Fantasy Doesn't Have to Be Realistic

 I’m running very late with writing this Saturday Note, and it has been a heck of a Friday, what with traffic problems, stomach problems, allergy problems, and also the smoke detector refuses to accept a new battery. I would normally detach it and hide it somewhere, but I can’t figure out how to detach the thing from the ceiling. It’s entirely possible I might shoot the thing. With what? I don’t know!

I kind of wanted to do something for Women’s History Month, but I can’t think of a really solid idea for that. I dunno. Look up Khutulun or something.

Fantasy Doesn’t Need to Be Realistic

I must have written about this before at some point, but it bothers me when someone looks at some fantasy creature and says, “We can’t have this fantastical feature on the creature! It needs to be realistic!” The example that comes to mind is George R.R. Martin’s blog post where he criticizes one of the banners in House of the Dragon for showing a four-legged dragon with wings. That’s absurd, he pointed out, because it’s unrealistic–creatures don’t have six limbs, they would only have four, like any other animal.

The idea of a creature that’s constantly growing, and yet can still fly, and also, yeah, breathes fire is apparently not an issue for him in ‘realism’.

I am not saying that you should not consider realistic aspects of a story, especially when it comes to certain tones and subgenres. In some stories, looking for a realistic, “How would this really work?” explanation can be good. Terry Pratchett gets quite a bit of mileage out of it, for instance. But he’s also writing parody fantasy. So when he writes dragons as weird little critters that are fire-breathers because gas, well, it fits because that’s ridiculous. That’s the joke.

And I suppose, yes, it makes sense that George R.R. Martin is writing a more ‘grounded’ fantasy (or at least, he’s presented it that way–I’ve seen some essayists argue that he’s not really that much more realistic in his presentation). In that regard, one could make the argument that he’s working for realism, so it’s okay that he insists on that with dragon design. At the same time, if he really was going for that, he would make the dragons less fantastical, such as giving natural explanations for fire breathing (like in Dragonology or Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real) and the lack of constant growth. He’s essentially trying to have it both ways, having both unrealistic pieces while insisting that he’s being more realistic.

There’s also the problem that a lot of people feel, because of Pratchett and Martin, that they have to be realistic in one way or another. That magic has to be treated like a science, or that they need to be able to explain the physics of things, like where mass goes when something transforms.

That’s… not historically how people viewed magic. They didn’t think of it like a science, they thought of it like… well, magic. Ceremonial, at the whims of the divine, and using weird symbols and things that may or may not work, depending on weird things like the alignments of the stars. You obviously need some level of rules for the story to function at all. Otherwise, your audience will have no stakes to believe in, and wonder why nothing is being solved by the protagonist waving his arms in circles and saying silly words.

At the same time, you don’t need to make all the rules come down to science. “Where does the mass go when someone shapeshifts into something of a different size?” The answer is magic. “When someone turns into a lizard, doesn’t that mean they have a lizard brain?” Maybe, but maybe not. Because magic. “How do dragons talk and fly?” Could it be… magic?

Of course it could! As long as you give me the gist, and some hard rules like ‘You can’t bring back the dead’, you can play loose with how strict the magic is, and you don’t need to provide me with answers to everything. I’ll assume that magic works the way you think it does. Most readers will, too, if you have it presented consistently.

The entire point of fantasy is to tell stories about things that don’t really and cannot possibly exist. If we have taken it upon ourselves to take that aspect out, and assume that it’s the way all fantasy has to be, then what are we doing with the genre? It’s like arguing that all science-fiction has to be a space opera, or all murder mysteries have to take place on an English manor. Yes those things can work, but they don’t have to be the limits, or even the standards of what the story and worldbuilding can be. Saying otherwise is just arbitrarily stupid.

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