aidensuchki

[aidensuchki]

Let's talk about fantasy

How I got to know fantasy

A long time ago, when I was just a little second grader, the only things I could do in my free time were build a Lego city, dress my Monster High dolls, and watch Let’s Plays on my tablet. Kuplinov was one of those Russian YouTubers I watched, which my parents tried to forbid me from doing, as all his videos were at least 16+ years old. However, all the new curse words I learned from him drew out all of their threats, so I never listened. 

One time, I stumbled across his videos about a game I’ve never seen before: there were a lot of beautiful landscapes full of dragons, bandits, and dungeons, as well as glorious cities filled with magic and mysteries. I saw The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, a fantasy open-world role-playing game that I could only dream of playing myself. So, all I was left with was to watch Kuplinov playing it instead of me. When I finished all of the 88 episodes in his Let’s Play, I watched them over, and over again, drooling over the game’s beauty.

A year later, when my parents and I were visiting our relatives in Canada, I accidentally saw my elder cousin playing that exact same game I had been dreaming about for the past year. I was begging him on my knees to let me play it, even for a second! After seeing this scene, my younger cousin started to beg, too, so I couldn’t play it. We decided to swap every 15 minutes, and I fought fiercely for each of them! Even though the game was in English, where my greatest achievement was learning the difference between “e” and “i”, I still was the happiest kid in the world while playing it! After the trip, I asked my father to buy me a game console with Skyrim on it, and after an immediate and clear “no”, I pulled out my signature move - begging him to buy it every single day for a whole month. By the end of this month, I finally got what I wanted, and that was the day when my world changed as I stepped into the world of fantasy.

How do I recognize fantasy?

So, how can we recognize fantasy?

“Fantasy literature is literature set in an imaginary universe, often without any locations, events, or people from the real world” - one of the definitions of fantasy and the most straightforward one. Now, we can have an idea of how to do that.

If there are dragons, unicorns, or magic in the world you are - then it is fantasy. If there are kingdoms, nations, or places that never existed in our world - it is fantasy. However, if there are new planets, technologies, or other things that can exist in reality, it’s science fiction or sci-fi. These two genres can sometimes be pretty similar, but still, they are different.  However, since this blog is about fantasy, let’s concentrate only on this one.

Examples of my favorite fantasy

To better understand something, it’s always best to look at its examples. In our case, let’s take a look at one of my favorite fantasy title, “The Witcher”:

Although I learned this title through the Netflix series “The Witcher”, after I read the books and played the games, I prefer to forget this little detail. Don’t get me wrong - the Netflix series is okay or could be okay if not the title. The creators got so far away from the source that it would be better to rename the show and forget its relation to the books and games. Anyway, I will talk here only about the books and their continuation in the form of games. 

“The Witcher” tells us the story of Geralt of Rivia - who would’ve thought - a witcher or a monster hunter. The presence of monsters, ghosts, and curses implies that this is fantasy, or more specifically, dark fantasy. This is also a book where low and high fantasy meet. What’s that? Well, those are the two main genres of fantasy: high fantasy is usually about epic and big world-level stories, while low fantasy is about more domestic and personal ones. In the case of “The Witcher”, we have Geralt, his work as a monster hunter, his struggles, friends, foes, etc. Meanwhile, we have his stepdaughter Ciri, the central figure of the most important prophecy, wanted by all the kingdoms and empires. The absence of Geralt’s low fantasy aspect from the books makes the Netflix show not bad but boring, in my opinion. This mix is what makes the original series so likable to me in the first place, as we can see and explore this world in all dimensions, from wars between empires to a king raping his sister, from intrigues between the greatest wizards and their conspiracies to racism against elves, etc. This series is not afraid to show all the best and worst sides of its world, and that is what makes it so special. My favorite thing about it is that if you take out all the magic and medievalism, it starts to be very similar to our real world, which is both fascinating and terrifying at the same time.

There are many other fantasy titles that I love, but the reason why I love them is the same as why I love “The Witcher”, so I decided to take it as the only example since this reason is seen the most clearly in there. This reason leads us to the next question.

What is fantasy to me, and why do I read it?

After all the fantasy games I played, books I read, and movies I watched, and especially when I started to write the plot for my own game in the science fantasy genre, I began to ask myself a question: “Why fantasy?”, or more specifically “Why do I like fantasy?”. The first reason that came to my mind was because of all the unlimited possibilities it presents in terms of imagination - it gives you the feeling that anything is possible. But, in reality, unfortunately, it is not… Or is it? When I first stepped into the fantasy world after launching Skyrim, I only wished to live in that glorious and wondrous world. The reality started to seem “colorless” to me and routine, and wherever I was, I was thinking about how to return to my fantasy worlds. When I finished one of them, I started another one, and when I couldn’t find something that would bring me happiness and joy again, I would replay, reread, or rewatch the old ones again, over and over again, so I wouldn’t need to think about the grey reality. But one day, I found another answer: fantasy helps us see our world the way we didn’t before. At the core, all these wild worlds of fantasy aren’t that different from our own. When I saw this pattern, the world around me regained its colors. Each fantasy world I “visited” opened new things about our world to me. They helped me understand that it's not only these worlds where everything is possible but our world, too.