bm IS MOVINGBrologue lives! The Sunday before last was Mother's Day in the UK. I may have made a breakthrough on the fantasy front with Mum...
Explaining Fantasy to Mum(s?)
https://brologue.net/2025/04/07/hard-of-fantasy/
Please ❤ 🔁 if you like what you read!
…Sup. Haven't posted in a while. I've been up to my eyeballs researching and writing for an assignment. Some of it looked like this:
https://brologue.net/2024/12/06/chessworld-annotated-bibliography/
Much of it looked like this:
https://brologue.net/2023/11/04/zettelkasten-an-antidote-for-boring-notes/
https://brologue.net/2023/12/26/my-spines-as-stiff-as-a-prosthetic-leg/
And I looked like this:
Before I move on... #Boardmier is a #chess-themed fantasy universe that's analogous and allegorical to our world's transition between feudalism and capitalism. You can read two of my short stories, "The Talisman of Aubaum," and "The Right to Krei," here:
https://brologue.net/tag/boardmier/
Like it? Put my name in the heads of those who you think would like it, too.
At the moment, though I'm writing for another assignment, I'd lack to pick up the slack around here. I'm feeling a lot like this:
As of writing, the Sunday before last was Mother's Day in the UK. Last time I wrote about Mum, it was about her #fantasy problem - she is a self-described realist:
https://brologue.net/2023/11/05/fantasy-for-mums/
Now, she's got no problem with fantasy, the genre, per se. Her problem, she told me the other day, is that she can't *immerse* herself in fantasy. She tried watching #GameOfThrones, thinking it was a period drama; she checked out when dragons started turning up.
She won't watch #GoT because it's about a place, people, and creatures that aren't real. She has watched all of #Outlander, because, even if the characters in the show are fictional, and even though time travel isn't possible, everything is firmly planted on Planet Earth.
Past Me never really did answer that question directly - "What would I want in fantasy, if I were a Mum?" - because Past Me didn't even diagnose the problem.
But he did leave that all-important measure:
> Anything pertaining to the fantastical and or supernatural [is] a no-go. Be there dragons, aliens, masked and costumed men, or wizards, she’ll have no truck with it.
This is an issue that we can explore through the suspension of disbelief; secondary worlds; and simulacra/simulation.
In his essay, "On Fairy Stories," J. R. R. Tolkien wrote that for one to immerse themselves in fantasy, one must imagine the fantasy as a secondary world where what we are shown is possible:
https://coolcalvary.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf
> The storymaker proves a successful "sub-creator." He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true:" it accords with the laws of that world.
For the hard of fantasy, that's not an easy bridge to cross - and one could argue that us fantasy writers don't make it any easier. As a genre, over the last 150 years, say, we've developed a set of assumptions about what our readers expect. Chances are, if I wrote a high fantasy epic with all the trimmings, I'd expect my readers to know and accept the plausibility of dragons in that world.
What defines Tolkien's theory also limits it. Things that happen in the fantasy world that cannot possibly happen in ours must be taken with utmost seriousness by the reader:
> There is one proviso: if there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away.
Mum does not take the magic seriously. But that doesn't mean she can never get into fantasy. After all, we already know she likes Outlander. And she *can* immerse herself within stories. For example: she refused to watch A Thousand Blows because it was billed as being incredibly violent. She'd empathise too much with the characters on-screen getting hurt.
Paradoxically, one way the hard of fantasy might be coaxed into a story is to explicitly draw attention to a ridiculous premise. Have a character introduce it from their POV, and slowly explain how this one weird thing affects their life. This way, the character becomes an audience surrogate.
This is how I approached the protagonist of my first Boardmier story. Courier B2-1, a human given no name because of their caste, can time-travel - but not in the way they expect!
https://brologue.net/2024/12/05/the-talisman-of-aubaum/
While Courier B2-1 doesn't outright call it absurd, they do actively question the nature of this uncontrollable power, comparing it to what they know to be true in stories (see next posts):
> Strolling at a leisurely pace, the Courier figured it took as much time for a pot of rice to boil, and yet, even when they wormed through the desert, on their belly, they always returned to find that little time ever passed for everyone else. Duration halted – but time marched on. It wasn’t like in stories, where time slowed like diluting a pint of beer in a lake; things kept going like they were borrowing beer from someone else’s pint entirely.
> That was Roy’s strangest euphemism. “Gift” triggered images of those time-travel stories again – those made-up mé féiners, indulging themselves in paralysed spacetime, like being in a real-life painting. They’d witness life, en vivan, as gods, en vitro, and all they could do was exclaim – “Wow! People actually live here!”
> *That* was more a “gift” than reality…
And, when they find out that their recipient is a(n in-universe) fictional character:
> Captain Groenback was a spook for rich kids. It was ridiculous: a magical golden ghost ship looting vessels of their earthly possessions, circling the archipelago forever without hope of a port, looting unwisely crews, who were then cursed by the same fate.
(Of course, in-universe, Captain Groenback was a real person - she was erased from history by becoming a legend. Legends are tricky things - you always learn if the people in the story were real after the fact.)
Here's the thing - we've been telling ourselves stories since before we wrote stuff down. In the absence of anything better to do, when prehistoric humans sat around the fire, we described to each other images *beyond* our earthly reality - things too good to be true. Because it was fun.
The late, great Sir Terry Pratchett reminds us of what the first stories probably were about:
> Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9654148-o-you-re-quite-a-writer-you-ve-a-gift-for-language
I might be talking completely out of my ass, and an anthropologist might know better, but wouldn't the whole point of telling stories about those gods be the extraordinary premise?
Either way, Tolkien's proviso - Thou Shalt Not Desecrate My World of Fantasy - is the very edifice that Pratchett's Discworld shattered into a million pieces. Daniel Luthi explores this is in an essay on Discworld as a 'postmodern playground':
https://dc.swosu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1036&context=mythlore
Even in the earliest Discworld novels, which were more heavy on parodying fantasy literature, Pratchett was never afraid to break the immersion of his world to tell a joke.
Discworld is self-aware. It knows that you know it's ridiculous. It agrees. Pratchett was never afraid to take the piss out of the world that he created. His footnotes are often a way for the narrator to take you aside and make fun of the new piece of Lore that's just been introduced:
> The idea that Winter could actually be enjoyable would never have occurred to Ramtop people, who had eighteen different words for snow.*
*(All of them, unfortunately, unprintable.)
- Wyrd Sisters, p88