: Re: What defines a Fairy Tale versus typical Fantasy? My second-grader has been asked to write a "fairy tale." We are both clueless about what makes a story a "fairy tale" different from a fantasy

@Karen856

Vote Up Vote Down

There are several distinctive elements that differentiate fairy tales from modern fantasy, if we understand "modern fantasy" to mean "the modern literary genre established by authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and the various sub-genres that have emerged from it since."

Scope: A fairy tale takes place close to home for the character. Jack plants a beanstalk in his own back yard. Red Riding Hood wants to go visit her grandmother, who lives within walking distance for a young girl. Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella all got mixed up in the affairs of local rulers, and so on. But in modern fantasy, the journey is a central element. Bilbo travels from the peaceful Shire to a far-off mountain kingdom, and the generation after him goes much further, all the way to Gondor and Mordor. The children from The Chronicles of Narnia are transported from Britain all the way to another world, and they spend a great deal of time adventuring throughout one exotic locale after another within that world. Rand al'Thor's journeys take him to practically every notable location on an entire continent, and so on.

Location: A fairy tale takes place close to home for the (original) audience. Even if it's not explicitly set in the real world (but with magic), its setting tends to be a very familiar place. Modern fantasy, on the other hand, is very bound up with the art of worldbuilding. It almost always takes place on a different world, one that is alien in many ways. (Even with locations like Terry Brooks's Shanara, which is theoretically set on a post-apocalyptic Earth where magic somehow exists, it's sufficiently non-Earthlike that that's more of a framing device than anything.) Fantasy authors often tend to revel in seeing just how different they can make a world. For example, Brandon Sanderson's Roshar, the setting of The Stormlight Archive, is a world that's been ravaged by hurricanes, powered by magic so they don't blow themselves out over land, every few weeks for millennia. As a result, there's no such thing as soil; everyone lives on bare bedrock, with plants and animals adapted to such an alien ecosystem. You would never see a world like that in a fairytale!

Characterization: In a fairy tale, the protagonist is generally an audience surrogate, and the characters that he or she interacts with are archetypes. Just look at how many stories Prince Charming shows up in: he doesn't even need a name, because his archetype is who he is, and that rarely changes for any of the characters. Whereas in modern fantasy, character development and character growth is frequently a central theme. Compare Luke Skywalker the naive young farmboy to the fledgling Force-user who turns off his targeting computer to rely on the Force, the brash trainee who abandons Yoda and Dagobah to confront Darth Vader and rescue his friends, and the mature and confident Jedi Knight who can stand without flinching as Vader stands right behind him holding an active lightsaber. (Yes, Star Wars is very much a modern fantasy tale; the sword-and-sorcery elements are far more integral to the plot than the spaceships and computers.)

Magic: In a fairytale, magic is something that happens to the protagonist. Whether it be Snow White's poisoned apple or Cinderella's gifts from the Fairy Godmother, the magic is always external in nature and something the protagonist has to deal with. In modern fantasy, it's very common to have the protagonist be a magic-user themselves. Even in Tolkien's works, both Bilbo and Frodo actively wielded the power of the Ring to help advance their goals.

While not every story in one genre or the other will conform to all of these points, (Urban Fantasy in particular blurs the line quite a bit,) they make good general guidelines to distinguish between the two story types.

(0)

Login to post a comment!