#on fantasy

[nixscriptum]

[grandturtleperson]

But there's another story of fantasy that needs telling. In this one, it isn't just the wonder-book of our impulses, or an organised nostalgia for a more romantic world. Here it exists because it is (paradoxically) a kind of necessary realism, arising in response to qualities of the contemporary world that we couldn't properly attend to, couldn't narrate, any other way. I'd argue that, as well as expressing our frustrations with the disenchanted world, it's also our best means for capturing the ways in which the world remains enchanted, for all our strenuous buffering. I read and write fantasy because it's the literature that sees the recurrent unearthliness in human experience. That knows we're hopelessly metaphorical creatures, who find meaning by tying together patterns of resemblance that might as well be spells. That knows there are some struggles where the stakes really are overwhelming, and good and evil in something like their pure forms really do pivot on human choices. Fantasy understands that to undertake the risks of love is to venture beyond safety, into landscapes strange to you, on perilous and wonderful journeys.

— Francis Spufford, 'Out of this world,' The Guardian, 21 Feb 2026

[goforth-ladymidnight]

"On Fantasy"

"The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real … for a moment at least … that long magic moment before we wake.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to middle Earth."

~ George R. R. Martin

His original essay can be found on his blog here.

[homonationalist]

As earlier mentioned, then, the blackness of the orcs is multiply-signifying: above, the dirt of physical uncleanliness and industrial pollution; here, the indicator of metaphysical and racial pollution. There is a significant shift here from [The Hobbit], where the orcs (there usually referred to as “goblins”) are not given a color. By contrast, in [The Lord of the Rings] the darkness of the orcs is repeatedly stressed so as to keep emphasizing for the reader their position in the bichromatic aesthetic/moral/metaphysical order, in which white good, white skin, white beauty, white people, white countries, white religion, and a white northwest stand opposed to black evil, black skin, black ugliness, black non-persons, black countries, black diabolism, and a black south-east.

[...] The opposition of a symbolic and a racial blackness is, in a sense misleading, because, for Tolkien’s characters, it can be said, ontology recapitulates physiology. “Their insides [are] on the outside,” says C. S. Lewis of Tolkien’s characters, in an unwittingly betraying judgment. For the black orcs the physical and the metaphysical are fused, just as they would be for the non-white subhumans encountered by expanding Europe. (Cedric Robinson makes a point that is relevant here, that Islam had always been “closely identified in the European mind with African and Black peoples,” as the very name “blackamoor” signifies.) And all the allegedly different races of humanoid beings of Middle-Earth are in effect really human. “Laterally,” in the Shemitic second tier, this is conceded in Tolkien’s statement in LTR that “Hobbits are relatives of ours” (FR, 21). But even more importantly, it is inadvertently admitted by the revelation that interbreeding (the traditional sign of speciesmembership) is possible “vertically,” between tiers. More than one elf-human combination is mentioned, giving rise, as earlier noted, to humans of noble blood, and Tolkien admits that: “Elves and Men are evidently in biological terms one race, or they could not breed and produce fertile offspring.” Correspondingly, among the first harbingers in the Shire itself of the threat from Mordor are a “squinteyed ill-favored” Southerner and a “swarthy Bree-lander” who Frodo and company meet at the Bree inn (FR, 213, 219), and these later turn out to be “half-orcs and goblin-men” (TT, 180).

It is the discrete existence of this biological/racial dimension of blackness that underpins “swarthiness” as a signifier of evil. If blackness were merely symbolic for Tolkien (as it largely is in the case of the Black Riders, who are simply fallen white men: thus, with the vision given by the Ring, Frodo perceives they have “white faces” [FR, 263]), then physical intermixture would not have the significance it does—it would, in fact, be an impossibility. But if the orcs are really human, then it makes complete sense that Treebeard should be horrified at what is, in effect, race-mixing, miscegenation. “That would be a black evil!” he exclaims (TT, 96), with the authentic outrage of any Southern segregationist, Afrikaner, or Nazi. The threat the orcs pose is therefore also that of racial pollution.

Charles W. Mills from “The Wretched of Middle-Earth: An Orkish Manifesto” (2022)

[buecherundmehr]

"We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La."

- George R. R. Martin, On Fantasy

[afinaland]

[bookbeani]

Unpopular opinion: YA is good for diversity but tends to lack the depth of worldbuilding adult fantasy books have

strongly agree | agree | neutral | disagree | strongly disagree

Though this is a pretty big generalization, I do agree that your average YA fantasy is a) shorter and b) more concerned with character and plot and action rather than the lore and history and general building of a fantasy world. I think it’s interesting, actually - the differences between the kinds of tropes and emphases you see in YA fantasy and those you see in adult fantasy, which in many ways are affected by the sort of subject matter they deal with and why they are being written.