So watching the Screen Actors Guild Awards I have gotten to thinking about movies and television series. And naturally because of this class, my mind floated to fantasy. So what do I do? I googled fantasy. What I got were definitions almost always involving magic. Yet, in our class magic hasn't been much of a theme at all. This week's short story "The April Witch" is the only magic-related story we've read, I believe. Of course, the best known fantasy series of our age, Harry Potter, is centered on magic. However, I think fantasy doesn't always have to involve literal magic, though I think it's pretty safe to say that all fantasy is "magical".
Thoughts on magic and fantasy? Is it an essential theme? Or is it simply very common?
5 comments:
I think fantasy is magical. Magic is pretty much making unbelievable things happen with a supernatural twist. In all of our stories something unbelievable has happened, and something supernatural has usually been involved. I can see where the name comes from. The stories also tend to cast a spell over the reader.
I think that it depends on what we are looking at. It's easy to associate fantasy with fiction, but there is definitely a line between fantastical fiction and more realistic fiction. (Harry Potter vs. like, Romana Quimby or something... random I know but we've probably all at least heard of those books... nothing real fantastic there.)
I would agree that all fantasy is "magical" however, but only in the sense that it's magic is limited to the extent that it has the ability to really stimulate one's imagination.
I think that all magic has an element of fantasy in it, but not all fantasy necessarily has magic in it. They are certainly related, but I don't think that magic is essential to fantasy. High fantasy, yes (you know, elves and whatnot), but not everything.
I actually disagree that fantasy requires magic. There is a famous quote, I don't remember who said it, but I heard it when I took Andy's sci-fi class. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and then there is also the flip version that "any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology".
A good example of this is the new Sherlock Holmes movie.
An example in an high fantasy setting would be a book I read called "Havemercy". It has magic in it as well, but it mixes magic and technology by having mechanical dragons that are fueled by magic.
That quote is the third of Arthur C. Clarke's three "laws" of prediction
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