From Philosophical Research
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[S2] (pronounced [S2]) Fantasy is the best history test 1:(-)1:(-)1
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- alias (en)
- Fantasy is just nonsensical history
- Fantasy may be defined as imaginary historical periods
- People's opinions on fantasy betray their insufficient knowledge of world history and historical processes
- prototype notes
- the more fantasy books I read the more I see this particular hypothesis building up that the impulse behind writing fantasy is to play with the causal mechanisms of history and try to slowly figure out what they are. science fiction can sidestep the actual way anyone gets to the future to focus on hypothetical technologies or forms of physics, but in a weird way, fantasy is almost inherently more progressive than sci-fi if you aren't too stupid to see it. although science fiction often does focus on analyzing civilizations in series such as Star Trek, fantasy is inherently more barebones in its palette of concepts in a way that often immediately forces it to reckon with the workings of societies. fantasy grounds itself in things like social structures, wars, nationalities and identities, whether particular civilizations are good or bad, who should be in power, and how imagined historical periods give way to other periods containing different civilizations. sometimes it seems like there is no difference between the categories of fantasy and politics, because a great heap of the things that happen in fantasy books are just medieval politics, and existing notions like Law/Chaos axes naturally lend themselves to fantasy stories about such things as characters slipping out of existing structures or patterns to discover LGBT identities. fantasy stories have all the puzzle pieces to turn into a believable imagined account of history where the material processes inside particular kingdoms, populations, or worlds actually unfold in understandable ways into new historical periods for centuries and centuries and you can actually trace through a fictional world's past and possible future(s) without any of it being arbitrary. if you actually understand history, fantasy is wired. I'm convinced that fantasy stories could teach the crustiest White people to actually understand historical materialism, maybe even more effectively than actual history could. in real-life history if somebody asks you to guess what happens next you always have "the answers at the back of the book", while fantasy is genuinely a blank history test you have to fill in. the act of creating fantasy is an act of showing that there really is such a thing as historical materialism and "history in general" without the content of a specific country. if that's not the case, how do people evaluate whether a fantastical history is convincing? why would there be a discussion about that where people have different opinions? I believe it all traces back to fantasy largely being simple representational art with regard to the processes that create real-world history. when people call for Media Representation in fantasy what they mean to say is that, because reality is stranger than fiction, in their attempt to represent the general concept of history current fantasy stories are overlooking a whole bunch of real-world historical events. it's one thing to say a story is technically unrealistic, and another to say it's literally missing information about reality that's making the representational art worse, which in this case is the complaint.
- prototype notes
- Warriors: shows there is such a thing as history in general within a tribal society.
- prototype notes
- Guardians of Ga'hoole, Adventure Time: shows there is such a thing as history in general in terms of warring states periods.
- prototype notes
- Lord of the Rings, Wings of Fire: shows there is such a thing as history in general within a Europe-like cluster of nations.
- prototype notes
- Animal Farm: shows, a bit badly, that there is such a thing as history in general in terms of the genesis of socialisms in one country.
- prototype notes
- Journey to the West / Dragon Ball: shows there is such a thing as history in general in terms of global empires and linked axes of empires attacking smaller nations.
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