Fantasy with Friends: Seeing Reality Better

Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about methods of worldbuilding: Sometimes people talk about fantasy as allowing readers to see or realize things about our real world that they would not otherwise have seen (that is, they argue that fantasy can more effectively help us see reality than realistic fiction or even nonfiction can). Has this happened to you? Is there something you think about differently now because you were initially inspired to by a fantasy story? I guess my answer is… not really. At least, not anything I could specifically point to. I’ve definitely had realisations re-enforced by fantasy, for instance (and I’ve written about this before) the whole thing in Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea where Ged learns that he has to turn and face his shadow in order to be free of it. It makes a stunning metaphor for anxiety, honestly, and probably other mental health stuff. Once one…