Are There Any Valid Criticisms? (aka Kalessin's Rant)

[Aiwendil]

I’m not formally acquainted with Plato’s theories of art. Any chance you could summarize what that “essence” is?

I wasn't actually referring to Plato's ideas on art - to be honest, I'm not acquainted with them either. But Plato said that for any quality that a thing might possess, there is a certain abstract thing that defines that quality. For example, we say that x,y, and z and beautiful. There must then be an abstract concept called 'beauty', and these things are beautiful because they have beauty. So if we talk about literature, music, sculpture, etc. all being art, there must be an abstract concept called 'art'. So it does then make sense to talk about 'the nature of art' or 'the purpose of art' without respect to medium, and then to require that specific types of art retain that nature and that purpose. So we can't say that the purpose of music is one thing and that the purpose of literature is something else.

my point was simply that mainstream fantasy – and what is Star Wars but science-fantasy? – is so conservative that the simple technique of writing from the first person, hardly revolutionary, is seen as a huge creative risk.

I agree. I think this is largely because it's hard for fantasy authors to break away from the structure that resulted in LotR.