What is the purpose of Fantasy?

[Frog]

I've been thinking about Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" and Ursula Le Guin's "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" as well as some of C. S. Lewis' points in "Of Other Worlds."

They seem to have some fascinating points concerning what Fantasy should be. In short, it's more about the personality of magic and "elfland" than humans and their every day muggle items and soap operas tagging along and ruining the whole escape. (So Percy Jackson would basically be the opposite). It's like how the Lorax movie got ruined when they added a rock and roll guitar and awkward sarcasm.

Which is what brings me to my question. While I'm ready to covert to their view and admit things like Percy Jackson and The Mortal Instruments are a waste of time (or at least no more constructive than getting entertainment from watching TV) , there's one thing that makes me reconsider the merits of Urban/character-driven Fantasy. (By character-driven I'm talking about stories driven by down to earth character interactions and personalities like Harry Potter as opposed to the less intimate, though good in their own way, types of characters in LOTR).

I believe good character-driven fantasy IS possible if an author knows what they're doing and deliberately uses magic and the characters to complement each other. It would be a *different* kind of fantasy, but not worse than what Tolkien and the others describe. I believe it can exist because I believe Harry Potter accomplished that and is fulfilling ethically, logically and emotionally. I doubt I would make that case for many others though.

So what would you consider is important for something to qualify as fantasy and why? Any thoughts or opinions on any of this? I'm always interested in other people's ideas about these things.

[Ruby]

I think the elfland fantasy differs from this urban one because of the major point that a lot of it is supposed to be epic. Percy Jackson and HP aren't supposed to have that massive, culture-filled epic feel- in fact, these two I think are supposed to be closer to YA.

So, in sum, fantasy for me has an otherworldly feel or an important presence of magic or some sort of spirit-y force/system. PJ and HP work with this because there's a hidden system of gods controlling everything in the former and a whole hidden world of wizards and wizard government in HP.

[Frog]

Hmm, then maybe Urban/high fantasy are being lumped together wrongly just because one borrows elements from the other. They're all Fantasy because of the presence of magic, but it's a little like saying every book with a police officer is a crime thriller. In my experience they're very different in spirit.

If anything, character-driven Fantasy should be compared to things like Dickens, Austen and Tolstoy rather than Tolkien, Dunsany or Eddison. In fact, I think because it's NOT held to such high standards in the area that's really crucial is the reason YA Fantasy so often fails to become very good.

I do believe there can be good Urban Fantasy, I just barely ever see it. Even if I enjoy it, I have to admit they're usually shallow. I believe it CAN be well done if it would stop falling into certain traps.

Thanks for the discussion, this always helps me to think.

[Preston]

Fantasy is more of the feeling a book gives you as opposed to the actual content. You can get the same feeling from a book that is ancient Egypt as you can from a book based five thousand years in the future. It is true that almost all Fantasy books have magic and swords and magical creatures in them, but fantasy is again just the feeling.

Allow me to clarify. When I say a feeling, I really mean a great many feeling mixed together, a sort of symphony or song of emotions. When you read a Fantasy book. You are feeling the exact feelings as when you think about anything, that is fear, happiness, joy, grief, anger, denial, which is a part of grief, and boredom or the absence of powerful emotion. The difference between Fantasy and real life or any other book is the order, intensity, and setting of these emotions.

When you feel sad when your favorite character dies, it is just a different facet of grief. Also when you read Fantasy you get the feeling of being near to something larger than yourself. For those who are acutely aware of their own self they can sometimes feel as if they could reach out and touch it. I myself am one of those people.

So fantasy just needs to be a clever arrangement of emotions all weaved together in a way that makes you think you just escaping the real world. In reality you are just think on a different level, seeing things from a new perspective. It is an extremely healthy thing to do and can take many forms, one of which is Fantasy literature. Indeed Fantasy is kind of like nerd Kung-Fu. You really can learn things about yourself that you wouldn't have learned going at the same pace as before.

So really the most important part of Fantasy is people, or at least their soul/mind/heart.

[Ruby]

Preston wrote: "Fantasy is more of the feeling a book gives you as opposed to the actual content. You can get the same feeling from a book that is ancient Egypt as you can from a book based five thousand years in ..."

