On Fantasy
Nov. 26th, 2006 12:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinA few weeks back, I posted two covers for one book, the Advance Readers’
Copy and the final public release. The ARC had an illustration of the title
location of the book, the Floating Island. The final published version had a
dragon, with the island relegated to a cameo in the corner, for no apparent
reason, because the only dragon the book contained was drawn on the door of
an inn and only mentioned in a passing description. There started a conversation
on marketing, fantasy, dragons, and the merits thereof, where I admitted that
the presence of dragons in a story is a pretty good indicator that it’s
the type of fantasy I don’t like. This raised all sorts of hackles (not
just on this blog) and the subsequent challenges have been rattling around in
my head ever since. I’ve been sorting out where I stand on fantasy, what
works for me and what doesn’t and why, with the aim of eventually writing
it all down and tacking it up in the shop window of the internet so everyone
knows exactly what I mean. Since I can’t find my paintbrushes, it looks
like tonight is the night to do just that.
First I must reiterate: I DO NOT HATE DRAGONS. There is nothing inherent in
the large scaly flying saurians that sets my teeth on edge or makes me want
to burn things. My grudge is not against dragons themselves, but against the
type of fantasy they usually appear in. Before getting in a huff (or at least
before getting in a huff about that) please know that I have not read
all that much fantasy. This is probably due to having a few run-ins with fantasy
in my early years that I couldn’t get into or that was just plain bad;
it has pretty much turned me off the genre and has made me wary of any fantasy
recommended to me ever since. I only read fantasy that’s been recommended
because it’s too vast and terrifying a world to wander through unguided
and, like I said, I’m wary. Obviously, though, I do read fantasy –
in fact, almost all the fiction I read and own could be classified as fantasy.
So it’s not like I hate the whole diverse genre just because of a few
airborne reptiles. However, the sub-genres I connect with are the ones in which
dragons, if they appear at all, do not feature prominently.
Some examples:
| LIKE | DISLIKE |
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Generally, I like fantasy that has at least one foot in reality. I need to
be able to relate to it if I'm going to be sucked into the story at all.
If I feel like I've not just dived into the deep end but fallen out of
the sky into the middle of the ocean, I am going to put the book down because
there are no landmarks by which I can navigate. If I can get a toehold on
the reality of the world the author has created, that is a good start, and I
am far more likely to be interested in what happens to the character because
I can relate to them in some small way at least. Many of the fantasy books I
like start with a reality very much like our own but add an extra layer or two
that go unnoticed by everyday folk but are very real to the people in the story.
Not only does this give me a grounding from which to explore the story but is
fun to apply to the ‘real’ world as well, such as spying out quartered
circles which are significant in The Dark Is Rising, or passing off
bangs in the night as the Knight Bus. That's fun. Fantasy that can add enjoyment
to what otherwise might be a boring world is always welcome.
I also like fantasy that works. This is why I like Discworld even
though, on the surface, it looks like Not My Kind of Fantasy, as it's got wizards
and trolls and all the other bells and whistles of your archetypical capital-F
Fantasy or, as I call it from here on out, Wacky Fantasy. Luckily Terry Pratchett
has thought about this a lot and is a lot better writer than I am, so here's
what he has to say, from The Art of Discworld:
Sometimes I wish I'd left out the bit about the giant turtle. It's a respectable world myth, but it might lead some prospective readers to think it is, well, not serious.
In truth, the turtle doesn't have anything to do with most of the stories except, as it were, to carry the plot. I used it to signal this is a fantasy world, with all the unusual suspects: wizards, witches, gods, and heroes. The twist is that it is taken seriously; not taken seriously as a fantasy, but taken seriously as a world.
In this I owe a debt to G.K. Chesterton, who pointed out on many occasions that the fantastic, when looked at properly, is much less interesting (and a lot less fantastic) than the everyday.
Take magical lights, for example. A wizard snaps his fingers and light appears. Where's the fun in that? He's only doing what wizards do. But a bunch of apes weren't doing what apes do when they learned, over half a million years, how to take the universe apart and put it together again so that a bit of it was the electric light bulb.
So Discworld works, more or less. People plough fields, file things, make candles, deliver letters and babies, produce newspapers, perform daily the thousand minor miracles that keep a city fed. Magic has pretty much the same status as nuclear power: under control it is useful, perhaps even essential, but too much reliance on it comes with a disproportionately high price tag, and only a loony would use it to catch fish...
And Discworld does work, in its odd little way. He takes the elements from
Wacky Fantasy and makes them work. Not only do they work in their own
right, but they're often wicked satire of both Wacky Fantasy and the real world.
That's the foot that rests in reality: the world itself may be fantastical,
but what happens in it is often so directly parallel to our own, albeit mirrored
or distorted slightly, that I can relate to that part of it.
