Very great question. The "real world" is always going to exist within a subjective experience. In your "real world" the powers that be are working hard toward achieving peace and prosperity. In my "real world" most of us are pawns to an elite group of people who stop at nothing to achieving ultimate control, including of consciousness itself. Neither of these worlds are necessarily real, but the subjective experiences are, and they are based on whatever is actually real. Speculative fiction (science fiction, dystopia,, etc) I consider to be an extension of this concept.
Ok- so from an idealist to a cynist , you feel closer to a story that may one day be within the bounds of reality, while I enjoy works that loosen the bounds of reality. From what I gather.
I think you're missing the point of fantasy, at least as I see it. People who like fantasy don't want the world to be complex; they want it to be simple. Very simple. I addressed this point earlier.
Yeah, but not all fantasy stories are as clean cut so as to have one singular goal, nor do their fans read it for simplicity's sake. I'm attempting a fantasy story where impressions mean little, myself. The dogged nice guy is the girl's codependent, the really shy girl with the caring best friend can't function without her manipulator, etc. Granted, I know it may be a exception, as I haven't had the time to read a book in a while, but not all people's reasons for enjoying something is the same- which was my real beef with that statement.
Fair enough. What I said doesn't apply to all fantasy, obviously, but I think it applies to quite a bit of it.
I think this is true of a lot of popular fantasy, but I wonder if this is because the readers want their story and morality in black and white, or because the plot is secondary to the world and the heroic acts that take place within it. I would say that sci-fi has a tendency to be more complex. Interestingly, referring to your earlier post, the prevention of WW3 on two occasions came down to a Russian ignoring orders and not pressing the button.
I apologize for budding in mid-convo, but I personally just feel very at home when I write fantasy, whether that world be set in a High or Dark/Gothic setting. Sword and Sorcery was always a source of adventure for me as a youth and I will always love creating settings with the fantasy genre.
To be honest, there's a lot more to the fantasy genre than epic Lord of the Rings/Game of Thrones storylines. It's the writer's literal sandbox to do whatever in the pure Hell he/she wants to do. So go, new fantasy writers, unleash the tsunami of imagination. Leave nothing standing.
There's no reason why a fantasy story can't have complex, multi-layered conflict. Realistic as they may seem, the characters in literary fiction are constructs. The settings in literary fiction are constructs as well, unless every aspect of them is directly copied from real life. If a fictional dystopia or neighborhood can be written in an intelligent manner, so can a fantastical kingdom. Whether it will is another matter.
I think that the reason fantasy is seen as simplistic is because in Sci-Fi you can't cut corners in explanations while still impressing readers. Any that don't meet the mark fade to obscurity. Fantasy is fantasy, so the willing suspension of disbelief is often set a little higher and some authors get lazy and start hand waving, while it's still accepted by readers. That's my take, at least, according to how many people are agreeing that fantasy seems simple.
Here's the problem. Imagine you go outside. Your neighbor has just gotten home. He gets out of the car and says hello. You say hello back. Then you go back inside. And that's your story. Now. There are thousands of non fiction books about automobiles. Thousands of non fiction books about interpersonal relationships. Thousands of books commenting on modern society. Then you have the concept of a neighborhood od, conveniently fleshed out for you by how many historians. The grass on the lawn. The germs you're breathing.. Real biologists have taken care of all that for you. Gravity, the sky? All taken care of. These are all things specific to our universe. Once you create a world 100% disconnected from our world, all that countless work millions of researchers have done can no longer be taken for granted. So you think your world's complex because you because you made up some half ass currency system and trite religion? Our planet has a giant field of economics and countless complex religious systems. Your made up world cannot compete . Minstrel is right. Fantasy is about simplifying. It's a shadow of the real world.
It's difficult to do this because a fantasy writer has to devote so many words to introducing the basics of the world. If you spend 20,000 words illustrating the world, the people, technology, and cultureetc, that's 20,000 words you dont have to create multi-layered conflict. It's 20,000 words you dont have to build out a character in greater detail. Unless you are an established author and your publisher gives you carte blanche, you have to cut corners somewhere. World building, character development, plot complexity take your pick. You cant have it all.
Most fiction is about simplifying. I work in the world of finance. The only fictional investment story that didnt massively simplify things was Boiler Room. Wall Street? So simplified at times that it was barely recongizable at times. Bud Fox's job was a composite of like 5 different jobs. It was like a soccer player scoring a goal on one play and then a minute later being the goalie. Michael Crichton brutalized international economics in Rising Sun. But that's just it. Fiction has to simplify otherwise you needlessly distract the reader from the primary elements of the story - plot, character, theme, whatever your focus. You'd end up with a brain dump rather than a story.
