The four categories of fantasy are:
| Portal | Protagonist enters a fantasy world from the ordinary world |
|---|---|
| Immersive | Protagonist lives in a fantasy world |
| Intrusive | Fantasy elements enter the ordinary world |
| Liminal | Least well defined. I like to think of it as “tease fantasy” where it is uncertain whether the story actually has fantastic elements. |
A Child’s Fairytale World is kind of a mix of all four fantasy categories.
I don’t think that’s because of any problem with the categories, I think Marloth is an unusual hybrid.
Even though I was not aware of this classification at the time, I had some notion of such categories and went out of my way to fudge them and ensure Marloth wasn’t too strong in any particular camp.
In its later parts the story does settle into mostly being Immersive Fantasy, and later installments will probably mostly live there as well, but Marloth as a setting will probably continue to have a little more tension between categories than most fantasy settings.
I used to really like portal fantasy, but I don’t like it so much anymore. As I’ve grown older I’ve become more fascinated with the juxtaposition between the ordinary and the extraordinary, and Portal fantasy tends to separate them too much.
The way A Child’s Fairytale World transitions from ordinary to fantastic is a splash of portal, but it never fully commits to portal.
This is the kind of fantasy I want Marloth to be.
And I don’t want it to seamlessly immersive like standard high fantasy settings. I want Marloth to be a jarring juxtaposition between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
<aside> 💡 I want to mix the ordinary and fantastic similar to how the Simpsons mixes cynicism and sentiment. The Simpsons alternates between each in such a way that it is continually throwing the audience off guard. And superior to most of it’s peers, it does not always end on a cynical note.
</aside>
I’m actually slightly more intrigued by intrusive fantasy than portal fantasy these days. Both through the teasing wonder of Lovecraftian horror and the spiritual parallels of God being infinitely beyond us humans.
And maybe part of the appeal is that it is the easiest category to splash. I can play around with some of it without committing to it as a foundation.
In many if not most cases I think it actually works better as a supporting category than a primary category because when it is primary it usually disappoints me.