But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
You can also make explicit certain social problems which, again, would be prejudged or not encountered at all in real life, because people have set up defenses against it. Fantasy allows you to get past defenses.
What happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that.
Fantasy allows you bend the world and the situation to more clearly focus on the moral aspects of what's happening. In fantasy you can distill life down to the essence of your story.
There's a very fine line between one person's reality and another person's fantasy.
Fantasy is more than an escape from the truths of the world and the past: it is an open acknowledgment that those truths are complex and morally difficult. It offers a different route to creating something which will resonate with readers, in a way which resists the erasure of privacy and autonomy which pervades our modern world.
Fantasy is an area where it is possible to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face. In mainstream fiction and even in a good deal of mystery, these things are presented as simply two sides of the same coin. Never really more than a matter of where you happen to be standing.
When you talk about fantasy, the usual problem is that whilst you've got the world of imagination, there are no controlling forces.
Fantasy is sort of a blank slate that everybody can project their own culture onto. Everybody can read it in their own way.
It's really hard to separate fantasy from reality.
The thing about fantasy - there are certain things you just don't do in fantasy.