But I like Andrea’s remark about three-dimensional characters moving through a two-dimensional landscape. But it goes the other way, too—two (or one) dimensional characters moving through a three-dimensional landscape. And several variations thereof. We’re talking about a mismatch here, and maybe that’s directly because of writers not paying attention to consequences.

1. I’m not sure that all that many folk tales, historically, have been of the hero-saves-the-maiden type. Certainly that’s what most of us grow up with (thanks to Disney) but when I go back and reread, say, Grimms’, what I am struck with is the enormous variety of stories and heroes and arcs and how impoverished we are relatively speaking. Where’s Tom Thumb, Thumbelina, Iron Harry, the Seven Swans? (In the latter the heroINE spent six years in complete silence and sacrificed her three eldest children, and nearly her life, to save her brothers.)

Also, reading them, I did not get a real struggling-for-autonomy feeling. What I got was the randomness-of-evil feeling, the despair-of-helplessness feeling, the necessity-of-sacrifice feeling, but not much about autonomy. In those days I would speculate that true autonomy would be fatal, not liberating, because people were so interdependent and the costs of failure were so high. Autonomy is, practically speaking, a luxury of the 21st century lifestyle in the developed world, an outgrowth of prosperity, specialization of labour and various political freedoms. I doubt it would have meant anything to the widow’s son.

2. “Politics” doesn’t mean “party politics.” Politics, broadly defined, means who has power, why, and what they can do with it. As Ursula le Guin said, it’s impossible to have an apolitical novel (all societies, right down to the level of the family, have some people who are legitimized to wield power over others), and those works that have the loudest political voice are often the ones that claim to be apolitical (often exactly because they claim to be apolitical and don’t examine the consequences of the claims they make or the society they set up).

Doesn’t it seem weird to you? Fantasy is so bloody monolithic. If it’s a good king, only bad guys disagree with him; if it’s a bad king, it’s the good guy who’s out to send him toppling. Where are reasonable people who disagree? Where are the rebels and revolutionaries, the heretics and freethinkers? Where’s William Blake, Christine de Pizan, Martin Luther? When the Inquisition appears and starts burning people at the stake, what are they really after? Why? Where are the cults, the new sects, the break-off religions, the communes, the refugees, the migrants, the despised immigrants? Where are the veterans of the holy wars? Why don’t they have PTSD? There’s never been a human society without these people, yet in fantasy literature they are almost completely absent.

I’ve often read that fantasy literature “works” when everything but the magic is kept as realistic as possible. Well, societies in fantasy literature are often just plain not realistic. You end up with three-dimensional characters travelling through a two-dimensional world. Whether it’s lazy or reactionary, the end result is still a world that legitimizes and glorifies the absolute power of one person over everyone else by refusing to examine the costs of such a system.

A point I’d like to add though is that I’ve always half-thought that an interesting way to analyze any kind of epic, be it fantasy or SF, is to think of the story not as an interaction between individuals in an imagined world, but as conflict between parts of the self belonging to the author.

For Tolkien to have successfully presented orcs as violent, petty and destructive, some part of him must have understood that humans can find delight in those things. ‘Orcery’ was a part of Tolkien at some level, just as elvishness and entishness must have been too. As such, tLotR can be thought of as a personal battle, a playing out of ideas concerning behavior, values and morals.

In tLotR the morals and values associated with men, hobbits, ents, elves and dwarfs triumph (in a Pyrrhic sort of way), not because this particular belief-structure destines a faction to ‘win’, or because it inherently makes a faction more likely to win, but because Tolkien had already concluded in his own mind that these values were his values.

The battle was long since fought, concluded and celebrated in Tolkien’s head before Tolkien ever started his work.

Most fantasy stories can be picked apart in this way, I suspect, though I won’t go as far as to say, all. It’s only natural that an author will inject the moral-dilemmas that feel most real and dangerous to him/her personally when writing…

I also wonder if this theory would hold sway in cultures that are less focused on autonomy and self-actualization. What are the fantasy stories that emerge from the Far East like, for example?