Writing Forum

Question:

Does epic/high fantasy provide an adequate literary platform for portraying contemporary human conflicts and present-day actualities?

It seems to me much of the appeal of epic fantasy literature can be found in its classically familiar themes and tropes. Our real world tends to be tediously complex and ambiguously road-marked. Good and evil, in the real world, are often chalked up to perspective---one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. And though I don't mean to trivialize real-life death and tragedy to the mere conjectures of literary populism, an aspiring writer with a curious conscience is occasionally going to ask how many children does one watch starved to death by foreign policy or blasted to pieces by foreign bombs before he or she feels a righteous justification in taking up arms against the oppressors.

Hell, as crazy as it might sound to many of you who live outside the United States, I really do know people who are going to vote for Donald Trump. And it's for that very reason that I ask the question above about the capacities of epic fantasy. I'm no historian, but never before in my lifetime, nor would it seem at any time in recent history, not since the ascendance of Adolph Hitler to Chancellor of the Reich in 1930's Germany, has a demagogue using such misguided and divisive appeals to nativism, naturalism, xenophobia, and other base human instincts been so successful as Trump in mass exploitation of human fears and political frustrations.

This is a not-so unique time in the history of civilization, this modern-day America. This sort of moment in time, while not-so unparalleled nor incomparable, is in my opinion historically pivotal and unfortunately repeatable. A man comes along every so often, and he tells frightened, angry fellow countrymen their phobias are well-founded and easily identifiable---it's the stranger down the street, the immigrant on the shore, or the migrant in the field that is to blame for... whatever.

Lately I've been reading research regarding political motivations. What makes some people personally respond more readily to authoritarian rhetoric, to promises of bolstered nationalism and escalated security, rather than messages of inclusion and kindredism? Okay, so I just made up that word kindredism. Just sayin'...

Epic fantasy literature seems to "work" best when it is deeply layered in classical archetypes. Good v Evil. Heroism v Self-Preservation. Mankind v Monsters.

But can epic fantasy still work when the Evil is a misguided, yet popular, modern political idea and the Monster is one's ill-informed neighbor living next door?

Perhaps for a fantasy story to be "Epic," for it to be placed in that same genre with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, George R.R. Martin, Robert Jordan, Steven Erikson, and other High Fantasy authors, it absolutely must have a Medieval or nearly Medieval setting, an over-arching quest which all subplots combine to support and advance, and heroic champions wielding swords and sorcery against an unambiguously vile foe. I honestly don't know and I've been reading this crap since I was twelve years old, ever since I picked up my first copy of The Hobbit.

By the way, this is not intended to be a political rant---although, I'm supposing if an actual Trump supporter stops by they probably won't see it any other way. Sorry about that, but I honestly do believe this is a bit of a monumental moment in the history of human civilization. Then again, maybe that's just the dramatist in me making more of this craziness than is really there. But either way, this was intended to be a sincere question about writing within the genre of epic fantasy. I know this very question, or at least similar ones such as, "What defines epic fantasy?," I know they've been asked in these forums and elsewhere millions and millions of times. But I just had to do it again. I was curious about the thoughts of others on this particular subject. I was also, mostly, just thinking out loud and needing to put some of my own thoughts down in writing. If you, the reader, have made it this far you probably deserve a merit badge of some kind, however, I checked and unfortunately WDC doesn't have one designated for heroic people who've made it all the way to the end of an Eliot Wild nine-paragraph question. Sorry, but I'll get with StoryMaster and work on that sometime in the future.