Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wayside" data-source="post: 2285263" data-attributes="member: 8394">That's madness man--the Jane Austin RPG has to be World of Darkness!This is exactly the way in which I've been chewing on the question, not because I think fantasy or science fiction have to be defined in such a way, but because fantasy and science fiction have to be defined in this way if we want to make them legitimate, in the sense that a bildungsroman or a tragedy are legitimate narratives. The problem with the "setting" or "style" approach to genre is that it means all fantasy or science fiction narratives are, as narratives, something other than science fiction or fantasy, so there's no point to science fiction or fantasy as genres in that case. The point would always be the bildungsroman (Anakin in Eps I and II, for example), or the tragedy (Anakin in Ep III).Yet I almost want to say fantasy isn't necessarily anything to do with the narratives, styles or settings themselves, but with the conditions that make it possible, desirable or imperative that we invent such styles, settings and narratives. This sort of definition makes a unified idea of fantasy impossible, I admit. The unity of the genre would be anterior to every actual work, not in the sense of an ideal that the work approximates, but in the sense of a problem the work solves, but solves only for itself and only for the present--other works would solve the problem in their own ways, and the link between these works would not be the similarities of their solutions (which could be amazingly different) but that they were attempts to work out the same problem.One thing that struck me today, as an example, was the difference between Star Wars and LotR. LotR, by I'm sure anyone's standard, is fantasy. Many others, myself included, often think of Star Wars in terms of fantasy as well, usually by drawing 1-to-1 parallels like magic=force, Jedi=knight and so on. But many of the major themes of Star Wars aren't fantastic at all. The politics, for example, the societal models, the level of tolerance among alien species; whereas in LotR we're working toward a King, all the good guys are white humans or close approximations thereof, evil bares a certain (certain hypersensitive citizens of the modern world might even say offensive) resemblance to cultures of our own world, etc. So it occured to me that I might call Star Wars science fiction because it looks forward on a lot of contemporary social issues, whereas LotR is very medieval and looks backward, which might be a characteristic of fantasy.I disagree that fantasy has to be about power, whether metaphorically, symbolically, allegorically or any other way. Perhaps because I see metaphor, symbol, allegory and so on as being relatively recent ways of authoring and dealing with texts, which, while they may hold true for some of what is and has been written, need not hold true for what is yet to be written. And for whoever leaves these things behind, I don't think they are barred from writing fantasy as a result. If we say that metaphors of power, for example, come up in fantasy because of an anxiety about the modern impotence of the individual, I can see different authors tackling this problem in different ways. Dune might be an interesting example in that you could say it meets your power requirement, thus making it fantasy; yet it also isn't about having power at all.</blockquote>

Verification