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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2273821" data-attributes="member: 4937">It goes without saying that not all morality tales are fantasies.  I'm trying to show that contrary to expectation, the reverse - that all fantasies are morality tales - is true.   I don't expect this to be obvious, and I'm not 100% sure of the definition myself, but I am sure that of the fantasy stories I've read they have this in common far more than they have any particular setting, and so I find this definition - incomplete as it is likely to turn out to be - far more compelling than defining fantasy as 'magic' or any singular particular setting convention.Defining a fantasy as containing that which is fantastic is a circular definition.   It's like saying 'magical stories' are stories about 'magic'.   Well, what do you mean by magic then?   As this thread shows, the definition of magic is hard to pin down, because simple definitions like 'things that break the laws of the universe' or 'stories that couldn't happen in this universe' at the least gather in things which you meant to exclude.   So what I'm saying is that when we are speaking of magical stories, the particular kinds of fantastic things we are speaking of are intrinsically related to incarnating, simplifying, or magnifying abstract concepts like 'good', 'evil', 'virtue', 'power', in order to make them more tangible and hense easier to deal with.   And that is at some level the reason that we are willing to exclude conventions like FTL travel as 'not magic' because we recognize that in the story it is in, 'FTL travel' is unlike ordinary magic in that it has no mythic connection to an abstract idea.  You probably could argue that at least some of the time, magic is sterlized in order to serve as the same sort of story vehical that FTL travel and intersteller trade empires serve in science fiction, but I would counter that so long as you still tie that magic to the mythic themes from which it originates that you are still going to be at some level dealing with the supernatural as the incarnation of the abstract, and as long as you have larger than life heroes in such stories, you'll still be dealing with the ancient idea of virtue being defined by a life lived like those in the larger than life mythic heroic narratives.   I might even be willing to advance (though I'm unsure how I feel about this idea since it just came to me), that the more you sterlize your magic and remove it from its usual purpose in the story, the more magic starts to seem to be conventional technology rather than the supernatural.   But that is, I agree, a rather debatable (yet to me interesting) point.</blockquote>

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