Alexis Currie on "What's the Difference?"

What’s the difference?

By Alexis Currie 

In order to assign definitions and compare high vs. low fantasy, we can take a gander at the Monomyth. The 17 stages presented in Joseph Campbell’s are all accurate happenings of actually events in fantasy. However, I have noticed that all the stories we have read seem to skip a few of the steps. I have been able to see the cliché stage such as call to adventure, supernatural aid, and belly of the whale in all the stories we have read fantasy or not, but the stages like master of the two worlds and refusal to return are harder to spot out without questioning if the scene qualifies. I’m not pointing these aspects out to disagree with the Monomyth, but if any reader takes the time to analyze a fantasy reading with the Monomyth in hand, they will see this too. 

No fantasy story has a plot without a direction. By this I mean that if a story did not have a call to adventure there wouldn’t be a story. Supernatural aid is a given. What would Cinderella be without her fairy godmother? Personally, the belly of the whale is my favorite part in every story. Sometimes this is the stage where the toughest characters become the weak as they are fully exposed to the unknown. I continue to question the credibility of master of the two worlds because in the stories I have read I wouldn’t be able to accurately point out this point. This could be due to obliviousness. In my high fantasy reading The Last Unicorn the main character, on a journey to find her other unicorn companions, a unicorn herself, was turned into a human at one point in the story. This is the perfect set up to the master of both worlds stage. When this scene started expected the girl to become a badass heroine! By the end of her journey she has been turned back into a unicorn. Yeah, she learned how it felt to love and empathize, but that’s about it.  Well, these are important things to experience that she would not have been able to experience being a unicorn, but she didn’t do anything that would qualify her as an extraordinary human. To say she was a master of the two worlds would be an extreme over statement. When I examine Neverwhere, we can see a better representation of this stage. Richard is able to acquire hero status in Below London. He set out to protect Door, and did just that. The only problem is that he was an insignificant person in Above London. An office job and a fiancé is all Richard had in above London. Why Richard may be considered a master of Below London, he was far from a master in his own world.

Sarah LaPolla described low fantasy as, “high fantasy, but slouched down in the seat, holding the steering wheel with one hand, and wearing sunglasses.” I’ll see her and raise her by stating that my definition of low fantasy is the older brother of high fantasy who wants to become a rapper instead of a doctor, even though he has wasted his parents in med school, they still love him. I hope you understand. Sometimes I feel like low fantasy isn’t given the respect that it deserves. High fantasy can switch from one unexplainable event to another, but its okay because it’s high fantasy. Low fantasy can be seen as a story that took a wrong turn and became fantasy by accident given the constant crossing in between worlds. However, high and low fantasies aren’t much different from one another. The only distinct difference I can see is in what kind of a world the story develops in, one comparable to reality or one completely made up. Other than that, high and low fantasy are related, one wears capes and cat ears to school while the other one wears khakis a blue shirt to school.