Monday means Fantasy with Friends time! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about methods of worldbuilding:

Sometimes people talk about fantasy as allowing readers to see or realize things about our real world that they would not otherwise have seen (that is, they argue that fantasy can more effectively help us see reality than realistic fiction or even nonfiction can). Has this happened to you? Is there something you think about differently now because you were initially inspired to by a fantasy story?

I guess my answer is… not really. At least, not anything I could specifically point to.

I’ve definitely had realisations re-enforced by fantasy, for instance (and I’ve written about this before) the whole thing in Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea where Ged learns that he has to turn and face his shadow in order to be free of it. It makes a stunning metaphor for anxiety, honestly, and probably other mental health stuff. Once one comes face to face with what one fears, and looks at it closely, there’s often less to fear than one imagined — and while I don’t think anxiety is my superpower or anything like that (I hate that kind of faux-positivity about my mental health issues), the fact that I have this knowledge does help my everyday life significantly!

Also, despite the fact that it’s blatant Christian allegory, C.S. Lewis’ The Last Battle ends with a man who worshipped Tash being accepted into Aslan’s Country, because though he worshipped Tash, he did good all the same. Again, the series is blatant Christian allegory so I don’t actually think Lewis would be on the Unitarian Universalist train with me, but I suspect all the same that that’s a part of what made me interested in Unitarian Universalism: the suggestion that all those who are good will go to the right place in the end, that perhaps there is no wrong god to worship as long as you live well. It’s a kind view of things, and that’s perhaps inevitably attractive to me.

(I don’t go in for discussing politics or religion much in detail on here, so it isn’t really the place to get into what exactly I believe now; I’ll just leave here the reminder that UUs can believe in more or less a Christian God, or the Muslim Allah, or anything else, or indeed be atheist, agnostic, humanist, etc. You can assume precisely nothing about what I believe in other than the Seven Principles, and I’d rather any comments don’t try to get any deeper than that.)

Otherwise, I can’t think of much… though perhaps when I see other people’s posts I’ll immediately realise there’s so much else I could’ve talked about.

Aaaaand it’s Monday again with a fresh start. As ever, it’s time for a Fantasy with Friends post; all the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is on the discourse about prologues:

There has been ongoing discussion on social media about whether readers actually read or enjoy prologues. Do you think prologues add value to a story, or do you wish the story just started with chapter one? Are there good and bad ways for an author to utilize a prologue in a fantasy novel?

There are good and bad ways to do just about anything when it comes to writing a book. Good ways might include setting the scene, providing some ancient history that proves important to the story, introducing characters who become important later, etc. It can be a good way to tantalise the reader, but it can also feel like a bait-and-switch if you swap straight to other characters right after the prologue and it isn’t clear at all how things will connect (or whether they ever will).

I definitely do read prologues, because they should be there for a good reason and be part of the story. If they aren’t, that’s definitely a problem! But usually they are, and skipping them seems like shooting yourself in the foot by omitting part of the information the author intended for readers to have — I don’t really understand the decision to skip them, honestly, and I especially feel like rolling my eyes when people who skip the prologue then complain things don’t make sense.

There are definitely times when it feels like it could’ve just been a part of chapter one, or that it’s unnecessary… but that’s an individual book being not that great, not a sign that prologues in general are pointless.

Monday’s back again, but look, here’s one I made earlier! I’m on a trip right now to celebrate my birthday (today is indie bookshop spree day!) so comments might be slow, but I’ve got a Fantasy with Friends post anyway. All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is on dark academia in fantasy:

Do you enjoy dark academia fantasy novels? What are some themes you enjoy seeing discussed in dark academia (ex. ethics in academia, corruption, classism, etc?) Do you think the genre does a good job exploring such themes in general, or are many books focused mainly on the aesthetics?

I don’t think I’ve read a lot of dark academia, not enough to really form an opinion on it as a genre. I’m not opposed to the idea, it’s just not the way my interests have taken me. I think the best of it grows out of and reflects the real dark sides of academia, where people are pitted against each other for limited funding or limited numbers of places, and privilege can get you a long way. Thinking about e.g. R.F. Kuang’s Katabasis, which I’m in the middle of, it feels like a lot of it is a response to those pressures and the sometimes unfair situation gifted people are placed in, struggling against each other for limited opportunities when the opportunities are a bit of a poisoned chalice anyway.

It is not my experience of academia, to be clear; I’m an enthusiastic and serial student, with a BA, MA, BSc and MSc now… but having to get into departmental politics is definitely one reason why I haven’t done a higher degree (the other major one being that I prefer to synthesise over doing something new, and synthesis is not rewarded in academia — despite being essential to scientific and medical consensus).

