Who is High Fantasy FOR, Anyway?

 I am strongly considering bringing noise-canceling earmuffs to work because I hate the sound of chewing and everyone in the office eats the crunchiest food imaginable.

Also my laptop was acting up so I’m writing this on my parents’ computer. Yay. Forgive me any typos as I get used to a different keyboard. I really wish my computer would just TELL me it needed to do an update rather than just letting itself run 10 times slower on basic tasks…

I had this thought for a while though so let’s talk about it!

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Who is High Fantasy For, Anyway?

So a few months back I kept getting video ads on Facebook for a crowdfunding from a Christian channel trying to make an animated adaptation of a book series called Wingfeather Saga so that they could make an animated fantasy show for children with Christian themes. Which, you know, whatever, fine. But something that caught my attention is that the guy asking for your money in the ad pointed out that A) he hated a lot of the children’s television his kids watched because it was mostly aimed at toddlers, and B) most high fantasy these days is made with the assumption that it’s for adults, citing Game of Thrones and The Witcher. And not just like, “This is more mature in tone and has themes that only adults will fully understand,” but “It had nudity, graphic violence, and swearing.”

I have been thinking about this. Because it’s kind of right? At least, in regards to live-action. There is still animated high fantasy being made for families, like The Dragon Prince (WHERE IS THAT NEXT SEASON THOUGH), but most of the live-action high fantasy is squarely aimed at an adult audience. And it’s not as if The Lord of the Rings films, or the Hobbit trilogy, were really made for children either, but they weren’t made in a way that families couldn’t watch them either.

I don’t want to say it’s the fault of Game of Thrones, but it’s definitely the turning point for the genre.

A quick side note too: when I say “High fantasy is now being made for mature audiences,” I want to be clear that I’m talking about film and television. Dark fantasy has been a trend for a while now. The Witcher and A Song of Ice and Fire books have been out for decades, and if you’ve ever walked through a fantasy aisle in a bookstore, even if you see a bunch of old books, they’re very often not for children. And there have been dark fantasy games for ages as well. This trend is not out of nowhere, it’s just now mainstream.

But what an odd thing to become so mainstream?

I strongly suspect that a lot of people saw Lord of the Rings as kids, and when they grew older, they saw Game of Thrones as filling that high fantasy itch, but also as something that appealed to their desire to see adult television shows with more graphic material. In a sense, an audience who said to themselves “Well I’m a grown up now, I want to watch a more grown up version of that.” That’s not to say that Game of Thrones IS a more grown up version of Lord of the Rings but it certainly got billed as that quite often. I definitely saw more than one outlet say something along the lines of “Well Tyrion’s a dwarf, but he’s NOTHING like Gimli, he visits prostitutes!”

In the wake of that show, everyone and their mother wanted in on that sweet success, and so we saw a bunch of fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction that desperately wanted to try their hand at doing dark fantasy. And it’s not always entirely fair to compare these shows, as many of them were based off of properties that existed long before George R.R. Martin’s books were written. But they also wouldn’t have been greenlit without that show, and it’d be silly to not recognize that it had an influence on them in one way or another.

But it’s gotten more than a little silly. Did you ever watch The Shannara Chronicles? It was trying to bill itself as an MTV Game of Thrones type of series. And so there are several “Court Intrigue” subplots added to the story, along with a couple of (fairly tame) sex scenes. The episodes I did watch, I did because I wanted to see Manu Bennet kick butt, and I gave up on the second season pretty early on when I learned he died in it. But it felt really silly because the show was trying to act like it was very mature about these topics of violence and sex, but the protagonists still vaguely referred to “feelings” instead of falling in and out of love, and many of these subplots went absolutely nowhere.

And what I’ve seen of the Wheel of Time show isn’t all that encouraging in this regard either. They have sex scenes, which is weird to me. It’s not that characters in the book series don’t have sex, they do, but it’s pretty much fade-to-black, and none of it happens this early in the story, because the leads are sheltered kids from a small town where everyone knows each other. The first time Rand sleeps with a love interest in the books, his first thought the next morning is that he HAS to marry this girl or else he’s shamed her. The development of these relationships is a large part of these characters’ arcs. And I get that if the show didn’t have any of that in its early seasons and then added them later on, it would feel VERY weird, like you’re watching a completely different show. And also that they aged up the characters. But I also suspect that the showrunners essentially decided that the show needed sex scenes to stay relevant in the market of high fantasy television shows.

As for violence–well there’s plenty of that in the books too. But the show also pushes that in some ways to match with stereotypical screen depictions. Like I said, the characters in the books start out as kids (older teenagers), but in the show, Perrin has been married, but his wife got frigded before the story started so he can have some angst. Like, yeah, we need to be taken seriously, obviously we need to have violence committed against a woman for a man’s character development; that’s how you do good fantasy, right?

[Hilariously/sadly, Screen Rant didn’t realize that this wasn’t something from the books.]

We don’t need this, is what I’m getting at. I’m not suggesting that we need to ban sex and violence from all of high fantasy, okay. But I am saying that we shouldn’t have to have those in our fantasy stories on screen in order to make it for adults. Or teenagers! If the story genuinely calls for those things, then fine! But very often it doesn’t, and it reads as if the writers or directors or what have you really wanted to make sure they had your attention, so that the reviewers will write “It’s like Lord of the Rings, but DARKER!!!” We shouldn’t have an entire genre that seems to be made just to be accessible to adults, very often in the shallowest way possible. High fantasy stories should be going across the board, for all kinds of audiences to tell all kinds of stories.

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