On Fantasy Made Mundane

 So last weekend I patted myself on the back for finishing The Sandman on Netflix only for Netflix to release a couple of BONUS stories. Which is just awesome but changes my schedule a bit. Also last weekend, Netflix watched an episode and some change of Locke & Key without me?  I turned on the TV to find it paused in the second episode of a season I had seen none of. That was… unnerving.

I had written this down as the topic of last week’s essay, but changed my mind. We’re doing it now!

On Fantasy Made Mundane

There is something very odd about the fact that we need fantasy to be brought down from fantastical. I first had this thought when reading a review of The Last Jedi that referred to the dialogue of the Sequel Trilogy as “Whedon-esque” (compared to the Original Trilogy sounding more like an ancient Greek play). Then I had this Note idea firmly lodged in my mind when I read a review of the recent animated movie Luck (I thought the review was from Polygon, but looking over that review, no, it’s not, and I’m struggling to find it because search engines suck now and “Luck” is such a generic title to begin with), which points out that many of the animated adventure movies that we see involving people crossing over into a fantasy world tend to have the fantasy world appear as a bureaucracy or government office.

Basically, we keep depicting fantasy as a mundane thing; very often, a boring mundane thing. Sometimes this is used for comedic effect, I suppose, but it’s getting odd seeing fantasy worlds, especially things like the afterlife, depicted as going over paperwork.

There is an overall tendency to try to paint fantasy into something normal. We keep trying to inject the real world in fantasy lands, and not just in a ‘I need to have a basic handhold for the readers to have a clue what’s going on’ sort of way. And I think it’s starting to be something of a problem.

To be clear, I don’t think this is a problem with parodies. I wouldn’t include Discworld as an offender. Because yes, Terry Pratchett worked very hard to make ideas from the real world leak into the fantasy setting, such as Christmas, universities, the postal service, banking, and such. This is a set of stories that is explicitly meant to be talking about specific parts of the real world through the fantasy setting, which itself started as a parody of fantasy roleplaying games and pulpy fantasy stories. 

It’s parody. The entire thing is a parody. I get it.

Nor would I put something like The Good Place here. The Good Place isn’t entirely a parody, I think, but it is a comedy, and the first two seasons are also quite definitely parodies struggles of making and maintaining a successful television show. Very much of the rules of the afterlife are defined by “Rule of Funny.”

But then you look at something like the afterlife in Coco which are just the same as our world, just, with skeletons? And I get that Coco is making a point about who does and doesn’t get remembered, and how that’s not always fair, but does that mean that the afterlife needs a literal border control office with guards and a bunch of skeletons doing desk work? This isn’t meant to be me bashing Coco, because that’s a great film, but are we incapable of imagining an afterlife that doesn’t involve office work? Is that the society we’ve become?

And we’re also incapable of imagining spiritual or divine beings as not being human. I’ve complained a lot about the way Riordan has lately made mythological deities into weird modern stereotypes with dated cultural references, but so often in fantasy, I’ve seen gods and angels depicted as physical beings who you can just off if you take the shot. The idea that no, there are beings beyond human power and imagination, seems to be lost among fantasy authors. Very rarely are they, well, godly, in personality or in physical nature. They’re just beefed up wizards, and fighting them is just a matter of having the right equipment. Beings smart and powerful enough to build and maintain aspects of the universe are clearly dumb enough to lose fist fights to mortals all the time, right?

I also mentioned in my Note last week that a common thing we see in medieval fantasy is constructed religions which apparently no one in the story actually believes in? And I strongly suspect that this is mostly a side effect of modern cynicism being applied to a setting it doesn’t fit in. Can we not imagine a fantasy world where religion is an interesting topic, and not just a way for the author to hash out his or her own issues with modern religion?

I’m not saying that fantasy can’t say things about the real world–it absolutely can and it should. I’m not saying that you can’t put elements of the real world and its frustrations in fantasy. Can’t we keep fantasy… fantastical? Can’t we say things about the real world without just copying and pasting things from the real world into the fantastical ones? You can absolutely make an afterlife with commentary on the world without making it into a bureaucracy, or critique religious institutions without making strawmen of American fundamentalist Christianity (that somehow exists in a medieval Europe-inspired setting)?

And this isn’t a call to try to make it so that fantasy follows strict rules that everyone expects. But is a call to stop transplanting the real world into fantasy stories that make it less fantastic. If I want to read about people conquering everyday problems, those stories already exist. I want to read and watch fantasy and experience wonder. I want to read and see things I haven’t seen before.

That’s the point.

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