So for some reason last night I was really craving some shoddy B-Fantasy, to the point where I would have been willing to do embarrassing things to get my hands on a Mercedes Lackey...
What's that? B-Fantasy? Oh, it's the same concept as B-movies - formulaic, low production value, flat characters - just with fantasy literature. Basically, what normal people think of when they think of fantasy, with the teenage protagonist who has to save the world from the Dark Lord and runs all over the countryside learning magic and eating stew. Etc.
Anyway, since all I brought with me to my apartment was some beautiful magic realism and some weird children's genre-benders, I was stuck. See, books are like food. Sometimes you want to go out to a fancy restaurant for steak and shrimp alfredo, or whatever you order (that actually sounds really good right now...) and sometimes you just want to heat up some Kraft mac and cheese in the microwave, because that's what you grew up on, and even if as an adult it disgusts you intellectually, and you can't bear to read the list of ingredients, it just tastes so bad, but so good.
But since I didn't have any to read, I started listing and categorizing and researching to try and pin down what makes B-Fantasy B-Fantasy. Because apparently when I want mindless entertainment, I have to analyze it.
I started doing a little research, and here are my findings thus far. Mostly is it some half-assed hypotheses and some Wikipedia trawling, but I intend to reasearch the matter further, I really do.
B-Fantasy was inspired by Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (1954), and augmented by LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy (1968). From LOTR we get the epic quest, magical macguffin, underdog hero, and Dark Lord. After Earthsea, the protagonist is allowed to use magic, and magic becomes institutionalized. However, many other aspects of Eathsea, such as the protagonist aging, did not catch on. The first Dungeons and Dragons manual was published in 1974, which codified the Fantasyland setting and rules for the narrative. This I need to look into further, but currently I blame D&D for making every fantasyland need 3races+2 - elf/dwarf/human, and two of the author's own creation; usually one of the extras is evil, and the other is unimportant to the plot. No one besides Tolkien wrote about the elves until D&D! (needs fact-checking)
1977 saw The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks, and also the Star Wars movie. I try not to mix fantasy and scifi, but Star Wars has the traditional epic narrative wth the whiny hero that all B-Fantasy uses, and is a potential forerunner. Shannara had 3races+2, and all the trappings of LOTR, except instead of quiet little middle-aged hobbit protagonist, it had a dopey teenage male protagonist, likely in reflection of the anticipated audience. It is also serialized; while Tolkien stopped with a trilogy, a prequel, and a manual, if Brooks isn't dead then he's still writing to this day.
Now we come to the 80's, which is the birth of B-Fantasy proper. David Eddings, I kid you not, saw the emerging market and decided to jump on it for the money - literally, created a formula and cranked out books for profit. He ditched the races (though they still remained prevalent elsewhere), instead creating a multiracial and paradoxically racially uniform world of humans (everyone of every race is the same as each other member of the race), and added meddlesome deities. Also, the hero is allowed, in fact required, to use magic. There is also the annoying crossdressing spunky princess love-interest. Like Leia but less badass. Oh, and she hooks up with the teenage protagonist.
1983 - Tamora Pierce sees the spunky crossdressing redhead princess and decides that she needs her own story, thus bringing about the start of feminist fantasy that tries too hard. Also the practice of making fantasyland be America with a medieval veneer, though Eddings hinted at that with Sendaria and I can't believe I remember the name of that country. Hero's homeland, go figure. Also has institutionalized magic (school of magecraft and blah blah), rather than random wizards who just float around organically to make plot things happen. Wizards become working-class.
1984, ten years after the first Dungeons and Dragons manual was published, the Dragonlance series is born. It was based off of a D&D campaign. No, honestly, it was. We have races, we have quests, we have institutionalized magic and meddlesome deities. For the most part, they do ditch the dopey farmboy, replacing him with the naive warrior, who is supposed to be all troubled and dark, but is really just naive and angsty. Also, the focus is more on the quest group than any one hero. It still has very black-and-white morality.
In 1987 Mercedes Lackey published her first book. So here we have feminist fantasy, and clique fantasy. I have to backtrack a little for that. In 1967, Anne McCaffery started the Dragonriders of Pern series. So we have a special clique of people with special powers whose job is basically to be heroes. This solves the problem of how to keep having the same person solve all the problems; it's their job, because they are telepathically linked to a magical critter. Because that totally makes sense.
Now we come to the 90's, which may be the Golden Age of B-Fantasy. Most of these series started in the 80's, but gained momentum throughout the decade and eventually came to dominate the 90's. There was still some very original stuff in the 80's - Kushner's Swordspoint, Diana Wynne Jones's everything, Suzette Hardin Elgin's Ozark Trilogy about a planet that was colonized by the South and people who ride flying Mules (it's good stuff). In 1990, however, Robert Jordan published the first book in The Wheel of Time.
What did WoT do that other books didn't? It's basically the same setup as Eddings' Belgariad. Teenage farmboy whisked away from his home by a wizard, told it is his destiny by birth to save the world from the newly reawakened Dark Lord, oh yeah and he has magic powers. All I can say is that Jordan made it bigger (800 pages per volume, minimum), he made it better (the world at least makes slightly more sense and is more memorable than Eddings'), and he made it with love. He kept writing even when he was dying, because he loved those books so damn much. And I can tell you a hundred things that make the books awful (don't call me on that, please), but I can at least understand why they are so loved.
Lately, however, there has been a mainstream movement away from B-Fantasy. Conflicts have become less idealistic, between the innocent and the Evil, and more political, between the jaded older warriors and the forces of society - kind of like the teenage hero grew up. I won't be able to say much about George R. R. Martin, because I haven't been able to get through more than three chapters, but I think he is the key to this movement. The current generation of writers grew up on B-Fantasy, and are too jaded with it in today's society.
Other books like David Anthony Durham's Acacia (2007) have similar political orientations - I can't talk much about this one either because I ran into the same problem as Martin, though in Durham's case the last straw was not "I don't know which of these characters I'm supposed to care about" (though there was an element of that) and more "That is the stupidest fencing lesson I have ever read." Then there are more direct criticisms such as E.E. Knight's Age of Fire series (2002), which is basically what Wicked did to Oz, only to Dragonlance. Sure, there are still throwbacks like Eragon (2002), but the mainstream voice of fantasy is shifting from a teenage coming-of-age quest to multiperspective stories of human conflict. Though in fact this sort of storytelling started in the 80's as well, with the Mannerpunk movement started by Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint. It did not gain momentum until just recenty, though.
And of course there are all the little splinter genres like Feminist Fantasy, which I touched on a little, and Queer Fantasy (people say that fantasy is really homophobic, but I think that the fantasyland setting actually makes it easier to include gay characters without stigma; again I point to Swordspoint), and I've already ranted about Dragonrider Fantasy, which is actually a subcategory of Animal Companion Fantasy or perhaps as a genre rather than a device, it would fit better under Heroic Clique Fantasy - you have this world where there is this institution of heroes, be they dragonriders or Jedi or what have you, and every book/trilogy is about a different one whose turn it is to save the kingdom/world/continent. Then there's the Supernatural Ensemble, which I'm not sure belongs in fantasy proper - technically its roots are in horror.
But right now, I still just want to read a magic pony story.
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