![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I think I might have figured out something about dual-world fantasy. It feels like a small something, but hey. They always do after you figure them out.
Okay, so remember a few weeks ago when I took a week off the internet? Yes, that week. So as part of my deliberate program of relaxing, slacking off, and refilling my brain during that week, I bought The Longest Journey, a ten-year-old adventure game, and its sequel, Dreamfall. I love adventure games. Looking at things and sticking stuff in my inventory together in clever ways gives me a bizarre little thrill in my cold, black heart that I cannot entirely explain. So every evening after work I came home, fixed dinner, and played computer games until bedtime.
(It was glorious.)
The second game ends on a cliffhanger. And while usually I am pretty good at compartmentalizing story, it has been driving me crazy since. And it's not even that I want to find out how the story ends, which is good because the average time between games in this series is something like nine years. What I want is back into the world. Worlds.
Worlds, I think, is key.
You see, The Longest Journey is about two parallel worlds: a still-recognizable this-world set 200 or so years in the future, Stark, and a medievalesque fantasy world, Arcadia. The protagonists of each game originate in Stark but can move between the two, which is the major point of conflict. The plot, while the writing's gorgeous and head and shoulders above most game writing I've seen even ten years after the first game came out, is in some ways pretty standard: it has a Girl From Another World. It has a Chosen One Plot. It has a need to return a status quo into existence. It has a tour of the entire fantasy world map. It has an antipathy and balance between science and magic. It subverts some of these tropes like hell, but it is founded upon them.
But it also has Stark and Arcadia. And the thing is? They're both wonderful.
So I think this might be the key to Girl From Another World Fantasy. It's one thing to write a bare-bones, filler, placeholder, boring hell of a world from which one can joyfully escape to the bigger but more interesting problems of a fantasy world, and that's often what happens. In the Fionavar books, Toronto barely exists. It's set pieces and cardboard, put there to get away from. Likewise with the now in Thomas Covenant. But it's another to write two worlds which are equally rich and deep, equally realized, equally interesting.
Is that just good writing? Well, yeah. But it's not an aspect of good writing that seems to be required in the formalisms of that subgenre. My favourite Girl From Another World books, Ru Emerson's Night Threads series, do this, and they're supposed to be a subversion. But they're a subversion that works better than most of the source material for me: by making 1990s California just as real and loved as Rhadaz, they makes the characters real. Our Heroes go "shit, this would have worked at home" or "why is everyone here medieval and crazy?" or "I miss my cello" and the whole thing springs into colour. They leave people behind. They lose hard-earned possessions, friendships, jobs. They had lives, and even though a life in the real world can be bad, there is no such thing as a person without a life, period. Girl From Another World Fantasy, in theory at least, takes us from one life to another; we travel. Going from depression, or blankness, or nothing to that fantasy life? Is not travel, because there was nothing, for good or ill, to leave behind.
In this game, Stark gets left behind. And Stark mattered. It was beautiful and complex and vast and full of green parks and artists' colonies and bridges, and it had our protagonist's friends and family in it. And that's the thing that has me considering playing The Longest Journey again, even though I know every answer to every puzzle. Both of these places were someone's dream, someone's yearning. Both of them were treated like the beautiful fantasy world.
Someone wrote them while loving them, so I'm in love.
Okay, so remember a few weeks ago when I took a week off the internet? Yes, that week. So as part of my deliberate program of relaxing, slacking off, and refilling my brain during that week, I bought The Longest Journey, a ten-year-old adventure game, and its sequel, Dreamfall. I love adventure games. Looking at things and sticking stuff in my inventory together in clever ways gives me a bizarre little thrill in my cold, black heart that I cannot entirely explain. So every evening after work I came home, fixed dinner, and played computer games until bedtime.
(It was glorious.)
The second game ends on a cliffhanger. And while usually I am pretty good at compartmentalizing story, it has been driving me crazy since. And it's not even that I want to find out how the story ends, which is good because the average time between games in this series is something like nine years. What I want is back into the world. Worlds.
Worlds, I think, is key.
You see, The Longest Journey is about two parallel worlds: a still-recognizable this-world set 200 or so years in the future, Stark, and a medievalesque fantasy world, Arcadia. The protagonists of each game originate in Stark but can move between the two, which is the major point of conflict. The plot, while the writing's gorgeous and head and shoulders above most game writing I've seen even ten years after the first game came out, is in some ways pretty standard: it has a Girl From Another World. It has a Chosen One Plot. It has a need to return a status quo into existence. It has a tour of the entire fantasy world map. It has an antipathy and balance between science and magic. It subverts some of these tropes like hell, but it is founded upon them.
But it also has Stark and Arcadia. And the thing is? They're both wonderful.
So I think this might be the key to Girl From Another World Fantasy. It's one thing to write a bare-bones, filler, placeholder, boring hell of a world from which one can joyfully escape to the bigger but more interesting problems of a fantasy world, and that's often what happens. In the Fionavar books, Toronto barely exists. It's set pieces and cardboard, put there to get away from. Likewise with the now in Thomas Covenant. But it's another to write two worlds which are equally rich and deep, equally realized, equally interesting.
Is that just good writing? Well, yeah. But it's not an aspect of good writing that seems to be required in the formalisms of that subgenre. My favourite Girl From Another World books, Ru Emerson's Night Threads series, do this, and they're supposed to be a subversion. But they're a subversion that works better than most of the source material for me: by making 1990s California just as real and loved as Rhadaz, they makes the characters real. Our Heroes go "shit, this would have worked at home" or "why is everyone here medieval and crazy?" or "I miss my cello" and the whole thing springs into colour. They leave people behind. They lose hard-earned possessions, friendships, jobs. They had lives, and even though a life in the real world can be bad, there is no such thing as a person without a life, period. Girl From Another World Fantasy, in theory at least, takes us from one life to another; we travel. Going from depression, or blankness, or nothing to that fantasy life? Is not travel, because there was nothing, for good or ill, to leave behind.
In this game, Stark gets left behind. And Stark mattered. It was beautiful and complex and vast and full of green parks and artists' colonies and bridges, and it had our protagonist's friends and family in it. And that's the thing that has me considering playing The Longest Journey again, even though I know every answer to every puzzle. Both of these places were someone's dream, someone's yearning. Both of them were treated like the beautiful fantasy world.
Someone wrote them while loving them, so I'm in love.