Yes, Discworld has dragons. After all, 'You've got to have dragons ... otherwise
how can you tell it's fantasy? [...] As so often happens, they were developed
by taking seriously something not intended to be serious.' The most notable
book for them is Guards! Guards! where they appear in some number.
The important distinction here is that they are not only dragons but parodies
of dragons. The great big flying beastie is explained, sort of, and satirizes
the customs of Wacky Fantasy, but the real stars are the swamp dragons, which
... work. They're all thought-out, as if they were real biological
creatures. Not only are they fully operational creatures in their own right,
but they're also a parody of dogs, in a way. Sybil raises dragons and runs an
abandoned-dragon shelter the way other upper-class single women might breed
and run charities for dogs. Her elderly dragon shuffles around the house, drooling,
and puts his head in your lap at table. They're dogs, who just happen to breathe
fire and eat coal and corrode a hole in the floor when they wee on something.
The only other book where they feature prominently at all, as far as I can remember,
is one of the earlier ones, where Rincewind ends up in a dragon 'hangar' where
they hang from the ceiling and you 'walk' upside down by hooking your feet in
metal loops driven into the roof. This is way at the beginning of the series,
back when it was busy being a parody of Wacky Fantasy and not much concerned
with plot or character, and therefore I am not as much of a fan of those early
books as I am of the later ones – so much so that I've only read that
dragon book once, and can't even remember the title or what else happens in
it. (I feel okay about this because none of the later books has ever revisited
this place or idea.) This is also why I don't recommend people start reading
Discworld from 'the beginning,' because the first few books give an inaccurate
representation of what the series is like as a whole. Had I started with the
first books, I probably wouldn't have bothered reading far enough to get to
the ones I do like, but Interesting Times, which I started with, was
as much a parody of the real world as anything, so I could sink my teeth into
it. I didn't get around to reading the first ones until much, much later, and
never bothered to read them again.
The other series on my list that has dragons is Harry Potter, and this one's
a bit more complicated. Whereas Discworld is ostensibly set in another world,
Harry Potter is very clearly supposed to be this one. The earlier books are
much more grounded than the later ones, which may be why I like them better;
they fall more into the category of 'Fantasy Veneer' and less 'Outright Fabrication.'
Harry is a real kid, who lives in Surrey, a real place, and has been going to
a real school and living in the real world for eleven years with only occasional
unexplained things happening. Even when he goes to school, it's still really
obviously a school, it's got sports and chemistry and history and lunch
and bullies and all those real school things, just replaced with their magical
equivalents. The elements of fantasy that are included are drawn blatantly enough
from folklore and tradition that at times it appears to be a parody of Wacky
Fantasy almost as much as Discworld is, or at the very least a tongue-in-cheek
salute to long-standing traditional magical lore. Everything has been imported
into a reality constructed to 'explain' it or at least make it all fit together
in a plausible way; it's all pretty well figured out in that regard, and the
amalgamation of these disparate fantasy elements establishes the internal logic
of the series. The point at which this starts to fall apart, in my opinion,
is Goblet of Fire – coincidentally (and I mean that)
a book which prominently features dragons. (Yes yes, the first book has Norbert,
but he's a way to establish Hagrid's character, an excuse to get the kids to
his hut to he can 'accidentally' reveal important secrets, and a way to get
Harry and Ron detention so Harry can have his pivotal encounter in the woods,
more than he is a dragon in his own right. And we are constantly reminded that
Charlie works with dragons, but that's far, far in the background. After all,
'you've got to have dragons...') It is in Goblet that the
balance starts to tip from the majority of fantasy elements being imported from
folklore or long-standing tradition to ones made up by Rowling herself, and
from there on the series loses touch with reality more and more, until by the
sixth book it's a struggle to remember the Muggle world exists at all. And while
I have more abstract reasons for disliking the later books, such as plot structure
and character development (or lack thereof), it doesn't help that they're becoming
the sort of fantasy I don't like.
The book that probably most put me off fantasy as a child was The Lion,
the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I think I read it for the first time when
I was in Grade 2. I don't remember having any trouble comprehending it and it
shouldn't have been above my reading level at the time, but I didn't get into
it and didn't see what all the fuss was about. I tried again a few years later,
when my Grade 4 teacher read The Magician's Nephew to the class, which
I liked a little bit more if only because it actually tried to explain some
things, but didn't like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe any more
then. I tried again in high school to see if maybe with an older perspective
I could see why adults would have thought I'd like it, but was still put off.
The problem is, as a world, it just doesn't work. Even aside from the
author's condescending tone, which probably had a lot to do with my not liking
it at first, I couldn't believe this world could actually exist in its own right.
