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2011-05-30, 02:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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#735
Re: When you play the Game of Thrones...
A not fully precise but general way of telling High Fantasy from Low Fantasy:
High Fantasy
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- Setting - A world other than ours. It may have a nominal connection with present day Earth, such as being our remote past or future, but this plays no role in the plot. Mythopoeia is often put into play to define the very metaphysics of the world. Nevertheless it often resembles medieval Europe, and is often peopled by People Of Hair Color.
- Scale - Epic. Power politics, wars, the death of nations, gods walking the earth, and the real threat of The End of the World as We Know It. This is what distinguishes High Fantasy from Heroic Fantasy.
- Great evil - An enemy which is near enough Evil incarnate or fundamentally abhorrent
- Methods - Victory is not achieved through force of arms, the main feature distinguishing High Fantasy from Heroic Fantasy. If Aragorn had killed Sauron in hand-to-hand combat, that would have been Heroic Fantasy. In short, The Aragorn or the Reluctant Hero will be offered up instead of the rough-hewn barbarian of, say, Conan or Beowulf.
Low Fantasy
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- Mundane settings: Urban, historical, After The End, or otherwise subdued and only sparsely supernatural. A clear contrast to High Fantasy's wildly superpowered setting.
- Cynicism: Low fantasy is famous for its gray morality (or in nastier cases, Black and Gray Morality), while high fantasy is famous for its Black And White Morality.
- Human dominance: worlds which are populated mostly (or even exclusively) by human beings rather than the usual Tolkienesque mix of elves, dwarves and other humanoids.
- Plot scope: Tends to focus more on the survival and tribulations of one or a few individuals rather than the whole world. A villainous king who steals a magical artifact is less likely to be trying to bring back the Infernal Legions of Hell and conquer the world.
- Heroism: High fantasy heroes are usually all-around nice guys who stand up for the little guy and fight the bad guy. Low fantasy heroes tend to be bitter cynics desperately clinging to their broken moral compass or devil-may-care anti-heroes who save the woman from the evil sorcerer just for the sex.
- Methods: Victories achieved through physical combat, not magical battles or moral superiority - the defining feature of Heroic Fantasy.
- Tone: Tends to be darker or more comedic than your average high-fantasy world.
- Sorcerers: In high fantasy, they're kindly old men who sling fireballs in the name of justice, with the exception of the villain. Magic also tends to be treated as a wondrous force that binds the world together. Low fantasy treats sorcerers as freakishly evil, and quite often insane people who would sacrifice a thousand virgins to some hideous monstrosity from another dimension just to increase their power a tiny bit. Magic is well within Things Man Was Not Meant To Know territory and is often thought of as the evil corrupting force that entices innocent people into doing anything for power. And this all assumes, of course, that magic exists at all - there are examples where magic is essentially non-existent.
- War: In high fantasy a clear "Good vs. Evil" smackdown between civilized races and the Always Chaotic Evil races. In low fantasy, a useless war between two empires to make their lands marginally bigger.
If you take anything from that list it should be that there's more to the distinction than the level of magic, but rather that the big difference is in the tone and on the emphasis.
As for ASoIaF, it's become a bit borderline. The scope has slowly but surely been drifting to an epic one, something that should have been obvious from the prologue of A Game of Thrones. That said, I would still sooner consider it Low Fantasy than High.