Quote:
Originally Posted by davem
Perhaps the best response to the question I posed is that a writer of fantasy should be free to create any kind of world, include in ot anything he or she wishes, explore any kind of idea, however 'offensive' to some - but that the onus is on the reader to be able to separate fact from fantasy & realise that the fantasy world may tell them little or nothing, may even (while it is not a 'lie' in itself) lie about the reader's own world.
Or at least that the best one I can come up with at the moment....
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Some readers do not
want to separate fact from fiction
And while that might be funny when you get people who live their lives as though they really
are Klingons, Hobbits or centurions or whatever, it does have a dark side. Plus a lot of people believe everything they read a bit too easily.
In that respect, fantasy
can be a dangerous thing. Tolkien was free to describe his battles how he liked, and he chose to leave them lightly described and the reader free to make up his/her own mind about how they worked. Course, that does mean that you can get stupid people who think "Wow, running round with swords is coooool" and then actually doing just that and hurting others (just as you get stupid people who think Grand Theft Auto is also something to recreate in the real world).
But why should the author's Art have to be changed just because some people are stupid? Or even because down the line, his books might be read by a whole generation of people who had no direct experience of the horrors of war (remembering that Tolkien and his generation knew full well how nasty war was and had no need of a graphic description as they lived it every night in their nightmares)?