To love, or not to love fantasy

[Keneldil the Polka-dot]

Miniver Cheevy by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Thanks for posting the poem Willie. I had never read it before. Although I am not an alcoholic and don’t despair at my birth, I saw a lot I can identify with in that poem.

I think one reason people might like fantasy is because things like Good and Evil and The Right Thing To Do are pretty easy to see. The Bad Guy is obviously bad, the Good Guys wear white, etc. In a morally ambiguous world, fantasy alleviates the shades of gray and allows us to go to a place where choices aren’t as hard to make. Fighting evil is a thing you go do, where in our world evil is harder to identify and the fight against it is not necessarily physical.

That being said, as I get older (maturity is debatable) I find that authors who are able to introduce moral ambiguity into their characters and situations are pretty interesting. Good Guys who don’t always do the right thing of course seem more human, Bad Guys who have better reasons than just evil for its own sake. Characters that evolve from Bad to Good, or vice versa.

A lot of people that I know dismiss Tolkien and other fantasy as merely escapist reading. They say it doesn't have the "reality" that true literature has.

Merely escapist? I feel bad for those people. It seems they don’t know how fun and valuable a little escapism can be. I don’t see what makes escapist reading a bad thing anyway. What else is fiction for? From Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

fic·tion
1 a : something invented by the imagination or feigned; specifically : an invented story b : fictitious literature (as novels or short stories) c : a work of fiction; especially : NOVEL
2 a : an assumption of a possibility as a fact irrespective of the question of its truth <a legal fiction> b : a useful illusion or pretense
3 : the action of feigning or of creating with the imagination

Invented story, suspension of disbelief, illusion...all tools of fiction whether it takes place in Middle Earth or in downtown New York.