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The rants and raves by me

Everyone has some thing in their life that irritates them. I'm just letting the world know about mine.

Jan 18, 2003

It's Getting Me High:
Nethie's Rant on High Fantasy

I'm an avid bibliophile. I love to read almost anything--realistic fiction, historical fiction, fan fiction, books on subjects I enjoy, classics, children's books, sci-fi, manga. Tons of books grace my shelves, from The Vagina Monologues to Sesame Stree Unpaved. And I look for more of what I like all the time. I even write books--tons of them, with all sorts of plots.

There's just one type of book that rubs me the wrong way. That's what I call High Fantasy.

Those are the type of books with cliches all over them. The ones with lots of mages, swordfighters, or talking animals, where someone's on a quest or a mission, where the time period is obviously not past the Middle Ages. Where the evil is pure evil and the good is ltimate good. Where chivary is not dead, the women are pure and just, and the men are noble and strong. The dragons are dragon like, the gryffins are gryyfinlike and the demons are demonic. The kind of world that seems like it's in a bubble.

Gag me.

Now, don't get me wrong. I like fantasy. I've read books by Tamora Pierce that I can really get into, and I'm a very avid Harry Potter fan. (June 21, I will be in line for my copy.) But there's a difference when it comes to those and High Fantasy. These have a little dash of reality or variation. In the Alanna series I read, the main character is a girl who wants to and suceeds (in the parts I've read) in becoming a knight. Harry is in the real world, having to deal with both Muggle problems and magical problems. In the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, Cimeron doesn't want to be a perfect princess, and the series never makes her one--she's never demure and sweet and helpless. Even the novels I write try to avoid tha full High Magic path--most of the time there's no magic, or magic that isn't perfectly controlled.

It's the perfect magic that gets me. The perfect kingdom, the perfect methods of learning, where a mage's biggest problem is trying to learn their next spell. I'm looking at Mercedes Lackey here. Trust me, I've tried to read them. I really have. But it seems like there's no challenge in her world. Either there's no bad guy or the bad guy is truly bad. Out of all her novels, the only one I've been able to get through and enjoy is The Black Swan, and that's because it's based on a ballet I love. I actually enjoy the bad guy's POV at times, but if the bad guy's just evil to be evil, then it turns me off.

I also don't like attention to detail. Not in the sense that I enjoy vague descriptions, but when the world is so detailed you feel you can't step out and create things yourself. If I have to learn a whole new vocabulary of twelve pages or have to flip to the glossary everytime I get to a new chapter, I'm going to put the novel down in a heartbeat. A world that's not fluid to change doesn't thrill me, and even worst are the world's that can't laugh at themselves. I'm a fan of Piers Anthony because of the puns in his world--his people can laugh at themselves, and his world's a living joke. Stiff formalities annoy me to no end.

Mebbe I'm just more into worlds that I don't feel will trap me into their mode of thinking, or worlds that can't be placed into the modern world without a lot of conflict. I try to give every book a chance, but if there's no hope of change I have to say nay and go pick up something a bit more thrilling.

Leave the fairy tale mentality to the fairy tales.

--Nethie-chan

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