I call that feeling "earth-shattering." I just think of it as a heightened versions of emotions or connection to the story that you would feel with other books. I think the difference is that this powerful feeling you get with fantasy is one that makes you think of big themes- love, loyalty, happiness, freedom, honor, glory, etc. Sometimes, like with LotR, I think that the story is so vast that it makes you think meta-style too, which brings on the feeling of looking down on the story from above and thinking about yourself and your feelings in a meta way as well.

[Frog]

That's a good way to look at it.

Now I'm going to ask a question. Do you think it's cheap, almost cheating, in a character-driven story to include magic to produce emotions in the way you explained instead of through character-interaction itself?

When you read things like Tolstoy and Gone with the Wind, aren't these examples of authors who accomplish producing these feelings without the aid of magically contrived situations? Would these be creatively superior for that reason? Is it close-minded to say magic is ever necessary to produce such emotions in this kind of work?

For example, The Mortal Instruments is a character-driven series and contrives a situation that the main character just so happens to have to kiss one of the two boys in the love triangle otherwise they're trapped by the fairies. Obviously the author thinks this is an interesting/juicy situation. If we use magic as a shortcut for soap operas isn't that a cheaper thing to do than letting emotions come from actual life? And isn't magic in character-driven fantasy essentially always just a shortcut, at least to a degree?

That's what makes me ask: is character-driven fantasy less creatively superior than elfland fantasy? Or even generic character-driven work that doesn't rely on the fantastic?
I'm having a hard time thinking of example to defend it. Although I would defend Harry Potter, it's hard to put my finger on why.

(Well, maybe not. It has to do with characters and situations not being so immature for once i.e. not catering to anything romantic, angsty or sarcastic as much as worthwhile values).

[Frog]

This is a quote by from Ursula Le Guin's essay, Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown. (Mrs. Brown being the vivid, novelistic type of character). I'll just put it here because I think it's interesting:

"If any field of literature has no, can have no Mrs. Brown in it, it is fantasy, straight fantasy, the modern descendant of folktale, fairy tale, and myth. These genres deal with archetypes, not with characters. The very essence of Elfland is that Mrs. Brown can't get there, not unless she is changed, changed utterly, into an old mad witch, or a fair young princess, or a loathely Worm.
But who is this character, then, who really looks very like Mrs. Brown, except that he has furry feet; a short, thin, tired-looking fellow, wearing a gold ring on a chain round his neck, and heading rather disconsolately eastward, on foot? I think you know his name.
Actually, I will not argue hard in defense of Frodo Baggins as a genuine, fully developed, novelistic character; as I say, his importance to my theme here is rather as a sign and portent. If you put Frodo together into one piece with Sam, and with Gollum, and with Smeagol, and they fit together into one piece, you get, indeed, a complex and fascinating character. But as traditional myths and folktales break the complex conscious daylight personality down into its archetypal unconscious dreamtime components, Mrs. Brown becoming a princess, a toad, a worm, a witch, a child, so Tolkien in his wisdom broke Frodo into four; Frodo, Sam Smeagol, and Gollum, or as Sam calls them, Slinker and Stinker. Frodo himself is only a quarter or a fifth of himself."

[Ruby]

I agree- I think :). Frodo and certain fantasy characters sometimes work best/only work with the people in their stories- because the story is the only one for them.

As to your other question...
What an interesting inquiry!
I say no, not at all. Magic, real life, they are equal in this sense. Having magic, potions, the Force, the elixir of life, is just a way of communicating a story– a way of giving the reader a new plot point, a new situation for the characters to solve. Anything is possible when writing– making what happens in your book "possible" is irrelevant.
As long as the writing is impactful and communicates the message, does it matter whether the situation was created through a plot element in the book called "magic" or not? Of course not! It is fiction– how are we miraculously able to judge whether that situation can or can't happen in real life? When we read fantasy, we disregard the impossibilities and accept them as if they are a code we must decipher to fully understand the story. If we had to pause and think to ourselves how to proceed every time someone did a spell in Harry Potter, how could we ever understand the story?

