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What is fantasy?

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
Oh no, not again!

Well, I hope not. This post comes out of another thread talking about fantasy character types. It got me thinking, as folks here often do; specifically, thinking about the other elements of story-telling: plot, theme, and setting.

It's interesting that we would all (I think!) readily agree that there's such a thing as a fantasy setting. Is there a fantasy plot, or are all the fantasy plots just regular plots in an unusual setting? Is there such a thing as a fantasy theme? If there are fantasy plots and themes, then it feels odd to say all elements of writing have a fantasy angle except for character.

Conversely, it would be odd to say there's no fantasy character, theme, or plot, which would mean fantasy is distinctive only in its setting. That doesn't seem adequate, to me.

So: what would you identify as themes either exclusive to fantasy or at least being characteristic of it, even if the theme sometimes appears in other genres?

Ditto for plots.

At first glance, I'd be most willing to say there isn't really a distinctively fantasy plot. I'm not talking structure here--not three acts or five acts. What about the Hero's Journey? Well, Campbell identified that as coming from mythology, which isn't quite the same as writing a modern novel. Plus, the Hero's Journey has been presented as being useful if not vital to a great many genres. Pretty much anything with a hero in it. Doesn't have to be fantasy. Perhaps once it was more associated with the fantastic, but not any more.

As for themes, those seem even more universal to me. What would be specific to fantasy? I'll let others take the first swing at that one.
 

Mad Swede

Auror
Might I suggest that "fantasy" is a modern term for a novel set either in some secondary world or in some fantastic or secondary aspect of our own? As an example of what I mean, Jonathan Swift's Gullivers Travels has all the ingredients of what we would now call fantasy - and it was published in 1726. It is also generally regarded as a satirical novel, not as fantasy.
 
I will defer the why to the what. The latter is difficult enough!

I'm sorry. I couldn't resist the Drax reference.

When confronted by the question posed in this thread, my mind naturally begins to wander down two roads. Are fantasies substantially no different than other fictions? What characteristics make fantasies substantially different from other fictions?

If I were to question a newly, first-time-published author about his fantasy novel, I might ask, "Why did you go there" and intend the remainder of the question to be "instead of any of these other genres: _____, _____, ______?" Actually this sort of thing is almost never asked anymore; but were I truly intrigued by the subject, I might ask this sort of thing.

The why seems intimately tied into the what. Why did Tolkien write The Hobbit instead of something more like Of Mice and Men, Out of Africa, or Death on the Nile, all published the same year? Answer: Because he wanted to. Heh.

Here's a list of other things published that year, from Goodreads: Most popular books published in 1937. There are some other fantasy or fantasy-adjacent novels besides The Hobbit. So other authors trended that direction, too. (The White Stag, by Kate Seredy, has caught my eye.)

Interestingly, since I mentioned Drax....Superman first appeared in the year after The Hobbit. So there's another sort of fantasy, in 1938. Of course, there was a lot of fantasy, and always has been a lot, throughout human history. At least, we'd lump all of it together nowadays.

I'm not really saying anything new here. This is just where my mind goes. I do desperately want to find the "fantasy plots" and "fantasy themes," but I'm not sure of my step.

My best guess is that the special aspect of fantasy, or what makes something fantasy and no longer a Western, a historical novel, an adventure tale, etc., is precisely the fact that fantasy is so very much like all of those genres. Fantasy is like all genres. So it is as if the author who chooses to write a fantasy first said, "Hey, I can imagine the wildest, most unreal things, but all these very human tropes, themes, plots, aspects, that you see everywhere in literature, keep shining through, nonetheless." That's the point. So it is a grand foil. Maybe we can call it The Grand Foil from now on.
 

Eduardo Ficaria

Troubadour
I think that the question of certain plots, themes and settings being used repeatedly in fantasy is a force of habit on one hand and, on the other, a sort of limitation derived from the worldbuildings usually used in fantasy or in any other genre. Let me elaborate the worldbuilding bit.

A worldbuilding is a framework that provides a certain set of elements and rules that not only frame and spice up the stories based on it, but can also condition or frame the mindset of the one creating the story. This conditioning may be due to the lack or presence of certain elements (be them technologies, concepts, resources...) that can lead a writer to envision only certain plots, themes and settings. In a way, the framework ends guiding (or forcing) the creator's hand instead the other way around. This is the easy way out for a creator, because instead of trying new things within the worldbuilding they're using, they just follow the path of least resistance.