It feels like everything's cooked up with the sole purpose of serving the allegory
and little attention is paid to logic or biology or physics or anything. Fantastical
creatures are thrown in to be 'cool' or something, and magic is tossed around
at random with no apparent set of rules. And there's Father Christmas,
being very overtly Christmasy, in a land without any sort of religious tradition
– at least Discworld's Hogfather has an origin and ritual significance
rooted in the early, suspiciously European tribes of the Disc. Anyway, I could
go on, but The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is an example of fantasy
I don't like that, lo and behold, doesn't have dragons in it. As far
as I can remember anyway.
Another book that turned me off was The Hobbit. I'm sure I have just
made a few thousand enemies by saying that, but it's an important part of this
argument. The Hobbit, much like its contemporary mentioned above, didn't seem
to work. I'm sure it probably worked in Tolkien's head, but so little
of that made its way into the book that it's more or less a collection of fantastical
episodes, each featuring a different race or individual to interact with and
get past in order to meet the next. It didn't help that Bilbo as a character
wasn't terribly appealing or interesting, and for that matter nor was anyone
else in his fellowship, so I didn't really care what happened to them. The whole
premise that Bilbo is on this quest in order to steal something (something
that had, admittedly been stolen already, so he was stealing it back ... I think...)
nulled his 'heroism,' and made me care even less. Then there's the writing
which – and I have had independent verification of this – starts
out as a sort of adventure story for children, then partway through becomes
a much more serious fantasy epic with wars and kings and politics and stuff
that is completely different from the beginning, leaving the reader [me] with
an uneasy sense of not knowing a stable vantage point from which to view the
story. Much as with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I really
tried to like this book, I felt that I should like this
book, and I kept reading it over and over, assuming that the previous time I
just hadn't gotten it. People told me when I was eight that I was too young
for it, so I read it again when I was eleven and still didn't like it; when
I didn't like it again at fourteen I was told I was too old. But my problems
with The Hobbit were not with the dragon, they were with the story
that I could not relate to.
It was because The Hobbit left me cold that I never read the
Lord of the Rings which was strategically placed in my bedroom by a well-meaning
parent. (I hope you can hear me through my giant mouthful of humble pie, but
I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings! Not all of it. I've read
Fellowship now, but not the other two. It'll happen eventually.) It
was by the same author, it was in the same world, why would I want to go through
a five-times-longer version of The Hobbit when I didn't like the first
one? I did pick it up, and I had no end of fun figuring out the alphabets based
on what was given as a translation (my copy didn't have the appendix, just the
illustrations), so I can probably credit The Lord of the Rings for
my little alphabet fetish which resulted in devising at least three of my own,
getting really excited about Atlantis: The Lost Empire and spending
far, far too much time on omniglot.com. All I really have to go on
regarding that most famous of fantasies are the movies, and even they fall into
Like and Dislike. I like Fellowship. I like Fellowship a lot.
It surprised me how much I liked it when it came out because I had assumed it
was going to be like The Hobbit all over again, but it was so much
more. The way they approached the movie won me over as well, because they weren't
distracted by the fantasy and made it about the characters and the quest, even
choosing to minimise all but the most essential magical elements, and those
were treated in an almost realistically subtle way. The only part of Fellowship
that gave me that Wacky Fantasy squirm was when Gandalf escaped Saruman's tower
on the giant eagle. The magic Ring (not just a ring but a Ring), great flaming
eye, dark zombie horsemen, elves, and wizards were treated so realistically
that I didn't question their legitimacy. The way they purposely treated everything
as if they were making a historical drama rather than a fantasy really won me
over. Unfortunately, the Wacky Fantasy elements started to creep in and by the
time Return of the King came around, it had gone completely to the
other side. There are many other reasons why I vastly prefer Fellowship
to the other two, valid storytelling and filmmaking reasons, but I might have
been more tempted to forgive some of them had they kept with the degree of realism
found in the first film. My suspension of disbelief can only hold so much weight
– if you throw in more and more stuff to believe in eventually it'll all
collapse and disbelief I would have suspended now gets turned around as criticism.
Oddly enough, round about the time my suspension of disbelief was starting to
feel the strain, the Ringwraiths switched form horses to ... golly, dragons!
Coincidence? Probably. But once again the symptom of Dragon indicated a more
general malaise.
In case you have any questions about the list above, I'll now address each
book individually:
Watership Down – When you go into a library or bookstore, this book is
not even shelved with the fantasy. And yet it's about rabbits ... that talk.
TALKING RABBITS. Fantasy, right? Rabbits don't talk. But this is meticulously
researched and very realistically written so that you can't help feeling if
rabbits could talk (or perhaps they do already and we just don't understand
them), this would be very very real. My dad read it to me when I was 5, and
sometimes I think this book is responsible in many ways for how I've ended up
as a person, for good or bad (but mostly for good, I think) – it's almost
certainly responsible for what kinds of fantasy I like.
