My brother makes fun of me for reading fantasy novels. I’ll gasp after a page turn and he’ll say, “What, did a one-eyed elf use the magic sword of Fordmotoria to wipe his ass?”
Let him mock, I say. I have thought about this a great deal, and I have come to the conclusion that nerds read fantasy as a form of wish fulfillment. For us it’s all about the wizards. The wizards are always physically weak, highly intelligent loners whom nobody else likes or trusts. And of course so are the nerds.
But the crucial difference is here: In this world, when we are abused for being different there is nothing we can do. We are impotent.
In the world of fantasy novels, we can call down fire from the heavens and burn our enemies alive.
The problem is that the book always ends. Somebody always looks off into the distance to watch the dragons fly away or pulls the hood over his head as he steps into the shadow of the woods or sits back down from stoking the fire and picks his pipe up again, whereas we have to go to school the next day. I don’t see how Columbine and Virginia Tech were a surprise to anybody.
Have you seen the BBC series Merlin? Exactly what you’re talking about, with added gay undertones.
Three words: World of Warcrack-er…Warcraft. Be all that you can be. *snort*
Hmm . . knowing your brother slightly, I would have pegged him for a fan of fantasy.
Wizards weren’t physically weak in the books I gravitated towards. Everyone was mostly buff AND magical in all the Piers Anthony books I loved, and the Roger Zelazny ones as well. But definitely the allure of magic powers to a nerdy kid was like literary crack.
I’m 28, and still play Dungeons and Dragons. With a bunch of people who have Doctorates. They are successful, a couple are independently wealthy, and none have felt like victims (in the sense you’re describing, anyway,) in years. The issue becomes, after a time, that we have to look at our weakness as a strength of its’ own sort, after while. We may not have muscle, but we’re wily.
Really, nerds always supply the best lines at the end of the day. I mean, how many times did you hear the blatantly unoriginal “Hey, fagboy!” at school? And how many of those times did you quip back something biting (and utterly new under the sun,) that other people found breathtakingly funny? Intelligent people always win. The unattractive, somewhat smelly, stupid squibs, however? Those guys/girls I always worried about. YOU ARE NOT ONE OF THEM.
By the way, what does happen when a one-eyed elf uses the sword of Fordmotoria to wipe his ass? Besides bleeding, I mean.
Given incidents like Virginia Tech, perhaps it’s a good thing that many of us turn our anger inward. I personally have never seen the appeal of outward aggression, and that’s probably lucky for my classmates.
I also think a deeper appeal of both fantasy and science fiction (I read mainly the latter) is that the universes they portray contain a subtle moral difference from ours: the forces of good should prevail over the forces of evil. This is not to say that good always prevails — for example, in a dystopia, it doesn’t — but when it does not, that is clearly a tragedy. There is righteous indignation. In the real world, by contrast, too often evil prevails and everyone is either indifferent or cynically resigned.
In fantasy or sci-fi, though, at least one person always cares whether good wins.
Sorry to leave such a long comment. I’ve thought about this a great deal too.
In the hard sci-fi I used to read, I realized I loved it because it almost always contained heroism of one sort or another. I’m hooked on uplifting tales where good ultimately triumphs; it gives me hope. (But for whatever reason, I never got into fantasy.)
In the hard sci-fi I used to read, I realized I loved it because it almost always contained heroism of one sort or another. I’m hooked on uplifting tales where good ultimately triumphs; it gives me hope. (But for whatever reason, I never got into fantasy.)