In Tad Williams’ The War of the Flowers, protagonist Theo Vilmos is the singer for a modern day rock band. After discovering his uncle’s book, he is transported to a world inhabited by fairies, trolls, and other mystical creatures. Understandably, Theo is disoriented, but at the same time he’s awed by the fantastic new sights in this magical realm.
Mr. Williams is hardly the only author to write about a person from present day who suddenly finds themselves in a fantasy land. There’s Terry Brooks’ Magic Kingdom of Landover series, J. V. Jones’ The Barbed Coil, and John Norman’s Gor series. There aren’t many other examples beyond the ones you find in juvenile fantasy novels and fanfiction … at least, not enough for Wikipedia to rank it as one of the major subgenres of fantasy literature. Is this because a modern day protagonist in a fantasy world is far too much an exercise in escapism, even for the kind of reader who regularly reads books with covers featuring fearsome dragons, heroic knights, and damsels in loose-fitting gowns? Or perhaps because we have a sneaky suspicion that the hero is a Mary Sue of the author?
In a way, though, sticking a modern hero in a strange, distant world hews closer to traditional speculative fiction. Jonathan Swift, Jules Verne, and Arthur Conan Doyle all featured then modern-day heroes voyaging to highly exotic locales, like, say, an underground cavern filled with dinosaurs. Really, is this so very wrong? Since J.R.R. Tolkien spread his influence on the literary world, modern day fantasy fiction writers seem obsessed with writing novels that mimic fictional historical narratives. The peasant heroes must be products of their time, immune to the realm’s wondrous charms.
And yet, almost all introduce a naive young hero, a handy device to introduce several of the world’s high concept ideas to the reader. The more accurate the hero gets to being a product of his time, the more the author distance himself from the reader. It gets to the point where authors almost always portray the hero to believe the stereotype that women are weak and reserved, and then witness an ass-kicking warrior female only to conclude, “Hey, chicks are our equal after all!” some 500 years before women were granted the right to vote. Characters written in this fashion really are no different than time travelers, dimension hoppers, and wardrobe travelers who share more modern mores.
Which brings us to the subject of today’s Webcomic Overlook, Rob Balder and Jamie Noguchi’s Erfworld … or, as it’s better known, “The One Comic on the Giantitp.com site That’s Not Order of the Stick.”