Just want to point out that WWII was literally about getting rid of Hitler and the Nazi's (And Tojo/Mussolini). I mean LOTR is virtually the story of WWI and WWII told in a fantasy setting. Its seems a bit unfair to say LOTR's plot is overly simplistic when the wars that inspired it were just as simplistic.
I think you are over-simplifying the causes of both wars somewhat. WWI for example. Franz Ferdinand was killed in Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian empire wanted to take military action in revenge. Germany sided with Austro-Hungary. Russia sided with Serbia. There was a Franco-Russian treaty, so the Germans pre-emptively invaded France. The British did not want German ports on the English channel/ Med, so they entered in defence of France. That is a very, very simplified version of the start of WWI, and it is a lot more involved than, Sauron was evil incarnate and wanted to destroy stuff. WWII was even more complex, given all the players involved, but enough already. Having said that, I would say that Star Wars has a lot in common with the Battle of Britain, and Battlestar Galactica has a lot in common with the US Pacific campaign.
That's simplfying explanations. The underlying dynamics dont disappear if your story takes place in the real world.
Then why read fiction? Real history is more complex than any fictional story. Anyway, I am a new writer, and I guess my first attempt at writing could be classified as "fantasy" (maybe "magic realism" but probably not), so here is my take: "Fantasy" is not a goal, as in "I want to write fantasy -- now, what fantasy story should I write?" Instead, "fantasy" is a convenient label for something that has already been written, and it is defined by the tropes the author happens to use. When shaping a story, I begin with fairly specific notions of what I want the reader to experience and which tropes can create that experience, e.g. "become more aware of my (the reader's) desire to matter, by identifying with a character who cannot be remembered" or "become more aware of the different types of love I have for the people in my life, by identifying with a character who impersonates people and feeds on love". Sometimes (usually), it is only possible to create that experience by breaking the laws of reality. As I pile on other things I want the reader to experience, I must break more and more laws of reality, until it is simply more convenient to set the story in a world I made up (which follows my own rules) than to spin a web of tenuous explanations of how the story could possibly take place in the real world. At that point, the story has become what you might call "fantasy". I believe in the importance of the story above all else. We tell stories to each other because stories are interesting. We need not justify our exercise of our imagination by convincing our audience that our stories could really happen. If the only way to explain why the fictional reality works the way it does is that "the story requires it", then that is a perfectly fine answer; the question was a stupid question in the first place. Like @Link the Writer says, fantasy is my sandbox to tell whatever the hell story I want to tell. "Cutting corners" is not as big of a sacrifice as you might think. As a rule of thumb, it is not necessary to provide an encyclopedic explanation of how a fantasy world works. The characters can just take everything for granted -- the politics, the technology, the magic, etc. -- and the reader can pick it up as he goes along. You did not learn to speak your first language by reading a grammar manual; you learned by listening to people who talked to you.
I think you're confusing story with setting. A setting based in our universe is inherently more complex than any completely made up one. Fiction and non fiction are two different animals and cannot be compared.
Just to inject a very pragmatic note into this interesting discussion.... The late, great fantasy writer Iain M Banks once said (in my presence—he was giving a lecture at a book festival) that he chose to write fantasy (disguised as space opera) because he couldn't be bothered doing research. Instead, he just made everything up! Instead of researching a period in the real world, or learning all about science to create a realistic future world, he created an imaginary interplanetary culture (called The Culture!) upon which his fantasy world was based. He said it represented everything he wished our own culture would be like. But of course, even in a perfect world, there are always problems.... His point: if you write fantasy carefully and thoroughly, you can create a very complicated world with situations that make for very adult plots. But you don't have to do research! I still miss Iain Banks.
Your argument was that fantasy discards the complexity of reality. My response was that all fiction discards the complexity of reality. Of course fiction and nonfiction can be compared. Nonfiction: I ate pizza for dinner. Fiction: I ate a burger for dinner. Nonfiction: Abraham Lincoln was the president of the US. Fiction: Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter. etc. My choice of what to eat for dinner was the result of factors in my body and in my environment too complex for me to begin to understand. In the fictional story where I choose to eat a burger for dinner, all kinds of laws of reality are broken. You and I may not understand those laws, but someone who understands physics perfectly and sees all matter and energy at all times could, at any time in the past, predict my decision, and could explain why it is impossible that I would make any given different decision. In layman's terms, it is ridiculously futile to try to capture the complexity of reality in a made-up story. I would rather admit that all fiction is infinitely simpler than reality (infinity times ten (fantasy) equals infinity (nonfantasy)), embrace that fact, enjoy fiction that simplifies the human experience in an interesting way, and do my best to simplify it in my own interesting way. I feel the same way about fantasy. It lets me spend time on things that matter (telling an interesting story) instead of things that do not matter (avoiding being "unrealistic" or insulting some culture or anything like that).
