What's Great About Fantasy Fiction

Found a great couple quotes on a stranger's LJ about the vital essence that makes High Fantasy (a la Tolkien) so thrilling. The full entry is here but I'll excerpt the part I found myself nodding along to:

Why I read it is really very simple, and I only recently figured it out explicitly. I'd been reading lots of W.E.B. Griffin, and then Trollope and then the three David Lodge books, and I was wondering what to read next. I thought I want something... something... something full of passionate declarations.

I want that range, that possibility of things absolutely mattering, of the whole world in the balance, and the declaration -- at the beginning of Kay's The Wandering Fire, Kevin Laine says "To this I will make reply, though he be a god and this mean my death!" When I want fantasy, I want situations where people can say that, and mean it, and where it can feel real and supported. There's a bit of my soul that thrills to it.

I have to admit that those moments of almost-cheesy, good-vs-evil, passionate declarative heroes are something I love and yet, I can't quite swallow them without a little bit of cynicism (recovering pomo grad school dropout that I am). This ambivalence is also something I'm struggling with in my writing. (You can tell I'm of two minds about this issue because one of my main characters--one of my alter-egos in some ways--is able to passionately declare that he has to do something "important" and help "heal the whole world!" while the other one--another one of my alter-egos I'm sure--snickers at him and can't quite take him seriously.)

I also found that one of the comments in the thread gave me that "right on!" tingle:

You touched on this, but I think other points to state outright: in fantasy, you *know* who is on the side of good and who is on the side of evil, and - here's the important part - one single person can make a difference. People in our day and age feel helpless and unable to positively impact the world as a whole - sometimes even just their community. Fantasy allows them the glow of *helping*, of doing something for the betterment of the world, when they feel powerless to effect change in the real world.

This is such a nice, succinct explanation of why fantasy in general appeals to me (I'm not even going to get into the debate of what consitutes "high" fantasy vs. "low" or other kinds). I really enjoy that whole set of hero tropes, where one person (willing or unwilling, reluctant or trained to it) fights the good fight for the sake of the world's (or their community's) salvation. But I also wish I could be more heroic in my own life. There was a brief period of my life I was all caught up in reading Holocaust stories, and I think one of the things that appealed to me was the incredible heroism of ordinary people thrust into these extraordinary circumstances, the way that life became so clearly black and white, good guy and bad guy. And the way that even in the face of overwhelming evil, some people chose to be good just because it was *right*. I still fantasize about what I would do if I were ever to be caught in that kind of situation (either from the side of the persecuted or the side of the non-persecuted). I like to think that with all my indoctrination into the cult of the hero through reading so much fantasy fiction (let alone the Holocaust stories), I'd have to do what was right, regardless of my own personal safety. (But I don't know. It's never that easy. What if the danger was not to me but to my family?)

I wish I could express this more coherently. I think what I'm trying to say is that (well-written, compelling) fantasy fiction is good for you, it gives one a moral compass and a sense that our actions and choices can be meaningful in a larger context than one's own small life. It's not that only fantasy fiction does this, of course--I mean really, this is a universal human need and theme. It shows up anywhere from religion to ecology to politics to history to art. Anyway I think I'm really rambling now....I think I'll quit while I'm still awake.