Dragons, Magic and SongBirds. Not All Fantasy is Good.
I engage with fantasy at a rabid level even though 10 years ago I swore against it. Game of Thrones (GoT), a fantasy, was the most popular television show in the world by its end in 2019 and is the second most-awarded television behind Saturday Night Live (SNL). So why is fantasy so popular and does it have anything to do with women’s nipples?
I will argue that fantasy is popular because it offers us an escape from our increasingly upsetting lives whilst titillating the whimsical parts of us. However, if we poke at the whimsy of these artworks for a bit, we begin to realise that not all fantasy is good. Tolkien describes fantasy as “The making or glimpsing of Other Worlds” and that description fits much of what we describe as fantasy or fantastical work today. Pumzi, Wizards of Waverly Place, Percy Jackson, Hunger Games and our main discussion for today: Game of Thrones. By the end of my argument, I hope to have convinced you that fantasy is fantasy but good fantasy can start a revolution.
Fantasy exists as an artful alternative to the canny and an artful transformation of reality. Through this, it fights against the constraints of ‘genre’ because definitions inherently impose limitations (Armitt, 1996). This means that fantasy does not only exist as a genre but a subgenre in all artworks that imagine or depict a deviation from reality. Rosemary Jackson (1981, 13) goes further than Tolkien and describes fantasy as “all literature that does not prioritise realistic representations” and now we can expand our definition of fantasy to not only dragons but living toys and people on Mars.
Fantasy is in every art form because art is inherently fantasy. Zipes (2009) further argues that artwork that is devoid of artistic intent cannot be fantasy because it lacks the heart and reflection necessary to depict an “other”. It instead exists by feeding off of the audience’s need to find freedom or escape through art, and so projects images that only scratch the surface of what an Other could be. Jackson’s definition of literature worries our earlier glib definition of “a glimpse into Other Worlds” because to make Other Worlds we must have some understanding and rejection of This World. Therefore fantasy must define itself as negating what we know and potentially upset the dominant structures and ideologies. [How exciting!]
A better life or utopia can only differentiate itself from reality by its differences and this is fantasy. Fantasy is the utopian [maybe?] projection of an alternative or the future. It is obviously through this difference that fantasy attains its power. Fantasy also works along the viewer’s imagination as fantasy allows the audience to see through their delusion and imagine a better life. Good fantasy engages the audience past their imposed passivity and turns the circle of reality and fantasy into a linear path.
Fantasy is in every art form because art is inherently fantasy.
In The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins makes a world where children are forced to submit their names in a suicidal game for food. The children face each other in a death match while the city watches and bets. Instead of depicting this world as a passive review of our own with no escape, Collins pushes the games to the last quarter of the book and makes an explicit connection between that dystopia and our own. Collins does not revel in the spectacle of child murder but rather in the heroics of everyday love. She incites in us the desire to volunteer and sacrifice ourselves for our loved ones even if that starts a revolution.
Game of Thrones does not manage to do that. Instead, it turns features of fantasy in on itself and uses them as devices of oppression; Dragons are used as weapons of mass destruction to force people into subordination under an imperial leader. The idea of freedom touted by Daenerys Breaker of Chains Targaryen, is laughed at because the people of Mereen and Westeros thrive under some form of enslavement and brutality. When this is shown to the audience, the audience also laughs at the image of complete freedom. We must delude ourselves into thinking that utopian freedom is unattainable and exists as The Purge. If not watched closely, Fantasy subtly becomes a weapon of the state.
So when we think about ‘modern fantasy’, we can begin to see its failings. Game of Thrones is a fantasy television program depicting the human war over the iron throne whilst a mythical power threatening men's lives rises in the North. Although staged in an Other World with dragons and resurrections, the day-to-day living in Westeros is based on This World. The system is patriarchal up until the credits roll for the last time, racism thrives, the economic system is capitalist, violence is undertaken and women, although experiencing more agency than they did in LOtR, are raped or assaulted by men for much of their time on screen.
To make Other Worlds we must have some understanding and rejection of This World.
