High fantasy and loooong childhood passages

[mrissa]

So I'm reading The Name of the Wind, and I'm mostly enjoying it so far, but I have a question:

Why does high fantasy seem to be skewed towards telling the reader all about the protagonist's childhood and training even when the exact details have minimal bearing on the plot of the book or series at hand?

I have a number of mutually contradictory theories about this, and of course they may all be wrong; please feel free to poke holes with wild abandon.

1) High fantasy readers are more focused on setting than the readers of other subgenres (at least while they're reading high fantasy). Therefore long passages that don't advance plot much but give plenty of opportunity for setting to be expounded upon are a virtue.

2) High fantasy readers are more focused on character than the readers of other subgenres. Therefore the details of how someone became who they are become more interesting, even if they're not doing much of what they do yet.

3) High fantasy readers have more difficulty than the readers of other subgenres with picking up on details of character or setting and want them exposited much more explicitly and slowly.

4) High fantasy readers are looking for books of substantial size, because they give more room for a leisurely pace and side paths of whatever kind, and this is one of the common side paths taken.

5) Many writers would love to tell their readers about the finer details of their characters' childhoods, but bookstores are not as keen on selling other subgenres at the same length, so their lovingly detailed prose is ruthlessly slashed.

6) ??? (your turn)

Whatever the explanation, I have some issues with the structural/thematic constraints this ends up imposing. If the discourse on the hero's childhood is not to be completely irrelevant, similar issues must recur in adulthood; very few people write at length about how our hero conquered a fear of heights, only to make tall buildings, cliffs, flight, etc. and the former fear of same completely irrelevant to the rest of the book. Where this really starts to bother me is in their relationships with other characters: either the hero meets the nemesis at the age of 12, or the nemesis bears striking similarities to the childhood version of same. And you know what? No. Most of us don't marry someone we knew when we were twelve (my parents notwithstanding), and while many of us can spot recurring issues in our lives, we sometimes do actually manage to move past them! Into new, different, ickier problems! Tell me: your arch-nemesis in junior high. How relevant are they to your life today? How directly, literally relevant? When was the last time you saw them? Did you still care? The It All Began When I Was An Infant school of high fantasy writing is alarming to me in that sense: it didn't all begin when I was an infant. And I don't think it has to be that way for characters, either.

Novels where something interesting and plotty happened in the protag's childhood are not at all what I mean here.

Comments

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

I think I picked up The Name of the Wind but I put it down somewhere and it's gotten lost with the other piles of books I've been meaning to read.

(The Novel of Doom, my current project, features the childhood of a protagonist, but since the novel is about how religion and belief shapes people, I think her devout childhood contrasts with her slide into apostasy.)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

My brain has this feeling that high fantasy and the bildungsroman sort of...exist in opposition to each other, in some ways. So where the bildungsroman details the tedious childhood of a character to show how they are morally mature when they can accept the strictures of society, high fantasy novels show characters adapting the fate of their whole society by their individual and personal actions.

It's...well, Geek Matrix Syndrome? It's not me that's wrong, it's the world? But in order to make that argument, you need to follow the structure of the thing you're arguing to refute.

This theory is possibly longwinded and false, but I like it.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

That sounds about right to me. I'd also suggest that you're seeing the influence of David Eddings, Orson Scott Card, and Mercedes Lackey (etc.) at work - the main character was born special, so of course you must read about how their specialness manifested in their childhood, at their special magic/military school, and so on and so forth.

Some people handle this better than others - sartorias's Inda books are an example of the story starting in childhood/at school and it being the right place to start - but it seems like a lot of people adopt the structure without thinking about it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So what I've wondered reading all these responses that came in the night has been, Why the bildungsroman? Why is that getting the structural attention of high fantasy writers? And it sounds like your answer is, because that's what pisses them off about society, sort of in a nutshell? Maybe?

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

6. High fantasies are generally in bildungsroman form, as they deal thematically with the transition from innocence to experience.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But my question is why high fantasy gravitates so much more strongly to bildungsroman (or to that form of bildungsroman) than other sub-genres. Most of my default explanations for why high fantasy does something it's not doing particularly well is to see if there's something in Tolkien that can be pulled out of context, stretched, or bastardized, but we don't slog through 150 pages of Frodo In Hobbit School before the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring. Other default explanations tend to involve D&D campaigns, but again, you don't tend to sit through the DM going, "Okay, roll an eight-sider to see whether your young halfling proto-thief meets a kindly stranger or strange kindness."

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Sometimes the gathering evil starts when the hero is a child. Sometimes where or how they grew up has to do with what happens later in life.

