Fantasy and Dragons
As a kid, I used to love dragons.
They captured seemingly every moment of my early childhood. Some of the earliest books I read were about dragons, I learned songs about dragons, drew dragons in my school notebook, and pretended to be a dragon on the playground. While I certainly knew that dragons were not real, I nevertheless poured over any depiction of dragons I was given. From How to Train Your Dragon and its associated TV series, to Dragonriders of Pern, which I read far to young to truly understand.
I wasn’t picky in my adoration. Giant dragons, tiny dragons, rideable dragons, evil dragons, dragons with 2, 4, or any other number of legs, dragons that could and could not breathe fire, all of these were accepted as “dragons”. If it was vaguely reptilian and clearly awesome, I was fine with it being labeled a dragon.
This uncritical acceptance of dragonhood began to shift as I got older. As I learned about taxonomy, biology, and the tree of life in our real world, I began to wonder if something similar could be applied to fantastical species too. Was a two-legged dragon really a dragon, or was it a wyvern? Were wings a necessary component of dragons? How did dragons breathe fire? Was there some universal method that could be described and examined? Could we use reality’s science to classify fantasy?
My wonder at dragons had shifted. When once I’d been content to just go along with whatever the author of a dragon told me, I now read books on “Dragonology”, Googled “types of dragons” into the family laptop, and adopted an almost cynical view of the dragons I’d once loved so fervently. Dragons now had to fit into my definition, otherwise they were wyverns, or lindworms, or drakes, or any other of several "lesser" dragon species.
This dedication to classification spiraled into itself. There was always another layer, another family of dragons, another way to categorize dragons. What I failed to realize was that dragons resist classification. Trying to force a rigid framework onto creatures born of shifting myths and legends will never work. There will always be an edge case, always grey areas, and there will always be examples that don’t quite fit the mold crafted for them.
It feels ingenuine to discuss classifying dragons in fantasy without bringing up J.R.R. Tolkien’s oft-cited thoughts on them. Tolkien claimed that “dragons, real dragons, essential both to the machinery and the ideas of a poem or story, are actually rare” [1]. Tolkien claims that dragons are characterized not by what they look like, but how they relate to the plot and themes of a story. However, even this classification has its grey areas. How do we categorize dragon-like entities that do not fit this definition? Must dragons always be a driving force for the plot, or can they just offer guidance for the characters?
On a fundamental level, the piece I was missing in my rush to classify everything I read and saw, was that a framework cannot be forced onto culture. And since dragons are constructed from millennia of myths, legends, and folklore, they carry with them centuries of changing stories, imagination, and creativity. Forcing something as complex as a dragon into such a rigid box lessened them. They were no longer a wondrous element of a story, but something to examine, slap a label on, and then move on from. Shoving all that history into a cleanly delineated box necessarily cut out parts of it in the process, and the result is that the distinctions feel arbitrary and meaningless, because... well, they are.
So why do we try to do the same with fantasy?
A Necessary Clarification
Now, I'm not claiming that it is pointless to categorize fantasy at all. Fantasy is a genre with a dazzling array of diversity, and if you're looking for a light, fun fantasy novel with cool magic and grand adventures, you might be annoyed if you got A Game of Thrones instead. It's still fantasy, but there are definitely differences in the story it's trying to tell and how it tells it than say, A Court of Thorns and Roses. Categorizing some of the characteristics of fantasy is good, perhaps even necessary. The issue lies when we try to restrict what fantasy is.
For starters, it's impossible.
I encourage you though, try to define it yourself. Is there some all-encompassing definition you can come up with that cleanly delineates fantasy from sci-fi, horror, or mythological retellings? You may be tempted to say that fantasy relies on supernatural or otherworldly elements. But take your classic zombie, for instance. A rotting corpse shambling towards you may be the result of some mysterious pathogen, as in The Walking Dead, or the a necromancer's dark magic in a misty graveyard, or perhaps it's a brain-worm that's native to the planet you just landed on in your high-tech spaceship. It's the same zombie across all three scenarios, but the genres are dramatically different.
Much digital and real-world ink has been spilled over trying to define fantasy as a genre, including a 2008 article in the journal Philosophy and Literature, where Brian Laetz and Joshua Johnston come up with the following definition: "fantastic narratives are fictional action stories with prominent supernatural content that is inspired by myth, legends, or folklore. Further, this content is believed by few or no audience members and is believed by audiences to have been believed by another culture. Moreover, it is not naturalized, solely allegorical, merely parodic, simply absurd, or primarily meant to frighten audiences." [2]
Not exactly the concise definintion you were hoping for, huh.
Now, this definition is not without value. It does seem to fix a lot of the common problems in defining fantasy. It addresses the purpose of the fantasy narrative, the audience, and the characteristics of the text all at the same time. But it comes with its own problems. Take the claim that the supernatural elements are "not naturalized", meaning that they are viewed as strange or fantastical by the characters in the story. While this is certainly true for many fantasy narratives, with magic otherworlds, enchanted forests, and mystical long-dead civilizations being pervasive throughout the genre, it isn't true for all fantasy.
Take Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archives series. While the story does have elements that are not naturalized, the world of Roshar itself is, despite being entirely fantastical. And many of the books' interludes cover characters interacting with this fictional world in very naturalized ways. They'll poke at the crustaceans and moving plants of Roshar, but it's a gesture that reflects more on the character's internal state than on the world itself.
This is, I admit, not my main issue with Laetz's and Johnston's work. Their definition of fantasy is relatively thorough, and does manage to capture the vast majority of the space, without being to broad as to be functionally useless. My bigger issue is: what do we gain by defining fantasy in the first place?
Similar to me trying to define what a dragon is, any definition of fantasy will always restrict the genre. Fantasy has much if not more history, tropes, and nuances than dragons do. And what do we gain from constraining it to a rigid, clearly defined box? There is one benefit, at least to certain people. Marketability.
Having such cleanly divided genres allows for publishers to easily market books to an audience they know already likes their definition of fantasy, sci-fi, or horror. But what does this do to the authors? Writers who want to create works that blur the lines are rejected. [3] This is not good. One might even say bad. And it's definitely not necessary.
Fantasy is a vibe. It's an amorphous, everchanging shape, and no two people have the same definition of it. And that's a good thing. While having inter-genre descriptions is useful, forcing works to adhere to a strict categorical system limits the creativity of their creators, while also taking away incredible art that we could otherwise enjoy. Like dragons, forcing a genre as complex as fantasy lessens it. It constricts both the genre and its audience. As I discovered as a child, putting things in boxes weakens them. It cuts off parts that don't fit with the definition we create. And why should we be so hasty to define a dragon?