What is "middle fantasy"?

Interesting. Where would you assess The Dresden Files on your scales? It seems to get both high and low marks.

Off-hand, I'd say that The Dresden Files ranks as so:

Magic Power: 7. By the latest books in the series, we're treated to creatures, spells, and effects of incredible power. A necromantic tome that can make someone a demigod; faerie queens that can disrupt the world's weather patterns; spells that can wipe out entire bloodlines.

Magic Prevalence: 5. As the series progresses, we can see that supernatural elements are widespread across the world. Wizard societies, vampire courts, and so many more lurk all around humans every day. As it is, this score is as lower than such elements would normally rank because this prevalence is hindered by the fact that these supernatural elements are deliberately trying to avoid becoming common knowledge.

Setting: 3. The books are centered on contemporary Earth. While they do acknowledge and venture into other realms, such as the Nevernever and an ill-defined afterlife, the main setting is our own easily-understood world.

That's an off-the-cuff set of ratings, but they seem plausible.

EDIT: The natural question that follows these scores is what they tell us about whether The Dresden Files (or any other setting that's scored this way) is high, middle, or low fantasy.

To that end, I'd suggest the following: simply add the scores up, and rank the total score on the following table:

A total score of 0-10 is low fantasy.
A total score of 11-20 is middle fantasy.
A total score of 21-30 is high fantasy.

The main idea here is that this method allows us to take these three disparate elements of magic power, magic prevalence, and setting, and combine them into an overall ranking, something that would otherwise be difficult to do, since (as you noted above) the three of them can have wildly differing scores for a given series. By combining the three scores on a three-rank scale, we're effectively averaging them out for the final determinate as to the question of high-middle-low.

This has the added benefit of making it so that some reasonable "drift" in the assigned scores is unlikely to change the rating. For example, using the above listings, The Dresden Files has a total score of 15, making it a solid middle fantasy setting. This is likely to remain true even if you feel that some of the scores need to be tweaked a little, such as if you think that the level of magic power and prevalence should both be a point higher - that'd make the final score 17, which would still be a middle fantasy world.

The caveat here, of course, is that this method takes a quantitative approach over a qualitative one. If you feel that high fantasy is defined - as Quickleaf quoted above - by qualities such as an epic clash between objectively good and evil forces, then you probably won't find this metric very useful. Harry Potter arguably lives up to that definition, for example, but on this list it's likely to be classified as a low fantasy (in my opinion, Harry Potter is magic power 3, magic prevalence 2, and setting 1).
 
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I don't think there is a middle fantasy. I always thought of it as a digital 0,1 kind of thing. It's either high or low. No analogue here.

Maybe so. What about the Witcher? Would you describe it as dark high fantasy or low fantasy?

It's got a totally fantasy world inspired by real world Polish legends.
It's got an epic plot revolving around a girl who can open portals to other worlds.
It's got fantasy races.

However...

It's got gritty themes, like persecution of said fantasy races, not to mention drug use and prostitution.
It's got a distinctly shades of grey morality, as well as idealists.
It's got very personal / local / gritty stories interwoven in the epic framework.
[MENTION=8461]Alzrius[/MENTION] What's interesting about the Witcher setting is that on your chart it would probably be closer to high fantasy (magic power ~8, prevalence ~5, setting ~7). And yet it's one of the most subversive books out there as far as the fantasy genre goes, using the Lord of the Rings tropes as a direct foil in some cases.
 
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Maybe so. What about the Witcher? Would you describe it as dark high fantasy or low fantasy?

It's got a totally fantasy world inspired by real world Polish legends.[/quote]

I haven't read it, but by the literary definition - that sounds like High Fantasy right there.
 


It's got a totally fantasy world inspired by real world Polish legends.

I haven't read it, but by the literary definition - that sounds like High Fantasy right there.[/QUOTE]

So Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series is Low Fantasy, but I feel so weird using those two concepts in the same sentence. Further, Leiber's Lankhmar stories are High Fantasy, but that feels weird to say also. It's contrary to 30 years' worth of fan zeitgeist defining it as "low fantasy" due to the low magic and gritty world view.
 


