Fantasy, Imagination, Fiction.

There are these two distinctions that I wanna turn my mind onto. One is imagination vs. fantasy. The other is fiction vs. non-fiction.

There are a couple delineations between imagination and fantasy, that of course, all depend on our definitions of them and our point of view.

Like, in my mind - which I'm sure has been affected by others' writings way more than an arrogant moron would be willing to accept - imagination founds and expands itself on reality, whereas fantasy is the reduction of our willingness to bend reality to fit our imagination in it. I got no fucking clue what I mean by it, but you'll get it. 

You imagine your ex getting hit by a bus, you imagine your supervisor found mauled by pigs, you imagine getting a small raise that you're definitely worth, just fkn ask for it.

On the contrary, you fantasise about Selena Gomez watching your ex getting hit by a bus right besides you, you fantasise about your supervisor getting mauled by flying pigs spitting fireballs, you fantasise about making rent.

Fantasy embraces imagination. But as the Ethnographical Questionnaire has shown us, fantasy can be systematised, it does not consider imagination to be one of its core elements. Anymore. You can create modelised worlds, and further remodelise and reduce them to dice rolls, make them serve a story. Which further serves brand identities and marketing practices if DnD has anything to show for itself for the past decade.

We could ask whether this is anyone's fault, or if Tolkien served a world with a couple stories (he actually served a language, and a whole debate of which one takes precedence, the language or the world, can spark from this, but shut the fuck up, this is not what we're discussing now). We could delve into the rabbit hole that is the existence of imagined worlds outside the confines of the stories told about them, and we could very much arrive at a stalemate because there will always be this Descola-loving PoMo oaf that actually has read tons of literature but has never had to work to realise the inherent defeatism within the ontological turn. We will not do any of these.

Instead, we will stretch this distinction between the imagined and the fantasised towards the realms of fiction and non-fiction.

Intuitively, innately, instinctually, we know the difference between these two to be something akin to: well, fiction is a non-historical, or non-systematised story that the author narrates to have happened, be happening, or that will happen, whereas non-fiction is more often than not, not a story but a systematised argument, the textual description of an empirical study, and when it is too a story, it's one exclusively based on empirical historical study of archives, textual or not, material or not.*

Of course, there are texts that walk the line between these. Camus has done great work, even if I despise him politically, mufucka was good. There are people that will consider Kafka, Proust, Goddard, and even Tolkien at times to depict concealed philosophies under the pretense of telling a story. I will humbly disagree. We can interpret texts however the fuck we like to, and the basis of our interpretation may very well be sound af. This doesn't mean the authors intended to communicate their arguments about anything. It doesn't mean they didn't intend that either. The whole basis of textual analysis is hyper-reading, but we're talking genres here. And I believe that genres are quite well-defined even if a lot of works - most of them - completely and correctly disregard these definitions. No, Derrida has no literary value. He's just attractively obnoxious.

Where non-fiction happens under an array of systems of logic and argumentation, fiction has no such demands. It's stories. And stories, as all history takes place in a time and a space. Fantasy fiction adds one more axis to this continuum; that of imagination. To the degree that we can systematise the study of space and time, through cliometrics, positivist sociology, or even the afore-mentioned questionnaire, we can systematise fantasy. To the degree that fiction is history (or sociology, or psychology, or whatever) plus imagination, we can pinpoint the point on the imagination axis where each fantasy work takes place, as we more often than not, can pinpoint the point in space and time where it's positioned. Is there need to do so? Of course not. I'm just saying that some STEM bipedal diarrhea of a human will set out to do so just because they cannot process critical thinking not even as a concept.

It is a common saying that Tolkien set out to write a mythology. He largely succeeded of course, which is astonishing if one thinks that we're not talking about some Renaissance scholar but about a guy that was probably headbanging to Led Zeppelin. On that matter, we need to make explicit that Middle Earth is not some exoplanet or some fantastical history timeline.

Middle Earth is Earth at a different imagination point.

Gravity exists, love happens, the sun rises and sets, water quenches thirst, and Lurtz is a beefcake.** This existence and a priori acceptance of natural laws, this familiarity of us with them and language-based magic on top, is what makes fantasy identifiable as every story needs to be. Nolan's movies are masterpieces, but have you ever asked any single person that has gone through any semblance of therapy whether they can identify with any one of his characters or not? Nolan makes movies. Astounding pieces of cinema that dissect concepts through genealogies. We tell stories of characters. We entice, enthrall, and hold the mirror up.

