When last I wrote, I was exploring the ways we could transfer the Angry GM’s “Eight Kinds of Fun” concept from role-playing games to fantasy literature. Today I want to look at the next three types of fun, Narrative, Challenge, and Fellowship.
3. Narrative
Obviously, fiction (fantasy or otherwise) involves some kind of story, so it goes without saying that people who like reading fantasy enjoy the fun of narrative. This type of fun in a literary context (as opposed to a game-playing context) is probably better analyzed through the sub-categories of narrative, i.e.: the tropes and sub-genre expectations that have come to dominate the way we digest and discuss fantasy literature.
It’s one of my particular hobby-horses to question the way tropes and sub-genres have impacted our experience of fiction, and I’m going to continue this line of questioning here. What happens when we start to codify our narrative expectations into these tropes and seek out only those stories that contain certain narrative elements, i.e.: friends to lovers, chosen one, orphan hero, dark lord, found family, etc., or stories that fit a certain sub-genre, i.e.: grimdark, cozy, gaslamp, urban, paranormal romance, etc.? How does this impact our reading habits and our overall experience of fantasy as a genre? How do these classification systems end up affecting the authors themselves and the fandoms that arise around their work? (I’ll get to fandoms a bit more below under “Fellowship.”)
I’m not against fantasy sub-genres, or the identification of tropes in a given narrative, but I do wonder how our ever-increasing awareness of these things and the way we talk about narrative using these terms has impacted both the writing of fantasy and the experience of fantasy on the reader. Fantasy, unlike its speculative cousin Sci-Fi, is generally characterized by its use of magic as a narrative element. What makes something “Fantasy” and not “Sci-Fi” is that the world includes some form of magic that is not explicable as either science or technology.
Now, I’m actually in favor of the blending of Sci-Fi with Fantasy, a la the old pre-genre pulp novels of the mid-20th century, but I also recognize that in making distinctions, we open ourselves up to a classification system. As soon as we start saying, “Novel X has THIS but not THAT, therefore it’s THIS GENRE,” we start getting into the sub-genre/trope game. And it’s only natural for readers to have preferences. Some of us like cozy fantasy and we want as much of it as we can get.
But at what point does a fantasy go from being just “fantasy” to being “cozy fantasy”? At what point does something become “grimdark” instead of just a narrative with dark and violent elements?
I suppose the simplest answer is when the story has enough of the “elements” of said sub-genre, enough of the tropes and imagery and narrative structure to fit the bill. What’s refreshing about the arrival of these new sub-genres is the way they help fantasy break out of what had become its default narrative form, the “quest” narrative. But I do wonder if we could break out of this default narrative in other ways, specifically in breaking out of a trope or sub-genre model and embracing instead a kind of “kitchen-sink” or “numinous” model. Maybe “carnivalesque” is the proper term here.
What I mean by “carnivalesque” in fantasy literature is not that we need more fantasies set in carnivals and circuses (though that would, in fact, be awesome!), but that we need to think less in terms of tropes or genre expectations and more in terms of surprise and strangeness. The carnivalesque is a kind of polyphony where many “voices” from across the fantastical spectrum come together to achieve the “recovery, escape, and consolation” that Tolkien argued were the aims of fairy-stories, i.e.: fantasy literature.
When we know the tropes and what to expect in a fantasy narrative, we run the risk of transforming a fantasy narrative into something mundane. The magic system may change, or the appearance of the fantasy creatures, or the world may look different from our own, but a kind of sameness takes over nonetheless. This was the critique of all the big fantasy series from the late 70s and into the 80s (like the Shannara books or David Eddings’s stuff); they were just Tolkien clones, essentially. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a Tolkien clone, but eventually these types of books became synonymous with what fantasy IS. And that sameness then robs the genre of its ability to re-enchant.
The development of new sub-genres, especially in the 21st century, has been a reaction to this flattening trend, but I’m not sure it’s adding bumps to the flatness so much as its adding a bunch of new parallel planes that are all equally flat. Readers find a sub-genre they like and the tropes they enjoy, so they seek out more and more of these tropes, and writers produce more and more stories following these same narrative patterns and with these same narrative tropes. There’s lots of different sub-genres now (instead of a million Tolkien-imitators), but we’ve still siloed off these sub-genres from each other. A lot of this is pure marketing, the selling of the books and not necessarily the experience of reading them. But it’s still there, still dividing and sub-dividing fantastical literature into ever-diminishing boxes that promise the same experience over and over again.
