Ceinwyn

BE STRONG, BE BRAVE

The Fantasy Fiction Continuum

Fantasy - as a genre, begins when the author inserts an element of the impossible into his/her conceit, making it a fantasy conceit.

Fantasy Conceit - what the creator intends to explore in the world, it is where the constructed world deviates from the real world, usually in the form of geography, biology, physics, metaphysics, technology, or culture.

Fiction set in the modern age sits closest to Non-Fiction since it shares the existing real-world setting. Audiences understand and identify with the modern setting, and therefore the author does not need to inject as much imagination into explaining the world around the characters.

Historical Fiction - edges a little further into the realm of Fantastical. The author must describe a past world that modern readers are unfamiliar with by painting mental pictures of times, locations, customs, and cultures that no longer exist.

Overlaid Fantasy - the Fantasy Conceit and real world comingle. A major component is that it is plausible, which is to say it still adheres to our real-world natural and societal laws with the exception of the Fantasy Conceit, at which point it diverges. Subgenres: Urban Fantasy and the Superhero genre.

Historical Fantasy - requires more fantastical elements than its modern Overlaid Fantasy counterparts and therefore sits a little more to the right on the spectrum as the author applies his/her Fantasy Conceit to a bygone age.

Secondary Worlds - stories where we have left our modern reality so that our story takes place in a setting that is decided not-Earth. At this point all plausibility that existed in our Overlaid Fantasy is out the window in that the audience no longer has the anchor of the modern world with only the Fantasy Conceit being different, but must literally discover a new world. This subgenre should always be logical, as in they adhere to their own rules established at the beginning and remain consistent to them throughout. These stories contain pretty much all the subgenres that don’t explicitly take place on Earth, but may be grouped into Low Fantasy, Sword and Sorcery, and High Fantasy.

Low fantasy - set in the real world; includes unexpected magical elements that shock characters, like the plastic figurines come to life in Lynne Reid Banks’s The Indian in the Cupboard (1980).

Sword and sorcery - a subset of high fantasy, it focuses on sword-wielding heroes, such as the titular barbarian in Robert E. Howard’s Conan pulp fiction stories, as well as magic or witchcraft.

High fantasy - in comparison to the above two subgenres, high fantasy contains the most magic and has more additional races.

Magical Realism and Nonsense - when logic disappears yet fantastical elements remain.

for your next poem/story (pt. 2)

Lacta - a small animal that lives in the graves of the dead

Martineta - a bird that does not decay when dead

Nightingale - a bird that sings to relieve the tedium as it sits on its nest through the night. At dawn, it sings so enthusiastically that it almost dies. Sometimes nightingales compete with each other with their songs, and the one that loses the competition often dies.

Oriole - a bird that is gold all over, except for some blue on the wings; hangs its nest from the end of branches; from the ground, they appear to float in the air

Paradisi - called bird of paradise because of its celestial beauty; brown and small; the sweetness of its voice can arouse devotion and joy in people; if captured, it will not stop crying until it is freed; rarely found away from the region of the Nile River

Stymphalis - a man-eating bird with a beak of bronze, sharp metallic feathers it can launch at its victims, and poisonous dung; according to the Greek legend of the Labors of Hercules, he destroyed the birds with poisoned arrows

Thamur - a worm with blood that can be used to split the hardest stone, like marble; Solomon discovered this property when he needed to shape marble for an alter without using iron to cut it, which was against Jewish law

Uria - a worm found in pigs; blisters form where it bites because the bitten flesh burns

Yale - a beast with flexible horns that it can move at will; when it fights, it keeps one horn pointed backward, so that if the horn it is fighting with is damaged, it can bring the other to the front. It is the size of a horse, but has the tail of an elephant and the jaws of a boar, and is black. The basilisk is its enemy, and if it finds the yale asleep it stings it between the eyes, causing its eyes to swell until they burst.

Zerahav - a bird that lays its eggs at the bottom of the ocean; then floats on the surface above the eggs where she can watch them, and incubates them from there. When the eggs hatch, she dives to the bottom and brings her chicks to the shore, where she feeds them.