Fantasy with Friends – hosted by Pages Unbound – poses questions each Monday about fantasy, either as a genre as a whole or individual works.
I had a lot of fun doing this one last week, so thought I’d continue it for Fridays! Plus, this week’s question is super interesting, and definitely one I have a few thoughts on!
Fantasy with Friends
W/C 20th July
Common Tropes in Children’s Fantasy
Is there a common trope or concept you see in children’s fantasy stories that you think would be fun to see more of in adult fantasy?
Do you know what I really think is missing from adult fantasy…
Portal Fantasy!!!
It’s something very common in children’s fantasy – child grows up in the ‘real’ world, maybe there’s something special about them, maybe there’s not, and events lead them to crossing from the real world into a fantasy one (think: Narnia).
And I get why. Children especially need characters they can fully connect to, that they can really see themselves in. Average, normal children, just like them, who cross over into a strange world full of magical creatures and maybe a touch of whimsey. As adult readers, our ability to connect with characters who aren’t like us is deeper – there’s usually something still relatable about the best written characters, but that comes from personality and histories and how they react to the events. We can read something from the point of view of someone who has always been in the world we’re seeing – we don’t need that real world standin.
But…sometimes it’s just fun! Sometimes it’s nice to see older characters going on adventures and quests in the same way younger characters do. We are seeing it more and more, especially in the indie space, but I’d love to see more portal fantasy in adult fantasy. I’d love to see a burnt out office worker making their way home after a stressful day, only to turn the wrong way and end up stumbling into a new world. Or a jaded doctor accidentally saving the life of a fae in surgery and being summoned through to a fantasy land.
There are so many different routes into it. We get it sometimes almost in reverse, with Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance especially, where the fantastical sits alongside the ‘mundane’, the ‘normal world’, but I’d love to see a 21st century human step into a world where fantasy creatures exist, and struggle with not being able to access WiFi to Google what they need to.
So yeah, that’s my view! More Portal Fantasy in Adult Fantasy please. And of course if you have any recommendations for adult portal fantasy books, please throw them my way!
Unwrapping Words 