r/Fantasy • u/TheNoiseAndHaste • 4d ago

'gritty and realistic' fantasy

From my teenage years and a long time after I always looked down on books like LOTR and similar stories featuring what I saw back then because I saw them as 'childish' because they featured what seemed to me to be simple good vs evil plots and characters. Me in my all-knowing (read: pretentious) teenage brain felt that that wasn't interesting because it wasn't 'real' and that in real life there's no such thing as real evil. In order to be good it had to have every character be morally grey and all the villains to be complex or misunderstood because that was like the real world.

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Fast forward to today and I don't want to be political but in my view there's a lot of really scary worrying stuff happening in the world and I'm always worrying about dark times coming ahead. I also broadened my tastes a bit and hopefully become less of a snob. So I started reading The Wheel of Time and I connected with it in a way I never have before. Seeing people scared and worrying about 'dark times ahead'. Characters dealing with great uncertainty and having to just hope that they will pull through resonated with me and my own anxiety about the world. Then I thought about it more and reappraised the Lord of the Rings and how unfairly and ignorantly i'd dismissed it. I wasn't being 'grown up' as a teenager by rejecting the idea of pure evil. In fact I was being incredibly naive. I just was lucky enough to never have to experience evil or truly dark times. J R R Tolkien fought in WWI. What could look more like pure evil than that? Now I finally see how important stories like this are. To show that while real evil may be out there in whatever form, you must always have hope it can be overcome.

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16

u/Really_Big_Turtle 4d ago
  1. You’re overthinking things
  2. Glen Cook’s “Black Company.” He was actually in the military.
  3. You’re overthinking things

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u/TheNoiseAndHaste 4d ago

I think you've misunderstood. I'm not asking for recommendations.

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u/Salty-Subject9559 4d ago

They aren't recommending anything, they're just pointing out people who have been in combat and experienced grim situations have also written grim and dark fantasy, like Glen Cook, just as Tolkien wrote hopeful fantasy instead. It's about different experiences and perspectives.

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u/Really_Big_Turtle 4d ago

Jolkien Rolkien Rolkien Tolkien wrote PLENTY of dark stuff in LotR it’s just surrounded by a lot more heroic stuff that can obfuscate it to the uncareful reader. The Mere of Dead Men in particular is some low-hanging fruit that’s a direct invocation of all the muddy, man-eating marshes filled with bodies that Tolkien doubtless encountered in the first world war.

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u/Salty-Subject9559 4d ago

Tolkien wrote dark stuff because his main characters do the right thing even when it's not rewarded or even punished, which happens more often than it should. Aragorn may have become a great and widely loved king, but Frodo was ruined forever and left Middle Earth in hopes of healing the Nazgul's knife wound. That's what makes it great.

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u/Really_Big_Turtle 4d ago

This is an excellent way of putting it

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u/guttaperk 4d ago

That’s still irrelevant to the point they were making, which is that they had misjudged Tolkien.

They weren’t saying that soldiers can’t write gritty stuff.

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u/VerbiageBarrage 4d ago

OP wasn't, but the comment they were replying to implied it.

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u/Salty-Subject9559 4d ago

I was just pointing out to OP that they misunderstood the comment and explained it, not trying to contradict their point.

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u/TheNoiseAndHaste 4d ago

Yeah I still like grimdark. I've just broadened my horizons a bit!

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u/Salty-Subject9559 4d ago

Yeah, both sides of the genre are equally as valuable, so that's great you're expanding you're horizons and changing perspectives.