This could explain the overabundance of certain stories on any genre: each worldbuilding is just a partial and imperfect representation of a fictional reality, and trying to expand it in innovative ways without breaking the already stablished rules and expectations can be hard (the canon curse could be called). An example of this could be taking The Lord of the Rings worldbuilding and make a story about some scientifical discovery and its implications on Middle Earth. The LoTR framework was not really designed for such kind of fiction, so it surely lacks certain elements to tell it. Trying to expand the lore in such unexpected way can be hard, and let's not talk about facing all the years of "tradition" attached to it. But it's perfectly possible, although only for someone daring to open new roads within a particular worldbuilding.

So, to sum up, I would conclude that is not a matter of just a particular set of plots, themes and settings being somewhat attached by "nature" to any genre. I think is more about creators playing it safe most of the time, due to commercial reasons, lack of imagination or of boldness. And you can see this happening in every major franchise: they just give more of the same, albeit with some mandatory cosmetic changes.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I don't disagree, Eduardo, but that argument only falls back on Sturgeon's Law. The interesting part isn't in the 70% that is crap, it's the 30% that is good.

What about the *good* fantasy writers? What sets them apart from other genres while at the same time letting them all be recognizably akin to each other? What, to be terribly dry about it, are the taxonomical principles?

Just to elaborate on the topic of setting, one could argue that urban fantasy uses the real world as a setting, but they often have some corner, or underground, or portal. I'll offer this alternative: In Calabria is an odd little story by Peter S. Beagle. It is set, not surprisingly, in Calabria, on a small farm. There is absolutely nothing magical or exotic about the setting at all. Then a unicorn shows up.

So, instantly we have fantasy, but it doesn't lie in the setting. So I can't even claim that fantasy is distinguished exclusively by the setting. Or maybe we could argue that the Calabria in that story isn't and cannot be the Calabria of our world. That'd work, but it does feel like a bit of a dodge.

Definitions are slippery critters, and one must have a care not to wind up like Pooh and Eeyore, forever going round the same boulder.
 

Ned Marcus

Maester
It's interesting that we would all (I think!) readily agree that there's such a thing as a fantasy setting.

Really?

I think fantasy can be set in many places, from outer space to the contemporary world or the core of the planet as well as the more common medieval setting. Anywhere really.
 
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Eduardo Ficaria

Troubadour
In truth, skip.knox , I didn't really answered the main question of this thread. So I'll try now but without distinguishing between good or bad content. What makes a story fall into the definition of fantasy is probably just a matter of perception. The further a story goes into the realm of the "unreal", more like a fantasy it seems to be. But what is "unreal"? It depends both on the personal and the shared perception we have of reality, which is conditioned by many elements like environment or culture. You've put the example of the unicorn, but just a few centuries ago a normal horse was nonexistant in the minds of the native americans. From their point of view, a description of such animal may have seemed a fantasy. It's in this particular nuance where lies the difficulty to define what is fantasy: what is unreal for you may not be for me. Therefore, the definition of fantasy is a constantly moving target, although always rooted in what is considered "unreal" or impossible within a particular mindset.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I tihnk there maybe be a difference--just trying out an idea here--between fantasy understood as a genre, as in where to I shelve this book, and fantasy as it is addressed by an author. It's one sort of exercise to distinguish a particular story as belonging more over with mystery, or SF, or whatever. It's another sort of exercise for an author to determine how to approach writing a fantasy novel, specifically in the categories I mentioned above: theme, setting, plot, and character.

I hasten to emphasize I'm just speculating here. I think I'm saying (I'm rarely sure) that if there is a way to identify the characteristics of a fantasy novel, then one ought to be able to break that down into fantasy themes, fantasy settings, fantasy plots, and fantasy characters. Perhaps the premise is false.

One way to check would be ask if a similar exercise can be done for horror, or detective novels. That feels more likely, without going into details, which makes me wonder why. And with similar lack of philosophical precision, I think SF falls rather more in the direction of fantasy. Which led me to this: there are three sorts of stories; namely, real, unreal, and a middle ground. Fantasy is the unreal, the middle ground belongs to SF as being unreal but with a grounding in the real that is not shared by fantasy (the "science" part), and all other literature. That sort of division explains for me why it's so hard to come up with a fantasy taxonomy. Look at "real" fiction. That's almost never taken as a whole, but is broken down into horror, literary, mystery, romance, etc. Each of those genres have their conventions, even down to conventions about plot, character, etc.

