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Response to: Thought experiment... Fantasy is harmless...?
15 years ago
KidLoose Productions Presents: 
redregon blocked me from his page, but I really wanted to chime in with my own thoughts on his latest journal so I thought I'd do it here. The original journal can be found here: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/1687099/oh the matter of violence and fantasy.
for starters... what is fantasy? well, if you kinda boil it down, it's what comes up in our imaginations... the stuff of fiction... not real... but, why is it as it is? well, fantasy is a sort of escape. if we never wanted to escape reality, why would we have fantasies in the first place?
so there is one point. but, what does that really mean? i mean, yeah, we have nightmares but that's kinda a byproduct of our imaginations. what is the allure of fantasy? well, it's what we imagine doing or seeing or whatever in things that we want to do in some way.
I'm always hesitant to agree with someone when they start an argument by making assertions like this, but I looked it up and did some quick reading on it and Wikipedia seems to agree with him at least as far as daydreams are concerned. But he not localize the discussion to just daydreams, but fantasy as a whole, which is where I draw contention with his argument, as fantasy as a whole contains more than just daydreams.
now, fantasizing about going on a roller-coaster... harmless
fantasizing about going on a roller-coaster nude... hilarious, but harmless.
fantasizing about shopping at the mall... harmless
fantasizing about going on a shopping spree... probably a lot of fun, but ultimately harmless.
so, yeah... it's rather blah for the everyday stuff... let's go a little further...
fantasizing about being intimate with that cutie on the bus... harmless
fantasizing about doing the nasty on a pool-table/hot-tub/etc... harmless
fantasizing about getting your freak on with your other... harmless (and fun)
now... here's the question... even though these things are fantasies, they are drawn from the drives in our heads that make us want to DO these things... that's why we imagine them, explore them from different angles, toy with them... that kinda thing (or it's just *poof* IDEA! and then it's gone... but those don't happen often.)
basically, deep down, there's a part of us that kinda wants to DO those things that we fantasize about.
This may or may not be true of daydreams, I'm hesitant to agree with this argument here, however it is not true of all fantasy.
The first thing that popped into my mind when reading his journal was The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. One of the missions in the game tasks you with killing a unicorn and retrieving its horn. This game is obviously fantasy, but before playing it, I never really had any desire to kill a unicorn, and I would argue that the programmer of the game doesn't really have a desire to kill a unicorn either. It was just an appropriately fantasy-esc creature for the very heavily fantasy-esc setting, and tasking you with killing it would make the Daedric Prince who gave you the mission look like a real bastard.
Switching gears from Magical Fantasy to another Fantasy Genre; Horror, I think we can see some real obvious examples of how fantasy doesn't necessarily equate to secret desires. Another game example, because video games, by virtue of being an interactive media I think are the best way to dispel this false equivocation; Silent Hill. It can be argued effectively I think that one playing such a game wants to be scared, yes, I can agree to this. However, I cannot agree that one would want to be Harry Mason; to face the abominations of Silent Hill in a desperate search for his beloved daughter only to lose that daughter to these demonic forces, I can't see a player wanting this and I can't see the person who penned the script wanting this either.
Fantasy in this regard is penned for the sake of creating an entertaining narrative. There are no actual wants involved in it.
now... turn your heads and look at the fandom. it's a community fueled by the imagination, drives, secret things we've wanted to try or wished we could do (as is the case of nearly all of us here having furry personas.) granted, everyone's going to be different, but there's that underlying theme... besides, don't you really think it'd be cool to be your fursona IRL for even one day? hour?
Bringing up the subjects of fursonas does raise an interesting point: Now, there are many fursonas, mine includes, that have rather emotastic back-stories attached to them. I, for one, wouldn't really want to live Leon's life, since while it would include a lot of sex, it would also include a lot of really bad things I'd rather avoid, and I think if a lot of the people who write their fursonas to have really dark back stories stopped and thought about it, they might not really enjoy those lives either, in spite of whatever powers and such might come along with it.
On the flip side, it cannot be denied that there are definitely a lot of people who would probably enjoy living their fursonas' lives. There are probably a lot of author's who might enjoy living the lives of some of their characters. It is very possible that even outside of daydreaming there are possible wants involved in fantasy, the idea of self-insert fanfiction is essentially predicated on this. However, I do not agree that all fantasy is based on secret wants and desires, and I might even go so far as to claim that not all daydreams are necessarily based on secret desires and wants either, but that some might just be based on their entertainment value. Hell,
redregon himself gives a rather good example of this with the 'riding a roller-coaster nude.' He says himself; 'hilarious, but harmless.' Exactly, the thought of riding a roller-coaster nude is hilarious... the actual practice of this, however, probably wouldn't be as hilarious if you were then arrested for indecent exposure and/or banned from the amusement park. Granted there are some who might think of something like this out of some secret desire to want to do it as a prank, but similarly there are others who would only think about it because it would be a funny thought.I'm actually reminded just now of an old episode of the Nickelodeon series Clarissa Explains it All. A running gag in the series was Clarissa's desire to own/drive a car and her frequent frustrations at being denied opportunities to do so, and in one episode she has the chance to take a motorcycle out for a solo joyride, but is hesitant and in a roundabout way asks her father about his opinion on motorcycles without revealing her desire to go joyriding. Her father at first speaks rather romantically about motorcycles, but then when asked if he would like to ride one if given the chance completely switches gears and begins complaining about all the problems of motorcycles from how difficult they are to handle for the inexperienced to gunk from the handlebars getting stuck under your finger nails. Here, he daydreamed about motorcycles and then in practically the same breath confirmed his dislike for them and lack of desire to ever ride one.
so, here's where i suggest to you... using this train of thought, extend the metaphor...
what do you fantasize about?
My fantasies are my own, and not really of any concern of yours, be they based on secret desires or simply their entertainment value. Only my actions and the intentions behind them should be of any concern to others.
"That's impossible there's no such thing as trolls."
"Then how do you explain the dead Unicorn?"
.................................. With that being said, sorry that bit out killing unicorn triggered my random thought generator. On the topic at hand, I have to say that fantasy is extremely subjective. It is to varied and undefined to deem any one line of thought as something more than or less than just thought.