Lady Business

The "it's only fantasy" argument disappoints me because, as you know, I've spent a lot of time in environments where I was shamed for reading genre, and where I was constantly cornered into arguing that the literature that I love deserves to be taken seriously. I often did this by pointing out that fantasy is in conversation with the real world; that the themes my colleagues and professors found so exciting in classics and "literary fiction" were all over the genre novels I read, too; that's it's really not just about quests and dragons and swords, but about, well, this whole business of being human. But whenever someone denies that these novels are in dialogue with reality with the "it's only fantasy" argument, it's like all those arguments were for nothing, you know? We shouldn't approach fantasy with low standards just because it's fantasy. No, a fantasy world doesn't have to be a historically accurate replica of reality, but if you're going to lazily use a real world culture, especially one you don't belong to and that has a history of being exoticised by the West, you're taking part in power systems whose ramifications affect the lives of real people. I believe that genre fiction can play the exact same role in examining culture and society as any other kind of fiction, but it's hard to argue this point when its own fans deny it the second something problematic is pointed out to them :\