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

[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.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Hmm, yeah, they are all totally doing that. I didn't read much Card or Lackey though -- there's an age for those, and I only found them when I was a bit too old to appreciate them -- but it's about there.

Come to think of it, I think there's also a bit of Normal Syndrome going down? This is the character's Normal Childhood on the Normal Farm. Now their Destiny is here! See how things change from the baseline! People are awfully fond of establishing baselines for some reason in fiction, and rarely actually need to.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there's a great deal of that. I think that establishing a baseline is only part of the motivation for that, though - there's a tendency for many authors to want to have their cake and eat it too by having their destined heroes start out as just plain folks, making it easier to establish the reader's identification with the protagonist before the power fantasy kicks in.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And then it doesn't matter that our protag has unopposable powers, because we remember him/her as a poor farm lad/street kid/girl whose parents wanted her to sew? (Because we all know that a) girls on farms do no physical labor and b) sewing is a fate worse than death.)

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Actually, that's one reason I don't like starting in childhood. It can take me entire books to stop thinking of the farmboy king as a farmboy-- he fights the Dark Lord, he wears the Special Crown, he gets married-- wait, what? The kid's TEN. Only not, because three to five books have happened.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Baseline, yes -- fumbling attempts at that in my first novel led to a weird attempt to present my urban fantasy world in a manner that didn't seem fantastical until a couple of scenes in. Which doesn't work so well in a first-person pov where the protagonist is a psychic studying magic.

(Hey, I was trying for a tonal effect: see, normal college life! EXCEPT! The contrast is worthwhile; the context in which I was attempting to deploy it was not.)

Also yes to the "special from childhood" note of alecaustin, and the bildungsroman was the first thing I thought of. I see your point about whether it's the character or the world adapting, but I don't think that variance negates the similarity of structure. (Which you may not have been suggesting it did.)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Oh no, I'm not arguing that the variance negates the similarity of structure, I'm saying the variance causes it. It's about how you argue a point in fiction: you lift the whole situation and go and this is how it's really done.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. But in urban fantasy, they're a lot more likely to establish the baseline (necessarily or un-) in the person's apartment when they're adults or nearly so. Is it because "when the protag was a young adult, they were a member of this warrior band" doesn't feel like a normal enough norm in high fantasy, the way "the protag was a totally special artist with artistic tastes and friends" does in urban fantasy?

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Do you mean urban fantasy like the de Lint kind or like the we sleep with vampires kind?

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

they were a member of this warrior band

This, in the middle of discussing urban fantasy, suddenly filled my mind with images of garage warrior bands, so thanks.

[rosefox]

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.

This all goes back to Biblical "begat"s. Tedious as all hell, but absolutely necessary to establish inherited importance.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Funny, I was just thinking of sartorias too - I've just finished Crown Duel and it seems to me like an example where this is done right. for one thing, it starts with the MC on the edge of adulthood and most of what we know about her childhood comes in her memories, so it doesn't feel like you have to read through it in real-time. And second, for perfectly good reasons with perfectly good intentions, she's had some mistaken and/or incomplete ideas drilled into her, and the rest of the novel is about getting past those. As nihilistic_kid said below, this is about the transition from innocence (and not knowing as much as you think you do) to experience; I can see how a clunkier rendition of the same thing would result in a childhood the read is stuck living through with the MC.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Right, Inda is one of the things I meant about things actually happening at young ages.

So...because the character was born special, every moment of their lives is special?

Ick.

When I was being Author at a local high school's Career Day (not Mentor, that's somebody different), the Interior Decorator came up to me to tell me that she teaches courses in memoir writing, and she tells her students, "Your story begins on the day you were born!" And I thought it was crappy advice for memoir (although perhaps reasonable for scholarly biography), and I think it's crappy advice for novels, too.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

not Mentor, that's somebody different

OK, kids, this is a Lens. Look close, but don't touch!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am now having Odyssey/Lensman/Real Genius mashup problems.

Thank you so much.

[hypatia-j.livejournal.com]

Ouch. I'm sure there are things you could take for that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Like what? I'm not at all sure Advil would help.