Meta Discussion Rec

[alixtii]

This poll is priceless, not only because it relates so directly to the thoughts in my Mmm, 'Cesty: Incest and the Adolescent Fantasy essay, but because it has so many people (including me!) going, "Well, in real life, it'd be bad for a sixteen-year-old girl to sleep with a 300-year-old vampire." :-D

I mean, at the end of the day, how much sense does it really make to suspend disbelief on the one point but not the other?

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[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

I mean, at the end of the day, how much sense does it really make to suspend disbelief on the one point but not the other?

Well, because that is how fantasy works - you suspend disbelief on the mechanics of the universe, but the realities of human relationships and feelings still have to be the same otherwise it all becomes pointless. Those are the unspoken rules that we accept when we read/watch/write fantasy.

If you want a set of stories where the relationship rules are different as well that would be a different genre (and not one I personally would care to read).

To some extent I think all fiction is following those rules - the situation is made up, but we need to recognise the characters as real people (even if they happen to be rabbits or moles). The only difference between a fantasy fan and a non-fantasy fan is that we fantasy fans aren't interested unless there is a strong element of make-believe in the situation. And no, I don't know why I have that preference, I just know that I have it very strongly.

So I'm not sure if it makes 'sense' any more than any other convention or preference makes sense, but I know it is a strong one.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

The only difference between a fantasy fan and a non-fantasy fan is that we fantasy fans aren't interested unless there is a strong element of make-believe in the situation. And no, I don't know why I have that preference, I just know that I have it very strongly.

Well, I don't know why you have the preference either, obviously. But speaking more broadly, I do think there is something psychological going on in the draw to fantasy, and to treat it as a thought exercise, "take real world, add vampires," the way some 1950s hard sf is written, is more often than not to miss the point.

Not that such a treatment couldn't be a perfectly valid in its own point, just as for people interested in positronic brains golden age sf is satisfying. But it's not going to satisfy a taste for space opera, and recognizing that a taste for space opera is what draws many people to the genre is to not understand it in its completeness.

Similarly, many people are drawn to fantasy because it offers a world where anything can happen, and people who can do anything, and while a focus on characterization (far more than was ever present in golden age hard SF, that's for sure) is part of what's going on ((the fantasy isn't exciting if the protagonist doesn't feel real), it's not quite pyschological realism which is part of the contract with the reader.

So in, say, Harry Potter, we're not just being asked to believed the make-believe that a boy can be a wizard, but also that a 11-year-old boy can be responsible to take on a Dark Lord. And yes, the relationship rules are different; the way we construct the relationships between children and their parents, or children and their teachers, is altered because it's fantasy.

Now, of course, that type of alteration can happen in ostensibly "realistic" fiction as well--the relationships in one of Frances Hodgeson Burnett's children's book have the same feel. But I think it's even more natural within the fantasy genre for the reasons I've stated. Certainly the fantasy works where this doesn't happen are few and far between; I can't think of one.