A “Spicy” Viewpoint:
The Key Difference in High and Low Fantasy
By: Roy “Takimchi” Kim
By: Roy “Takimchi” Kim
There are stories where the reader
is placed in a wholly different world that has almost no resemblance whatsoever
to ours…and then there are those that take the universe as we know it and add
in various fantasy elements. Many people that are familiar with the fantasy
genre, including myself, say that looking at the author’s world-building is the
best way to determine whether or not a story is high or low fantasy, and that the
difference between these two tags is having a completely new reality (high
fantasy) as opposed to a hybrid one (low fantasy).
Of course, this definition still
creates issues when trying to label tales as “high” or “low”. Quite a few fantasy
stories start off with the protagonist living in a perfectly normal world until
some major event causes them to discover a whole different reality. In these
cases, no matter how fantastical and detached this world seems from the other
one, I would still consider the overall story a “low fantasy” due to the fact
that a “normal, rational world” exists alongside it. This definition of high
and low fantasy would label books such as The
Last Unicorn as high fantasy and Neverwhere
as low: there is no mention of another kind of “normal” world that
resembles ours in The Last Unicorn as
opposed to in Neverwhere.
In addition to all that, low
fantasy stories tend to have a “jump” that storytellers make really very clear
to the audience that one has occurred or there’s about to be one.
Whether it’s the
protagonist falling down through a rabbit hole…
 |
| I still think Alice just ended up finding a bunch of LSD at the bottom
of that hole.
Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Alice_in_Wonderland.jpg |
…the colors up on the
movie screen changing drastically…
 |
“Was it the unrecognizable flora, the eccentric architecture, or the fact that we just went from black-and-white to color?” Source: http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/25000000/Toto-I-have-a-feeling-we-re-not-in-Kansas-anymore-toto-the-wizard-of-oz-25001749-500-311.gif |
…or a bushy-bearded
half-giant breaking down your uncle’s front door…
 |
| If you were a ten year old boy and this happened to you, you most
definitely would have lost control of your bowels. Don’t even lie. Source: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyQgqQ-dVCmCkWo-8hMgsfgJSK8NqI948c4kfn51D0BrBT4SFOkRnGPyloo44-Lj7IU3_1DYltk2gB_QWJPzqKy0JWy2QeL7zRYDcl7HYBwBz-HYN1iV_STOy_TtwIDJ50ThaJA-vMYcVy/s1600/Hagrid_by_Muenchgesang.jpg |
…you just know when shit’s about to go down. In the story of Neverwhere, this jump would be when Richard decides to help Door when she is lying on the street covered in blood, setting in motion his “disappearance” in the normal world.
A lot of us go to fantasy to escape
our daily lives right? The real life can often get a bit tedious and/or boring,
so we often just pick up a fantasy book for a little bit of fun. However I
think what type of fantasy we want to read depends on our inner desires; high
fantasy is for when people want to forget/get away from our world completely and
low fantasy is for when people want to believe that someday we will find a
rabbit hole, get an acceptance letter to Hogwarts, or, as morbid as it sounds, find
an unconscious, bloodied girl on the streets that will eventually lead us into
the world of London Below.
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But some days, you just want to live in a world where robot unicorns
exist.
Also on a completely unrelated note, if you’re bored and have a couple minutes (or hours) to spare, check out this absolutely beautiful flash game! |
You seem to get more comfortable with the informality of the blogging voice as you go on, Roy, but one thing that doesn't quite surface is a concrete sense of WHY Beagle's novel, _The Last Unicorn_ , is clearly a world apart from our own. And how is it clear in that text that "the shit is about to go down"? If world-building really is the key thing to your way of thinking, actually showing some specific examples of world-building from the salient texts is really what you should be doing.
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