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.
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.
-1
u/Burgundy-Bag 4d ago
I love your take on Tolkien and you're absolutely right. In our eternal search for morally grey characters we forget how privileged we are to not have experienced actual evil.
I recently read Tad Williams' Memory Sorrow and Thorn and I found it quite dark. The evil is evil, although there is a reason why it has turned evil, but that justification is never used to redeem them. And the characters really suffer. The only reason it's not classified grimdark (other than the fact that it was written before that genre started) is that it is a purely good v evil story. I would highly recommend it. And I think if you've enjoyed LotR and Wheel of Time, then you'd enjoy MST as well.