Fantasy lets you do ANYTHING! -- except that. And that.

Over on Second Life, a friend of silkspider's was helping another friend work up an RP sim.

She checked it out, and described it to me.

It's the most utterly generic fantasy I could think of.

Humans and Elves and Dwarves and Halflings are Good, Orcs and Goblins and Trolls are Evil, no, you can't play a noble, no, you can't be a Furry, no, you can't do this, that or the other thing.

If the appeal of Fantasy over Science Fiction is supposedly that you can do anything with Fantasy, why do people keep doing the same damned thing, over and over?

That's not a rhetorical question. I know some of you out there in Your Obedient Serpent's LJ Friends Sphere have used exactly that excuse to explain your preference for Fantasy over SF, in literature, game settings, or both. Explain yourselves!!

Fantasy lets you do ANYTHING! -- except that. And that.

Over on Second Life, a friend of silkspider's was helping another friend work up an RP sim.

She checked it out, and described it to me.

It's the most utterly generic fantasy I could think of.

Humans and Elves and Dwarves and Halflings are Good, Orcs and Goblins and Trolls are Evil, no, you can't play a noble, no, you can't be a Furry, no, you can't do this, that or the other thing.

If the appeal of Fantasy over Science Fiction is supposedly that you can do anything with Fantasy, why do people keep doing the same damned thing, over and over?

That's not a rhetorical question. I know some of you out there in Your Obedient Serpent's LJ Friends Sphere have used exactly that excuse to explain your preference for Fantasy over SF, in literature, game settings, or both. Explain yourselves!!

"Laddie, don't you think you should... rephrase that?"

Nobody quite answered the question I thought I'd asked in my last post. They answered the part about why Fantasy fans keep doing the same thing over and over, but not the part that really interested me.

So let me ask the same question, differently:

If the appeal of Fantasy over Science Fiction is really the comfort of the familiar, why do so many Fantasy fans insist that it's "more imaginative" and "less restrictive" than Science Fiction?

"Laddie, don't you think you should... rephrase that?"

Nobody quite answered the question I thought I'd asked in my last post. They answered the part about why Fantasy fans keep doing the same thing over and over, but not the part that really interested me.

So let me ask the same question, differently:

If the appeal of Fantasy over Science Fiction is really the comfort of the familiar, why do so many Fantasy fans insist that it's "more imaginative" and "less restrictive" than Science Fiction?