(I'm always reminded of The Dragonbone Chair when this is brought up, where the first 80 pages are the main character's life up to age 16. And while I feel it drags on a bit, I never feel it can be cut. So I assume it must be tied in later, it's just been so long since I read the books I can't remember how or where. :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sure, but really, do we need 350 pages and counting of how the gathering evil was totally gathering when our hero was a kid? And gathering and gathering? And they learned how to walk silently in the forest and pick pockets in the city and do everything else in the rulebook?

Oh, there's another thought: is showing our hero learning things supposed to counter the complaint that the hero is unrealistically skilled? Hmmm. not very effectively, if so.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

6. Everyone likes the bit where Frodo's parents fell out of a boat and drowned.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I thought it was because high fantasies have heroes, and heroes come with birth and childhood narratives, as a matter of trope.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Other speculative subgenres often have heroes, too.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I think high fantasy sometimes implies a bildunsroman form, especially if the story encompasses a life.

But one thing a writer can do in deciding whether or not to begin at the childhood or just cut that all out and start later is to ask, how much of this is going to be relevant later? Because although you're right that not always do our childhood memories have direct impact on later decisions...sometimes they do. And often when children are unwilling participants in so-called great events. I'm thinking of the Tudor children here, and how each was shaped by early events. Charles II and his being shaped by what happened to his father. If we shift away from kings, how about some of the British writers whose childhoods encompassed one of the "great" wars. And so forth.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Forgot to finish: sometimes you just don't want to hassle with a ton of flashbacks later. It's easier to start at the beginning.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I vote for #1. While I'm all for world-building, I don't need to know every last detail of it. This is one of the things that drives me nuts about high fantasy, along with the unpronounceable names and the complete cultural anthropology of a minor character who dies halfway through the following chapter. But, I do believe I am a minority in holding these opinions.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Well, the majority of human beings on the planet do not read high fantasy novels. So you are probably not in any real sense a minority.

Locally, possibly. Hard to say.

[mightyjesse.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I am not hip to all the big writerly words like "bildungsroman," (Though I have copied them to my clipboard for later googling.) however I am willing to make the sweeping generalization that maybe fantasy authors are writing for people who want to escape. And people who are trying to escape their own lives need a good bit more detail than those who already have a good life going on and just need to be entertained for the duration of their bus-ride to work. Because if people who were into escapism had better imaginations, then their lives would probably be interesting enough that they wouldn't be looking to escape in the first place. So maybe the author is trying to give the pathetic readers sufficient platform to build their vicarious fantasy lives on.

Because SRSLY. Have you seen how we dress? We need some author (who is probably JUST as socially stunted) to explain to us exactly WHERE THE REST OF THE WORLD WENT WRONG. Because clearly, we are all delicate flowers and the rest of the world just hasn't realized yet how special we are. *facepalm*

Ok. Yeah... I'm uh... not a fan of the detailed childhood chapters, unless they are REALLY relevant. 6 times out of 10? They are not. The other 4 times, it's a YA novel and the main character IS a kid...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Or even if it's not a YA novel, the protagonist starts protagging early on, and that's fine with me, too.

I don't know. I'm not sure if high fantasy appeals more to escapist impulses than other sub-genres of fantasy or science fiction. Maybe. I find it amusing that you're taking the opposite position from most spec fic readers and fans, that your/our imagination is deficient; most spec fic readers/fans I know are fairly sure that their/our imagination is superior! Or we'd be reading something that required less of it!

[arkuat]

I am not suggesting that high fantasy is particularly influenced by the gospels. But this thing of which Mris writes: Luke and Matthew do it to Jesus a lot. Mark and John, not so much.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, but they don't. If they did, there wouldn't just be that one story where he gets left at the temple between birth and the wedding miracle. There'd be How Jesus Learned To Build Houses and How Jesus Learned To Build Chairs and What Jesus Bought In the Market When He Was 14 and Jesus's Best Friend Bob Dies At The Hands of Roman Soldiers So That The Not Peace But The Sword Line Can Be Foreshadowed.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I think in this particular case the childhood is:

a) relevant to what happens later in that volume and looks likely to happen in the other volumes, though that may not yet be apparent, as well as to who the character is.

b) interesting anyway.

c) this is the story about how that character came to be in that place doing that stuff, and that's where that story starts.

Having said that, most people's lives begin in their childhood. Certainly all my characters did, except one that is a computer. But most of my stories don't begin there... but then again, most of my stories are not character studies, are not heroic tragedies, in the way that NotW is, and the one that is comes nearest to beginning in childhood. All my first person stories have at least a mention of the childhood that made the character who they are.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Mention is one thing. Three hundred and fifty pages and counting is quite another.

