What do you love about Fantasy?

[S.T. Ockenner]

I personally love the idea of flying away on a pegasaus or broomstick or whatever, and venturing across a beautiful world and meeting wizards, going on epic quests, and battling demons and other evil beings.
I fell in love with Fantasy because I love all the magic, the imagination, The beauty of fantastical landscapes, and the wonderful stories that can take place in these otherworldly terrains.
Plus, I love the aesthetic of an old man with a beard, flowing robes, and a pointed hat just doing his thing, offering wisdom to heroes and casting magic and whatnot.

 

[Chasejxyz]

I love spec fic because it allows us to think about things in new ways and gives us new insights into the world. The Guardians of Ga'Hoole was a world full of talking owls, but of other species, too, like magpies, eagles, bears, wolves etc. Everybody (everyhooty?) relies on the stars to navigate, how would that affect their relationship with them? What would they name their constellations? How do the fliers and the land bound creatures interact? There's a huge size difference between an elf owl and a polar bear, how would they see each other? There was so much world building and thought gone into it and it was wonderful to think about these things.

Another one that gave me a lot to think about was the Earth's Children/Clan of the Cave Bear series. It's set in "cave people" times, so we see interactions between the different cro-magnon tribes and even between cro-magnons and neanderthals. This was the one time in the history of humanity where we lived besides and interacted with another sapient species and there are no records of how those went or what we thought of each other. They also had a vastly different view of the world, as they didn't have any "scientific" explanations for things, so much was unexplained, any wound could quickly turn fatal.

In our modern world, even though we're all the same species, we all have vastly different experiences than each other. I always knew colorblindness was a thing, but in high school one of my friends said that UPS trucks were green and I never really stopped thinking about it. How he saw the world, he thought, was correct, he had no way of knowing what he was seeing wasn't the same as everyone else. I see them as brown, but even then, is that correct? In college I worked in a print lab and learned about color science, so even if you objectively pinpoint the color of something (by measuring the wavelength of the light it reflects), it's still going to be perceived as a different color by different people because of countless factors (even the clothes you're wearing can affect the color of a sample you're looking at). There are multiple "realities," each experienced by different people, and they're all valid and true. There's an enormous range of human experience out there we can't even comprehend, but there's still the common threads we all experience: we want to be safe, happy, loved, to be valued. Spec fic allows you to explore these concepts in ways that are easier to digest.