself: "people really haven't got a clue about this world? It sticks out like a sore thumb." I watched a vampire movie a while back where vampires were killing humans for food (obviously) and no one noticed that the only real trauma to this dead body seemed to be a bite on the neck. And that this was happening quite frequently in just one city...that's going to be in the new papers for sure. Another book followed a journalist who was reporting on unusual rituals performed on murder victims. The city was gripped in fear and of course, or journalist becomes a detective and gets sucked in (no pun intended) this paranormal world. But these beings had been here, they claimed longer than humans, so why was everybody now gripped in fear? He solved it by the end of the book. So why hadn't it been solved before and why were people only just noticing in 2011? So it can be done well but also seem false.

But I like the contrast of the familiar and the strange. And seeing how our world would be different with another system running along side it. For some reason it feels more real to me and more believable. I like mysteries and think their are so many in our own world you don't need to go to another planet to explore odd things. I like movies like The Mist and not just for it's killer ending but you have a basic day turn into a surreal nightmare. The things the MC was worried about that morning no longer are relevant. And it does go to show you how suddenly life can throw you a curve ball and yesterday's concerns no longer matter. Also, there tends to be less of a learning curve and you're eased into the story a bit slower, that's why so many children's fantasies start with the normal world. Our world isn't really that safe, but I like when it suddenly becomes safe compared to somewhere else. Other world fantasy with elves, dragons...has been done to death and I feel urban fantasy could be explored a bit more. I lost interest in epic fantasy a while ok because it could become very samey and formulaic and not in a good way. But that's just my opinion.
 
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I love a good real world fantasy or also sci-fi story. One of my favourite books growing up was Slan, which is an excellent secret sci-fil story involving the next phase of human evolution (even though it tends to be castigated as evil right wing propaganda that I've always been too stupid or too insouciant to notice).

My own story coming out next year is a secret-aliens-among-us type story, but quite original for all that...I hope.
 

TTCiloth

New Member
The secret underbelly and absolute fantasy are such separate categories that it's difficult to compare them. Audience might have a harder time immersing themselves into a secret underbelly story because they might try to add connections where there shouldn't. However, Harry Potter is a secret underbelly so immersing the reader can be done.
 
Obviously both can be good. What I like about secret fantasy is that it links the story to the reader's own reality and makes the story seem more real.
 
Guess we need to differentiate between a) hero sucked into another dimension, and b) hero discovering some underbelly of the real world
 

KaeSeven7

Dreamer
New here so sorry if this response is all over the place!

I think it could also depend on your characters and plot. If you want the world to feel secretive and maybe like an escapism, choose the 'underbelly' (great description, by the way). If you want your main character to stand out this could work too, and things could change dramatically in this world without the need for much transitioning. Then again, if you prefer writing about the gradual changes of a world, or get immersed extremely into the laws and physics, maybe it would be best to keep the reader ingrained in this world to avoid any confusion when switching back and forth. In the end try writing a scene in both ways and whichever you prefer, the reader usually would too!

Personally I enjoy using the true fantasy world, but slowly revealing the unsettling aspects so before the reader knows it, something they thought was familiar has become quite the opposite (hehe).
 
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