#159 - [no subject because I'm too brain-dead to think of one]

[reileen]

Nick Mamatas (nihilistic_kid) writes about the trend of "fantatwee" in recent fantasy stories:

There are two major families of fantatwee, the first being the retold unreconstructed fairy tale. These stories recite a fairy tale, generally something from Grimm and very very often a retelling of Snow White (and sometimes Snow White with vampires). The second type of fantatwee are stories about how awesome fantasy stories are.

At the risk of engaging in a little biocrit, many young people find solace in fantasy stories. It's escapism, which isn't all that dirty a word. Plenty of realist literature is escapist as well — one simply escapes into the world of aspirational middle-class problems in which one's relations drink and then sit on a sofa to weep as opposed to drinking and then balling up their fists to smash your head in because the rice was burnt. There was escapism in the Gulags too. Escapism is not, by itself, an evil. It is no surprise that these young readers, when they grow up, attempt to recreate the joyous bits of their childhoods by writing stories with this same escapist quality.

Unfortunately, fantatwee is all about second-order escapism. Many great stories have elements of escapism, but also a twist of a thematic screw that lets the reader know that not everything is strawberries and cream. Hard choices get made. Misery abides. In the film version of Return of the King, Frodo may have had a big pillow fight with his friends and then moped about the house for a bit. In the book, he was a shattered man, utterly alienated from his communitarian society. That's what you get for saving the world from doom.

On that note, I've received Mamatas' novels Under My Roof and Move Under Ground, which were being sold as a set for about $7 directly from his publisher's website. I'm...not sure why I thought this was a good idea, since I probably could have gotten two manga volumes off Amazon for that price that I could have added to add to some of my still-incomplete series, but hey, I like Mamatas' blog, so why not support him, and anyway, books!

-Reileen
passion turns pain into ecstasy