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

[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!

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I think that a lot of high fantasy readers are also people who feel alienated from the real world. Often, the protagonist is also alienated because of his power or his history. As a child of a dysfunctional household, I tend to resonate with that kind of protagonist. Less so now, at 46, than at 16. A lot of fans are also survivors -- it seems like our percentage is higher than the outside world. There's also the comfort of something "chunky." You can settle down with a big honking trilogy and be reassured that you'll be taken away on an adventure that will last a really long time. This can be reassuring if you are, like I sometimes am, afraid of time with nothing in it. These days LJ fits the bill. Constant stream of other people's lives to hide in.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do you think that an equally big-honking book that was more plotty -- say, like truepenny's stuff -- and less biographical would have similar effects, or no?

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I think that a big-honking book can do the same things, but they're not always going to, so it's a risk for the reader who is looking for a specific thing. I also think that it's harder to pull a reader in the way Tolkien pulls readers in, and that the biographical approach is easier to write. But to be honest, I don't tend towards big-honking fantasy. Unless it's really well done, say by Tolkien, it bores me. truepenny's stuff has been fascinating so far, but it doesn't scratch the same itch that Tolkien does. I don't seem to be able to come up with another example.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Tolkien is pretty unique. Most of the people who try to do what he was doing are trying on less background; most of the people who are doing it up big with the background are doing something different.