I don’t want to overstate this trend, by the way. There are still plenty of fantasy novels and stories that operate outside of a strict sub-genre category. And even the ones that do operate within these bounds are often amazing books that I (and others) enjoy reading. There’s nothing wrong with wanting the same kind of story over and over again. I love a good cozy mystery, for instance, and never tire of the formula!
And that’s why Narrative is a type of fun. We like the formulae we like, and we just want more and more of them. Their satisfying. Their fun. We want to get swept away in the familiar, but with a mix of the new just to keep things interesting. Too much new — too much strangeness — and we’re put-off. The narrative starts to break down.
But what would happen if those of us who enjoy reading fantasy were given more surprise in our narratives? What if we had more and more books that defy classification or that embrace the carnivalesque? I know within the gaming/RPG community, this is what draws some people to indie games or the OSR, but those communities are tiny compared with the monolith that is fifth edition D&D. On some level, we want familiar narratives and tropes. Too much weirdness is off-putting. It might attract a devoted minority, but it’s never going to dominate the genre. This is true in fantasy and in film and in any other art form. Narrative as a type of fun means adhering to certain expectations. It means coloring vividly and boldly, but inside the lines.
4. Challenge
Okay, so I just wrote that people who like Narrative as a type of fun want narratives that adhere, on some level, to an established formula, but many fantasy fans also enjoy the “Challenge” of reading too. Challenge as a type of fun in the literary sense is not the same as challenge in a game-play sense. For gamers, challenge is fun because they’re trying to win or optimize or do something the best way. The fun comes from the challenge inherent in playing a game.
For fantasy literature, it’s a bit different. Readers like the challenge of reading huge, 1,000 page tomes, or a seven-books series. Or they like the challenge of keeping track of all the weird names, or figuring out the magic systems, or following the multiple plot lines and complex world-building.
This type of fun is not specific to fantasy either. Speculative fiction in general has an aura of being “dense” or “challenging,” of being byzantine in its complexity and emphasis on detail. Not that literary fiction can’t also be dense and difficult (it too has a reputation of being more “challenging” to read in terms of being more “literary”), but fantasy — because of its reputation for indecipherable names and immense world histories — is the kind of fiction that readers can become so immersed in that it can become all-consuming, a personal identity more than just a taste in literature. (Science Fiction is like this too, of course.)
This identity stuff is related to Type of Fun #5, Fellowship, which I’ll get to below, but for now, the “challenge” that comes from reading long, multi-book series with dozens of characters and complex world-building is definitely a type of fun for many fantasy fans.
For writers, too, part of the fun of writing fantasy is the challenge that comes with building a secondary world that is different from our own and exploring those differences through narrative. We’re not just telling stories about people from our own world; we’re telling stories about people from another world, or our world but somehow different. This world-building is exciting. It’s a kind of game in and of itself. We’re trying to make worlds that are unique, that are different from the other secondary worlds our colleagues have created. We’ve got to think of a new magic system, not just a knock-off, second-rate Sanderson kind. The challenges of writing this type of fiction are what excite us. We want to be world-builders. We want to see if our imaginary cities can stand tall and not fall down.
I’ll admit, this type of fun — the challenge of creating a coherent, detailed secondary world — is both enticing and terrifying for me. If I think too hard about whether my fantasy worlds make sense and have internal consistency, I start to get overwhelmed with the magnitude of it all. One of my biggest stumbling blocks is whether to call things by the ordinary English word or to make up a “fantasy” word. Ex.: Should chickens be called chickens or some made-up word like “kleckin”? And if I start making up words, then wouldn’t I have to invent an entire language in order to write the story? Why would a character or narrator from a secondary world even write in English anyway? Wouldn’t I need to invent everything from scratch? And where does this secondary world exist? Another dimension? Another planet?
(You get the idea.)
