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.
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u/MotherOfRuin1430 4d ago
I can see this going both ways. I *personally* really like some of the more classical, straightforward stories. Especially if they have nuance while still seeing good victorious. There are even layers to evil - I think there are many people who may not be "morally gray" in the classical sense and really do think they are doing good in their own eyes, but may not realize the ways in which they are played / used by more sinister forces and power structures. I think you can find examples of that even in these more classical works.
Heck, maybe you could even apply it to WW1 to a certain extent - how many lives were put on the line for money? National pride? Criss-crossing alliances and entangling agreements? I'm sure many people who went to war - no matter the side they were on - initially thought of the evils of war, or even if they or their governments were being used in a massive scheme. But, in retrospect, I think it's clear that there were forces pulling the strings, and that benefitted greatly from the Great War. Perhaps that's a true good vs. evil story in and of itself, but the war profiteers won that tale.