CT: What if Harry Potter was Low Fantasy?

[espanolbot]

Something that some people don't seem to know is that, like science fiction, there are many different subgenres. Regular Harry Potter is part of the subgenre known as Urban Fantasy, which combines fantasy with modern trappings. High Fantasy, meanwhile, is more along the lines of Lord of the Rings, while Low Fantasy is more of a grungey variety of story along the lines of Berserk.

Because it amused me, I wondered what a Low Fantasy version of Harry Potter would be like. Not entirely accurate though, if it were they'd also be caked in mud, blood and crap as well.


A better definition of the subgenre, via TV Tropes
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LowFantasy

Comments

[nemryn]

It's also a matter of attitude. In high fantasy, 'We beat the Big Bad, but things still suck' is a plot hole; it's not an explicit part of the narrative, and it's something you don't necessarily notice until some time after you're done reading, and you go 'Hey, wait a minute...'. You realize it, but the characters and the narrator don't, or they don't acknowledge it, or the fantasy world is set up so they really do all live happily ever after. Whereas low fantasy does acknowledge it, and in fact 'We have to fix the things that still suck' is the hook for the next trilogy.

[valtyr]

Well, examples of low fantasy given at TV Tropes are 'Conan' and 'A Song of Ice and Fire' and if Conan ever attempts to solve sexism and racism, good God I can't even finish that.

[espanolbot]

Hm, have you heard about the revisionist Russian parody of Lord of the Rings, that is told from Sauron's side of things and points out that his forces both the most culturally diverse and encourages cultural and scientific development. And it interprets the Elves and Gandalf as xenophobic guardians of the status quo who want to culturally logic the world into one place to stop any form of societal progress, as it would mean that the already weakening grip the declining number of Elves have on the world would be lessened still as they're rapidly left in the past.

Naturally the idea of Sauron as someone motivated by wanting to make people's lives better through occupying their land and forcing change on them (like Sozin over in Avatar: the Last Airbender) has some major flaws in the interpretation (Sauron being a greedy, hateful bastard and all) but it does point out some interesting things that are kind of problems in the original work that aren't treated as such.

Things like the "Science, bad!" attitude, the good guys essentially being a bunch of white people wanting to keep the foreigners out while the bad guys consist, not only of orcs, goblins etc. but also "Wildmen" who were forced out to the edges of the good real estate and the Arabic/African-ish people with elephants too. etc. etc.

A lot of it could be put down to the time period that the book was written in, but to me at least they still kind of bug me.

One things of the things that I like about Avatar: the Promise is that it's actually attempting to address that issues left over by the previous series, such as the issue of moving "invaders" off of occupied land when they'd already lived there for 100 plus years and thus had intermarried with the locals fairly extensively. Some people, even here, don't seem to like how everything wasn't just all cut and dry once Ozai was defeated, but I guess that it's just a matter of personal preference.

[icon_uk]

Terry Pratchett has said that if he ever dealt with a Lord of the Rings scenario he'd want to investigate what happened next, the reconstruction that would be required for the devastated lands of Mordor, the relief effort for those whose lives had been laid waste by Sauron's corruption. What to do with the remaining goblins and orcs and Uruk-Hai etc etc...

[espanolbot]

I guess that he has sort of covered that in relation to the references to Uberwald in the later books. With the collapse of the Mordor-ish Unholy Empire standing in for both a post-Dark Lord Eastern Europe stand-in (left over orcs for example) as well as a post-Cold War USSR.

I do have a story I wrote based in a fantasy setting along similar lines, but in a immediate post-WW2 Germany sense, with some of the heroic nations taking an Western Allies approach and others taking a Soviet approach to the "liberated" former Dark Lord's territory. I wondered if the two nominally allied nations would be scrabbling for any dark wizards or alchemists left over from the old regime they couuld add to their arsenal, like the move to grab Nazi rocket scientists and the like.

[salinea]

I always wanted to read a fantasy book that dealt with it - I don't mean specifically with Lord of the Rings - actually with the return to the shire chapters LotR does more of a job of dealing with it than most fantasy series - but exploring "what happens next", after the heroic quest and the big battles between evil empire and plucky heroes, yessssssssssss.

[espanolbot]

I'd better try and get my notes together and complete my story them. :)

[salinea]

INDEED