Fantasy as a way to inspires self-reflection
It’s never been easier to be a fan of fantasy. Every year, there’s another blockbuster or TV show featuring swords, sorcery and iconic period costumes. What used to be the domain of nerdy kids has become watercooler talk and no one would bat an eye these days at a trailer featuring fire-breathing dragons or knights riding to war.
That said, fantasy still faces a kind of stigma, especially from parents and educators who feel compelled to talk kids into consuming more serious literature. The tropes and trappings of fantasy look like a lot video games or comic books on the surface. That has unfairly put a label on the genre for not being mature enough. That’s a big shame. For all the magic and monsters, a good fantasy title is as serious as Shakespeare (who also wrote about fairies and sorcerers, don’t forget).
Fantasy isn’t really about wizards and gods; it’s about the human experience. Like the most celebrated literary classics, the best fantasy stories explore what it means to live in the world.
Great Stories Prepare Us for Big Changes
It’s often the stories we consume that prepare us for rites of passage into the next stage of life. Becoming a teenager, graduating high school or getting married are all things we see our favourite protagonists go through long before we do them ourselves. Stories help us navigate those events when they happen because we’ve seen characters near and dear to our hearts go through it, and we have a chance to learn from all the messy mistakes they make along the way.
Teenagers experience the world a little more intensely than adults. Everything feels new and important. In a way, the world they live in is already charged with the epic significance that fantasy worlds capture. When a writer wants to capture that feeling of enchantment, or the high-stakes drama of a small argument with your parents, they can’t just replicate the real world. They need to reach into their tool box to pull out the extremes.
Take , an NPR Best Book of the Year by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. It starts with a Cinderella-esque situation, in which Casiopea is stuck cleaning her wealthy grandfather’s mansion, while the Jazz Age is in full swing in 1920s Mexico. Her grandfather treats her as a servant and she’s tormented by her cousin while she dreams of escaping and starting a new life. That desperate need to escape into a world that’s exciting and full of opportunities is something plenty of teens growing up in small towns and suburbs can relate to.
When Casiopea unleashes the Mayan god of death, Hun-Kamé, she finally gets her chance. The two of them set off across Mexico to restore Hun-Kamé’s powers, facing demons, sorcerers and other supernatural dangers. It’s just as much about leaving home and facing the challenges that come with the big wide world as it is about ancient Mayan gods.
