Magical worlds vs real world

[_xela_]

Possible, slight, minute Neverwhere and LotR (What do you mean you haven't seen it yet?!) spoilers to follow.

Sometimes, I just don't understand the endings of some stories. Take Alice and Dorothy, for example. Both travel to amazing, wonderful worlds that are infinitely more interesting than their home worlds and yet they go back home. I just

Comments

where's that rabbit hole got to...?

[peregrinejohn]

You are SO right! What the heck is wrong with those characters?! Dorothy in particular always struck me as an ungrateful prig. There are any number of "I wanna go back to where I was miserable" characters out there, and I absolutely do not understand it. Lousy character motivations, says I. Just silly.

Oh, and anything more you want to tell about Prague would be lovely. I've never been there but would really love to. Regale with your adventures!

Re: where's that rabbit hole got to...?

[_xela_]

Aha 'ungrateful prig' - best description of Dorothy EVER.

There shall be a Prague post tomorrow =) If it starts to look like I've forgotten, feel free to prod me into action ^^

[anachronaut]

For the most part, dramatically, a main character needs to be driven by a primary goal, something to be working towards to keep the action of a story churning.
In these sorts of stories, often it’s the desire to get home, or reunite with loved ones. Also, fantasy worlds have a tendency to involve allot of danger and violence. So they’re very interesting to observe from the reader’s perspective, but for the character themselves, probably on par with a holiday to Iraq.

[_xela_]

Fair point, I'd never thought of it in quite that way. I think I have a default mind setting that a fantasy world would be better than here (think Narnia) and therefore I don't understand why these characters would want to leave (though I recognise that in Narnia the characters never left voluntarily, and getting home wasn't their goal).

[anachronaut]

But if you look at the structure of most fantasy worlds, they're fairly allegorical to the real world. The gestures are bigger and the issues are simpler, and the aesthetics are often much cooler, but they're generally rooted in reality.

Frodo and Bilbo before the adventures, probably lived in a very similar community to Dorothy's, in a quaint rural farming community. And I'm generally sure that there's a daily grind for most of the LoTR characters.

[_xela_]

Of course, and that's partially my point - quite often in such stories the characters leave their adventure behind after fulfilling their quest and we're left to assume that they just slip back into the daily grind. Perhaps wiser and more rounded individuals, but back they go anyway. It's why I like Frodo: he tried to manage every day life and realised that he couldn't do it, he wasn't the same person he was before the quest and so he went with the Elves. I can respect him as a character because I can understand his decision.

Perhaps it's because I feel the stories are never completed, we never see what happens to them once they've stepped back through the looking glass. It frustrates me.

[groundlingchild]

Simply put, because your 9-to-5 probably lacks flying monkeys, evil playing cards, and wraiths. And whatever was wrong in Neverwhere, because I'm not actually familiar with that one. The people they send to magical worlds in those stories are innocents, who just want to have their happy, safe little lives. I think it's supposed to teach us to also like our safe little lives, but it fails.