A line of thinking that has always bothered me in discussions I used to take much more seriously than I do now agitated me more in a recent encounter with it than it ever had before: the thought that fantasy is not real, therefore it can be anything. The less invested I’ve become in consuming popular culture as such, the more effectively I’ve been able to articulate my grievances with the fantasy-can-be-anything mentality, especially as it appears in online discussions about works of fantasy belonging generally to what I would consider the lower echelons of quality. The dismissive attitude that the heart of fantasy is the imagination of the author, that any criticism of a work of fantasy can be eradicated with the fact of its unreal nature, increasingly seems to me to be a last defense of the kind of art that fails to speak to anything about reality.

A culture’s view of reality shapes its fantasy. Since the vestiges of modernism in our culture have kept science on a pedestal, our fantasy increasingly depends upon a scientific, forensic sort of framing. American pop-culture’s answer to the question, “What is a giant?” for example, would likely sound something like, “A large humanoid creature.” Our culture would examine the concept of a giant through a scientifically motivated hermeneutic, setting about determining the nature of a giant as a taxonomically categorizable entity, a species with a hypothetical unique genome. “Large humanoid” may describe what a giant looks like, but it doesn’t get at the heart of what a giant usually is, that is, an embodiment of the dangerous, unconquerable forces of the primordial world. The assumption that the essence of a creature in fantasy should be its naturalistic significance is arbitrary and only elicited by a particular culturally inculcated epistemology.

In this way, much of what our culture calls “fantasy” is actually science fiction. It speculates on alternate worlds to our own in a purely naturalistic mode of thinking rather than implementing myths as explanatory instruments of reality. A rather unfortunate example of this can be found in perhaps the great titan of this modernist-consumerist variety of fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons. The cultural prominence of D&D has grown incalculably from a niche hobby for geeks, weirdos and Satanists in the 80s to a multimillion dollar franchise with a big-budget feature film and one of the most successful video games of the last few years, the latter being a perfect place to see the unfortunate elements to which I refer.

Without dignifying the game by dwelling on it unduly, a significant feature of Baldur’s Gate 3, which takes place in the world and rules of D&D, is the sensual and sexual freedom and variety afforded to players. It’s in the confines of this focus that we see the varied and imaginative races of the D&D world do not exist as archetypes or myths, but rather as arbitrarily different creatures which are fundamentally no different from humans, to the point that sexual intermingling is not only a possibility, but an expectation. Even the existence of a half-elf, a staple of D&D lore, for example, is unthinkable and even unintelligible in the sort of folklore that authors like Tolkien distilled, which ostensibly serves as inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons. In the ancient imagination, an elf is not a race or species in the sense we are inclined to think in our day. Its kind is determined through its place in a myth, not in a genetic taxonomy. Elves are related to men by their function in the world, not by evolution.

The meaning of these types and categories are irreparably altered in these popular fantasy works of today. As fascinating as I find the myths and wonderful creatures of varied folk tales, I am not too proud to admit I barely understand them. It is sufficient for this discussion, however, to understand that they have a deeper, more abstract significance even without knowing what that significance is in each case. Even Tolkien, an expert on the subject of folklore, said of his own work, “Even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are.” For a layman such as myself, most of the figures of myth are enigmas. This is, again, enough to understand that changing the approach to fantasy must somehow change its color by the addition of a modern glaze. Perhaps I am still too engrossed in a modern Western worldview to see what the color of fantasy might have been before, but it is clear that a modernist fantasy cannot stomach much mystery at all.

I think it is this detachment from the original meaning that leads to the pitiable argument that started this rant in the first place. In my view, it is not hard to move from “Fantasy can be anything you want” to “Fantasy doesn’t actually mean anything real.” A giant is not just a big jerk, he is a walking member of the deep levels of the hierarchy of nature. This is why he has analogs across all sorts of cultures and even within the same. Giants, titans, cyclopes, even Nephilim are generally united across cultures not by a naturalistic sort of connection but by their abstract signification of inexorable antiquity. A myth, fundamentally, is a statement on reality.  If a myth is constructed purely from an altering of natural details, it can only speak of reality in naturalistic terms. A modern conception of a giant can only say that the forms of life are arbitrary and interchangeable with little to no meaning beyond. The hypothetical child of a giant and any other creature would only symbolize the fluidity of genetics present in Darwinian thinking, nothing more.

