“… fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why they are afraid of fantasy. They know it’s truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin, from Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons?
@3 weeks ago with 4 notes
#Ursula K. Le Guin #Fantasy #Dragons #Literature #Fantasy Books
Proving yet again that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is still one of the most relevant cultural properties getting around: season 9 issue 6. And right in the middle of the shameless ‘Sandra Fluke debacle’ and the ‘War on Women’.
Though I’d say that the difference between this and so many of the defences of Ms Fluke is that Buffy doesn’t pull any punches, and makes no apologies, because of course Buffy shouldn’t have to, nor should any woman.
There should be no apologies. Not for sex. Not for birth control or reproductive rights.
It’s a shame this storyline quickly proves to be a misdirect by issues 7 and 8, because Buffy is just enough of a sacred cultural identity to take on this issue.
Even though I seriously hate hearing the S-word in any context, here’s an appropriately un-apologetic article that I read recently for anyone who wants to catch-up on what I’m talking about:
http://www.rolereboot.org/sex-and-relationships/details/2012-04-if-you-dont-respect-sluts-you-dont-respect-women
@1 month ago with 8 notes
#BtVS #Buffy #Buffy Season 9 #Buffy the Vampire Slayer #Reproductive Rights #Sandra Fluke #The S-word #The War on Women
The Roots of Fantasy:Prologue.
This is the first in a series of posts I’m going to do about the roots of fantasy story-telling. A style which has thousands of years on realism as a literary mode. I deliberately say ‘roots’ rather than ‘origins’ because who could presume to encapsulate such a huge canon or say where or how it began? The story of fantasy is really the story of fiction. For me it seems that only since the scientific revolution and the advent of ‘rationalism’ has fantasy fiction gained any perjorative context, separate from fiction ‘proper’.
Why? Aside from certain historical conflicts I’ll bring up later, I think that because fantasy shares components with the ‘children’s tale’ and with the moral allegories of ancient fable (see above) it is often trivialised. Another obvious reason is that the word ‘fantasy’ connotes aspects of delusion or escapist flights of fancy.
But the ability to fantasize is a major part of the human condition. One might even say the ability to imagine is the crucial part of our experience. The ability to recombine from the memory to construct ideas about how we should and shouldn’t perceive or react to the world is not escapist but crucial to human survival.
As one of my literature lecturers recently put it very succinctly, in the imagination “hypotheses die in our stead.”
Fantasy creates possibility. And such is the nature of fiction that fantasy can represent and reflect reality in ways that the (often quite fascist) realist mode cannot.
Before I get too student-y (too late!) let me say it’s all in the sake of fun and I’m interested for people to inbox me about their own ideas, reading or comments. When I’m done with this, probably finishing with Tolkien et. al., then I’m going to approach the history of SF as a genre. Because even though it seems to work through the same mode, ie: creating possibility, people will insist on defining it as something different…
@1 month ago with 2 notes
#Fantasy Fiction #Fables #Fantasy #The roots of fantasy
