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.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

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

[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. :)

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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...

[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.)

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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]

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?

[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.

[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.)

[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?