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

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I've only read one trilogy of Robin Hobb's, and I don't remember it well enough to say. But while there may be Lackey books that do this, I actually can't think of a single one: not the Vanyel stuff, nor Talia, nor Elspeth, nor the gryphon books, which are all the ones I remember best. (Out of the secondary-world fantasies.) They start with teenagers, in most cases. And certainly they may start with teenagers who are Misunderstood By Those Around Them -- but that isn't the same thing. Maybe it's her more recent books that do it?

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Brightly Burning and Take a Thief are the two that jump out at me. Those are also the two that made me stop reading Lackey for a good long time.
The only other examples I'm coming up with just now are Orson Scott Card, and all three are SF.

I think that Robin Hobb's books are another good example, not least because a commonality between two of her main characters is their main ambition: to be Good. It's a childlike (?) goal, to do what they're supposed to do, to be praised for such a good job, to be a good boy.

Having typed that, I think that's part of why people are seeing so many novels start in childhood even if they start in adolescence: the characters may be physically older, but they haven't matured yet. Their motivations are still simple and more likely to be 'I want to be good' than otherwise.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Brightly Burning is where I stopped, because it was a one-volume rehash of Vanyel instead of a new story. But okay -- she does do it, just not in the ones I've read.

I think a lot of the books you're describing would look totally normal if they were marketed as YA: they're about people who are physically mostly grown, but just about to go through the process of maturation, of deciding who they are, who they want to be, and what they want to do with themselves. Which, for me, passes the bar of "plotty stories set in childhood" as opposed to "childhood as prologue to the actual plot." And the Lackey examples I can think of generally involve a first volume of that type, followed by two more that show the character as an established adult.

In which case, my answer to the original question is that the books start at the moment where the character's life is about to change, and adolescence is a suitable time for certain kinds of changes. Plus there's less previous life to back-fill, as mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. You get to see their character being formed, instead of having to explain where X prejudice or Y obsession came from.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I can definitely see that (and I can't come up with very many childhood-beginning stories). I'm not sure if it explains the prevalence of this kind of story, though. Adolescence is not the only time people change, and the types of changes that go well with adolescence aren't the only changes I want to read about. I like it when the main character doesn't begin the story as a relatively blank slate.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think Cassie is dead on here: I'm pretty sure I'm mentaly drawing the line between childhood and not-childhood in terms of emotional development, and there are lots of 16- or 18-year-old high fantasy heroes who are emotionally 10ish.

[alecaustin.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I also see little to no distinction between the likes of Kvothe & Rand Al'thor in terms of their status as naif - just because Rand's a teenager doesn't mean the underlying bildungsroman structure isn't the same.