Fantasy vs Space Opera

One recurring theme of my hobbyist endeavor is space opera vs fantasy. In reality, I don’t want to pit them against each other, because I like them both a lot, but one has to be a favorite that gets the more of my attention than the other. My love for space opera tends to come in waves, while my love for fantasy is more along the lines of “steady background noise.” Sometimes space opera crests high enough to rise above the level of fantasy, but other times it troughs to a point lower than fantasy. I still love space opera, but when that happens, fantasy by default comes to the fore. In contrast, I don’t think my love of fantasy is very variable. I think it’s constant. But from a practical standpoint, that’s not very different than going back and forth between the two. I have two settings that I’m nominally still developing, although I don’t do much with either anymore on a regular basis; one is a fantasy setting that’s kind of like a grubbier, darker, almost horror-like sword & sorcery; Conan combined with the X-files, maybe you could call it if you’re OK with handwavey shorthand, the other is a kind of Star Wars-like frontier zone space opera. Considering that Star Wars as a setting is quite broad, I’d suggest that from a setting perspective, its more like the Mandalorian show than the mainline movies; more toned down, more frontier and fringer focused, more aligned with a lot of the same literature that Star Wars itself synthesized than with Star Wars itself as its become since the first movie was released in the 70s.

In many respects, the difference between the two genres is less marked than you would think, and more based on superficial cues rather than major structural ones. One side effect of Star Wars is that fantasy elements in science fiction have become more mainstream than ever, and the idea of literal space wizards and monsters being fought with swords by space-faring fantasy heroes is a mainstream idea. For both genres, I’d guess that I’m more interested in telling stories, or exploring situations if we’re in an RPG environment, that aren’t unique to either genre. Intrigue, skullduggery, frontier/wilderness exploration, and thriller/mystery with a darker supernatural twist would be common to both; although it would “look” a little different in a space-faring setting than in a fantasy setting. But looking different and being different are not the same. Like the iconic and much maligned (in the past; somewhat rehabilitated today) Bat Durston story, but as likely to be a space hardboiled or a space horror story or a Cold War space spy thriller as a space western. The point is that they are plots and characters that are not unique or original to science fiction, but the setting is a science fictional setting.

I’ve also talked before about how as a kid, I wasn’t very interested in Westerns. I thought that they were an old-fashioned story from my dad’s generation. But in reality, as I’ve come to discover, it was the setting, not the tropes of the genre itself, that I struggled with. I’ve since both come to appreciate the setting of the Old West, largely driven by my many wonderful hiking trips taken over the same territory in west Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Montana, and my appreciation of the tropes of the Western as a superlatively American story about the American character. The same is true about hardboiled stories, although they are more cynical, obviously, and the Cold War spy thriller is maybe not uniquely American given that its most iconic example is James Bond, who is a British character written by a British author, but it certainly captures the zeitgeist of Western civilization including America during much of the twentieth century. Although the Cold War is over, I think most have found that the themes are still relevant with only minor adjustment. Frankly, although I dislike subversion of genres, I think in this case it makes some sense to cast the Western globalists as the villains. It was already a theme in spy novels that spies questioned the morality of their actions, and had cynical doubts about the governments that they represented, so this is maybe less of a subversion and more of an expansion of an existing theme.

This begs the question; if I’m more interested in crime stories, hardboiled stories, Western stories, spy thriller stories, etc. why not just operate in those genres explicitly? What does adding a fantasy or space opera setting add to the experience? That’s a good question. I’m not sure that I know the answer to that, but I can noodle around with some of my own thoughts. First off; I like fantasy and science fiction settings for their own sake. I like making up the details rather than having to research them, I like the exotic nature of alien planets and fantastic settings. They’re fun, and as a fan of fantasy and  science fiction, it’s a big part of why I think it’s fun. Exploring the exotic setting is a reward in its own right. Secondly, having that setting means that problems which couldn’t be an issue in a more realistic setting can be used when desired. If you’ve ever read Jeff Sutton’s First On the Moon, a Cold War spy thriller written in the late 50s involving astronauts trying to claim the Moon as sovereign territory for their respective empires pits an American astronaut vs a Soviet saboteur embedded within his crew. But the story involves astronauts in an extremely hostile environment, and technical problems involving the launch of the lander, the oxygen stores, etc. play an important part of the plot, which wouldn’t be the same if it were set in even the most hostile Earthly environment, like Antarctica or something (except possibly deep underwater.) Thirdly, the themes of those stories play a little different in different settings. Given that the actual cultural landscape has changed since Westerns were as popular as they once were, for instance, or hardboiled stories, there often has to be subtle updates to the themes too. Putting them in a different setting makes the themes stand out, and the nuance between a cowboy in space and a cowboy in 1870s or 1880s in the Territorial west is different.  It’s a bit difficult to explore a theme about culture clash with all of the baggage that our culture has heaped on the actual Old West and the specific peoples who lived there, but if you wipe the slate clean and use stand-ins to explore those same themes, it’s significantly different. Granted, I don’t mean literal stand-ins, because I dislike allegory being too strong myself, although maybe not as much as Tolkien famously did, but I’m not interested in exploring the relationship between the American homesteaders and the Sioux or Comanche, I’m just interested in exploring some similar situations, and maybe seeing how it applies to colonist Third Worlders feeling entitled to take our First World countries from us. Or just exploring the theme more generally and seeing where it  goes. And fourth, if there is any allegorical (or applicability) issue, as noted offhand just now, stripping the baggage of real history and what people believe about it due to propaganda or for whatever other reason, makes the theme more robust and applicable. It isn’t going to be very applicable if people can’t see past the real life players and their biases with regards to them.

Not that exploring cultural or political themes is really my intention with either fantasy or space opera. But you can’t help but introduce them, the same as your biases and beliefs, even if you don’t want to, so I don’t pretend to ignore them, I just don’t want to make them the major focus of anything I do. But they will certainly lurk in the background, because you can’t help but have them lurk in the  background of any type of creative work.

Taul Kajak, shown above in his very original look, just finished Belsavis (including the bonus series) and hit level 79. He's about 20% or so of the way towards level 80, just guesstimating on the green XP bar, which given that I've still got two whole planets to finish before I get to the end of his normal story, is more than enough. Given that I haven't played the planetary or bonus series on Voss or Corellia in a long time, I'm actually thinking that I might do them with Taul.

But I'm also feeling a little burned out with him for the time being, so it's time for him to tag someone else in and take a break on the bench for a little while. Playing Jedi is a bit more tedious than most because you have to engage everyone in hand to hand rather than just sitting back and plinking your enemies to death by spamming the 1 key. Which isn't exactly fun either, but it least it's not difficult or tedious, so it's to be preferred sometimes. 

On the other hand, if I wanted to finish him off, I could ignore the planetary stories entirely, just do the class stories, and be done fairly quickly, and still have no problem getting to level 80 before I'm done (and if for some reason, I'm not quite at 80, spamming the Coruscant Heroics would probably put me over the top.)