Keeping Fantasy Real

I've often mentioned how I like my entertainment grounded in something resembling reality. This idea of making things like superheroes and sorcery and space knights "realistic" means different things to different people, depending on the lens through which they view life.

To people like Zack Snyder and an inordinate number of comic book creators who hail from the British Isles... realism equates to cynicism. It's about making everything look like what they think the real world is. They make characters so flawed there is barely anything heroic about them. Their settings are bleak and their story themes are nihilistic.

Those aren't the kinds of stories I like to tell. But I DO like for my stories to be in a world that savvy readers can relate to without having to switch off their brains.

By definition, you're working in a genre where some suspension of disbelief is required, and in fact assumed. The trick is to make the audience feel like they aren't.

Think of genre fiction like professional wrestling. There are people out there who just don't get it, and never will. They call it fake. Some fans get offended at that, but I just roll my eyes. Because there are millions around the world who know what's up and appreciate it. We let ourselves get caught up in the scripted matches and promos as if it were all real.

The first and always most important key, to me, is the characters. Make people--even aliens or Fae--recognizable as people. If you have relatable characters who behave and react to circumstances how you or I or someone we know would, the audience will roll with a lot.

I typically point to Harry Dresden here. Some of Butcher's rules of magic and plot elements don't always sit right with me. His grasp of Chicago culture and geography and often lacking. But Harry is one of the most complex, well rounded characters I've ever read. And he is surrounded by a top notch supporting cast that keeps you engaged.

The Witcher is another one that jumps out. Much of the story gets a bit confusing, but you stay engaged because Geralt and Yennifer are both so interesting you want to follow them, even when you don't know exactly what they are doing or why.

The second key is consistency. Grounding fantasy with a sense of realism mostly comes down to establishing rules within the bounds of common sense and sticking to them. My favorite settings are worlds that look and feel like our own (or a possible one), but where some fantasy element like super powers, light speed travel, magic, inter-dimensional creatures, and whatnot, exist.

There are degrees of how "real" you want things to be, of course. You still have to leave enough room for the adventure and the drama to keep the audience engaged. At least the kind of audience that I target.

For my taste, hard-science fiction does not interest me. When writers in a space opera group get all stupidly technical, I tune out. Take, for example, Netflix's Lost in Space. It gets panned hard by science fiction purists. But for a normal, savvy viewer, there is just enough science to make the experience feel believable without getting in the way of the action.

On the flipside, when my fellow writers talk about how to make magic or super powers adhere to theoretical physics, I'm all over that. It's fun imagining how to strike that balance between handwavium and Stephen Hawking.

But this is where things can get dicey.

So I've played magic and superhero themed RPGs with my fair share of rule lawyers. And I've learned that certain powers can be easily abused to the point that they break plots. The existence of something like interdimsional portals and phasing specifically--two of Dr Strange's trademark powers--can make a story boring as hell if used to the extent that some people would use them. Plus they really make your brain cramp when you get even a little into the physics of them.

If you want them, you have to set hard boundaries.  Like why wouldn't you send the bad guy though a portal to the middle of a desert every single flipping time? Why ever drive someplace? The answer is because you lose the sense of drama. So how do you keep that drama without making the power useless. That's the fun challenge.

In my world, long distance teleportation takes so much energy that it can only really be done with fixed points, with a big enough magical power source. Kind of like a Stargate of sorts. Certain creatures can teleport with a medium, but not just anybody can learn how to do it on the fly by studying real hard. As fun as that idea can be (and I do like the Dr Strange movies), when I'M writing it, I have too much trouble wrenching my mind from all the ways this ability could be abused, and wreck a plot if you only apply it selectively.

Ok now back to writing my big magic fight scene.