Can you identify any common fantasy meta-narratives from your own reading/viewing?
A common meta-narrative I’ve found from my own viewing and reading of the fantasy genre are the decline of the environment and humanity which are in the brink of destruction. It seems like a very popular concept especially because how relevant it is to our current society.
In The Tales from Earthsea, an adaptation of Le Guin’s Earthsea series done by Ghibli, it tells us of a heroic story but underneath all that is a tale of lands in ruins rife with poverty and immorality. Scarcity of resources spawned chaos and injustice. People are taken to doing drugs to ease their suffering from the world and human lives are bought and sold like things.
Nature has lost its balance and up to humans to fix what they broke. If they can.
Also, an anime I’ve been watching recently aptly named ‘Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (Humanity has Declined)’ has the same meta-narrative. The narrative is in contrast to the tempo Earthsea, using dark humor.
This anime depicts tiny fairies as creatures with superior technology, insatiable love for sweets and self obsessed with taste for consumer products. They breed at incredible rate when together but can be literally controlled by simply putting them away in a boxes with divisions. The fairies have very little regard of knowledge and morality. In any case, it’s clear to see that these fairies are us, the humans. The little adorable fairies are humanity’s descendants.
The perpetually smiling fairies were shown in the first episode discussing what would happen if resources run out.
Ultimately, it doesn’t seem like anything has changed since the time Le Guin wrote her stories. We still continue to go down the same path no matter how many years pass. We’ll always head towards ruin and we can only hope that we become adorable fairies in the end.
Excellent level of comment here Julie. thoughtful. And i like a visuals! I think things have changed since Earthsea, if not for the better! Your comments reinforce the notion that fantasy tells us more about the culture that produced it than about any fantasy land. These fantasies reflect us, our culture, and, since it seems we are a culture in decline, that is what is reflected.
ReplyDeleteHaha maybe I'm just a misanthrope and that humanity, including me, can only head towards destruction. Hopefully, it would be as you say that we're heading for the better. I find that fantasy is as you say, reflecting us and our culture like a mirror. Rather than showing a completely different and amazing utopia like land in fantasy, although they do at times, it's more common in fantasy to have settings like apocalyptic wastelands saturated with immorality just like Earthsea. And as the fairies illustrate, even the ugly and being on the verge of death can become a fad. And if it does become a fad, which society is so easily swept by, we'd all just die - therefore, ruin.
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