"But in fantasy, you can make a complete break, and you can put people in a situation where they are confronted with things that they would not confront in the real world"
About this Quote
Fantasy is often treated like a decorative genre, a place to park dragons and avoid the news. Moon flips that assumption: the “complete break” isn’t escapism, it’s leverage. By severing the tether to our familiar institutions, manners, and power structures, fantasy can reroute a reader’s moral reflexes. When the scenery changes, the excuses change with it. The usual defenses - “that’s just how the world works,” “it’s complicated,” “nothing can be done” - lose their authority.
Her key move is the word confronted. Moon isn’t praising fantasy for being soothing; she’s praising it for being coercive in the best narrative sense. Put a character in a society with different rules, or a crisis that can’t be ignored, and you force choices into the open. In realist fiction, the reader can hide behind plausibility: people don’t talk like that, systems don’t shift that fast, justice rarely arrives on time. Fantasy can tighten the screws, creating situations where cowardice, prejudice, complicity, or courage can’t be rationalized away.
The subtext is also autobiographical craft advice from a writer known for disciplined worldbuilding and ethical pressure-cookers (Paksenarrion, Vatta): invention isn’t a flex, it’s a lab. The context here is late-20th-century genre respectability politics, when fantasy was routinely dismissed as childish. Moon’s argument is a quiet rebuttal: the unreal can be the most efficient way to make reality impossible to ignore.
Her key move is the word confronted. Moon isn’t praising fantasy for being soothing; she’s praising it for being coercive in the best narrative sense. Put a character in a society with different rules, or a crisis that can’t be ignored, and you force choices into the open. In realist fiction, the reader can hide behind plausibility: people don’t talk like that, systems don’t shift that fast, justice rarely arrives on time. Fantasy can tighten the screws, creating situations where cowardice, prejudice, complicity, or courage can’t be rationalized away.
The subtext is also autobiographical craft advice from a writer known for disciplined worldbuilding and ethical pressure-cookers (Paksenarrion, Vatta): invention isn’t a flex, it’s a lab. The context here is late-20th-century genre respectability politics, when fantasy was routinely dismissed as childish. Moon’s argument is a quiet rebuttal: the unreal can be the most efficient way to make reality impossible to ignore.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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