Fantasy Violence

The other night I was researching knife fighting in hopes of making one of my characters' combat scenes a little more realistic. In the midst of a bunch of videos of guys sparring with wooden knives I came upon a YouTube video of what a real knife attack actually looks like. Even though it was done with fake knives, it shocked me. The sheer brutality of it was unlike anything I'd ever seen. I don't flatter myself to have seen all that much, so that might be expected, but it did get me thinking hard about the role violence plays in fantasy, and the morality of using it to tell stories.

At first the stark contrast between the type of armed violence I saw that night and the way it's typically presented in fantasy abhorred me--it seemed wrong to cultivate in people a sense of armed conflict as beautiful or thought-provoking when in reality it's anything but. As I thought it over, however, I realized that contrast might in fact be fantasy violence's saving grace. The elegant, dance-like knife fighting of, say, Legolas in The Lord of the Rings films is nothing like the brutal stabbing of a realistic knife attack. Anyone who has seen the two would never confuse or conflate them. Whether or not it's incumbent upon the fantasy author to make this explicit to readers is a more difficult question.

Fantasy violence is very rarely meant to signify real violence. Fantasy, in my general experience, lends itself to parable and allegory. A fight to the death between two characters is usually a struggle between two competing abstracts--love and hate, selflessness and greed, empathy and callousness. The characters are made to embody one or more of these abstracts as the author understands them, the reader picks up on that characterization, and through the violence in the narrative (and in the best fantasy, internal conflict in the point of view character that mirrors the external conflict) is made to understand a.) that the two are in conflict and b.) something about the nature of that conflict.

This makes it important, in the end, that fantasy violence remain very unlike real violence. Not only would a stark description of realistic violence distract from the allegory, but the conflict between something like love and hate cannot be settled with a knife point--and an author wouldn't want anyone to accidentally get that message out of their story (I hope). By maintaining the unreality of the violence in one's story, one can use violence as a literary device without implying that violence must be used as a real-life solution.

That leaves, of course, the problem of conveying to readers the difference between fantasy violence and real violence. Unless a story is aimed at children, I think readers can generally be trusted to sort it out on their own, but while I haven't yet read fantasy that successfully contrasted real world and fantasy violence, it's not a bad goal (and it seems to me that someone must have done it, so if anyone has seen it I'd love to know where so I can read it).

That's a lot to think about (took me a few days to mull over, anyway) so I'll stop there for now, but writing this has launched a thousand ideas in my mind. Expect more to come on why violence makes an effective literary device, the fantasy world and what it signifies, and internal vs. external conflict in fantasy.