I'm afraid Mr. Rothfuss is achieving something rather precise with me here: he's making each bit just barely as interesting as it needs to be for me to keep reading. And, I mean, he is doing that; I am still reading. But it's an odd thing to watch him doing, especially as he seems to be going through all the canonical high fantasy childhoods sequentially: wandering players, street child, magic school...that's as far as I've gotten, but I smell at least two more standard-issue fantasy childhood elements coming. And if it weren't for the callouses and the lamps, I may well have been gone by now.

[logovore.livejournal.com]

6) Successful high fantasy usually finds some way of delaying full exposure of the plot until after the reader has had time to learn the rules of the world.

Sometimes that means the protagonist starts out with a simple task that gets more daunting (Tolkien's Lord of the Rings). Sometimes that means the protagonist starts out frankly ignorant of the situation and even the world itself (Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber). Sometimes that means the protagonist starts out as a trainee who steps perforce into their boss/parent's shoes when tragedy strikes (Herbert's Dune). And sometimes it means starting the protagonist as an outright child.

Part of the fun of high fantasy is a huge challenge threatening/embracing a vast swath of a charmingly different world. But such a big story, in a foreign world with foreign rules, requires a lot of setup for the reader. So you have to keep the reader entertained while you're setting up the big challenge they're looking forward to. You need a warmup act, and a warmup act that convincingly promises and flows smoothly into the big story.

A portentous childhood is one such possible warmup act. I prefer the others, but it is one of the easiest for readers to follow.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Two of your three examples are not in any sense high fantasy. And that's of interest to me: why is high fantasy, as a specific sub-genre, handling things statistically differently than other sub-genres? I don't think Dune was any less sweepingly different than most high fantasy, and I don't think it was difficult to follow. Am I statistically unusual there?

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

I think another factor is that for some high fantasy, the main idea for serving the reader is not to provide an interesting and original plot. (Indeed, the sort I'm thinking of -- "only one special manperson can save the world!" -- might tend to see such a plot as a negative). Instead, it aims to provide pleasure by providing escapism and vicarious experience. And if that's how you're doing things, well, if one could go back and relive some part of one's life with Mary Sue powers... childhood/adolescence is really tempting! The embarrassments were sharpest without the softening of experience, and the mistakes were stupidest in retrospect. (I think this is a similar impulse to the one you were thinking of when you felt compelled to specify "directly, literally relevant".) And even if the character isn't a true Mary Sue and has to struggle, we have plenty of sympathy, because who felt that they really were in control or on top of things as a kid?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I don't know if you've read The Name of the Wind, but its hero alternates between telling us what a fool he was and telling us how amazingly easy everything was for him. So he gets to do both! Whee!

[raecarson.livejournal.com]

Okay, here's a hypothesis that will make me incredibly unpopular: Most fantasy fiction writers and most fantasy fiction readers (and by most, I mean at least 50%) may suffer some form of arrested development and may find a great deal of satisfaction in living someone else's childhood, particularly the childhood of someone Very Special.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And I'd be totally fine with that if things would happen in that childhood.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

The Name of the Wind is not so much about plot that I noticed. More about how awesome Kvothe is. At everything. The point of the book is that Kvothe is awesome, has always been awesome but has not always exercised his awesome, and will be awesome by... probably halfway through the third book. That's where I'm betting the storytelling stops and the sitting-in-the-inn story takes off.

The problem with Kvothe's awesomeness is that he's annoying as hell if he's just being awesome with lots of support. So instead, he gets enemies and adversaries, people who just don't understand-- and he gets them by making mistakes when he switches situations. The only mistakes he makes that I felt the story admitted were mistakes are because he doesn't know the new rules. The multiple childhoods are to show that he learned things in a non-arbitrary fashion and that his decisions are perfectly reasonable in context-- it's just that his context and the context of the people he pisses off are kind of different. He is being reasonable, they are being reasonable, he cannot possibly be to blame for what they are blaming him for.

You know that the scribe is thinking the same thing you are. "You know, I told you that X Awesome Dude took eight hours. You said you needed three days. If you could extract the pertinent details, we'd probably be closer to one, one and a half."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think the difference between awesome and interesting is key here.

I had a friend in California -- he's still my friend, but we no longer have this type of interaction because we're not hanging out in person very much any more -- who went off and learned to do all sorts of awesome things. And it would come up in conversation: "Well, in trick-riding motorcycles, it's kind of like what you're talking about," he'd say, or, "Yeah, we did something like that in my comedy improv group," or whatever it was he'd been learning to do. And you'd go, "Wait, what? In your what? Dude, that's awesome. You're awesome."

But what he did not do -- because he was, and remains, interesting as well as awesome -- is sit his friends down and say, "So, from 1997 to 2000, I took lessons in the following awesome thing. This is what I learned to do and how learning to do it went. Then in late 1999, I started getting interested in this other awesome thing." Etc.

