Ok, so fantasy is....
Society trains you to seek for the mainstream values as you mature through life, such as a steady career, a happy family, and helping others. But the side of you that craves for adventure is never really satisfied because you’re too busy trying to attain those values that will appease everyone else around you. You grow tired of living a cookie-cutter life, which is difficult of getting out of the habit of molding. This is where fantasy comes in. You crave for something different, something out of the ordinary, something that you wish you belonged to. That is what fantasy is for me. It is a world I get to escape to, away from reality, regardless of how good it is. There is no fun in simply living one life. Like husbands who lie to their wives to experience a once-a-week, different life by going to stripclubs or playing fantasy football/baseball with their buddies, we fantasy fans imagine a magical world in which we can also belong to.
My experiences with fantasy began in elementary with Ella Enchanted, Bunnicula, Redwall stories (Brian Jacques), and A Wrinkle of Time (Madeleine L’Engle). We had the Accelerated Reader program in our school, and once I got a taste of the world of magic and fantasy, I couldn’t stop. Now, I have explored and discovered worlds of sorcerers and dragons with Harry Potter and Eragon, but also worlds of darkness that satisfy the basic hungers….. It is a world of necromancers, vampires, and werewolves. Charlaine Harris (the Sookie Stackhouse series), Garth Nix (The Abhorsen Trilogy), and Laurell K. Hamilton (the Anita Blake series) weave a life of danger and mystique that completely steal me away from everyday responsibilities.
Fantasy rox.
4 comments:
Jessica's emphasis on fantasy as escapism reminds me of the famous passage in J.R.R. Tolkien's long 1939 essay "On Fairy-Stories," which is in part a defense of escapism in literature against the Modernist critics who assailed it:
"Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?"
A legitimate follow-up question, though, is: What, through all this escapism, are we escaping? In Tolkien's next paragraph, amid a denunciation of electric streetlamps, he makes clear that to him, the "prison" from which fairy-stories offer release is nothing less than industrial civilization, i.e. the modern world. Do all the escapist fantasy authors and texts we're listing on this blog share Tolkien's desire to turn back the clock to a preindustrialized world? If not, from what are they, and their readers, escaping?
Woot for Laurell K Hamilton! Okay, that's all I really wanted to say.
I don't think they're escaping just from an industrialized world... Hamilton, Harris, and even Rowling's plots rely heavily on modern-day technology. I have a feeling they're escaping more from a monotonous life; the routine that develops from a somewhat boring life.
I basically agree with Jessica about fantasy escapism providing a dash of excitement in an otherwise mundane life. A lot of fantasy focuses on leaving one world for another- THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH springs quickly to mind (side note: for real guys, if you haven't read this remarkable children's book, READ IT. It's short, heck, it's for kids, and it contains a beautifully whimsical world). Also, I think Link's works that we'll be perusing have quite a bit to do with escaping normal perceptions: like "Stone Animals" for example.
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