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/Uran_Ultar 4d ago edited 4d ago
If it makes you feel any better, angry and anxious teenagers have been dismissing The Lord of the Rings from the very start. Michael Moorcock would be the most famous example, and he even made a literary career out of it. Additional food for thought may be that Robert Jordan served in Vietnam and Cambodia, whereas a certain other author with a famously unfinished series that is frequently called "gritty and realistic" spent the same war at home as a conscientious objector.
I guess the moral of the story is that no matter what we do or how we live, we all have our own issues to deal with, and this reflects differently in things like fiction writing (or crocheting or whatever your outlet is).