6 Comments

Very interesting and thought-provoking! Also, thanks for one more good reason to continue avoiding ACOTAR like the plague.

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Thank you! It's a pity the story was loaded with so much agenda. I typically enjoy a good tale about changelings, fae, and Arcadia.

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I definitely thought it would be right up my alley, until I started hearing...literally anything about it.

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As usual an amazing piece. I think that the “on fairy stories” lecture by tolkien may be of interest here.

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I'm the type of guy who has 1 million tabs open at all times. And that is one of them: https://coolcalvary.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf

I'm still reading through it, but fascinating so far.

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As a fellow author of fairytales, I was glad to find this. I do have a slightly different take on the function of fairytales, however. I don't see them as teaching a moral lesson, though there are certainly some that were written for just that purpose. But the best of them, I believe, are really about what it is like to live under The Law.

Fantasy magic is a system that can be mastered and used, a kind of alternate physics. Fairytale magic is chaotic, upending the laws of nature and leaving the protagonist with only The Law (the Natural and Divine Law) to fall back on. They are thus fundamentally moral, not because they teach virtue but because they create the experience of the practice of virtue.

Thus, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight does not set out to teach the moral that you should not sleep with other men's wives, which surely no one at the time disputed, but presents the experience of living under The Law when your very life is at stake.

More on this here: https://gmbaker.substack.com/p/fairytales-are-not-fantasy

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