Author’s Note: Sorry, people who wanted an essay on Campbellian heroes—everything I could think of about that I’ve already written in chapter two, or Yuval has said in their astute review for said chapter. So, there might be more on that but I’m not sure when. Instead, you get…

Cruel Gods V: Fantasy Is Fictional

or

Welcome to Narnia, Now Go Home.

This one’s for fantasy writers, unless one of you is brilliant and can figure out a way to apply it to other things. Feel free.

You’ve seen this movie/read this book. Main character (age 12-16) daydreams about growing up to be a kung fu master/wizard/spaceship pilot/whatever. The author is obviously targeting real life kids who dream like that sometimes and want to have vicarious adventures. Since this is the fantasy genre, the kid ends up in another world via a portal of some sort, and perhaps that world is similar to what s/he has daydreamed about. It’s Grand and Epic and Only (Insert Kid’s Name Here) Can Save It. The kid meets the Evil Army and some loyal companions, usually in that order because it’s more exciting that way. Things happen. The kid/hero defeats the Dark Lord (usually with help, because needing help is a good virtue or something). Kid gets granted wish by Benevolent God-Thing whom there were rumors about throughout the book but for some reason didn’t take out the Dark Lord Itself (but I digress). Kid says:

“I just want to go home.”

(My main source of this rant-essay (and that quote) is the movie The Forbidden Kingdom, which I was so prepared to like, but I will also discuss some other things, including how Narnia takes the trope and makes it decent.)

Does anything in that cliché little story I just told you not add up to you? Where did the fact that the kid’s (likely only) characterization point in the real world part of the story at the beginning was that s/he was a dreamer go? Did the kid suddenly forget his interests? Is he not going to go home and look at the kung fu/science fiction/whatever posters on his walls and say “I had that once, and now I’m back here, oh drat?”? Has going to the fantasy world cured that penchant for dreaming? (Perhaps so, if the lesson of fantasy is that the journeys symbolize life, and if one is supposed to not think about fantasy so much when one is adult, but I digress again--)

World-shifting is a subgenre: while one could argue that the cliché farmboy wondering off into the lands outside the farm is a shift in worldview, it is not what I mean by a shift in world. There are certain ways which fantasy writers—usually those who target young adults—illustrate their characters' reaction to being in a entirely new world. Either the characters are full of wonderment and are ok with the whole situation—Narnia did a fantastic job of this, (as did Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising , although that one uses time travel and fantasy-in-our-world elements instead of an physically separate realm– )or the kid wants to go home, and often wants to throughout the whole book. That is the Annoyingly Reticent Hero, the poster boy for which, or the first that made me think about this anyway, is the kid from the Pendragon series, a fantasy series from a time ago that targeted middle schoolers, of which I read the first. I really disliked this excuse for a hero, as he repeatedly wanted to go home to his suburb and his girlfriend instead of saving the kingdom from Bad Guys. I kept thinking—You’re in a fantasy world. I’d give almost anything for that, and you’re complaining about it. Jerk. And by the way, if you were having so much fun in the real world, why do you deserve another one? (No, I do not see the logic in that belief in some sort of fantasy-world-distributing Hand Of Fate either. Nevertheless, it is how I think and it is a source of much anger.) Maybe I’ve just thought too much about this. But I can’t help but pine for a story where a fantasy fan ends up in a fantasy world and actually appreciates it. Maybe writers, as I wrote about in the first chapter of this essay-thing, are the only ones who are mentally capable of appreciating tough situations they’re in. (And writers aren’t the general populace, so a book with a main character as a writer might not sell well. Unless of course it was written by Steven King. But I digress--)

I want to see a fantasy story where the dreamer-kid (who, let's extrapolate, because of (let’s just pick a gender here) her penchant for dreaming instead of thinking about real world things, is in general a person who is mildly dissatisfied with the world, might even have taken the writer’s route and begun to think she could do better, and isn’t very good at socializing with “normal people”) goes into the fantasy world and thinks, and I paraphrase, “Gasp, sweet.” She’s going to be happy. She’s going to be amazed. She’s going to thank whatever she’s been praying for this to.

Even in the battles, even in the rough times, she’s going to be able to think this is better than my home world. This is what I wanted. This is where I belong. Because she's kindof like a writer.

She might even get power-hungry; have too much fun with magic, maybe even bring some back to the real world and spice things up a bit for the people who called her crazy because of her dreams.

