Beginning of a new week, and as usual, I’ll mark it with 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 witches in fantasy:

What are some interesting witches in fantasy? Is there a certain portrayal of a character that makes them a “witch” vs. a “sorceress” or other magic worker, in your opinion?

As ever, as soon as I’m asked a question like this, my brain goes completely blank. So let’s have a think: there are various ways witches get into fantasy stories, and different shapes they come in, which maybe will help me think of some examples! There are magical worlds where witches are a part of a wider magical landscape and everybody knows about them; one example that I’ve got started with but not finished is Samantha Birch’s Cat Dragon, for instance. There’s witches-as-known-entities, which Thorn is at the start of An Ancient Witch’s Guide to Modern Dating, and witches who are mostly secret among “normal people”, which she essentially becomes when she enters the modern world. And there are good and evil witches in fairytales.

I think “sorceress” is somewhat more often used when female characters have more power and agency than your standard witch — it has a bit more authority and a ring of scariness in a lot of worlds, and for me that’s probably the dividing line in a lot of cases. Witches might also be called sorceresses in a more formal context: I think there’s more “court sorceresses” than “court witches”, and more “hedge witches” than “village sorceresses”, in general. I suppose I might also associate it with something more formal: anyone can be a witch, but a sorceress has done a degree (so to speak).

Overall I don’t think there’s a super solid consensus on the difference between “witch” and “sorceress” and some of the other magic-workers: sometimes a witch is just what you call a female wizard, sometimes it’s a derogatory term, sometimes it mostly just means a weird older lady who knows her herbs.

I think a favourite exploration of women’s magic and what makes a witch or wizard would be Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books. I didn’t love it as a teen, but it all grew on me as I revisited, and realised what she was doing in The Tombs of Atuan and especially in Tehanu: re-examining the assumptions she’d made herself in writing A Wizard of Earthsea and making it (much as I think it is beautiful and important) way too much of a sausage fest. She wrote some fairly typical fantasy in that book, not at all unusual for its day in terms of the way she portrayed men and women… and then she came back to it and insisted on not sweeping it under the rug but interrogating it.

Pretty sure there’s a big space somewhere in here where I should discuss Discworld’s witches, as well, but sadly I never quite got on with the books in the series I tried to read, and haven’t yet had chance to go back to it after finding I did enjoy Going Postal… so I’ll have to leave it here.

Monday again, so 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 the work of Brandon Sanderson:

Are you a Brandon Sanderson fan? Some readers online have called his books the “fast food of fantasy?” Do you think that’s a valid criticism?

I wouldn’t call myself a fan of Brandon Sanderson; I’ve only read a couple of his books, and broadly speaking I enjoyed them, but he’s not a must-read author for me and I haven’t even touched his most popular series. I did recently read The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England, and didn’t like it much at all — Sanderson’s idea of humour doesn’t match well with mine, for sure.

I don’t know what I think of the epithet “the fast food of fantasy”, though. I remember finding the worldbuilding of Warbreaker really interesting, and was pretty interested in Elantris (though I stalled out on actually reading it for mood reasons and never came back to it)… it does seem to me like Sanderson is perfectly capable of coming up with his own ideas, even if his prose isn’t on the level of, say, Ursula Le Guin. I’d be more inclined to call the stuff churned out by the likes of David Eddings the fast food of fantasy, given that a couple of his series were essentially copy/pastes of one another.

(Obligatory note that I definitely don’t endorse Eddings’ work, given his conviction as a child abuser.)

Even so, I don’t like the term or any other (like “pap” or “trash” or “guilty pleasures”) that put value judgements on books other people enjoy and connect with, even though sometimes I think the substance and beauty comes from the reader of certain works, not the writer. I think valid criticisms of Sanderson’s work include the heavy influence of his Mormonism on his work, or critiques of how long and unnecessarily sprawling some of his works can be, or of his fairly plain writing — none of which necessarily preclude enjoyment — but calling it the “fast food of fantasy” seems like a way of dodging doing difficult work to actually write a decent critique.

That said, as a flippant one-off remark by a blogger or something, it just comes across as an unserious critique of a disliked book/series/author, which is fair enough.