Another aspect of dark academia is the importance of acknowledgement that academia has done some very dark things indeed. I studied at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a school founded in order to train doctors for colonial service. The whole point was to keep white enslavers healthy for the sake of Empire. It was engaged in “decolonisation” initiatives by the time I enrolled, and continues to be, but that fundamental attitude ripples through the whole course of study. We were taught (in 2020-2025) about the importance of keeping African people healthy so they can study and later earn more… and yes, that is going to benefit them in the sense of helping them get jobs and make informed choices around drug treatments, but there’s also a high degree of “capitalism is the one and only answer, and we must help them do it properly because they won’t if we don’t intervene”.

This blog isn’t a good place to delve into the ethics and complications of all that, but the point is that LSHTM isn’t alone, and many academic institutions are mired in that kind of history, and a history of extracting knowledge without credit and without benefit to the peoples and areas studied. I don’t think I’ve read anything yet that really engages with that, though I think one or two of the books on my TBR do (like Kuang’s Babel).

Anyway, I think what I’m interested in when I do read dark academia is a bit of awareness of the tensions there and how they can particularly impact minorities, and/or of the dark history of many academic institutions. I prefer the “darkness” to mean something rather than rely on vibes to provide a background to an “enemies-to-lovers” story or something. Not that I’m against an enemies-to-lovers story, but I’d like the “dark” part of the academia to make sense and drive the plot, rather than just be an aesthetic.

Happy Monday, once more! And that means it’s time for Fantasy with Friends: all the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about fantastical plants:

What fantasy plants have stuck in your imagination? A plant with magical properties or a plant a character uses in a potion? What memorable ways does nature feature in fantasy?

My immediate answer is Caz and Meep, from Sarah Beth Durst’s The Spellshop! I loved the idea of a sentient spider plant right from the start, and honestly for most of the story I was just wanting more of Caz, because it’s such a cool idea. I wasn’t as big a fan of The Spellshop in general as some are, but that part stuck with me!

Casting back a bit further, the other thing that weirdly popped into my head is the toffee tree in The Magician’s Nephew — the way it grew from Polly and Diggory’s remaining toffees, with magic all new in the land and so much potential that even a lamp post could grow… We don’t see the toffee plant in the books later in the chronology, and I always wondered what C.S. Lewis thought happened to it. If it were a story by Tolkien, I’d feel sure he knew (even if it never fitted into a story he actually got chance to tell), but less so with Lewis. Maybe he never thought about it again!

I’ve no real green thumb of my own, so I must admit that not a lot else sticks out in my memory! I’ll have to see what everyone else talks about to jog my memory on what I inevitably missed…

Start of a new week, and time for Fantasy with Friends! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is about fantastical companions:

Who are some memorable fantastical sidekicks? Animal familiars or anything else that fits the prompt welcome!

Prompting about “animal familiars” mostly makes me think of Nighteyes in Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings books, mostly. Nighteyes is a great character, deeply loyal, sometimes quite funny, and providing a great foil to Fitz’s wavering and uncertainty. Life’s a lot more simple for Nighteyes, not because he is simple, but because he doesn’t see such a need to complicate things.

I’m also for some reason thinking of the fire demon Calcifer, in Howl’s Moving Castle: snarky, curious, not half so devilish as he’d like to make out. Admittedly some of his lines in the (very different, but still fun) Studio Ghibli adaptation are the most memorable, when Sophie bullies him into letting her cook on him: “Here’s another curse for you: may all your bacon burn!”

And of course, the best sidekick of all has to be Samwise Gamgee. No notes.

In more recent reads, though, I’m thinking of Mu Qing and Feng Xin in Heaven Official’s Blessing — they’re old friends of Xie Lian’s, or rather, his former bodyguard and his former servant, whom he considered as friends (it’s a little more complicated for them, given the status difference when they were humans and when they served as his deputies when he ascended). As themselves or in their disguised forms, they back him up and follow him around loyally, even despite the mess between them — and while a lot of people really dislike Mu Qing, I rather like the fact that he’s prickly and quick to take offence (but even quicker to give it). He’s by no means perfect, but he’s still a friend who cares deeply, and it’s clear that he takes his role as a martial god seriously and takes care of his worshippers.

And in Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, one really has to give a nod to Wen Ning. He’s faultlessly loyal to Wei Wuxian, who was kind to him and brought him back from death to be with and protect the remainder of the Wen family. He stays with Wei Wuxian through a lot of horrors, for both of them, when the whole world is against them, and stands up for Wei Wuxian and tries to act in his best interests no matter what. The way he gets angry and tells Jiang Cheng about a certain secret in order to show him how terribly he’s treated Wei Wuxian is just, aaaah!

I could keep going, but I’ll stop here, ahaha.