Our lives are mostly boring. Colourless... Sorry? Your life isn't? You've got lots of stuff going on? Well does any of it beat flying over Epicvale on a dragon, fighting off minions of Lord Baddybad and saving millions of helpless people who will chant your name every time you enter a tavern? No? See. Boring.
That is what fantasy is about. An escape from our humdrum lives into a more magical, a more epic place. A place you'd rather be. Well. Is it really?
With Game of Thrones becoming a worldwide phenomenon, does this notion of fantasy still hold? How many times after a particularly exciting episode have you gone 'awww... I wish I was there...'? How many times while trying to sleep have you thought 'how awesome would it be if I woke up to find myself in Westeros'? Never? Figures. Who would want to be in a world so full of incessant danger and blood spilling? And it's a world without heroes. A world where good thriving over evil is a matter of probability just like here in reality. At least here in the comfort of your homes you don't have to worry about getting on the wrong side of the Mountain. Or a certain wall in the North.
If anything Game of Thrones only reinforces your will to be right here right now. No matter how tedious your life is, you still wouldn't want the excitement of being impaled. And its not just game of thrones. A lot of fantasy today discards outright heroes and the triumph of good over evil.
Another fantasy series I quite like, The Malazan Book of the Fallen, also has grey characters in a bleak world suffering from interminable warfare. Over the course of a book, thousands of soldiers die excruciating deaths. And the author, Steven Erikson, doesn't shield you from that pain, doesn't sedate it ever so slightly by making every death mean something, by making every death heroic. Yes there are all-powerful badasses with big swords but the book is written in such a way (it's called the 'Book of the Fallen') that you relate more to the soldiers, even the nameless ones. Or maybe especially the nameless ones. But you still wouldn't want to escape into the world to stand and die beside one.
Man of Steel. Granted it's a superhero movie but no matter how much they try to explain everything through science I have always considered Superman fantasy. *Man of Steel Spoilers ahead* Hasn't superman always been about wish fulfilment? In a world so bad, it felt so comforting to have a Godly figure looking over us (I take the liberty of saying 'us' even though I'm not American). So, by the end of the movie, Superman is at least partially responsible for levelling metropolis to the ground. Again, thousands die. If you were there, it could have been you. So much for wish fulfilment. And I'm not even going to go into the neck-break incident.
Fantasy has changed from the Lord of the Rings, Narnia and more recently Harry Potter days. Its no longer inviting. It is no longer grandma's tales. It much more like a burly drunken guy in a bar, who you hate at first sight, loudly telling tales of the bad things he's seen and done. They are interesting stories and he's got your attention, but you are not joining him on for his next adventure.
Truth is what you speak brother.
ReplyDeleteThe prophecy is right.
You are our saviour. ��