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
Talking of Wyrd Sisters, there's one scene in my mind that sticks out as pure Mum.
Our three protagonists - Esme 'Granny' Weatherwax, Gytha 'Nanny' Ogg, and Magrat '' Garlick, all witches - go to see a play. It's touted as a professional production, but Pratchett frames everything as though it were a Punch and Judy show - just sacking curtains and planks of wood laid over barrels.
And yet:
> [The theatre] had also managed to become The Castle, Another Part of the Castle, The Same Part A Little Later, The Battlefield, and now it was A Road Outside the City.
Granny Weatherwax watches a king being murdered in the play, and calls bullshit:
> "He's killed him," she hissed, "Why isn't anyone doing anything about it? […] right up there in front of everyone!"
Magrat grounds her fellow witch to limited success. The next scene in the play is a long soliloquy by the murderer, and how he's filled with so much regret:
> Granny was not to be distracted. "What'd he go and kill him for, then?"
Nanny Ogg jumps in as the mediator:
> "I reckon," she said slowly, "I reckon it's all just pretendin'. Look, he's still breathing."
[…]
The corpse tried to shuffle its feet behind a cardboard bush.
But Granny's one of Discworld's sharpest minds. She doesn't need Nanny's comments to know the charlatans on stage are 'purveyors of untruth and artifice.' In a later scene, the actor playing the dead king fills the role of a soldier. Granny calls bullshit once more, and looks for the actor who previously played the murderer (presumably he's in a different garb - maybe he isn't):
> "He done it!" she shouted triumphantly, "We all *seed* 'im! He done it with a dagger!"
Things don't just stop there, though - no, no, no. It's a well-known fact on #Discworld that Witches can go wherever they like. The three of them head backstage…
> "You!" [Granny Weatherwax] shouted. "You're dead!"
That, he was. And there, after a fake bush meets a Lancre steel-capped boot and bursts into splinters, she exposes the lie to the world at large:
> "See?" […] "Nothing's real! It's all just paint, and sticks and paper at the back."
At first, you might think this whole affair ridicules the sorts of hackneyed scenes that are ONLY (and I repeat, ONLY) possible in entertainment. One example soaps have been leaning on since we could put phones in our pocket:
> If your character is going to be killed off, you WILL show the viewer their forgetting to charge their phone, and it WILL run out of juice when they need it most.
But when you think about it, Granny Weatherwax, in her own abrasive way, critically (and literally) deconstructs the secondary world that the production asks the audience to believe.
How did Mum prove to Dad that dragons aren't real? She googled for dragons and found their Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon
For the same effect, she could've looked up some behind-the-scenes videos of the actors flailing in front of a greenscreen. None of it's real.
So, what's all this simulacra and simulation business, then? When we see a White Walker or a dragon on-screen, what relation do they have to our reality? That is: what does Mum mean when she says a dragon isn't 'real?'
I'll start with something that reflects the real world, one-to-one: a photograph. If you're looking for a place to eat while abroad, you're most likely going to look at the unedited photos of food by previous patrons to know what you're getting into. If you can trust that the photo hasn't been edited at all, then it's as true a reflection of reality as we might get.
A step up from that, we might take photos from the business with a grain of salt, because, if they're not edited, they're at least trying to show the business in a manner that doesn't reflect real life. Mum and Dad experienced this first-hand last year: they booked a hotel based on very clean-looking photos, only to find their real room in squalor.
Another example might be cleaning your home for an estate agent to take photos. The state of the house in these photos does not reflect the tidiness of our day-to-day lives, because they are intended for potential buyers for whom this might be their 'forever home.' They don't want to see or imagine the dirt that life tracks around the house. That comes later.
One step further, we get a bit abstract. People say where there's smoke, there's fire. But consider the role of a smoke alarm. It's essentially a stand-in for the fire, to alert you to a danger and get you to stop whatever it is you're doing before that imaginary danger becomes real.
On the final step, there be dragons. Except, not really. No human being has ever seen a living, breathing dragon, in the flesh. There is no way for such dragons to appear before us, right now. We made them up.
Similar could be said of dinosaurs. They, too, aren't 'real.' True, we have a trove of fossil evidence that proves they existed millions of years ago. But there's zero chance that Mum will get to see a living, breathing Velociraptor in her lifetime. The dinosaurs depicted in Jurassic Park are just as unreal* as any dragon.
('Unreal' in the sense that they were either computer-generated images, or animatronics. Consider, also, that at the time Jurassic Park was released, it was not yet discovered that velociraptors were feathered. For a *real* velociraptor, get back to me when science has figured out how to transport cameras back in time.)