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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wayside" data-source="post: 2250556" data-attributes="member: 8394">If what you're saying here is that, for example, the Realms could be played grim 'n gritty, I completely agree. Grim 'n gritty doesn't necessarily have to exclude high magic, flying castles, dragons or anything of that sort at all (mine just happens to)--what it does have to do is make it all very lethal. In my game there is no healing magic and you can die of a decent knife wound at any level, but the amount of power characters can possess is actually beyond anything in D&D, and it's also nothing like D&D (the closest equivalent in an established RPG would probably be Mage: tA). I did conflate genre and ruleset a bit in my post, when I was responding to your comment about how 90% of fantasy novels are put together, but I meant that response to be separate from the rest. Absolutely, grim 'n gritty and high fantasy can coexist--just be careful where you toss those fireballs.Reading always begins with an expectation or a set of expectations, I'll give you that. It's just basic hermeneutics. Whether these expectations are genre-related or not (in fantasy they're likely to be, I imagine), they're always there. But in singling out specific features of 'fantasy literature,' for example, in grouping these texts together according to what they have in common, you've already foregrounded what is least interesting about them, you've already created a sort of homogenous zone of 'fantasy' that you can travel over in any direction because you know it already, without even having to read it, because it's 'fantasy.' Just as a sort of example, look at the idea of 'Romanticism.' 100 years ago (well, technically about 105) there was no such thing--literary historians hadn't invented it yet, hadn't yet assimilated the very disparate texts we now think of as Romantic into a whole. 50 years ago, any schoolboy could have told you what Romanticism was. Now we've come full circle. In fact pretty much the biggest "scandal" (used loosely) of English departments in the last ~40 years was the argument over whether there was or was not any such thing as Romanticism, and if it did exist, just what exactly was it?Anyway, my point here is only that genre comes after the works it describes, so to give it any sort of authority over them is backwards. It is absolutely possible to read without any idea of genre in your head. One doesn't need to know anything about tragedy to read Sophokles or Shakespeare, whom we all, in fact, probably read in highschool without really knowing anything about tragedy (or drama!) as a theoretical genre. 'Genre theory,' as such, is always after the fact, and to my mind a little illegitimate for that reason. And, to take this a step further, I regard the work of writers who take the 'genre' as anything more than the barest point of departure to be generally inferior. So, when I say that genre always comes after, I realize I'm being a bit of an idealist, because I also recognize that, in much or even most 'fantasy,' genre in fact doesn't come after, rather is the entire basis for the story. And that doesn't appeal to me at all, because the best books, whatever else they may do, should force us to reassess our idea of a genre, if not obliterate it completely. That is why, while I have certainly read a few fantasy books here and there, I find the genre, as genre, ultimately uninteresting.</blockquote>

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