Are You Writing Serious Fantasy?

[bombur]

I did not mean that fantasy must be all black and white. It cant of cource. In Tolkien we have Saruman and Boromir and Denethor, who have mostly just fallen under Saurons influence. There are orcs and trolls and such... who knows if they were nice people, if they had not been TOOLS of the dark wills for thousands of years... how long would it take for those people to recover, if there was chance. There are those willingly turned to the dark, no matter how far along the road they are, easterlings, black Numenoreans, pirates of Umbar, the mouth of sauron. A teenage easterling recruit hardly qualifies as Evil, mouth of Sauron might. Most of theese are not evil in the sence I meant.

There are the pure tools like Nazgul, complete slaves of dark will.

Then there are the big bad ones... the Evils those voluntarily executing their own dark wills. Ranging from smaller of the true Evils, like Smaug, to greater, like Morgoth.

In fantasy there is always degrees as well as in real life. But fantasy (epic fantasy... not Moorcock etc. gothic fantasy of cource) diffrentiates from any even vaguely realistic stories in one thing. There always has to be the purest darkest black and clearest brightest white somewhere. I think this total Evil is exteremely challenging charachter and consept to crate. Thats what I meant.

Janne Harju