There’s an argument about “gritty” fantasy you’ve probably heard before. Sometimes it’s about race and racism, sometimes about gender and sexism, but it comes down to the same thing: authors depict and/or recreate oppressive value systems, progressive writers criticize the way it excludes diverse modern readers and perpetuates still-active systems of oppression, reactionaries respond by invoking historical authenticity, and progressives counter with this pithy little meme: “fantasy is called fantasy because it’s a fantasy. There were no dragons in the real Middle Ages either, but we don’t have a problem including them.” Or “We are talking about being comfortable with the inclusion of wraiths and magic, but not the mere existence of people of color. Accuracy and realism flew out the window with the harpies.” This cycle has recently been applied, for example, to sexual violence in Game of Thrones and representation of people of color in The Witcher 3 (sources of the quotes, respectively).
This response makes my hackles rise. That’s uncomfortable, because it’s usually voiced by people I agree with, in defense of a cause I support, against ignorant assholes hiding their prejudice behind the unconsenting skirts of academic historians. But that’s precisely why I find it so annoying. It feels like a wicked comeback, but really it’s a sort of surrender. It’s smug about the wit of an argument that undermines its own platform. Because appealing to fantasy, to the idea that progressive-minded fantasy should simply build new, more utopian worlds, admits that they are right, that the problematic medievalism they defend is an adequate and objective depiction of history.
But what about historical fiction? If genre-specific creative license is the main thing permitting fantasy to deviate from presumed “historical realities,” that implies historical fiction, tied to historical “objectivity,” is inherently oppressive--eliding context, perspective, and the vast diversity of historical example. This line of argument abandons the actual battlefield—historicism—and moves off to less contested pastures. What’s in question, it seems fairly clear, is not the boundary of fantasy, but rather what we can accept when fans and authors assert that works are congruent with medieval history.
Authors often deliver the “no dragons” argument as a preface to many of the same points I’m about to make. I’m not saying anything new, necessarily, but I just want to illustrate how these things are undermined by the “no dragons” point. It sets the argument up on an uneasy footing, for me, and suggests that we don’t understand the people arguing with us, when in fact we have quite robust theories to understand their motives. It points the conversation away from the matters at hand: education, presentation, and an expanding idea of what history can bring to fantasy.
A big part of the problem, I think, is that historicism entered the fantasy lexicon as a package deal alongside some exploitative and backwards looking habits. Some of its biggest trendsetters were from subscription TV, where great historicist writing was packaged with nudity, sex, and violence, which were forced to coexist not just as storytelling elements, but as selling points. And in literary fantasy, the founders of the Grimdark style replicated the Eurocentric medievalism of traditional fantasy partly in order to deconstruct it. But works like Game of Thrones represent steps towards historicism in fantasy, not endpoints. If this nest of historical contingency has led authors to indulge in exploitative and marginalizing depictions of historicism, let’s focus on expanding that execution and explicating the oppressive habits it reproduces, rather than turning our backs on historicism as a tool for progressive change.
I like fantasy that pursues historicism. I don’t think that taste is at odds with making fantasy more progressive, more feminist, more anti-racist. Quite the opposite. I don’t mean to cast aspersions on people whose taste runs in other directions. I think there’s plenty of value in works set in secondary worlds without Earth’s oppressive baggage. But for my part, I’d like to see more works that embrace historicism more completely, not less. Historians have expended tremendous efforts to override versions of history that focus on women only as victims of sexism, if at all, to complicate narratives that paint Europe as a monochrome bastion of Whiteness, to dissect the myths of race and gender and class reified by genre authors in the past. By relying on fantasy to bypass historicism in the pursuit of progressive ideals, the “no dragons” argument ignores this work, tacitly admitting that such well-documented revisionist ideas are no more plausible than fantasy monsters.
And, of more immediate relevance, it ignores the dozens of fantasy authors already carrying that expanded history, that feminist and anti-racist history, into the very medieval fantasy settings that are defended as the traditional bastions of oppressive myth-making. Authors like (among many others!) Jesse Bullington, whose book The Enterprise of Death features a lesbian African necromancer travelling a thoroughly researched medieval Europe. Or Paul Kingsnorth, author of The Wake, which provides a thorough deconstruction of the Anglo-Saxon masculine hero archetype in a depiction of early medieval England culturally immersive to the point that it is written completely in a pseudo-reproduction of Old English. Or Starz’ Black Sails, which began with some rather exploitative presentations of sexual violence but quickly evolved to portray unique and richly characterized LGBT relationships—not to mention empowering POC in an overtly postcolonial storyline. Or, in the scholarly sphere, authors like Helen Young, who has created a thorough problematization of race in both early fantasy and recent works that outlines a theoretical framework for anti-racist fantasy.
So I think we need a better response than “it’s fantasy.” A response that emphasizes that Eurocentric, abusive medievalisms are themselves fantasies. A response that frames issues in terms of execution and context rather than simple presence or absence. A response that points to the fantasists taking that fight to the front lines, who are confronting historical legacies of colonialism, sexual oppression, and racism on medieval terms in ways that are empowering as well as historically authentic. Perhaps that response is too complex to compete with a meme as appealing as this one, but memes are more versatile and expressive than they’ve ever been, so maybe it's only a matter of time.