By that very shaky logic, if we're looking at plot, character, and their good friend et caetera, then we need to fantasy into genres. Urban fantasy had better be in a city and isn't likely to have a Farm Boy of Destiny. High fantasy or epic fantasy is rarely post-apocalyptic, rarely has vampires. One could almost argue that what distinguishes fantasy sub-genres one from another is exactly variations on conventions of plot, character, setting, and/or theme.

Finally, to arrive back to myself <g>, the above suggests I ought not be offering a workshop on fantasy writing, but instead one on epic fantasy, another on YA fantasy, another on urban fantasy, and so on, at least insofar as the audience is made up of authors. Or, to put it another way, when I run the fantasy workshop this November, I ain't bringing up *any* of this! But I surely am enjoying the discussion here.
 

Eduardo Ficaria

Troubadour
Like in many other things, the tags we apply nowadays to contents are an expression of how our cultures perceive and understand the reality they're in. For instance, there wasn't such a thing as YA novels some decades ago, it's a (commercial) product of our times. Another example, I'm sure some (or probably many) scifi works from the "golden age" have aged badly, and for a modern reader they'll look more like odd fantasies or some sort of alternate history novels. I could go on with examples but you get the idea, right skip.knox ? Is not that there's a definition attached to a concept or anything like that as if it were a "law" of physics, it's just us pesky humans who come up time and again with fancy tags and convoluted classification systems. But reality is constantly moving on, making our perceptions obsolete over time. In other words, human societies keep on evolving, and so their view on things including, of course, how they perceive and classify their own cultural creations (and the ones from others).

On the other hand, somehow I got the impression that you don't handle yourself much on other media beyond literature (and probably films). That's fine by me, but then you're missing the great amount of mixing that is happening mainly in videogames and animation. Vampires or other horror elements in high fantasy? Already done. I also happen to remember a japanese RPG game about vampiric humans in a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk setting, which seems to me quite the blend of plots, themes and settings. Ah, and zombies... zombies everywhere! Although most if not all of them should be called ghouls. I type this just to suggest you other sources of inspiration for your fantasy workshop, because this other media certainly cannot be ignored nowadays (specially when videogames is now the biggest media industry in the planet). Of course, there's no need to play yourself, there are plenty of gameplay videos and trailers to give you an idea of what is being done in the sector.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
>Vampires or other horror elements in high fantasy? Already done.
Sure. I wasn't saying non-existent or unprecedented, only that it's not common and not what most folks would call a defining characteristic.

I've been known to play a video game or two. Been playing since the original Adventure game, which I first encountered in 1983. On a DecMate II, no less. I very much take your point about videogames being not merely a legitimate but an increasingly important and influential aspect of the fantasy genre. Given that this is a two-hour workshop aimed specifically at older folk (fifty and up, I believe), and given how vast is our field, I need to set limits. One that is arbitrary but easy is to focus on the writing of novels.
 

Ankari

Hero Breaker
Moderator
High fantasy or epic fantasy is rarely post-apocalyptic .

Wheel of Time
Sword of Shannara
Broken Empire

These are all examples of high fantasy/epic fantasy set in a post apocalyptic world.

I think these definitions need adjusting. Before we can examine the proposed characteristics of subgenres, we should make sure not to erroneously assign traits to those subgenres.

But to the larger question. Fantasy is the incorporation of the implausible or the unfounded in story. Implausible can include the supernatural, superpower, magic (otherwise breaking the known laws of the universe). The unfounded can include races, settings, worlds without parallel in our known world (the imagined).

None of what I used as definition modifies any of the story arcs we know. The Farm Boy of Destiny not found in an urban fantasy? Why not? Farms don't exist in urban fantasy settings? The protagonist can't move from the farm to the city setting? Isn't that one of the themes of Superman? Superman is an urban fantasy story.

High/Epic fantasy without vampires? One quick search found a series by Barb Hendee and J. C. Hendee named Saga of the Noble Dead.

