[vanwalossien]

I think all who have posted on this thread have made excellent points, making me very confused, because there are so many good answers to the question. Rather that trying to comment on all the other replies, here’s my ‘answer’ to the original question:

The only thing that I have been able to find that all of us have in common is simply our ability to like fantasy. Lots of my friends didn’t like the LotR movies, because “it never could’ve happened in real life”. They never bother to read books, if they did; I think they would get a pleasant surprise. I have tried to explain that it could have happened (OK, maybe not that bit with magic rings and stuff (but who knows?), but evolution could’ve made hobbits instead of humans and Elves too, though I doubt if they’d be immortal…). So maybe we’re just a little more open-minded?

I’m addicted to reading (seriously, if I don’t get to read anything I get stressed, I once brought my science book from school on a holiday, because I desperately needed something to read), but still, to me fantasy isn’t about escaping our reality, I think it’s more about escaping our time. One of my favourite fantasy novels (or actually series of novels, but anyway) is Katharine Kerr’s Deverry-series, and I think I like it because (and not despite) of the fact that people there aren’t just clean, white-wearing good guys or filthy, ugly dark wizards. There are shades of goodness and darkness. A very wise good-guy Nevyn who works as a chirurgeon is once tempted to let one of his enemies die when he tends him after a battle and sees that his wound is about to go septic. He doesn’t do it, but only with a wrench of will does he manage to fight off the temptation. And even the worst of bad-guys has an excuse to be so bad. He sought to the Dark Path of magic to get back on people who treated him extremely badly.

So it isn’t that I escape from our reality into a place where it’s obvious what’s wrong and what’s right. It’s the time I’m fascinated with; the Middle Ages have always intrigued me, and a great number of fantasies take place, if not in the middle ages, in times when the technology level of their civilisation was about the same as it was in Europe in the middle ages.

Magic has also always fascinated me, and where, pray tell, do we find both Middle Aged exotic civilisations and magic? I always liked Katharine Kerr’s Jewish-style magic (she claims that it is based upon old Jewish magic, I wouldn’t know) better than Harry Potter’s "wave the wand and zap –you’re dead"-magic, because Kerr’s seems more real. Fantasy is fantasy, just about anything can happen if the author wants it to happen, but it still needs a believable feel to it. I like Deverry because of its very human people, where no one is all good or all evil, and because of the magic. Harry Potter I like because it has the same shades, and because Rowling is so brilliantly good at describing young Harry as a normal boy, he’s afraid and lonely, he has arguments with his friends and so on. Tolkien has a bit of all these things (well, the man was a genius wasn’t he?).

So, I’ll try to make a conclusion here…
I think we’re all a little more inclined to believing ‘unbelievable’ things, and have a general interest in the themes of fantasy. That’s all I could find (I could’ve made this post a lot shorter, right?). Just one thing: We’re not all geeks. No way. I’m geek, but one of my classmates, who also loves Tolkien, is a real babe, you know, pretty girl whose main interests lay in clothes, boys and parties. She’s very intelligent; perfectly well of aware of the fact that she’s pretty, and a bit b*tchy at times. Absolutely no geek in any sense of the word.

[ January 04, 2003: Message edited by: vanwalossien ]