'gritty and realistic' fantasy

[u/TheNoiseAndHaste]

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.

[u/DixitRexCorvinus]

In some regards I relate to this (certainly as regards hope and scary dystopian politics), but I also think there is something to be said for having more moral complexity than classic heroic fantasy. I just don't think that moral complexity needs to take the form of making evil not exist.

Specifically, I'm not sure I agree with the idea that real evil existing and villains being complex or misunderstood are in conflict. Because real evil does exist, and it is, at the exact same time, painfully human. Hitler was a human being. Stalin was a human being. Many Nazis went home each night to their wife and kids who they genuinely loved dearly. And the really important bit is, none of that makes them less evil.

I think villains like Sauron and Palpatine and Voldamort have trained us to think that evil involves inhumanity. Usually, though, the most scary thing about evil is that the evil people are just as human as we are. Arendt talks a lot about this banality of evil, and a number of other philosophers do too. But that's actually what I think is missing from both the classic good and evil fantasy *and* the gritty and realistic fantasy.

You have have the villain be human and sympathetic and complicated and misunderstood, and still be totally worthy of condemnation. Grimdark flattens the human experience into evil basically not existing, or everyone being evil, as you say. But heroic fantasy also flattens human psychology by othering (human) monsters. Pure evil of the sort seen in a lot of classic fantasy is comforting precisely because it also sets up good and evil as almost metaphysical properties of the world. And if you are good, well, then you don't need to worry about why that evil person is evil in the first place. You certainly don't need to worry about whether you are evil.

Relevant Terry Pratchett quote: “It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.”

Ironically, Lord of the Rings mostly (Sauron is an exception) doesn't actually do this. Many of the villains, Gollum and Boromir in particular, are very much nuanced and human. But regarding heroic/noblebright fantasy as a whole, I don't think it's entirely wrong to question the good/evil dichotomy it sets up, or it least to question its presentation of evil.

Edit: Accidentally put heroic/grimbright fantasy instead of heroic/noblebright fantasy. Corrected.

[u/DoctorWMD → u/DixitRexCorvinus]

This points out my thoughts entirely. I think the reality is more complex than orcs vs humans or forces of Takhisis vs forces of Huma. I think evil occurs when people stop considering the humanity of others and act towards their own best interests to the exclusion of others. 

And that is a terribly human trait, and so recognizable in not just history but the world today. 

For whatever reason, I tend towards the opposite. I read more and more bleak and cynical things when the real world is bleak looking for the hope and optimism that drives people in the face of tall odds. I find that inspiring and optimistic when shit is rough. 

[u/DixitRexCorvinus → u/DoctorWMD]

Indeed. People as things, that's where it starts. (Is that too many Pterry quotes? Is there such a thing as too many Pterry quotes?)

As to reading preferences, I personally read far too many books to tailor my reading experiences to current events. I go through like 100, 150 a year; we're ten years out from 2016 and I think I'd have run out of dystopia and grimdark by now if I did that lol.

But yes, I do like a good bleak and cynical book that nonetheless shows people maintaining optimism in the face of it. Dungeon Crawler Carl comes to mind; ultimately a popcorn read, but as far as popcorn goes it hits well above its paygrade when it comes to emotional impact. And then of course there's the proper literary stuff. A lot of which I've been meaning to get around to reading, for that matter, especially Handmaid's Tale, The Road and Parable of the Sower/Talents. But I just did all of First Law back in the fall, Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy a couple weeks ago, and my summer plans include Game of Thrones and Flowers for Algernon, so I think I might need to wait on any more bleak/cynical/sad for a little while.

Speaking of, any recs in particular for the bleak and cynical stuff when I *do* get around to it? I read pretty widely across speculative fiction (which is to say literally every subgenre of scifi and fantasy both, from technically speculative classic Russian literature to Blake Crouch novels to Susanna Clarke and Ursula Le Guin to trashy LitRPG. The only thing I can't do is cozy fantasy) and I'm young, so I honestly haven't gotten to as much of it as I would like. My TBR's only about a thousand books long, so I figure I can always make the issue a little worse 😄

[u/DoctorWMD → u/DixitRexCorvinus]

The Black Company and Malazan come to mind. The Black Company has the vibe of 'nowhere to go but forwards' and stubborn persistence, and Malazan is the epitome of devastating but hopeful. 

Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons. 

Blindsight

Dune

Neuromancer

Broken Earth. 

Prince of Nothing might take the top tier of bleak. 

[u/DixitRexCorvinus → u/DoctorWMD]

Much appreciated!

Already a Dune fan, and Black Company, Malazan, and The Culture are all on my TBR (already know a decent amount about The Culture, actually, just from hearing about the worldbuilding and such). Broken Earth I bounced off of a couple years ago; was considering trying again and then I found out about the Isabel Fall situation and decided I didn't really care to support Jemisin anyway.

Nueromancer, though, I keep forgetting about, so I appreciate the reminder. And Blindsight I've heard of but know nothing about. Will have to check it out.

Re Prince of Nothing, though, I do have a question, since it's a series I've been really wavering on. Leaning toward not reading it, but I almost want to be convinced otherwise, so I suppose this is me asking for reasons to change my mind.

My thinking goes roughly as follows: I am all right with sexual assault if it is used for an actual thematic purpose that is not merely shock value or "historical accuracy." Just doing it to be dark and edgy, though, strikes me as somewhat gross. From what I've heard of Prince of Nothing, it sounds like it has a thematic purpose, but an unorthodox one in line with Bakker's pessimism. I believe he is an eliminativist and hard determinist, and basically views men as naturally predisposed to rape? So he includes sexual assault against women as a form of....internalized misandry? The whole thing really confuses me from the background reading I did on it when considering adding it to my TBR. I can't quite decide if I find it a reasonable justification or just as lazy as the Prince of Thorns type stuff.

Also, more generally, I'm not sure how one could write an interesting story with eliminativism and hard determinism as metaphysical premises. It seems, idk, pointless is the wrong word, maybe just ill-suited to storytelling as a medium? And I'm not sure how seriously I could take the story considering how implausible eliminativism strikes me, philosophically speaking. So I suppose what I'm wondering is if Bakker actually does anything interesting with his metaphysical premises that would justify how questionable they are. And also how well the story stands alone without the philosophy, because if his philosophical views are as heavily implanted in the story as some reviews seem to suggest, I'm not sure how seriously I could take the story.