Understanding Fantasy - Adventures to An Alternative World
In my previous post, I talked about Fantasy. You may read it HERE
Now, I'm progressing to talk about types of fantasy.
Let's go straight to the point as I am parley about mystery or supernatural fantasy, animal fantasy, and enchanted adventure to unknown world.
Mystery or Supernatural Fantasy
As major among the most common types of fantasy is mystery or supernatural fantasy; this kind of story is embellished to be beyond what is natural.
For instance a story of ghost or a human being who kills thousand of beasts without using any weapon can be regarded as mysterious or a supernatural story.
In such a story, the Ghosts or the supernatural being could be either helpful guardian, or a deadly adversary.
A story of a widow whose late husband always visits for the purpose of protection against other enemies is not exception.
In other hand, among Yoruba, they believe that a child that dies prematurely can again enter its mother's womb and be born over and over again which they best referred to as Abiku while it is called Ogbanje among Igbo.
However, in a mystery, every attainment is impossible in real life and can't be possible.
The mystery revolves around the existence of witchcraft is important in this discourse.
Animals Fantasy
Fantastic fictional works of art that present animals supernatural attributes reveal to us that animals can talk like humans.
In modern fiction, we see a lot movies where dragons become indomitable and can talk exactly like human beings.
Therefore, animal fantasy presents tales about animals, speaking, behaving, experiencing emotions, and acquiring the ability to reason exactly like humans.
Nevertheless, those animals remain as animals, retaining their various animalistic animal characteristics but performing like human.
The plot of such story has its development from the use of literary symbolism as it will be constituting symbolic expression of humans that these animals are representing.
Take the following as examples of animal fantasy texts;
- The Wind in the Willows written by Kenneth Grahame.
- Charlotte’s Web written by E. B. White.
- The Tale of Peter Rabbit written by Beatrix Potter.
Enchanted Adventures to An Alternative World
In Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travel , we can see the instances of unknown world that Gulliver visited.
In these types of fantasy, you see major character going on a journey to an alternative and unknown world, or a fantasy world.
This doesn't imply that all adventure stories are fantasy as we can see realistic tales that also employ journeys and at times in verisimilitude.
The different is clear as you would only see magical things happen in fantasy journeys while instances of reality would be order of the day in realistic story.
Another example of fantasy that has to do with adventure are:
Alice Adventures in Wonderland written by Lewis Carroll.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone written by K. Rowling.
In my next post, I will talk about the other types of fantasy. Have a nice day.
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