The seed of this world I planted a long time ago. But as it goes, or as I go, it wasn’t enough to have a world with some cool stuff in it.
Getting into the theory of what causes the reader to experience the fantastic has taken quite a bit of reading around this question: “what is fantasy”? Getting into the philosophical side of what defines the genre of fantasy was unexpected but inevitable. From my reading so far, I have settled on the following definition of fantasy.
Fantasy or being in a state of the fantastic is a point of indecision or moments of uncertainty where the reader or the protagonists can not decide or decipher what is happening to them. No mention of dragons yet. The point is that fantasy is not the suspension of belief but an inability to believe or explain what is happening using the known rules of a world. Readers or protagonists tend to exit the fantastic into “the uncanny” or “the marvelous.” What is essential is a heightened state of being unable to explain or believe.
That fantasy is not dependent on dragons, magic, and epic battles for crowns and land works rather well for me. Weirdly the last decade has been a media onslaught of fantastical headlines. I have continually wondered, “Is this really happening?” followed by “which exit do I take?… do I choose news or satire?” Each time I choose an exit, I move ever closer to the idea that maybe the truth never existed in the way I thought it did.
So I am going to run with this definition of fantasy:
Arousing a state of fantasy in the reader or protagonists will hinge entirely upon their inability to explain what is happening to them or around them using known laws. Potential explanations will either be supernatural, uncanny, marvelous, or weird.
What I am most interested in is: Conceptualizing a fantasy world with an exciting spin on ideas of truth, power, race, magic, and…. farming. Yes, farming. I don’t know HOW I will set all of this against the backdrop of agriculture, but I will. Ultimately the goal is to stay away from a fantasy story of war and violence. Worlds with texture, depth, and philosophical ideation feel more compelling.
The Eternal Believer
Mountains and caves in Llyria are place of power and magic. Grottos and natural caverns are especially powerful.
Interesting questions are: How do you build people together when those people have rejected the idea of a shared truth entirely? How do these people live alongside people who are still fully convinced that truth can and must exist? What happens when a raceless society comes into contact with communities that believe in racial equality but haven’t yet come to terms with racial impurity? Is it better to find common ground in the five senses and the body, or is it better to create common ground using ideology? Can how we relate to the land influence how we think about power? How important is it to have power over the subtle unseen cultural and social forces if you seek power over others? Could living beings create a system of living that doesn’t depend on those beings, being at the top of the system? How important are “rational” ideas like love, morality, or ethics? How is our “need” to believe weaponized into the tools of division by those seeking power? How do we transcend the bodies’ limits to close the gap between the separateness of “you” and “me”? Is money really so terrible? Is eternal romantic love an illusion that needs to be rethought? What does intimacy look like if there is no romantic love? What does a society that holds the ability to be uncertain as more important than the ability to be sure look like?
The Eternal Believer
In Llyria,the situating of power inside large earthly forms, binds the idea of power to the land.
My own status as a person of very mixed heritage makes me think a lot about: What happens to a society with no racial or cultural history? What happens when racial impurity forces people into a state of otherness? How do they understand themselves? Will we still use visual cues to easily represent who we are as raceless people? On what basis or commonality do people who have no shared history come together?
Our current decades are very much about racial equality. Still, there is a growing number of people for whom the word race is incomprehensible from the perspective of: “having” a race. I don’t have a race. My experience of the idea of race is simply one of “absence.” I do not have this thing. There is no story of my race. There is no cultural history of my people. If my people are other mixed-race people, then we simply exist as a nondescript collection of otherness. Always the other but never the thing itself. There is nothing to belong to or identify with. It is easy to say that mixed-race people get to choose from multiple cultures, but that misses the point that we are excluded from the cultural identities that we choose. At best, we are honorary members; even in the current discussions on equal representation in the media, we are missing. We are invisible. The world is still very much caught up in the idea of race and racial equality rather than racelessness. Diversity of race is not the same as racelessness. Being in a room full of mixed-race people might be pretty unnerving in that no one would look like they are from anywhere specific. Yet, those are the only people I belong to. But what is there to belong to other than “otherness.” How would I know who I belong to without some sort of visual cue? I wonder if I can tell a fantasy story that also deals with this idea of racial otherness vs. racial purity?
My next steps are to fully understand how to create “the experience of the fantastic” for the protagonists and find a way to use farming and agriculture as a subtext that works well with ideas of “power over,” truth, and certainty. And, of course, the magic system needs to be worked out.
I am currently leaning towards a world with several magic systems. (two at least) One system will be the standard chaos magic system. And the other will be a sort of collaborative magic system where several people must engage, or there is no magic. The third is a little harder to explain. Still, I want to do something with the idea of uncertainty and unknowing and use an ability to not know as the crux of this third magic system.