Fantasy

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Originally Posted by davem

"X is brutal, harrowing and devastating for everyone involved, and X fiction should be every bit as brutal, harrowing and devastating as the violence of the reality it seeks to document. Anything less at best sanitises X and its effects, at worst trivialises it. Anything more exploits other people's misery as purely vicarious entertainment. It is a very, very fine line."

Also substitute love, romance, child-rearing, changing nappies, discussing reality with a teenager, life, football, and discussing fantasy for X as well...

Even Steven King, known to be just a little on the verbose side, can't capture *everything*, to everyone's satisfaction and adequate to everyone's experience. There are, perhaps, hundreds upon hundreds of allusions in LotR to things British that I as a 'Merican have no appreciation for (like how best to refer to all things British). Should Tolkien have wasted extra pages to explain why anyone would care to smoke a pipe, drink tea when not ill or not iced, stay at an inn or eat at a pub (an interesting experience when I was there), or -gasp- farm?

P.S. Note to davem and Lalwendë: Had a dream the other night - must have been reading the Downs before falling off to sleep. Anyway, in a dream that was just a collection of odd thoughts, remember meeting your children, and saying hi, though that makes no sense at all.