Magic is part of the setting– a tool, a means to an end. The story isn't about the mechanics of magic, it's not about the powers of the elves, it's not about how pixie dust makes you fly. Once we understand this, we see certain situations for what they would be in real life, magic or no. In your example, we aren't really thinking of magically having to choose one boy or the other to save– we think back to our frame of reference, to the experience we have heard of or experienced ourselves, and find memories and ideas from the past. We think, maybe, of a situation where one would have to save one boy or the other from an oncoming water balloon. Or from an apple falling off a tree. The magic is a useful way for the author to get us there without breaking his/her back to create the perfect "realistic" scene– not a cheat but a means to an end.

In a character driven book, it's not the mechanics of the world or the setting that makes the character development valid or impactful- just look at Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter– magic and lore everywhere, but the series still have tremendous impacts on us.

So magic is far from a shortcut- every way to set up the scene is a shortcut. Magic is just a fantastical way of doing it.
What an interesting inquiry indeed...

[Frog]

Thanks for the thoughtful answer. I probably think about this kind of stuff way too much, haha.

That's a good argument. If magic is part of the setting it can serve as a valid means of furthering the plot as well as any other element, so what's the difference? On the flip side, story elements that aren't magical might sometimes be heavy handed and contrived.
Magic can be one way to emphasize common parts of life, and storytelling is about telling the truth in new exciting ways. Magic is one way to add wonder to situations and make you look at them differently. I don't see it as pointless to mix with down to earth situations in this light.

This is how I see it:
Elfland Fantasy looks at the world through a telescope from far away. Character Fantasy looks at the world through a magnifying glass. One is intimate, one is grand and vast. There's probably actually no reason to worry about comparing them. That's my thought process right now, anyway!

[Richmonde]

I think the purpose of fantasy is that your supposed to feel like anything is possible which we know is not true if your not being rational. I think the purpose is really straight forward if your talking about lord of the rings than the purpose of this fantasy will be an adventure filled story with unimaginable things to see and visualize, like the orcs the elves that live for ever thing s like that, the purpose is to fill your dreams with a thought of this fantasy and to feel like your apart of something that could never truly happen in real life . That is what I feel fantasy for to think of new cool possibility and this is coming from an 12 year kid take my word for it I know what fantasy feels like ; ) .

[Saul the Heir of Isauldur]

For me, Fantasy is a feeling or cluster of emotions, like Preston said above. But the feelings have nothing to do with the magic or elves, fairies, etc. The good kind of Fantasy is the one that can tell a good, compelling, truly human story in a setting that is vastly different from our own. Tolkien's LOTR of course comes to mind. The story is about Frodo and Sam's friendship; they're almost brothers, and they're willing to carry each other to the end. Never mind that they carry a magic ring into the realm of an evil demi-god. Aragorn is in love with Arwen, but he must attend to his duty to his people before he can be with her. As a leader, he must put the wellbeing of his people before his own interests. never mind that his girlfriend is virtually immortal, that he had a quasi-magic sword and that his enemy is hordes of mythical monsters led by a corrupted super-being.

Urban Fantasy and High Fantasy differ, in my opinion, only in the setting. The Mortal Instruments happens in NYC, LOTR happens in Middle-earth. I frankly think that Tolkien does a better way of telling his story than Cassandra Clare does, but that doesn't mean that either s better.

High Fantasy has a tendency to make you look at a different world using your own reality-goggles if you will. You look at Middle-earth or Narnia or Prynn or Westeros through your own biases that originated from you living in this world. Urban Fantasy, on the other hand, makes you look at your own world through the goggles that the author gives you. What if there were truly werewolves? Would they really be delivering pizza and selling antiques?

Now, it's no cheating if someone uses magic as a quick way to reach an emotional situation. It only depends on what you as an individual reader like. I may think it cheesy, someone else may think it brilliant. But what defines Fantasy in general is not the setting so much as what you're looking at and how, as I said above.

Would Dune count as Fantasy? It's technically science fiction, but we're looking at the universe through the lens that Frank Herbert gives us. What if everything depended on one thing that's nearly impossible to obtain and impossible to recreate? What if all of humanity actually depended on a single person? The setting is vastly different from our usual one, and the scale is grandiose and glorious, of sorts.

Fantasy, like I said, is a familiar, realistic story that takes place in an unfamiliar, fantastical world.