(Okay, that would be vindictive and creepy. But I think it would be realistic.)

No one knows what it’s like to enter a fantasy world, one such as Narnia or Landover. Although writers of crime stories, for instance, like to research their material by reading about real crimes, fantasy writers do not have the luxury of precedent. If one thinks about it, one can figure that lots of interesting things would happen to the psyche if one’s worldview was changed so completely as by a shift into another reality—not to mention one’s priorities.

However, most fantasy fiction takes one of a few routes in order to introduce their character who was born on our Earth to the other world that is the subject of the book—either they’re calmly accepting, or they want to go home. I don’t think those options give due credit to the variable human psyche.

A good example of complexity in world-shifting is the very weird Thomas Covenant series. I suggest them for adult and near-adult readers. Covenant loses a bit of his grip on sanity when he reaches the fantasy world oh-so-creatively titled The Land.

Maybe the answer to the question is that world-shifting novels are simply made for children, and children would not like complexity.

A Brief Tangent—Bad Fan Fiction

A young (12-15, usually) writer’s first instinct, like a newborn puppy moving toward warmth, is to write bad fan fiction. This is not because the human race is hopeless. It is because writers can ‘sense’ worlds. When one is just starting to read fantasy, one comes across a world one likes (Middle-Earth, Pern, whatever), and the instinct is to imagine oneself in that world. Thus self-insert fan fiction, which tends to be poorly written and just plain ridiculous. It is, though, a type of traveling-to-other-world story, and therefore worthy of brief discussion here. It usually depicts Earthling characters that are so enthusiastic for the new world that it’s silly, and maybe the line between ‘silly’ and ‘not silly’ is thin and worth discussion. But I would argue that this stage of writing, representative as it is of self-centeredness and enthusiasm instead of skill, is an essential stage in the writer’s development. That doesn’t mean it’s any good, or that I like to read it (I don’t), or that everyone has to go through it to become a writer (they certainly don't), because not only do fanfic writers often not think for any length of time about how they would really act if their world changed, they do not think accurately about how that world and its inhabitants would react to their presence. Can you imagine how you would feel if you were told that your world was fictional? First of all you would think the one who was telling you was crazy.

Insanity is underrated in fantasy fiction.

But fan fiction does give the writer a feel for being, mentally, not physically, inside a world, which they need to have to create one. It gives them the feeling that they can change things. It gives them a taste of arrogance, which, in its mature form, I have already stated is important for a writer to have.

I could go into a whole rant about self-insert fan fiction tropes, but you probably either don’t really care or have heard it before. Anyway…self-insert fan fiction can be a good example of what not to do when writing world-shifting--don't make your characters stupid with enthusiasm either, which I think is a necessary caveat to the whole subject of this essay.

/end tangent

I think that stock reactions deemphasize what a massive shock entrance into another world would be. The likeliest option, perhaps, would be that an adult would simply refuse to admit that there was any fantasy at all, and that a child would simply react to it like they do to the real world. (Everything would be nearly equally new to them.) But so often an essential part of the story is that the main character wanted to go to a fantasy world and thought about it considerably. (Because teaching our children that dreams come true, even if those dreams defy laws of physics and will eventually be forgotten about or found to be actually impossible, is apparently a Good Thing To Do, because that doesn’t teach them anything about disappointment, now does it?)

I’ve tried, in my own prose (Plotseekers and All’s Faire), to address this issue. I’ve sometimes been told that I’m taking something petty or humorous too seriously. But I feel (/society has taught me) that dreams are essential, that what one dreams and aspires to is an essential part of one’s personality. Serious dreams of escaping the real world are rare (I suppose), because it’s easy to separate what is possible from the impossible. But you’re not limited to that in books. So to disregard those dreams as a part of a main character’s characterization—question: if the kid dreamed of the fantasy world on Earth, would they find something else to dream about in the fantasy world? What if there is a type of person who cannot ever be content?—seems a flawed action. No one has been able to do psychological studies on someone who’s gone to a fantasy world (however, I would put forward the speculation that they have done so on people who thought they’ve gone), because that just doesn’t happen. It’s not reality. But I am not concerning myself with reality here, but with fiction (although the two reflect one another--) and think that the subject is one of the most poorly explored in the genre. It could be a very deep subject, if only someone managed to do fantasy and deep in the same book.