On On Fantasy

I was having a bad day yesterday. But suddenly, my day turned around. HBO posted this picture on the internet.

For those of you that don't immediately recognize these people, this is a still of Stannis Baratheon and Melisandre the Red Woman, my two favorite characters from George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire books. I was overjoyed. There they were, human actors bringing two of my favorite fantasy constructs to life. Yesterday was a good day; I escaped to escapism. That night I beat story mode in Soul Calibur 5 and read X-Men comics.

Sci-Fi and Fantasy exist for bad days. If the real world isn't cutting it, who says you can't go to Westeros or the Xavier Mansion? I remember being eleven and twelve; I was an awkward child who was overweight and lisped. Where did I go to get away from it all? Redwall Abbey.

As a preteen, I knew the halls of Redwall Abbey and the woods of Mossflower as well as I knew my own neighborhood. I could draw the map like a self portrait, I could recite all the Redwallers in order to wield the sword of Martin the Warrior, I could speak in the quasi-Scottish Molespeak. This level of escaping into my favorite fantasy worlds continued as I aged: I know far too much about Fire Emblem, and in the words of Alex Brennan I "know more about Magneto's family tree than [my] own".

Then in 2011 while I was studying Latin in the CCM Library, I looked at Twitter's trending topics and began to cry. It read: RIP Brian Jacques.

I never once met the author of Redwall. I've barely even heard him speak. But it moved me when he died. He wrote stories about mice and squirrels who live in castles. And I lived there. I spent my childhood by the creek with Dean and our friend Sam pretending it was Mossflower Woods. He wrote words that lived within his imagination, but it became a part of mine. It was a part of my life. It was my solace. It was my home.

I still run head first into fantasy, and on days when I don't, I seem to be dragged in head first. My aunt once showed me a musing once that summed it up. By who?

Who else, George R. R. Martin.




   "The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real ... for a moment at least ... that long magic moment before we wake.

     Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?

     We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.

     They can keep their heaven. When I die, I'd sooner go to middle Earth."