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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2280446" data-attributes="member: 2205">I think I read it carefully enough.  You defined fantasy by the presence of morality tale symbolism and the presence of iconic figures.  In order to do that, you have to find symbolism and iconic, mythic figures in every work of fantasy ever published.  In order to do that, you'll have to go look for tenuous and weak connections.It should also be painfully apparent that I wasn't making that argument, though.  What I said was that unless the connections are near allegorical in strength, they automatically are too weak to be held up as definitive.You may well disagree, but that's the argument I'm making.  I know you're not saying that the story has to be allegorical, but I question how useful the definition is if the symbolism is weak.  Assuming that I accepted your definition, yet didn't accept your symbolic interpretation of a work, which seems certainly plausible, I would exclude a work from the genre that you would include.  And I'm not talking about isolated instances, outlier cases and deliberate gray areas; I'm talking about your normal, mainstream, regular stuff here.  I can accept a certain amount of outlier, hard-to-define gray areas, but I can't accept that gray area swamping the majority of what's out there.Just because he borrowed some themes doesn't make Rand into a Christ figure, is my argument though.  I have no doubt that Robert Jordan borrowed some ideas from the iconic Christ figure for Rand, just as he borrowed warrior soldalities from the Plains Indians for the Aiel.  That doesn't mean that Rand is Christ anymore than it means the Aiel are Apaches and Comanches.  Everybody borrows.  To me there's quite a difference between an element in a story that borrows from the iconic Christ figure archetype, and an element in a story that is symbolic and representative of the Christ figure archetype.And maybe in that distinction is where we are not seeing eye to eye.And I still owe you a detailed response to your analysis of the definition I favor; but it'll take me a good half hour or so to type that out, and I've been too busy with work to spend that kind of time on it.  But just because I haven't responded yet, I do mean to!  As soon as I get a chance...</blockquote>

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