Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The fantasy/fantasy ambiguity fallacy

Tolkien was a the grandfather of high fantasy.

It is often wrongly assumed that the terms high and low fantasy refer to the prevalence of magic in the setting. What they actually mean is primary v. Secondary world settings.

High fantasy takes place in self contained settings that have no relation to the real world. This includes The Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones, and Mistborn. Even though LotR is presented as a fictional history of our world, because it has no geographic or historical similarities, it is high fantasy.

Low fantasy is when characters from our world cross a threshold into a magical world. This includes The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Alice in Wonderland, Neverwhere, and Harry Potter.

TIL. Also I kind of hate this definition. It's not at all self-explanatory, unlike low [amounts of] fantasy vs high [amounts of] fantasy.

Very true. It’s not at all intuitive. But “amount” of magic can’t really be quantified, and there really isn’t a need to divide genres of fantasy by this criteria.

the terms are meaningless and just exist for gatekeeping and drawing lines between respectable and genre pulp, is not worth worrying about.

Very funny post. The OP has identified a more or less correct insight, such a conflation really does happen, but they aren't reflective enough to realize their own demands for 'realism' in the wake of this are nothing more than another kind of basically fantastical demand. In other words, every demand for realism is a demand for a certain perspective of realism - for a socially constructed image of realism. It's never actually about 'realism' because nobody has an objective view of reality, only a perspective. The roles of women and minorities change in fantasy because fantasy, like any other fiction, is a reflection of 'our' concerns first and foremost, an internally consistent 'realistic' world a distant second. This is why any demand for these sorts of things is really just a rationalization of that social perspective, simply what the one demanding wants to see reflected in fiction. This is why the same person saying that 'realism' demands no revealing female armor or 'boobplate' can be saying that 'it's fantasy, anything goes' the next second; the same reason the opposite conservative viewpoint will demand women have -2 to Strength, but permit Conan style unclothed barbarians in the same fight as plate armor. Regardless, the point is that Larian, averaged out as a company, has a view of fantasy that I personally rather like, all their other faults fully acknowledged. It goes without saying that while both are mere rationalizations, that doesn't mean that one view of realism can't have advantages over another - such as permitting more representation.

Eh, not really. Both high and low fantasy have examples of pulp, but high fantasy is much more associated with pulp than low. When it comes to big capital L Literature, low fantasy has Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, and Chronicles of Narnia. High fantasy has Lord of the Rings and Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea novels, but is generally more pulpy and less “respectable” acclaimed literature.

Internal consistency is not an easy feat to pull off in a high fantasy world that is predicated on player empowerment. The creator has to choose between being too restrictive for some people and too extravagant for others. Perfect balance is unachievable, so the best you can hope for is an audience that's willing to go with the flow, even when it creates internal dissonance. This is why the concept of head canon was invented

Using fantasy for representation is silly. Why do we play these games, answer mostly to role-playing. Role-playing only works is if the characters are realistic. Make setting as fantastic as you want, make the story as fantastic as you want, but the characters have to be believable to be interesting. So to take the fat body idea, fat bodies for PC are not believable, we are running across the world and back fight 24/7 by necessity we need characters to be in shape. When it comes to things like race, if you make a country for you world it should be homogenous, and if it's not you need to provide a reason why otherwise it's not believable.
In other words, representation makes stories worse.

Gross.

Lmao what kind of backwater country has never experienced some level of human migration or societal fragmentation at any point in thousands of years of history? The concept of a perfectly homogeneous society is a recent imagination based on an idealization of the nation-state model. How tf did these perfectly homogeneous societies trade with other perfectly homogeneous societies and acquire goods from far off lands without somehow acquiring characteristics and members of other "perfectly homogeneous" societies?

The fact that the world has "the system", so you have a level 22 Elminster and a level 0 "human", throw every real world consideration down the toilet, this is not in any way or shape a real world setting, this is an artificially created environment in order to create "heroes" or "super villains".

In the real world CIVILIZATION controls the world, not individuals, even world leaders, is nothing more than a cog in a complex machine. This is why conspiracy stuff is so insanely stupid, because it just isn't possible to be a bond villain or whatever.

In a fantasy world on the other hand, even one without "the system" you have superman vs office worker, it's not really a fair fight.

So at this point we have warped reality so much it isn't even REMOTELY like the real world.

So why are you arguing that 1 in 51 people has to be autistic in BG3?

Oh, wait you where instead hating on the possibility that people could be open to sexual diversity, you were not arguing for inclusion as always... You were trying to enforce exclusion, ignoring that many of us is EXCLUDED already.

Not sure if it's my autism or some sort of asexual thing, but I do not understand why learning magic from Gale is sexual and people hate on me for asking for [Romance] flags on dialog option, because I don't at least deserve to get some consideration? It's bad enough that the game has no autistic companions, you don't want me to even have a chance of enjoying playing the game.

Yup.

Fun fact: most old world medieval cities were highly diversified. From Constantinople to Alexandria, the cities of various caliphates in the Middle East, Northern and coastal Africa, through India and into China, any respectable political power would attract individuals with useful knowledge and expertise from all over the world. Having a court packed full of diversity was a display of prestige and power.

Now European medieval cities were less (but not completely) diverse, but medieval Europe was also the impoverished backwater of the medieval world, producing almost no luxury trade goods and were often (depending on the place and time we are talking about) people didn’t even wipe their asses after they shat. Not very appealing.

But Fantasy does not need to appeal to or conform with history. The Forgotten Realms is deeply ahistorical and always has been. It’s a silly playground for swords and sorcery adventures, not a gritty medieval life sim.

It does not have to be perfectly homogenous but if I go to a city of X race I expect the denizens to be 80%+ of that race.

This discussion reminds me a lot of the Kingdom Come Deliverance controversy.

Like it or not, but the FR world is established enough to also have fixed demographics and it would be good if a game set in the FR follows the demographics of the place it is set in and doesn't throw it out the window for the sake of modern diversity.

The mediaeval period lasted c. 1,000 years and Europe is a pretty large place so any generalisations will be open to contradiction.



The racial diversity per se is not the problem. The problem, it seems to me, is the way it is handled. To take three TV examples:
1. Game of Thrones. Different races occupied different regions - a sensible approach which didn't seem to bother many people. Books sold millions, TV much acclaimed (apart from it falling apart towards the end)
2. Rings of Power. Had the ridiculous situation whereby the population of a remote village had a demographic rivalling the General Council of the UN. And let us not forget the racially diverse hobbits. TV panned.
3. Wheels of time. The books have the same approach as GoT but the TV show has the same approach as RoP. Books sold millions, TV show panned.

The also Witcher suffers from this.

Man do I miss the good old pixelated game days as a kid when you can go to a drugstore or a bar without having social issues spoiling the fun.
I guess thats what we get for wanting realistic "everything".
Retro games for world peace!

Exactly. This was one of (the very many) criticisms levelled at Rings of Power. The makers of that could have just created their own world to do their political ideology rather than cash in on the Tolkien association and then trash it. Larian could just have easily done a DOS 3 rather than cash in on the BG association and then do what they have done.