Is fantasy literature often dismissed as ‘escapist fluff’?

Fantasy literature has the capacity to affect one’s beliefs, one’s way of viewing life, one’s hope, and one’s faith. When the vision in art the writers of fantasy incarnated, the sense of imagination with their own psyche will soon become the outer world of the readers. In my opinion, it is true that fantasy literature is often dismissed as “escapist fluff”, where allows readers leaving our world for a fictive one. However, I would also add that the fantasy implicitly projects primitive man’s emotional impulses, leading readers to actualize themselves into a keener self-understanding in reality. Thus, in fantasy there is always reciprocating action to interchange between two worlds.

Horizon of Expectation
Fantasy literature is an escapist fluff because the art pieces usually embody a fantasy of power and control with the surrounding environment. The story, common characters, evocation of another world, use of magic and the supernatural, a clear sense of good and evil, and the quest, all represent the traits which must be presented in fantasy with otherness across fuzzy or nonexistent boundaries. At such, the created story seeks to free from imagination and allows readers to establish their horizon of expectations in another world.

Touch Our Spiritual Nature
The immersive fantasy is among all fantasy stories the most appropriate genre to distinct itself as separated from and unconnected to our real world. Authors establishes it not only as an “alien geography” by its setting and magical elements, but also cultures and customs that go with each island, which contribute to a sense of a very different world from ours. Tolkien’s Hobbit with the development of Middle Earth presents us with wizard, powerful ring, as well as various creatures ranging from the main character, his dwarf companions to giant spiders, and even a dragon. Characters in fantasy often have powerful mental and spiritual struggles. While the readers are tumbling through the enchantment of this supernatural experience, the story meanwhile allows them to revitalize their perspective, to recover beclouded by knowledge, and more importantly, to realize the importance of their spiritual nature.

Connect From One Reality to Another
It is commonplace that some fantasy conceptualizes the dream visions and “doorways” to interchange two portals. The dream does not only function as dream but a portal into the otherworld of the dreamstate. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a prime example. Not only does it have the portal in a physical form (the rabbit hole), but it also includes the psychological notion of dreaming as portal. Contrasted with the dreamstate in Carroll’s story, entrance into Lewis’s Narnia is typically achieved through the means of another kind of portal. In the book of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the portal is the wardrobe in the spare room. The curiosity of both two characters described in this story, Alice and Lucy, successfully arouse their interest to seek an adventurous journey in the dreamstate. By designing this kind of story plot, the writers can build a stronger resonance between readers and characters in story to follow the fantasy.

It is right to say that imaginative concepts, or even magical beings and creatures in fantasy literature bring readers through into the fantastic. This escapist wish of passing through a transformation relies on readers to enslave a role so that they move outward to grasp and possess their religious, sexual or philosophical desire to fulfill their need. Magical powers are of crucial significance in fantasy. However, the elements upon fantasy, after all, correspond to every aspect of our subjective experience of reality other than escapist fluff. Therefore, if fantasy begins in another world, it is also another world for us to actualize, to self-understand, to reach out our human soul in reality.