GoT thus produces fantasy that naturalizes the oppressive forces of this world while providing a spectacle to turn our heads away and blind us from them. When we turn our heads or are blinded, we are deluded into believing in the dominant structures (Zipes, 2009). A very clear example is when Daenerys rises from the flames in the last minutes of the first season and does so completely naked. Before the outrage from feminists can begin, we see the 3 dragons around her body, a thrill passes through us. We are titillated and blinded to the naturalisation of the naked female body in 1 camera pan.
Zipes (2009, 79) argues that our world is so evil and the ‘violence’ we experience is so fantastical that it cannot compete with fantasy, yet we still conjure images of an Other World. He argues that we run to fantasy as a means of diversion or “resistance” from the shock and horror of the everyday. But delusion eludes resistance from us because we engage passively. When we watch GoT, we imagine that these fantastical elements like dragons or wildfire exist only in the fantastic but white phosphorus ammunitions are allegedly being used on Palestinian people and nuclear weapons have been used on Japanese people to enforce their subordination.
Irwin’s definition of fantasy as “a game which is used to confront us with an Other to show us what is” can be used to point at the lack of artistry in fantasies like Game of Thrones (Ziolkowski, 1978: 125). At some point, the imagination of a utopia does not stretch far enough past the understanding of this world and instead of a confrontation that exposes us to freedom, we are left with Arya knifing the Night King and the world resetting. And this is not only due to “lazy writing” but what I have come to argue is the lack of understanding as to the power of fantasy. Or more conspiratorially, the greatest understanding of fantasy and its power to incite revolution.
[What I mean by that is, what would it have meant if Jon killed the Night King? Wouldn’t that have meant that our petty infighting for material goods is useless against the powers of the forces of nature? Or what if the Night King did not die and simply could not be killed by an individual’s might? Wouldn’t that have meant that people working together are more powerful than our isolationist systems?] But I digress.
Therefore, fantasy is important because it allows us to imagine freedom [got chills writing that]. When fantastic works reproduce the same images or force together un-reconcilable work (like freedom and racism), they create a circular definition of living in which freedom is not possible. And thus, the capitalist machine wins. We must think about how people laud works that show the subordination and rape of women because it is ‘realistic’ or how fat people do not exist in outer space. These fantastical works only reproduce our realities, confined to the aesthetic of the present when fantasy is supposed to, at the very least, ignore these structures. Art pushes us to imagine a better life.
But when fantasy is created or tapped by the capitalist machine, it goes through a process of emptying it of any targeting to appeal to the widest audience or not to divide the audience it was meant for. Art is stripped of its larger meaning and becomes simpler and simpler (Zipes, 2009: 89). We are no longer raised in the cruel and shocking world of the Brothers Grimm or African fables of how the tortoise got its shell but simplified and well-dressed Disney tales. We lose our ability to fight against delusion and imagine bigger and better for ourselves. Our media literacy decreases and we turn our backs to images that dream of true freedom.
In conclusion, fantasy is popular because fantasy allows us to imagine more and better. Fantasy allows us to tweak our realities into a version in which we are a little less hungry, haggard and hopeless. And because of its power, fantasy is frequently co-opted by megacorps and made into an artless artwork that feeds our needs but blinds us to how dystopian our world is. Art like Game of Thrones feeds our need to point away from ourselves and revel in the spectacle of wildfire and dragons while we ignore our decreasing freedom. Artless fantasy cannot incite a revolution but all fantasy is popular.
Maybe I’ve missed something? Write to me, I'm an eternal learner.
References!
Armitt, L. 1996. Theorising the Fantastic. London: Arnold.
Jackson, R. 1981. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen.
Ziolkowski, T. 1978. Otherworlds: Fantasy and the Fantastic [Review of The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy; Modern Fantasy: Five Studies; The Fantastic in Literature; The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, by W. R. Irwin, C. N. Manlove, E. S. Rabkin, T. Todorov, & R. Howard]. The Sewanee Review, 86(1), 121–129.
Zipes, J. 2009. Why Fantasy Matters Too Much. The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 43(2), 77–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40263786
