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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 8149750" data-attributes="member: 59082">I too am a bit leery of the word "subversive," especially as it has the potential to diminish the atmosphere and immersion so necessary for good fantasy. But we really don't know what they mean by that, so I'm not ready to channel my inner nerdrage.Picking up on a few threads...I can't speak for the person you are replying to, but I don't think "commentary on the real world" and "touch[ing] on the human experience" are synonymous. They can overlap, but one implies commenting on our world as it is right now, including and perhaps especially social, cultural and political dynamics, while the latter implies something more archetypal or universal: what it means to be human, regardless of time and place (or world). Fantasy is great for exploring the human experience via way of archetypes and mythic forms, but when it becomes a vehicle for social and political commentary it often diminishes its fantastical nature and veers towards social SF or mimetic fiction in the guise of fantasy.This is not to say that no such commentary should be employed, but that a major part of the joy of fantasy, or at least secondary world fantasy, is the experience of a new world, in which the reality of the world is taken as literally what it is, rather than as an imaginative reference for our own world. The more this fantasy world mirrors our own in terms of socio-political dynamics, the less it feels like fantasy, and consequently the more one has to take a stand in relation to whatever messages are being conveyed.I would also argue that recent fantasy has involved far more such commentary and allegorizing, perhaps partially as an overall attempt by many fantasy authors (and publishers) to legitimize fantasy in the eyes of the mainstream. Thus we have "literary fantasy" as well as countless YA fantasies that involve characters in coming of age stories with thinly disguised real-world socio-cultural dynamics. There are lots of great contexts for socio-political commentary, for allegory and satire, but I personally prefer fantasy to focus more on archetypal processes that transcend any particular context: coming of age stories, grail quests, good vs evil, etc. That said, I see nothing wrong with fantasy continue to broaden itself to include a greater diversity of stories, but I don't think a D&D film--at least the first such film--is the right context for a story heavily based in contemporary socio-cultural dynamics. To be honest, that sounds horrible and I really hope they avoid that sort of thing. Deadpool works for Deadpool, and silly antics have their place, but this would utterly diminish any kind of immersive fantasy experience. IMO, of course.Lots of stuff in your post, so I'll take it piece by piece. I agree insofar as you can't out-Tolkien Tolkien. Create something new, or at least different. And of course D&D is at least as much--if not more so (especially if we believe The Gygax)--drawn from the sword & sorcery of Howard, Moore, Leiber, Moorcock, Smith etc, not to mention precursors and contemporaries of Tolkien like Dunsany, Cabell, Eddison, Lovecraft, Anderson, and others.Starting to diverge a bit. It really depends upon how it is done. Sure, a straight up Tolkien clone ala Terry Brooks would be transparently tedious, perhaps especially to those whose experience of epic fantasy starts and ends with the LOTR films, Game of Thrones, and Harry Potter. But there are tons of variations on that basic theme as it is a basic mythic structure that is universal to the human experience: companions questing together to defeat some "evil."Perhaps a model that might work well is something akin to Scott Lynch's books, or the great fantasies of David Gemmell, which are in many ways relatively classic fantasy, but with a different tone - one that harkens closer to Leiber than Tolkien.Well it depends. A "new way" can be just as shallow as cliche fantasy tropes, and doing a classic fantasy quest really well could be great. In other words, I think the quality of a fantasy story has less to do with whether it treads familiar territory or not, and more to do with how it explores the terrain, and the authenticity and originality of the authorial voice. Subverting the tropes can be just as superficial as the standard cliches.I think what you are saying that I agree with is that it is really hard to make a good fantasy movie. For myself, the only secondary world fantasy films that I really like can be counted on both hands: Excalibur, Conan the Barbarian, Dragonslayer, the Dark Crystal, LotR, Game of Thrones...and I'm runny out of films and I'm just getting started on the second hand. There are some others (e.g. Princess Bride) but most veer away from classic secondary world fantasy.Some of those had huge budgets, especially the recent ones, but not all. The early ones required immense creativity and just good old film-craft.I think the problem, or challenge, is translating an inner imaginative landscape to film, a more limited media form than a book. And of course there's the problem of translating a linguistic media into visual...by way of example, I just re-read the beautiful Riddle-Master trilogy by Patricia McKillip and had the stray thought, how could this ever be translated to film? McKillip is a perhaps unsurpassed wordsmith: her prose is extremely poetic and evocative, and so much of the beauty of her work would be lost in a visual medium.This is only partially true, imo. Genre fantasy--meaning, the mass produced fantasy of the post-Tolkien era, before whom there wasn't really a "fantasy genre"--has a generally lower standard of writing craft than mimetic literature. But not only is that true of all genres (e.g. sf, thrillers, horror, etc), but it is because fantasy employs different domains of writing than realist literature: especially creating an imaginary setting, whichopens up whole new worlds (quite literally) of challenges and complexities. And of course most who read fantasy just want a good story, first and foremost, so readers (and publishers) are less picky about prose than they might be of the latest postmodernist treatment on family pathos.But the fantasy tradition also includes a huge number of quality prose stylists. Just off the top of my head, in rough chronological order: William Morris, Lord Dunsany, James Branch Cabell, ER Eddison, Clark Ashton Smith, JRR Tolkien, Hope Mirrlees, CS Lewis, Avram Davidson, Alan Garner, Peter S Beagle, Ursula K Le Guin, Patricia McKillip, Gene Wolfe, John Crowley, Guy Gavriel Kay, Robert Holdstock, George RR Martin, Robin Hobb, Neil Gaiman, Steven Erikson, etc etc.As others have said, don't confuse winning the Pulitzer and other literary awards with quality. I think a lot of it has to do with an inability to understand the fantasy genre by mainstream critics - it is like asking a fan of classic rock to judge House music.</blockquote>

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