This near-total to total detachment from reality may be an interesting impetus for speculation, but it often leads away from reality rather than toward it. Even the best of science fiction, whose nature, not fantasy’s, it is to speculate, does more than imagine a world different than our own, instead describing our world by logically building upon technologies and concepts that either already exist or have clear analogs in the present. John Vervaeke compellingly discusses the modern form of the zombie myth, which in my estimation commonly appears to take cues from Shelley’s Frankenstein. This connection is made apparent by the displacement of modern zombies into aesthetically medieval “high-fantasy,” as zombies are often depicted in a way that  clashes with more antique archetypes. Frankenstein’s monster is an inextricably modern product of the industrial revolution, an unnatural result of science whose ambiguous place in the mythological structure of the universe leads to a loss of meaning. When the zombie archetype is infused with this significance, it becomes largely incompatible with the medieval conceptions of the mythological world that so-called “high-fantasy” draws on, yet the naturalistic reframing that almost inevitably takes place in modern high-fantasy makes room for the modern zombie. Zombies in this frame may draw aesthetically from some pre-modern myths, but their meaning and lack of meaning is distinctly modern.

These things should seemingly not fit together, but they are evidently made to. The same or similar could be said about the apparently increasing focus on fictional technologies in otherwise medieval looking worlds of pop culture fantasy. At the steep cost of exposing my own pop-fantasy consumption, one of my favorite modern fantasy worlds, the world of Nirn from The Elder Scrolls, relies so heavily on technological fiction that the same world of dragon-slaying and swashbuckling is practically brimming with autonomous robots and aircraft. The world of Magic: The Gathering is predicated on multiverse theory, which in this case (seemingly blindly) functions as a mythological structure of the nature of reality. The resulting story is thus a fantastical fairytale of goblins and knights in shining armor that is also filled with laser guns, space aliens, and all manner of distinctly modern concepts crammed into the same space as classical ones. I contend that the lines between science fiction and fantasy are blurred aesthetically because they have been blurred meaningfully.

A startling connection appears here between the mythological structure of popular media and the culture of consumerism. Multiverse theory is a framework that couldn’t be better built for extending the lifespan of an intellectual property, which has lent a great deal to its unbelievable growth in prevalence in popular media. The theory allows for storytelling to be perfectly molded to the demands of a market, enabling branded stories to become nearly infinitely flexible to meet trends and repackage old products. The multiverse theory as a myth is painfully well-suited to carrying aging brand identities into new generations of the market. It promises to take artists and their employers across the gap from artistic integrity to limitless wealth, but the merits of this promise are dubious. The connection is of note simply for the role consumer capitalism has played in molding the myths of our day, but perhaps the rest is a discussion for another time.

To be clear, I do not mean to be too hard on this development in our cultural history. Despite the weaknesses present, it is not all bad, simply the way things are, as I see it. If it wasn’t clear already, however, I certainly have a preference for the more traditional ideas of what fantasy means, and not just for aesthetic reasons. Like so many features of our culture, the narrowness of implicitly scientistic, naturalistic cultural self-unawareness blinds the zeitgeist to the weaknesses of this development, namely, the desiccation of pre-modern sources of their teleological wisdom. Culture doesn’t generally seem capable to me of understanding itself, at least not well enough to deliberately weigh the pros and cons of cultural shifts before collectively “choosing” a direction. We can often only look back at where we used to be and course-correct after we’ve gone astray. 

In the end, just as is the case gastronomically, the average American’s artistic diet is full of junk. There’s nothing wrong with a Twinkie from time to time, but people who swap sweets for substance doom themselves to misery of body, and those who put pulp in the place of literature do the same to their minds and souls. I am hopeful that the mindlessness of consumerism and skepticism of postmodernism will soon steer culture away from empty signifiers found in the decadent and indulgent fantasy of today. Perhaps the emptiness of total “freedom” of imagination is already beginning to spark a real appreciation for truly mythical art. If a work of fantasy aspires to artistic merit, pure escapism will not suffice. Even art that yearns against reality is inevitably about reality, but only artists who understand this will be able to escape naturalistic hindrances and comment about reality cogently and edifyingly. 

All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not. – 1 Corinthians 10:23 (KJV)

But refuse profane and old wives’ fables, and exercise thyself rather unto godliness. – 1 Timothy 4:7 (KJV)