/lit/ - Literature

>>22720086
The brown one is the Facebook atheist trying to classify stories thousands of years old as being part of a genre not even 200 years old which, though inspired by mythology, folklore, and religion, is not any of those three. Fantasy is not written to be accepted as a core belief by any culture, and no modern fantasy story has hundreds upon hundreds of years of oral tradition under-girding it in itself to allow it to rise to the classification of folklore. Again, though they may take aspects from real-world folklore here and there, whether or not they are far off-base from what the people who actually believed in those things said about them; it is fantasy after all. But why do they do this? It's because they feel insecure about reading so much fantasy. If they were comfortable with themselves and proud of their interests, they wouldn't try to make fantasy out to be so much more than it really is. It's no different from how you'll get recommended all these video essays on Youtube talking about how this or that game or TV show is really a massive allegory for that thing and, oh, that too. Even if those games or TV shows are allegories — which they almost never are — they are bad allegories. Allegory does not automatically make a story good or literary, in fact it's often the opposite. Edgar Allan Poe was absolutely correct when he said there was scarcely one respectable word to be said in defence of allegory.
>Its best appeals are made to the fancy — that is to say, to our sense of adaptation, not of matters proper, but of matters irnproper for the purpose, of the real with the unreal; having never more of intelligible connexion than has something with nothing, never half so much of effective affinity as has the substance for the shadow. The deepest emotion aroused within us by the happiest allegory, as allegory, is a very, very imperfectly satisfied sense of the writer’s ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have preferred his not having attempted to overcome. The fallacy of the idea that allegory, in any of its moods, can be made to enforce a truth — that metaphor, for example, may illustrate as well as embellish an argument — could be promptly demonstrated; the converse of the supposed fact might be shown, indeed, with very little trouble — but these are topics foreign to my present purpose. One thing is clear, that if allegory ever establishes a fact, it is by dint of overturning a fiction.
It should be obvious that you can't lump modern fantasy and mythology &c. together, but apparently that's too high of a bar to expect the average fantasy fan to jump over.

>/lit/ fails to recognize satire
Yup...