“Why Fantasy?”
It’s always easier, I guess, to answer that when you don’t know the people. You can talk in high and lofty tones about a culture’s need for a hero they can’t dissect and deconstruct. You can talk about addressing fundamental human issues and concerns at their most basic level of fight or flight. You can even talk about symbolism, archetypes and analogy, although I wouldn’t recommend it.
Families don’t always get what writers do. In the same way that they don’t always get what you want to read. Why read a romance novel? Why a thriller? Why fantasy?
I’m blessed with an extremely supportive husband who reads many of the same books as I do and loves his SFF with a passion. But my family veer towards the literary, something that four years of an English Lit degree chased out of me pretty effectively.
Genre fiction in general is looked down on in our curent society, frowned upon, and frequently laughed at. Especially Romance and Fantasy. Crime and thrillers have gained more mainstream acceptance. We see their like all the time on the news. SF can be positively high brow (because it is speculating about science and the future of mankind). But Fantasy? Romance? It’s pure escapism, isn’t it? It’s just a load of rubbish designed for a quick thrill and a brief period of entertainment.
Er. No. (Although on occassion, a quick thrill and entertainment can be exactly what I, as a reader, am after.)
Fantasy and Romance are intricately linked together. They stem from the same roots. In the middle ages, when the romance tradition was born, troubadour poets told fantastic tales of adventure and perilous endeavours for the sake of the perfect woman, the woman the knight loved beyond question, even if his love was in vain. These stories generated a quiet revolution in the medieval mind, because masked under the adventures, amazing quests and dangerous exploits, was the simple truth that a woman could be loved as a woman, that she had value in her own right and not just in relation to her huge tracts of land (Sorry, Monty Python). And if a mere woman, who was at the time no more than a chattle to be married off to the highest bidder, had value, so did other people. Fantasy romance subtly changed the medieval mindset.
That undercurrent still exists. Fantasy and romance both deal with the value of the individual in their own right. Heroic fantasy lets us look at a unique individual, someone we can aspire to emulate. The heroes and heroines are brave and loyal, not always the strongest or the best, but the most faithful, the most likely to get the job done while maintaining their integrity. Even those characters who start off as reprobates and theives prove themselves to be heroic when it comes down to the line (Han Solo anyone?). Fantasy celebrates the best in the human spirit in a way that can be hard to recognise when placed in our modern world. Our cynicism registers it as naievity perhaps, or foolishness. Maybe, but it is our modern cynical world that is losing out.
When I sink into a fantasy romance, I want to be swept away. I want the worlds to capture me and take me to some far away world. Escapism is part of the entertainment factor. But these worlds are often brutal and dangerous places. Beautiful, yes, and capitvating, but adventure needs danger, and danger requires a hero or heroine to face it. Looking at a fantasy hero, or heroine, we can see human beings (or non-human beings) reacting at a most basic and primal level. They aren’t dealing with the morning traffic (unless its an invading hoarde of barbarians) or with the mortgage payments. They face life and death, love and betrayal on a level we don’t need to have inflicted on us (and let’s face it nor would we wish to have them inflicted on us).
So why fantasy? Why romance? For me it is a matter of humankind pushed to the edge, whether on the grand scale of nations and entire worlds in fantasy, or on the intimate level, of two people who risk everything they are to be together. You can’t get more thrilling than that.
R.F. Long always had a thing for fantasy, romance and ancient mysteries. The combination was bound to cause trouble.
Her Holtlands Novella The Wolf’s Sister: a Tale of the Holtlands is coming from Samhain Publishing, Ltd. on November,11, 2008. Her debut novel, The Scroll Thief: a Tale of Ithian, will also be published Spring 2009, to be followed by the paranormal romance Soul Fire in July, 2009, all from Samhain Publishing.
You can learn more about her writing and contact her through her website: http://www.rflong.com/.
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