Fiction genres do not only move through space, time, and imagination. They also - to a degree - predetermine the manner in which they relate to the actual world and history around us, and as a result of that, the process through which we mould the projections of our identities onto them. I know I'm not Garrosh Hellscream. And it makes me sad. But why does it make me sad? How do I project myself upon such awful writing as Warcraft nowadays has to the extent that I allow it to make me sad?

I will put three grand genres to the lens here. Fantasy, high, epic, or low, whatever, historical fiction, and science fiction/opera. Their blends are of course, well within the scope of this discussion but let us take these enormous reductions as a given for the sake of hoping that this rant will at some point, end. What does each genre say about the processes of our projections?

I believe, with no argumentation or conscious basis behind this claim, fuck you, that we shape our identification through escapism, anachronism, and appropriation respectively.

Fantasy is built upon the ruins of empires. The Trojan War, the fall of the Roman Empire, the Arthurian virtues, Kislev, Pelennor Fields, the Dragon Republic, Nilfgaard, and al-Qadim all contain history altering events. The timeline breaks, people revolt, fight, bleed, death brings ruin, and ruin rises and is rebuilt into something either more or less in step with our societies and values. But something does crumble, and something is built. Of course, fantasy also thrives in the liminalities of these things. We may witness the process of rebuilding per se, we may martyr in the slow crumbling, or carouse in the ruins. But events do happen, we recognise them, and we are content with our inaction. Our ideologies do not matter in the course of these histories. And this is what escapism ultimately is. A relief, a respite, a grove where ideology goes to slumber until we are asked to do something with fantasy itself. But in the end, we have identified with it, we have found ourselves in fantasy, we can do something with it.

Anachronism is the simplest of them all. It's the simple practice of putting something out of time, casting it back to make the past more familiar to the present. It's the great anathema of historians, avoiding its allure is the Holy Grail of anthropology, and its use is the grandest selling point of a historical fiction novel. Of fucking course Darius did not talk like a 1910s Englishman. What does it fucking matter? It's much cooler and much easier to depict him as if he did. This is what distinguishes history from historical fiction. Anachronisms offer the author the comfort that they do not need to historically educate their audience in the vast bibliography surrounding their era of choice, and it offers solace to the reader that they will not only understand but also identify with the narrated events. Good, historically informed historical fiction offers journeys, feeds the imagination information that it would otherwise not even fathom their existence. Bad historical fiction nurtures nationalism, breeds hate. Saying that the Ancient Greeks had algebra is an anachronism that puts the Islamic world at a massive loss. Using this anachronism to write a novel about Pythagorean numerology and a love sextet between his students, is doing something artistic with anachronism and inviting the reader to discover ancient Sicilia by means of "you know what fucking algebra is, read about "3-6-9, damn you're fine" in classical Greece, that's all I'm saying".

Appropriation is a harder nut to crack. 40k is Thatcherism going for broke against ultraviolent mushrooms, Star Trek has been criticised as being the wet dream of the British Empire, Star Wars is what happens to cool stories when you grow up as a hippie Protestant and let half-assed ideas to inform your ethics (and then people actually do something inspired with it - the Old Republic is the real Star Wars - and then Disney buys it and back into a shitfest we go), and Dune has huge, disgusting worms and I will never read it, ew. But what matters is that given SF/SO's need for the non-human, we can only appropriate created worlds that have been breathed life so as to make them identifiable. Aliens have human forms, they talk, they either feel or use human-created systems of logic. I still miss HK47. Planets have atmospheres, time passes, gravity needs to exist in varying degrees. We need SF/SO works to remind us of home because the journey is a long way from that. We do not set out to discover or describe. We are there to explain, utilise, appropriate. There is an actual planet where it rains glass. We'd rather have one more Coruscant. It's easier to have stuff happen on it. It's more familiar, identification becomes easier. And what we cannot identify with, we explain under our own biases and predispositions. We appropriate.

To end this shitfest of a text; why did I write all this. Because I wanted to. Fuck outta here. Fiction matters. Even if its stories absolutely fucking suck at times, even these messes say something about us. Go read. 

*: We say "exclusively" as the genre of historical fiction does exist, it can produce masterpieces but it must not, to the degree that we can tell it's an imagined story, be utilised as a historical source, merely historically informed, and definitely, not a source.

**: What do these say about the existence of black elves or women taking first roles? Nothing. You absolute fucking moron. They say nothing. Black elves are not the issue with Rings of Power. The capitalist shitheads in California casting their putrid shadows upon immaculate works of art and spitting their poison upon holy words is. Rings of Power is an awful pile of dung thrown upon literature not because of black elves but in spite of them. Black elves are cool. as. fuck.