Redwall – I was recommended this series by my Grade 4 teacher when she
found out I was a fan of Watership Down, but it wasn't until Grade 6 that I
actually started reading it. It also has talking animals but they're significantly
more anthropomorphised than the rabbits of Watership Down. They build buildings
and wear clothes and fight wars in ways animals certainly don't in real life,
but there's practically no magic at all. I lived in this world through most
of middle school and this was probably the only way I survived, but I started drifting
away from it as the newer books came out that started veering more towards the
Wacky end of the spectrum ... there was some actual 'real' magic, a bit too
much in the way of psychic flim-flammery, and increasingly far-out species that
seemed to be a gimmick to keep things fresh, which didn't work ... for me.
Harry Potter – See above for more details. It started out as adding another
dimension to everyday life of a magical community living in secret, but the
stories are simultaneously losing touch with the 'real' world and decreasing
in craftsmanship.
Discworld – See above as well. Discworld's 'furniture' is fantastical
but its stories, themes, and characters satirise the real world well enough
that I can relate better to them than to a large portion of 'straight' fiction.
The Bromeliad's central cast is entirely made up of four-inch high nomes that
live ten times as fast as humans but they live in the real world and their perspective
on it is like looking at reality from behind, or maybe underneath. Johnny Maxwell is, like Harry
Potter, an ordinary kid who ends up getting involved with some pretty weird
stuff, but it's always rooted in reality and comments on very real things.
Thursday Next – She lives in a world slightly different from our own
but similar in most of the important ways; most of the stories are spent rocketing
around the world of fiction, piggybacking on well-known established realities
in other books. Her bookjumping is, I'm sure, what many avid readers desperately
wish they could do.
The Dark Is Rising – This series is another one that adds an extra layer
or two to reality; like Harry Potter it's got an otherwise ordinary kid who
finds out he belongs to this secret society of slightly magical people. Instead
of getting swept away to a place where this is the norm and the ordinary world
falls away, he has a series of adventures in this world that involve
the magical layers. It's better than it sounds.
The Bartimaeus Trilogy – Another 'alternate reality,' in this case replace
all the politicians with magicians, reinstate the British Empire, do a little
juggling with European history, throw in a few demons who do the actual magic,
and tadaa. Very well thought-out and follows its own internal logic assiduously.
Roald Dahl's books – Books like The Witches and Matilda
turn the dial up on reality a little bit and then throw in a judicious amount
of fantasy – just enough to make it juicy but not enough to make the whole
thing unrealistic.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – See above. Basically everything
in the book either mindlessly serves the allegory or panders to children with
little regard for internal consistency or plausibility.
Dragonriders of Pern – When my Grade 6 teacher realized I was nuts about
Redwall she suggested this series. I got about ten pages into whichever book
she handed me before I gave up in despair because I was hopelessly lost. It
was on another planet, had completely different species, had dragons, and was
chock full of weird names and gratuitous capitalizations. The one thing I can
remember specifically was that the planet's orbit around the sun was called
a Turn (with a capital, note) rather than a year – just call it a
year! Give me something to hang on to! I don't care if it's not an Earth year,
if you explain that I can get used to it but why just go and rename EVERYTHING??
And capitalize it? Anyway, yeah. Not too taken with the Dragonthingies.
This book might have been the first to make me automatically suspicious of anything
with dragons in it.
Dragons: Fire and Ice – Okay, this isn't a book. It's a direct-to-DVD
CG flick I worked on. I'm including it in this list, though, because it was
about dragons, more or less, and its script (which is not great in
the final cut but was even more amazingly horrible in earlier drafts, if you
can imagine), seemed to have been cobbled together by listing every Wacky Fantasy
cliché on separate pieces of paper and rearranging them until the writer
got a shape he liked. It had:
Dragons
A Prince and Princess
- from warring countries
A Prophecy
Magic Crystals (excuse me, Krystals – because deliberate misspellings
are kewl)
-that glowed
A Evil Wizard
-who you're supposed to think is good at the beginning
-who flies around on a floating ice ... thing
A Mystic Portal to Another World
A Training Montage
Animate Skeletons
Stupid Lizard Men
An Evil Lair High in the Mountains
Mystic Destiny
A Complete Disregard for the Necessity of Agriculture
I'm sure there's a lot more but it's been a few years...
The Hobbit – See above. Having a central character who is a middle-aged
male homebody is probably not the most effective way to hook the kidlets. If
it could make up its mind what kind of book it was, perhaps I could have found
a comfortable mental place from which to watch the action but I had to keep
changing my frame of reference.
Well, I think that about covers it ... I've been thinking a lot about Rules
of Fantasy and the Snicket books but that's a topic for another day. I hope
I made at least a little sense and that my stand on the dragon issue is a little
more comprehensible.
Sorry if some of the formatting is weird; I composed most of this in Dreamweaver and copy/pasting the code can do funny things.
