What is fantasy (high concept)

By funny coincidence (probably not any coincidence at all; probably the infamous Algorithm™) I've seen two videos in the last day or two complaining about D&D of today no longer resembling Medieval fantasy, or even fantasy—it's just modern day social structures put in a cozy utopian setting with some fashion cues from the middle ages. That said, I don't think fantasy is supposed to be medieval simulationism, and while I think something like Hârnworld or Hârnmaster is an interesting idea, it's never been what I was interested in doing in my fantasy. Grounded and realistic doesn't have to look like historical simulationism. As much as I don't like "woke fantasy" or "cozy fantasy" or whatever, I do think that fantasy is at its best when it, at least partially, reflects our current society in some way, and by reflecting it in a different context, makes it more meaningful. Applicability, as Tolkien liked to call it. And he did the same thing; The Shire was very much a reflection of a romanticized rural pre-industrialized Edwardian England from his own childhood, for instance, even though most of the rest of Middle-earth reflected heroic mythic Europe. The familiar is a powerful tool to make the work more accessible to the reader, the viewer (in the case of movies and these TV shows) and the gamer in the case of RPGs.

From my perspective, fantasy at a high level is a combination of three things, and all fantasy that I have any interest in does some of this. Any fantasy that eschews any of these three doesn't really feel like the fantasy genre to me, or if it does, it's so strange that it feels way too different to really qualify as fantasy as I expect it to be.

First, as noted, it needs to be relatively modern. I like watching Modern History TV as much as the next guy, and while much of what he says is actually quite fascinating, I'm not interested in using that as the basis for my fantasy except as items here and there of local color. In order to engage or immerse your audience, either as an author or as a Gamemaster, you need to present a world that is fantastic, but it also needs to be sufficiently familiar that your audience doesn't feel too disconnected from it. They need to understand how it works at a basic level, i.e., if you travel, and stay at an inn, as with Frodo and Co. at the Prancing Pony, it's more like checking in to a modern hotel with modern English pub as a common room than it is like anything that actually happened in the real Middle Ages. The more you dig into the actual Middle Ages of Europe, the more you start to discover that they were much more foreign than you think in how they thought and how they behaved. The more the exercise feels like a smug lecture on an anthropological study on a foreign way of life, the less you can engage with it. Fantasy should be fantastic and have things that are different, but it also needs a grounded foundation that is familiar. The idea that we need to be super Medieval instead of modern is false. I think fantasy needs to be more modern than not. And even when I'm not using "Medieval inns" more like a modern Fairfield Inn, I also use modern fiction conventions. My games and stories tend to have an awful lot of hard-boiled-like influences, and modern thriller influences. I often say James Bond and Robert Ludlum are as important an influence as anything fantastic. Of course, those are pretty fantastic without belonging to the fantasy genre anyway...

Secondly, fantasy is ultimately a romanticized genre that looks backwards and romanticizes some aspect of the past. Usually the Medieval period, but as many people have pointed out, American fantasy tends to have the trappings of the Middle Ages while in many ways reflecting the culture and social structure and environment of the Old West frontier just as much. Two comments: 1) romanticizing doesn't necessarily mean making it pleasant. It could mean making it exciting, which could mean making it particularly unpleasant. So even darker, borderline horror fantasy, like some of what I dabble in, is certainly romanticized. Fantasy is idealized and larger than life. 2) I'm just as likely to hearken back to the frontier or Old West and the Golden Age of Caribbean piracy or the Musketeer era of pre-Revolutionary France as I am the actual Medieval period. The setting of Old Night should—deliberately—come across as much cowboys and mountain men, swashbuckling action like old Errol Flynn movies, and stuff like that as it does Arthurian romance or even Dark Ages post-roman early Medieval, or any other Middle Ages milieu. The European Middle Ages is our shared cultural heritage with our European cousins, because it is part of our heritage from before we split off from them, but the pirate stuff and the pushing back the frontier is a very specifically American mythology, and as a very specifically American man, it's part of my heritage and maybe a more immediate part of my heritage than the Middle Ages.

And thirdly, fantasy needs some kind of overt fantastical elements. This may seem obvious, but I think sometimes people try too hard to be grounded and forget to include this. I also don't mean that fantasy needs to be all fantastic all the time; I actually definitely prefer a more grounded fantasy that is more realistic than not, but if something fantastic and unworldly isn't an important part of the setting, and frankly, the development of the plot and scenario, I don't really consider it much of a fantasy. That said; the fantastic can be subtle, discrete, and even hidden from most people in the setting. But the PCs or protagonists, being special, are the ones who are going to interact with it the most.

UPDATE: Not worthy of its own post, but I've noticed in the last couple of years or so that whereas people always used to say RPGs, they now say TTRPGs. We used to default to the acronym RPG meant of course table-top RPGs, and if we were talking about a computer RPG, we'd say CRPG for something like, I dunno, Final Fantasy or Knights of the Old Republic or whatever. I'm not sure when the need to add TT to RPG seems to have become a thing, but mostly, people now call RPGs TTRPGs and the hobby is called the TTRPG hobby. As an old cuss who doesn't care, I of course will refuse to jump on this bandwagon, but it's a curious observation nonetheless.