The title reflects the name of an excellent board game company, whose work my wife and I are enjoying when we have two hours to devote to a game. The name of the company, however, reveals a partial untruth.
Fantasy has become mainstream. And by fantasy, I don't mean any particular sexual or dress-up habits, although they may approach the more mainstream as well. I mean the genre fantasy, often rolled up with science fiction, and tucked into the back of your favorite commercial bookstore. That fantasy has become common. It's hard to say how it happened--the Lord of the Rings movies? Battlestar Galactica? Or did all of us who grew up believing that were nerds, ostracized from the mainstream, turn out to be a sizable market? Hard to say. But in the milieu when A Game of Thrones has become a many-Emmy-nominated phenomenon, I'd have to say that fantasy hangs out at the edge of the party no longer. Something has changed.
Why has this happened? I wish I knew--I could sell it to marketers. After all, even football has a 'fantasy' component for monetization these days. But maybe it's a nice moment to remember why fantasy is important, and maybe that can teach us something about why it appeals to us.
Contrary to the name of the board-game geniuses, fantasy usually is not flight. Sure it can be--like anything else, and I do mean anything. Politics and news can be flights from reality; so can children; science has become a rather entitled flight from reality, although economics still seems to me to be everyone's favorite flight at the moment; and everything else. Nothing is definitely real when it interacts with us--reality is cooperative event, if it is to happen.
Fantasy the genre, or science fiction, is fundamentally about flight. It's about the externalization of character, emotion, or idea into a living world to see what happens. That's why Battlestar Galactica is, in many ways, a political commentary. A Game of Thrones is an examination of human nature, if we were to consider its true complexity. It may also be about the idea that life has no inherent fairness.
In any case, what this teaches us is that fantasy is about learning reality, not fleeing from it. It's about finding convincing ways to re-examine what we or other people think. And if we have fun doing it, well--maybe we all think reality should have a fun component. Fantasy is how we grow into something particular and not all over the place. Without a fantasy, or a role model or ideal or faith (which are different ways of saying 'fantasy'), we look like the sweet potato vine in my backyard, growing everywhere quickly but nowhere in particular.
If fantasy is on the rise, it might be because we want out of this place we all live. It might also be because this place we live needs to grow up.
