That genre is chock full of them. Most popular genres are, as @malkav11 said earlier. Stephen King for instance.
There’s nothing wrong with tropes. Every story has them. It’s how one combines them in interesting ways and turns them on their head that makes books/movies/etc. interesting.
I think, again, this has to do a lot with mass market authors, and specifically male-centric ones. Some samples per my wife, who reads fantasy quite extensively, and says that virtually nothing she reads would be considered a power fantasy.
E.g.
The Last Unicorn (Peter S. Beagle)
Deerskin (Robin McKinley)
Palimpsest (Catherynne Valente)
Most of Robin Hobb’s work.
These are generally character studies, explorations of folklore, etc. None of them follow typical hero’s journey’s.
If you start plumbing the barrier between horror and fantasy, it (naturally) falls apart even further.
It certainly is. A lot of the popular books, movies and games that are horror based have power fantasy elements if not the focus a large part of it. And not to mention sex.
I think Sci-Fi/Fantasy is just like everyone else, it dabbles with a lot of plots, a lot politics, a lot of different kinds of characters but they devote more time and effort into the world behind it because that’s not a given. They have to sell it. And yeah they borrow from history, they borrow from romance, they toy with the imagination of kids and adults and the what-ifs, but I think it is absolutely a generalization to say all fantasy is power fantasy.
Not sure if this is related or if I am threadjacking, but…
Matt Coleville (a fiction novel author and game writer, who has been D&D streaming and campaign advice vblogging on the youtubes) has recently reignited a discussion which he frames as the difference between Fantasy and Fiction. Basically an argument from Stephen R Donaldson, who claims that in Fantasy, the world is a manifestation of the internal beliefs and conflicts within the character(s) head and ethos, whereas in mainstream Fiction, the characters are a manifestation of the World and the characters represent and act out the central conflict of the world they occupy. He contrasts the way he and Matt Mercer run their D&D campaigns, where M.Mercer’s (Critical Role) is Fantasy because his world and the conflicts and enemies are based on the player characters and their backstories, but M.Coleville’s is instead Fiction which is about the world he created which lives and develops on its own as an objective reality, and how the PCs choose to interact or plug themselves into the world and events. Narrative vs Simulation, or Character driven vs World driven perhaps.
SRD Essay —v
http://www.stephenrdonaldson.com/EpicFantasy.pdf
I’d like to hear some examples, if you would, because I can’t think of one.
No, it would be a matter of finding which ones interest you, or maybe which ones don’t bore the holy hell out of you. I find myself rapidly tiring of power fantasies myself, which is one reason I’m totally checked out on superhero movies these days.
There are entire studies and researches available for pretty much anything vampire, starting with Dracula. It’s not really a surprise that we see so many vampire reiterations in horror, but so often the vampire is male and the victim is a woman. Vampires are square in the horror section although they shift a bit with some modern versions of them. Stephen King, Dean Koontz, they tend to play in that area too. Heck, the movie I just saw, The Meg, would fall into this. Jason Statham saving the day. We could probably list a hundred monster movies, and while some would say those are sci-fi, not… really. They’re more horror than anything else.
Survival Fantasy and Eldrich Horror are pretty much the opposite of power fantasy I think?
How is Dracula a power fantasy? Do you think Dracula is the protagonist of that story?
Best non-power fantasy fantasy off the top of my head: Big.
I’m not yet that well read in the Fantasy space but I would say that some of the stuff I’ve really enjoyed that avoided the power fantasy aspect have cleaved closely to the Tolkien-esque folklore strain. Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword, for example, or The Elven by Bernhard Hennen. Both are tragedies, to a degree.
You have to take into consideration when that book was released, and then you look at the media that drew from it. I don’t really want to go into a huge research debate about Dracula simply because there is so much material there they study in academia circles.
In an age when anorexia isn’t really seen as a physical illness, tiny waists are in, the act of not eating and sucking blood as sexual and dominant it’s… ummm, it’s there.
Sci and Fantasy are huge genres so you’re going to find some with power fantasies of cousre, and some without. Horror covers the classics, the teen slashes, the monster movies, the thrillers… yeah it’s there too.
I get that this is a viable distinction between two types of story but I don’t agree that it describes the difference between fantasy as a genre and the more general fiction category and it seems like a weird thing to argue.
(I’m also instinctually suspicious of it because Terry Goodkind, who is a huge asshole and whose books are increasingly ridiculous in their didacticism, likes to argue that his books full of wizards, dragons and magic aren’t fantasy.)
Well that’s interesting. I tried to get into those books years ago and just couldn’t; I even tried a few times a few years apart.
Look, my point is not that power fantasy equals bad. If that’s your thing, have at it, doesn’t bother me. Like I said, I’ve tired of it as of late, across whatever genre it may be encountered.
I know I’ve read that the prevailing opinion of Iron Man 3 seems to be pretty low. But I liked it a lot - I liked that Tony Stark was sufffering PTSD and making tons of inferior Iron Man suits that keep falling apart on him when he needs them. It’s still a power fantasy, but with an Achilles heel (see what I did there?)
Super, super don’t bother. He’s a Randian and trying to sell that ideology through his work. (Plus it’s fucked up in a number of other ways.) I don’t know how I missed it in the first few books but by like the fifth or sixth it’s just blatant.
I am not saying if they are good or bad either. I just think the power fantasy ideal hits several genres. 99% of the time they’re not going to be power fantasies for me whether I like it or not anyway.
Back before college and certain high school classes sucked the joy of reading right out of me, these were big. It was the only reason I tried to get into them. I wound up reading The Summer Tree, some of the DnD based stuff, and some others instead.
I approach TV, games and books pretty much the same way. I either like them or I don’t. They’re never really catered for me. I just thin sci-fi fantasy, like what falls into that, is a lot larger than most think.
I wouldn’t say all (or near all), but I think it’s the most common trope in fantasy for sure. When I started reading fantasy in my late teens, it was David Eddings’ Belgarion that hooked me, and those books were for sure the very essence of the fantasy power trip: young farm boy discovers he has powers and becomes a hero king. I guess there’s a reason the trope is common - it sells books?
If you’re looking for good counter-examples, a couple of my favourites are:
Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay
Kay is rooted in the Tolkien fantasy style, and his earlier books follow the power trope, but starting with Lions, he leaves the trope behind.
First Law Trilogy by Joe Abercrombie
While not my favourite of Abercrombie’s (that would be Best Served Cold), this trilogy was specifically written with the goal of subverting the standard power fantasy trope.
I’ll add that while compiling the above list, I had several more ideas I was going to recommend, but as I looked them up, I realised that they were all of the kind “young person discovers some exceptional power/trait, and goes on to do great things”. I think the trope is more common than I first thought.
Nesrie, I couldn’t disagree more about horror. As a general rule, horror is the opposite of a power fantasy. The horror genre is the modern day version of dramatic catharsis. Something taps into your dread, your feelings of fear and powerlessness and death, and by experiencing those feelings in the context of a story being told, they are drained or purged. Ideally.
I see fantasy as the opposite, which is why I’m posing the question. The most common fantasy trope seems to be someone with a lot of power over a fantastical world. The very antithesis of horror.
Also, don’t hold The Meg against the horror genre! The Meg is a dumb and safe action movie engineered to be exported into China.
Ah, interesting. Night Watch sounds like a Russian power fantasy, which would be a power fantasy crushed by dictators or czars! It sounds like it’s offering the sort of social commentary I associate with science fiction.
This again! I think I’m going to have to try one of these. Abercrombie came up in the Steven Erikson thread.
-Tom