Why Fantasy Stories Matter in the Real World
Ever since I was in Elementary School, I’d been reading fantasy stories. It started with Animorphs (which I know was sci-fi, but techno-druids fighting mind stealing slugs from outer space is pretty fantastical no matter who you are), then in Middle School I moved on to Dragonlance, though I read them in very much the wrong order, and by High School I’d torn through most of the Harry Dresden novels while currently having just finished Battleground and am waiting for my breaking heart to heal a little before subjecting myself to Twelve Months. There have been many other books throughout the ages, and many worlds that I’ve visited, however, the same remains true regardless.
Fantasy is what reality should be.
When I was in Grad School, I had a professor who was trying to teach us the different genres of writing so we could teach them to our students. The problem was, my group was made up of myself (a high school teacher), another high school teacher, and a middle school teacher. The rest of the class, and the professor, were all elementary teachers. Now, I have no intention of insulting elementary teachers, but I feel this would have been a great example of having separate classes for the separate levels, because this was my least favorite class to go to.
Professor: “Science fiction is a story that takes place in the future! Where there are robots, and advanced computers, and technology beyond our wildest dreams!”
Me to my group: “For our purposes, Sci-fi is a mirror we hold up to our own world, the technology is meant to be a gross exaggeration that allows us to see the horrors of our own world through the eyes of a different one, so we can realize that what we’re doing or experiencing is horribly wrong. Like how Minority Report was all about racial profiling.”
Professor: *Gives me Death Glare*
See, the genres are far more complex than many people give them credit to be. Fantasy, in her eyes, was just dragons and magic and whimsy, when in reality, fantasy gives us as readers the ability to affect change on a world that represents all the things that we cannot affect in our daily lives. I think that’s one of the reasons role playing games are so popular. Baulder’s Gate 3 was a massive hit, and not just because you can romance a sassy vampire twink or a tsundere warrior woman (though I always go for the traumatized goth girl with a heart of gold). What made BG3 so popular is the same thing that made Fallout: New Vegas so popular, and other games of their ilk. You have choice in those games. Specifically, choice in how you want to handle things.
I can try to talk down the conflict, intimidate the people trying to push me around, and failing that (or without trying that) I can just gun them down in a blaze of glory and righteous revenge. In reality, I have to grit my teeth, bear the consequences, and scream along to an angry song on the ride home from the DMV after I was missing one form that stood between me and not having to come back again.
Fantasy allows us to address the problems of our world that the institutions of our world hinder us from addressing. Hospitals reject people because of a lack of insurance and treat a disease we’ve been researching for decades and still have no cure for though the conspiracy theories claim we do? In our world, we piss and moan and die. In the fantasy world, Luis just lays on hands, removes the cancer, and then cuts down the enforcers who want to silence the people proving that there is a better way. One way is far more satisfying than the other.
And I know this is going to play into the reflection I wrote for Friday this week, but there was a reason why people praised the killing of Brian Thompson, why people make jokes about Charlie Kirk getting merked, and why some people have a bottle of champagne chilling in their fridge for the day it finally happens. These people aren’t ghoulish people who crave the suffering of others, (Thompson got rich over denying life saving coverage, Kirk got rich sowing discourse and hate, and it got rich on a plethora of crimes I won’t list here, thus making them the ghouls) but rather are cheering for the fact that someone, somewhere, is taking action against the dragons in our world that seem unkillable.
“They just needed to pay us enough not to do this” is a battle cry being heard around the internet, if not the world, because the media won’t cover the stories. There have been over TWENTY arsons across North America but only a few have been reported on because rather than rallying behind the poor multi-billionaires losing their warehouses, the media was shocked to discover that the people were rallying behind the arsonists. Why is it, do they think, that the people cheer the dragonslayers over the dragons?
That’s really the core of it all. That is why fantasy is probably the most important kind of story. There is a reason we tell our children fairy tales, why we teach them about heroes and monsters, because the world is full of monsters and we’re going to need heroes. Neil Gaiman said it best: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
