A Guide to Fantasy - Part 2

[espanolbot]

Just how I'd define them, people are free to disagree as the boundaries can be a bit vague. :)





I'd do a strip of Wuxia, but I'm not familiar enough with the genre to accurately put a label on it. I mean I get the basics, but I read to read a bit more before I can make a strip about it.

Might do more fantasy subgenres next, or I might do some horror ones. What do you think?

Comments

[donnblake]

Putting Discworld in any one category is hard, because there's so much difference between the books. The early Rincewind books, especially Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic are pretty straight parodies of various fantasy tropes, but then you've got the Watch books, which are police procedurals/detective novels with a heaping side of political satire, and the really metaphysical stuff like Hogfather, Small Gods, and Reaper Man.

[espanolbot]

The description I liked was how it looks at different genres through a low fantasy lense, such as parts of Sourcery (like the treatment of magic) are very much in the style of High Fantasy but the actual wizards and magicians themselves are more similar to the Low Fantasy depiction of them.

[donnblake]

That's fair, and it does tend to look at individuals with their own interests and agendas rather than focus on Big Events (although often those individuals get dragged into Big Events)...

[icon_uk]

Sir Terry relates that a critic once decried his brand of fantasy because "the elves don't sing" Pratchett replied that if all elves sing he'd certainly want to write about the elf who was tone deaf.

He's also said that if he was writing a story set on Middle Earth he would want to investigate what happened to the orcs and the Uruk Hai AFTER Sauron was defeated, left without a mission, a leader or a means of living peacefully. What would the Middle Earth equivalent of the the Marshall plan for Mordor be like?

He also says he once rather upset a bunch of folklorists he once addressed at a convention by pointing out that he whilst he loves the old stories, he looks at folklore the way a carpenter looks at trees.

[cainofdreaming]

Dragons, gods, demon princes... I don't think Skyrim really fits in the "low" fantasy category either.

[espanolbot]

The civil war and thieves guild subplots?

[cainofdreaming]

Low fantasy elements can still happen in a high fantasy world, but the overall tone is still high fantasy. I mean, they've got thieves in Faerun too I reckon.

[espanolbot]

Fair enough, I think that it's more of a Low Fantasy universe with High Fantasy elements in though, but considering the broad definition of the genre it could count as both at once.

[cainofdreaming]

I don't really see that. Just take the main quests in the last three games (didn't play Arena and never got that far into Daggerfall so I don't really know about those) - an immortal being using artifacts which were once used to create a god, an invasion from another plane of existence and the return of dragons (plus, you know, the one behind it).

Such big, world changing, things just weight too much in the balance.

[donnblake]

The thing about Skyrim is that it not only leaves your choices open, but what happens in the game revolves heavily around those choices. You can play the main storyline and focus on being the Dragonborn who stops the return of the dragons and leads the Norns to freedom, or you can be the skulking assassin who occasionally runs into a dragon while she wanders around sneak-attacking mudcrabs. So I'd say it varies what height of fantasy it is depending on the player's choices.

[cainofdreaming]

You can play it like that, but the story is still there. Also these games have a canon, the next Elder Scrolls probably won't refer the Dragonborn as just a wanderer who left the dragons to do whatever they wanted.

[donnblake]

The story is still potentially there, but not actively. No matter how much danger Skyrim might be in, if I don't decide to go fight the dragons, it will never be destroyed.

[cainofdreaming]

Yes, like I said, you can play it like that. But the story is still there, in the game universe. It's what sets the events rolling, even. The dragon which saves the character from getting beheaded... well, the main story will reveal its importance. So the high fantasy elements are there, from step one, even if you don't bother looking more into them.

[kaysper]

I keep having mile wide grins when I see that there's a new genre guide comic. It's been nice to see fantasy in particular, because I've been entrenched in a lot of the different types since I was an ickle kid, (my dad thought that the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings would make for excellent bedtime stories...And he was right!) and they've always been around as the subgenres of choice for me.

[rainspirit]

You DARE talk about Low Fantasy and not mention Conan the Cimmerian?!

C'mon, Ebot! Really! You had DWARF FORTRESS in place of the pulp classics! That's not on!

[espanolbot]

I brought him up in the Heroic Fantasy section, as he inhabited the borderlands between heroic fantasy and low fantasy called the Swords and Sorcery genre.

[rainspirit]

That... okay, but... nng...

I guess you have a point! Still, it feels off somehow to compartmentalize Conan in the heroic fantasy section. There was such an emphasis on his weird, fantastical environment that it never felt like he was central to it. Plus, he was never that heroic in the first place, by our standards...

[metanewsmods]

Hi, can we link this one as well?

[espanolbot]

Sure. :) I have more on my DevArt account too.
http://espanolbot.deviantart.com/gallery/41785849
http://espanolbot.deviantart.com/gallery/41814894