I’ve grown bored of Fantasy. I used to absolutely love it as a kid. I used to watch The Two Towers almost every night and just replay the Helm’s Deep sequence over and over again. Magician is probably still my favorite book ever, although that’s probably wrapped up in an 11 year old’s mindset and has just carried forward on the wings of nostalgia.
But recently I’ve had a falling out with the genre. It’s probably fair to attribute this in a large part to the pressure of going into university and trying to picture myself as an adult. I’ve probably thrown out some of my interests so that I could adopt new ones to consider mature.
But now I’ve cycled right back into Fantasy. Specifically Game of Thrones and The Witcher. This particular style of Low/Dark Fantasy which doesn’t feel like Fantasy despite ostensibly being Fantasy. In Game of Thrones I think the renewed appeal lies in the way George R. R. Martin uses the bevy of characters to try and paint an all encompassing picture of a Dark Ages society. For me, it’s the way he talks about shield construction, the way that they break and degrade over time. That someone needs to repaint the bloody things every so often. I had never about what went into putting a crest onto a shield before and his books are filled with these tiny moments. It feels like an authentic society out of a history textbook with some fantastic elements layered on top of it.
Another evocative element of Game of Thrones is the way the houses are associated with animals and people interperet that house through the animal's characteristics. I imagine that's what people used to do.
In the Witcher, I get that same sense of historical authenticity despite the game’s far more prominent fantasy elements. It obviously isn’t portraying a real society in the same way, but it feels really faithful to what the fables of the Dark Ages must have been like in middle Europe. The idea of a monster slayer who slays beasts with a silver sword and men with a steel sword is sensational. There’s no magic involved and in all likihood, no real difference between the swords. It just seems like the kind of thing they might have done back then, were there beasts. Word passes around a village that somebody slayed a monster and within a year everyone carries a sword made of silver.
Why not just use the silver sword against both beast and man? Is the silver blade pure enough that it’s significantly more brittle? I can imagine a religion teaching that you had to slay them separately, lest they grow to be the same thing. Which is a theme of both universes. Men becoming beasts.
We fear what we might become. The scales are just an artist's embellishment.
My favorite enemies in The Witcher are called ‘Drowners’ and are described as:
scoundrels who ended their wicked lives in the water. Drowned alive or thrown into deep water after death, they turn into vengeful creatures which stalk the inhabitants of coastal settlements.
They look like the creature from the black lagoon and aren’t terribly interesting ludically. But they do really invoke that fear of the unknown, back when death was understood way less than it is now. Some weird bastard drowns a few people out in one hamlet and a year later some village across the kingdom has changed their burial practices to stop people from rising up. Fear and Superstition. A man who is cruel in life will become a monster in death. In that regard, the distinction between the two swords in The Witcher is a pretty amazing irony.
GAME OF THRONES FIRST BOOK SPOILERS HERE
Game of Thrones handles the whole “Man into Monster” thing in a pretty cool way too. At the start of the first book, the Seven Kingdoms are at peace and everyone’s having a lovely time getting married, one unfortunate murder aside. A lot of emphasis is placed on The Wall and the role of the Night’s Watch in guarding the kingdoms from horrible skeleton warriors from the north. Although everyone’s being kinda dismissive of the threat. So you immediately jump to the conclusion that the story is going to be about skeleton warriors invading from the cold North. Real standard fantasy fare.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon popped up in a Google image search for "Evil Skeleton". Bizarre, especially considering I looked him up not a paragraph ago. Nightmare time.
Then they don’t. For almost two books there’s nothing but foreshadowing to say that Evil Fantasy Monsters are going to come and make everything horrible. But that doesn’t stop people’s ambition and greed from turning a peaceful kingdom into something horrible. Men are the real monsters again.
They also both share a love of bandits and thugs, portraying the dark ages like a Spaghetti Western where violent men are kings outside of the main towns. Power is a law unto itself and all that. Reminds me of Mount and Blade which is set in the same kind of “pre-medieval” society. As soon as you leave a town in that game, you have to be able to defend yourself. Because there’s fundamentally nothing you can do if there’s a larger party who catches you out away from the safety of a city. They will kill you if they want to.
Which is perhaps an important distinction to make, that Dark Fantasy isn’t interesting because bad things happen, something I think Dragon Age missed. It’s so fascinating because that dark lawlessness is evocative of time in Europe where everyone’s life was just a little bit shit.
Radiant Agenda 