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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 4364412" data-attributes="member: 2205">What I'm claiming is that it's transparent that fantasy is indeed not about good and evil, and if you'd remember your earlier claim instead of now changing it to be "about defining heroism" we'd be able to have a more cogent discussion about it.  Howard, for example, is very patently not about good and evil.  In taking the fact that Howard romanticized barbarians and their "free" way of life in the Conan and Kull (and other) stories, and trying to cast that as Howard's definition of "good" and "evil" you've migrated into territory that I find thoroughly unconvincing.Yes, exactly my point.  When you define what it means to be about "good vs. evil" instead of using a standard definition, such as any speaker of the English language familiar with the words "good," "vs." and "evil" would use, then of course you find evidence to support your definition.Most (or at least an awful lot of it) fantasy is not, however, about good vs. evil in the conventional sense of good vs. evil.  Sword & Sorcery in particular is defined as a subgenre that ignores the issue entirely.  Only High Fantasy often but not obligatorily tends to concern itself with the nature of good and evil by definition.Although I'd argue that plenty of other works also deal with the issue; much of Mercedes Lackey style Romantic Fantasy, for example, or Glen Cook's Military Fantasy, etc. also treat the issue.But the idea that fantasy is defined by the question of good vs. evil, and it's obligatory to the genre, and as near as I can tell the only definitive characteristic you offer up gets us to the place where you have to admit Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment as fantasy, yet can't admit Howard's Conan corpus without some real special pleading about how you can cram a good vs. evil interpretation into stories that fundamentally are very obviously not about good and evil.  When you define modern fantasy in such a way that you leave out one of the main pillars of modern fantasy and have no good reason to exclude books that very clearly are not considered fantasy by anyone that I know of, you've come up with a definition that is—again—thoroughly unconvincing.This doesn't have anything to do with admiring Homer and Virgil vs. being a devout Christian, and your (and Corjay's) insistence that just because Moorcock or Burroughs weren't actually religious means that they weren't completely products of a culture who's values were heavily influenced by that religion is absurd.  I'm not claiming that either of them "fully accepts the tenants of that theology" and you should know that very well.  You're arguing a strawmen; attacking a position I never claimed as my own.At the same time, holding up ancient standards of good and evil and claiming that either of them actually mimic the values of that culture is equally absurd.  John Carter is nothing like Achilles with his petty and vainglorious fits of pique, and not even very much like Odysseus other than the fact that he wanders around a lot to get back to his wife and son.John Carter mimics values that were current in Edgar Rice Burroughs own time and culture, not values 2,500 years older.Bully for you.  Of course I've read them, and yes I have them on my bookshelf too.  But as I mentioned above, you're barking up a tree of your own fashioning.  Of course you can prove The Gods of Mars isn't a morality tale about how you should go to church, but since I never made any claim that even kinda sorta resembled that, I don't know why you're talking about it.My claim is simply that you can't extricate the values of ERB's society from the religion that largely brought them to that society, even if ERB was not religious.And even that's a barely relevent tangent to the discussion anyway; ERB wrote romanticized adventure melodramas, not morality tales anyway.  He didn't discuss the nature of good and evil; his characters were cardboard thin.  John Carter was the idealized Dudley Do-right dashing hero, his villains tended to be moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplashes.Plus, the Barsoom stories are not even necessarily fantasy.  Given the scientific understanding of the time, they were more accurately called science fiction, and they are directly ancestral to space opera.No, you have not.The biggest flaw in your argument as I see it is that you claim that any fantasy story in which the protagonist actually exhibits any character traits is indicative of "a discussion of good vs. evil."  Rather than refute your argument that Conan doesn't exhibit non-modern character traits which Howard clearly idolized and romanticized, I'd rather see how you explain how El Borak or Steve Costican doesn't do exactly the same thing, and explain how according to your definition those aren't fantasy as well then.  Or to go even further afield, how your typical Louis L'Amour novel and James Bond aren't therefore fantasies because they hold out strong characters with traits that the author clearly considers good and contrasts them to the villains and are therefore also stories of "good vs. evil."And finally, seriously—if you're going to come up with a definition for fantasy vs. science fiction that doesn't even reference anything that "the establishment" uses to distinguish those genres, you've got to expect some resistence to your ideas.  My biggest beef with your idea, other than that I remain unconvinced that your definition actually includes a good portion of modern fantasy and I also can't see how it excludes a huge portion of patently non-fantasy work, is that it is completely unrelated to what anyone else in the field that I know of is using to distinguish the two genres.  Even if your definition gave comparable results to standard distinctions between the two genres—which it doesn't, and which makes it a non-starter right at the gate as far as I'm concerned—I still would be very reluctant to accept them as other than an interesting observation rather than a diagnostic prescription for separating the two genres.</blockquote>

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