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

[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!

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

I have, and yeah. I'm reserving judgment on it until we get to see what this is leading up to... (it's very clear from structure that this really is the first third of a novel rather than the first novel of three!). On the one hand, I found Kvothe's various childhood happenings interesting enough, and there's some face justification for describing them in that his path is all kinds of weird, even for the world he's in. On the other... I'm hoping that there's some point to this, eventually?

Maybe it's just Rothfuss's solution to the problem of, well, I want to give in to the guilty pleasure and write about a character who is just off-the-scale in talent... okay... so why doesn't he like conquer the world at age ten and live happily ever after? In Kvothe's case it's pretty clear that if his family hadn't been *coughcoughspoiler*, he would have eventually grown up as a comfortable and well-adjusted guy, his emotional maturity would have caught up with his intellectual precociousness, and then he'd have been this invincible level-20 20-year-old with no challenges anyway.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Callouses and chemical showers. If not for those, I totally wouldn't still be reading this.

[elsmi.livejournal.com]

Hear hear. (No brain, you *don't* need to take notes on techniques for improvising magical heat dumps, it won't come in handy later. Really. --oh, fine, go ahead.)