I propose that fantasy isn't a self-contained segment of literature with it's own themes/arc/story theory. Fantasy is just a a type of cloth we favor draping over our stories. But stories, when the clothing is lifted, all share the same bones.
 

Almyrigan Hero

Minstrel
I'd argue that fantasy is less of a formula, and more just an evocative style of storytelling. 'Vanilla' modern fantasy is evocative of Dungeons and Dragons, D&D is evocative of Tolkien, Tolkien is evocative of European folklore, that's evocative of classical mythology, and that's reminiscent of a time when the cosmos was made of 4 elements rather than 118, snakes could burn down villages, and you could dig for treasure on some distant hill without worrying about the state taking you to court over zoning rights and disturbing a burrowing owl habitat.

What gives a story 'that fantasy feeling' tends to be writing that evokes many or all of these points: untamed world, limited resources to explore it with, incomprehension or mythicized presentation of how it operates, gods (or similar figures) with a tangible worldly presence, forces of good and evil that wear their hearts on their sleeves, magic or some placeholder, and romanticized worldbuilding elements that may exist despite their seeming impracticality (the five hundredth successive king of the entire world, using some iteration on swordplay when guns, dragons, and exploding fireball spells are commonplace, etcetera.)
 

Stevie

Minstrel
I'd go out on a limb and say there is such a thing as a fantasy plot and I'd try to define it as any plot where elements of fantasy (magic, weird beasts and the like) are necessary to make the plot work. Take police procedural crime novels as a comparison. To make the plot of one of those work, you'd generally need a criminal, a crime, a detective and the trappings of an investigation.

It's not just about putting a plot in a fantasy setting. You can do that - the Outlander novels come to mind, and not write a fantasy story (though you can have a good debate about what genre Outlander is, exactly). So maybe a fantasy plot is one that relies consistantly on fantasy elements to carry it along. This might be the same element used repeatedly or it might be a number of different elements.

Although it can be just about putting the plot in a fantasy setting. Joe Abercrombie's books comes to mind. Virtually no fantastical elements other than the world they are set on. But that world, in effect, becomes the fantasy element that is needed to make the plot work, albiet at a very high level.

As with most things in fiction writing, I think the answer to the question is always going to be fuzzy round the edges.

Good luck with that writing course, Slip. And remember, if you get asked difficult questions, always make a great show of nodding sagedly, writing them down and promising to get back to them on that. Or pretend to faint.;)
 

Ankari

Hero Breaker
Moderator
To make the plot of one of those work, you'd generally need a criminal, a crime, a detective and the trappings of an investigation.

Antagonist
Inciting incident
Protagonist
Setting

Therein lies all the confusion I see in this thread. Either people are unwilling to group the elements of their specific favorable genre of fiction properly, or people don't know the elements that make up story structure.

I suggest people visit Helping Writers Become Authors website. She provides a great resource on the sidebar dedicated to the elements of story structure, character arcs, archetypal arcs and scene structure. These are the elements of stories. All stories. All of this subgenre specific plot talk is inaccurate.
 

Steerpike

Felis amatus
Moderator
But to the larger question. Fantasy is the incorporation of the implausible or the unfounded in story. Implausible can include the supernatural, superpower, magic (otherwise breaking the known laws of the universe). The unfounded can include races, settings, worlds without parallel in our known world (the imagined).

I agree with this approach, generally. A fantasy is fantasy due to story elements and/or setting. The plot, broadly speaking, could be any plot that might exist in any genre or could be something that is particular to the specific fantasy world at issue.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
While I do agree that one can abstract story elements to the point where they are application (and, arguably, useful) to any genre, I also hold that most readers will instantly be able to say this is a romance novel, that's a detective story, and this over here, this one's fantasy. So there must be characteristics of such stories to which readers are responding in a relatively consistent way. If someone says they want to write a fantasy story so what components are necessary to the genre, there's a reply to be made.

I was having some difficulty with that. I thought it would be fairly easy, but the dang thing turned out to be surprisingly slippery. I'm still finding it serviceable to think of fantasy as a form of literature in itself, and that we can't talk in a useful way about characteristics--whether of plot, character, theme, or setting--until we move down into the sub-genres of fantasy.

I also think the whole topic is very much too large for a two-hour introductory workshop. Important and complex enough, indeed, to require a pub and several large wooden tables.

Or an online forum.
 
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