Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "creatures"
Rule Number Two of Magic: Plenty Magic, Few Wizards
A human mind has always longed to make sense of things - to understand, to quantify, and to bind and take advantage of... or to get rid of what cannot be understood, to destroy or subjugate that which we fear.
For the last generation or so, this sort of thinking has been in vogue in fantasy as well. We now have great many stories where magic is fully understood, wizardry is a common and accepted profession, and fantasy creatures and weird races walk among us; or where all that nonsense has been shunted aside in favour of gritty medieval realism. On the internet message boards - particularly Tumblr - people love to discuss magic and monsters and such things, wonder how exactly they work, seek out loopholes in their behavior and new strengths and weaknesses, or have a good laugh about what happens when their rules are applied to reality in new and ridiculous ways.
For example...
Even that last aspect, about destruction and domination, has found new life in a subgenre called HFY - short for "Humanity Fuck Yeah" - which started out as an attempt to give humans something to be special about in the face of all the aliens and monsters, rather than being the generic Normals, but which many have chosen to interpret as humanity applying their science, intellect, and combat instinct to destroy all the fantastic and weird.
It's not just a yearning to understand, really - it all works in concert with an almost-equal yearning to explain. To show off, to feel smarter than those around us. To describe in great detail how our magic systems work, how well they make sense, and how we've integrated other creatures and monsters and races into the world and how they would change things in society; or, at the opposite end, how much research we've done on the subject of medieval history, technology, sociology, heraldry, and mud. Hell, I myself am far from immune to this: I make one atypical cosmic system and ensuing seasons and weather patterns, and I now find myself wanting to talk about it in every story I write.
I think it all shows an even greater issue we as a species have: when we get an idea that's ostensibly good or beneficial or funny, we exploit the shit out of it. More often than not this results in far more trouble than its worth. We cannot do anything in moderation. As seen here: we want to make sense of stuff, and so we kill fantasy.
Well, it's a slight exaggeration. It's not to say that any such fiction could not be pretty great anyway, or that some of the internet fantasy analyzation isn't really funny and making some curious remarks - it's just that I don't think we should follow such a trend too far, as a general rule, and that we should give a new chance to not understanding everything, and to let the world's own strange logic to carry things for us.
So as I like to do things, there's a lot of magic out there, a lot of fantasy, a lot of mystery - and there's nothing you understand about it on the outset, and very little you understand even after you've had an adventure. Wizards are rare and few, considered powerful and sagacious even when they're relatively weak or ignorant by the standards of most fantasy - each as well-known as kings, and no more common, yet each has only ever glimpsed a little bit of the unknown realm of fantasy. Other races live far away from human realms, at best mysterious and detached in the borderlands where they're sometimes seen, at worst unseen and wondrous, relegated to realm of imagination and fairytale, in the inner lands. The very world, its lands and seas and skies, acts bizarrely and erratically, all too often impossible to predict or defend against, let alone control. The people who have gone to these lands of wonder and returned alive, are venerated by all.
In your little farm, village, or town, things may - indeed should - seem altogether normal and sensible, your immediate surroundings well understood to you and no longer causing you fear... but step out of your door and onto the forest path, and who knows where it will take you and what strange sights will open to you.
That, as I understand it, is Fantasy.
For the last generation or so, this sort of thinking has been in vogue in fantasy as well. We now have great many stories where magic is fully understood, wizardry is a common and accepted profession, and fantasy creatures and weird races walk among us; or where all that nonsense has been shunted aside in favour of gritty medieval realism. On the internet message boards - particularly Tumblr - people love to discuss magic and monsters and such things, wonder how exactly they work, seek out loopholes in their behavior and new strengths and weaknesses, or have a good laugh about what happens when their rules are applied to reality in new and ridiculous ways.
For example...
Even that last aspect, about destruction and domination, has found new life in a subgenre called HFY - short for "Humanity Fuck Yeah" - which started out as an attempt to give humans something to be special about in the face of all the aliens and monsters, rather than being the generic Normals, but which many have chosen to interpret as humanity applying their science, intellect, and combat instinct to destroy all the fantastic and weird.
It's not just a yearning to understand, really - it all works in concert with an almost-equal yearning to explain. To show off, to feel smarter than those around us. To describe in great detail how our magic systems work, how well they make sense, and how we've integrated other creatures and monsters and races into the world and how they would change things in society; or, at the opposite end, how much research we've done on the subject of medieval history, technology, sociology, heraldry, and mud. Hell, I myself am far from immune to this: I make one atypical cosmic system and ensuing seasons and weather patterns, and I now find myself wanting to talk about it in every story I write.
I think it all shows an even greater issue we as a species have: when we get an idea that's ostensibly good or beneficial or funny, we exploit the shit out of it. More often than not this results in far more trouble than its worth. We cannot do anything in moderation. As seen here: we want to make sense of stuff, and so we kill fantasy.
Well, it's a slight exaggeration. It's not to say that any such fiction could not be pretty great anyway, or that some of the internet fantasy analyzation isn't really funny and making some curious remarks - it's just that I don't think we should follow such a trend too far, as a general rule, and that we should give a new chance to not understanding everything, and to let the world's own strange logic to carry things for us.
So as I like to do things, there's a lot of magic out there, a lot of fantasy, a lot of mystery - and there's nothing you understand about it on the outset, and very little you understand even after you've had an adventure. Wizards are rare and few, considered powerful and sagacious even when they're relatively weak or ignorant by the standards of most fantasy - each as well-known as kings, and no more common, yet each has only ever glimpsed a little bit of the unknown realm of fantasy. Other races live far away from human realms, at best mysterious and detached in the borderlands where they're sometimes seen, at worst unseen and wondrous, relegated to realm of imagination and fairytale, in the inner lands. The very world, its lands and seas and skies, acts bizarrely and erratically, all too often impossible to predict or defend against, let alone control. The people who have gone to these lands of wonder and returned alive, are venerated by all.
In your little farm, village, or town, things may - indeed should - seem altogether normal and sensible, your immediate surroundings well understood to you and no longer causing you fear... but step out of your door and onto the forest path, and who knows where it will take you and what strange sights will open to you.
That, as I understand it, is Fantasy.
Pankarp
Pages fallen out of Straggler's journal, and others.
...more
- Juho Pohjalainen's profile
- 350 followers