What's interesting about the Witcher setting is that on your chart it would probably be closer to high fantasy (magic power ~8, prevalence ~5, setting ~7). And yet it's one of the most subversive books out there as far as the fantasy genre goes, using the Lord of the Rings tropes as a direct foil in some cases.

I've never read it, but it sounds like that's a good example of the difference between a qualitative judgment of whether something's high or low fantasy, and using the above quantitative scale.

One thing I'll reiterate is that the above scale is meant for judging a particular setting, rather than a particular narrative. That's important because the qualitative judgment for stories tends to rely on the scope of the narrative for its determination.
 

So Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series is Low Fantasy, but I feel so weird using those two concepts in the same sentence.

Yes, I'd normally call it Low Fantasy. But, I'd more likely call it Urban Fantasy. Or, even more likely, I'd call it Supernatural Romance.

Further, Leiber's Lankhmar stories are High Fantasy, but that feels weird to say also. It's contrary to 30 years' worth of fan zeitgeist defining it as "low fantasy" due to the low magic and gritty world view.

Thing is, there's loads and loads of magic in Lankhmar. The main characters aren't themselves throwing fireballs, no, but our heroes face supernatural threats in pretty much every single story! One of our heroes was even an apprentice to a sorcerer! They regularly meet up with mentors who have altogether the wrong number of eyes! And I think Lankhmar's grit is only a veneer - it has too much action-movie-style action and ignoring of wounds and fatigue to be really gritty. IMHO, anyway.
 

So Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series is Low Fantasy, but I feel so weird using those two concepts in the same sentence. Further, Leiber's Lankhmar stories are High Fantasy, but that feels weird to say also. It's contrary to 30 years' worth of fan zeitgeist defining it as "low fantasy" due to the low magic and gritty world view.

I'm comfortable using the gamerspeak meanings of High Fantasy and Low Fantasy as amalgamations of the literary definition with the prevalence/power of magic.

It strikes me that there are two kinds of High Fantasy: there's the obvious epic good vs. evil kind, and then there's a subtler kind that tends to have blurred allegiances, a mix of idealism & gray morality, and political+personal stories without necessarily cosmic consequences. It's that second kind where the *feel* of magic tends to be more bounded by some kind of rules, or gritty, or somehow qualitatively different than stories immediately recognizable as High Fantasy. It's hard to put into words.

Lankhmar clearly fits into that second category of fantasy. I don't think it's Low Fantasy per se, but it certainly seems to borrow aspects of both High and Low Fantasy.

So maybe "Middle Fantasy" is trying to capture a branch of High Fantasy that is distinct from the rest of High Fantasy? And "middle" refers to a gritty aesthetic that epis evocative of Low Fantasy?
 

So maybe "Middle Fantasy" is trying to capture a branch of High Fantasy that is distinct from the rest of High Fantasy?

Stepping away from the literary definition for a moment.

Given that we don't know what's supposed to fit there, I don't expect it's all that distinct.

Genre definitions are about general trends, not about hard lines. Basically, a genre is defined as "a thing that has enough of these tropes common to the genre to be considered part of it". The definitions are never clear and distinct - they're always fuzzy and vague, and you can often argue about what genre a given work fits into.

"Middle fantasy" then, is splitting hairs between two large, indistinct blobs of works that may overlap a bit, to create three indistinct blobs of works that overlap a lot.
 

[MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] Very true. I got intrigued when I saw "middle fantasy" being discussed online, but what this thread has shown me is that not only is the term not commonly used, it also would mean different things to different people even if it was.

What got me interested in learning about it (I had been under the assumption that it was a genre or sub-genre I hadn't heard of before), is that I have been looking for a way to describe my homebrew setting succinctly to friends and online. Like when someone says Dark Fantasy for Dragon Age and people pretty much get it. I guess what I've learned is that for my setting (which I woul shave dubbed middle fantasy), I won't be able to be so succinct.
 

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