Also, like most of my awesome friends, he is perfectly willing to admit actual real-live mistakes, or even non-mistakes that are not Examples Of His Awesomeness. So there's that.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

(Disclaimer: I am at work and did not have time to read the 45 other comments, so all of this may be a rehash)

This occurrence has bugged me as well.

I think of your options, 1 and 4 are the most likely. Epic Fantasy is frequently (I am tempted to say usually) as much or more about setting as story. That's okay, if you're into that. It is amusing when the same people who love those books bash Tolkien for being pastoral, but that's another snarkpost. I have also noticed a tendency toward a lot of attention being paid to book length. I have even seen consumer reviews that mentioned the cost/page of a certain book. It's weird, but it happens.

Here's MY number 6:
I think that the coming of age story is very prominent in high fantasy, and has been done pretty well a number of times. I personally like Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn for that. I think that it has been done well enough and often enough, that Certain Authors have it in their head that it's a necessary part, and put it in even if it's not the main focus. Heck, my first attempt at writing a novel had the same issue - I started WAY too soon. I actually still like that novel idea, but have a much better idea where to start the story. :)

I had a similar experience as you with Name of the Wind. I thought it started out way too early OR it suffers from lack of focus, depending on how you want to think about it. If the point of the story is the conflict with the Chandrian then a lot of that stuff is way superfluous. We could have had much less itsy bitsy Kvothe and a lot more ass-kicking. If the point of the story is to tell the whole life tale of Kvothe, I think that's a bit too diffuse for a novel. That said, it was still enjoyable, and I will most likely finish the story unless it turns in to an endingless Slog Of Death like Wheel of Time.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Also, it caused the "I want to see a story where someone's in school and the bully is a scholarship student or something" reaction.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

So, I woke up with this bugging my hindbrain: actually, I've read relatively little high fantasy that starts in childhood. Eddings, yes; in fact, I'm pretty sure I somehow picked up Queen of Sorcery first, and if I hadn't, I might never have read the series, because Pawn of Prophecy is not so much with the interesting. Tolkien? No. Jordan? No. Goodkind? Not that I remember. Martin? Certainly not, except for those characters who are children and have more plot happening to them than most of us will suffer in our lives.

I've seen lots of baseline normality, but usually it has the protagonist already in young adulthood, right before things change. And I bring this up because when I first read your post, I nodnodnodded . . . but then I woke up this morning and thought, wait. How many examples can I actually name? Or is this just one of those things I treat as true despite lack of evidence?

Which is a long-winded way of saying, maybe I'm missing all the high fantasy that has childhood openings. (And maybe this is a good thing.) Could you name some other examples for me? That would help me think through your question more fairly.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The name that pops most immediately into my head is Robin Hobb. Mercedes Lackey is also not an inapt reference point.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Forgive me if someone else has already posited this theory:

Is it because the target audience is in some state of childhood? Maybe it's an attempt to show their hero starting out "normal" and "just like me" (but with magic and dragons and whatnot for interest) in an attempt to cultivate identifying with the character now and later on? Or not?

[hbevert.livejournal.com]

My junior high arch-nemesis is irrelevant to my life today, as in many ways I live the same way I did when she was making fun of me for doing so. I keep meeting people in different cities and different countries who remind me of her, but they are also ultimately irrelevant to my life. Some other problems that cropped up in my childhood have come back in different forms for me to try to surmount again and again, each one a new growth experience, so I figure some will be back sometime so I can learn some more.

I have adored character development in fantasy, esp. the "how did such-and-such legendary character experience, from his or her own perspective, the things that made him or her a legend, and how is this different from how the legend turned out?"

The thing I found more endearing about Kvothe than some other fantasy protagonists is that the things that made him a legend were really just a series of major screw-ups, as opposed to being awesome from birth and just going through life checking off the things that are supposed to happen according to the prophesy made at his birth.

The part that makes Kvothe terribly unbelievable is that he can just pull astounding feats out of his ass at every turn, and for this type of thing fantasy readers forgive their protagonists all the time. I think this "everything will work out just fine, I mean, look who we're talking about here," lies at the heart of the escapism of superheroes and fantasy protagonists.

I always wondered why so many fantasy settings are heavily influenced by medieval Europe, and perhaps one explanation might be this need to have all the characters meet each other and start interacting for the rest of their lives starting at young ages and to be in a time that readers find otherworldly. Most folks in medieval Europe didn't travel very far for their entire lives, so they were more likely to have lifelong relationships that started young, as they spent their whole lives stuck with most of the same people. BTW, this still happened up till a couple generations ago in more insular rural areas.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's still happening now in more insular areas, rural or not. I have acquaintances who live in cities of many thousand people who are still interacting mostly with the people who lived on their block when they were six. But their lives are not very interesting.