Fantasy-based ideologies invariably have neat happy endings where all the bad people and all the bad behavior goes away when the volume is turned up and enough force is applied.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
These happy endings all express the weak and sly promise that the world is not rotten and out of joint but meaningful and ultimately in excellent condition.
Once the world has been created, the fantasy author still has to bring the story's characters to life and unfold a gripping plot. That's why good fantasy is such a hard act to bring off.
Fantasy has a dark side to it. It also has a light hemisphere - the power of the human imagination to keep going, to imagine a better tomorrow.
Corrupt fantasy points us, or forms us, in a consciousness that can lead to thinking that evil is good and good is evil. In the worst case, this may have long range effects, prompting the reader intuitively, subconsciously, to do evil while thinking they're doing good.
What happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that.
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
For me, a happy ending is not everything works out just right and there is a big bow, it's more coming to a place where a person has a clear vision of his or her own life in a way that enables them to kind of throw down their crutches and walk.
Endings are really hard to do, and it's hard to do an ending where it's sort of collaborative with thousands and thousands of people, and to satisfy all those people is impossible.
If the general opinion is pessimistic, fantasy is going to hold its own.
I find it ironic that happy endings now are called fairytale endings because there's nothing happy about most fairytale endings.