It’s not that I don’t find this kind of “what if?” imaginative exercise fun, it’s just that I have trouble stopping myself long enough to start writing up the story. On a certain level, all fantasy stories are like stage plays where we (the audience and the players) have to suspend our disbelief long enough to engage with the story. As the author of said story, I sometimes have a hard time accepting that certain parts of my world will be “hand-waved” away because there’s only so much a writer can do to make up another world and tell a story within that world.
I think many of us who write fantasy can get too caught up in the challenge of making our worlds highly detailed and specific. Tolkien was a genius in this sense because he purposefully left some portions of the map and the history fuzzy and vague. He hinted at things but often never explained them. There’s wisdom in this approach, but for those of us who like the challenge of building new worlds, it can be hard to stop and just get on with the story.
For readers, there’s a sense that it’s not really Fantasy unless it’s 1,000 pages or a series. The challenge of reading all these books, of completing a series, is a strong pull, one that makes fantasy-reading into a kind of literary sport. Sort of like those people who want to read everything on a “Great Books” list or everything by a particular author. Nothing wrong with these sorts of challenges, nor with the challenge that comes from reading the latest fantasy tome.
5. Fellowship
Fandoms can coalesce around anything, and they often do, but Science Fiction and Fantasy, for whatever reason, are the big two when it comes to sizeable and enduring fandoms, whether it’s Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel Superheroes, The Lord of the Rings, or Harry Potter. I think this is related to the “Challenge” type of fun above. Fantasy and Sci-Fi are often harder for the average reader to pick up and start reading. The names are weirder, the worlds are stranger, there’s an aura of nerdiness around the whole thing. Many normies are put off by all this, but for a certain subset of people, the weirdness is attractive. The lore and minutiae are endlessly fascinating. And because these types of books often have a lot of lore (and maps and whole histories that never even make it into the novels themselves), they lend themselves to study and even obsession.
There’s something wonderful about meeting another person and finding out they’re a Harry Potter freak just like you, or that they’ve read all the Cosmere books, or that they not only love the Lord of the Rings, they also belong to a reenactment group. Part of the fun of fantasy is belong to this fellowship of readers and fans who go beyond just reading the books and instead make these books and these worlds part of their identities.
Fandom is not just a fantasy thing, of course. We like forming groups around all of our interests, whether sports, music, or otherwise. For many people, the fellowship around a common interest is the absolute best type of fun. I know for myself, the thrill of attending the LOTR Trilogy Tuesday and the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows are some of my best fantasy-related experiences. What made them special was being with the community of fans who all loved the same things I did.
I’m not going to get into the ways a fan community can become toxic or unfun (which is a real danger, especially with big properties like Star Wars), but it’s important to note that fellowship doesn’t just have to be participation in a fandom. I don’t need to go to a convention or join a subreddit in order to find fellowship with other fantasy fans. Fellowship can be as simple as sharing an interest and taste for fantasy literature with a friend. But there’s something wonderful about sharing that interest. Fantasy (and Sci-Fi) invites an over-analysis, a hearty discussion, a speculation, a fan fiction. It’s a genre that begs for readers to go in-depth and get a little obsessed. Because fantasy invents new worlds and new creatures, because it deals with the arcane and the fantastical, it welcomes those who want to plumb the depths of these strange magics. And we often like to plumb them with a friend.
In Part 3 of this series, I’ll look at the remaining three types of fun: Discovery, Expression, and Submission.
Till then!
Blog Posts of Interest
I’ve decided this summer that I need to read more of the books in my house. I’m always getting books from the library (which is great! I love libraries), or I’m downloading ebooks on Hoopla, but meanwhile my bookshelves are growing ever more wobbly with unread books, and I should really, really start reading some of them. So this is the summer of my “homegrown reading challenge.”
I also mused a bit on my daily habit of writing in a “writer’s notebook” and why the writing I do in my notebook is just as important (more important?) than the writing I share with the world.
Finally, I wrote a little ode to a patch of trees that were cut down near my house a month ago. I know there’s nothing I can do to stop this kind of development happening in my community, but writing this elegy for the trees felt like a small form of resistance.
If you’re looking for something to read this summer, grab copies of Avalon Summer and Gates to Illvelion by clicking the image above or the link HERE.
That’s it for now! Thank you for reading! And please consider buying my books HERE, or my short stories HERE.
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