The Standard Fantasy Setting and the Tradition of Inspiration

If you've read a lot of fantasy books, you probably recognize the Standard Fantasy Setting. It's what you get when you mash together the setting of most fantasy books into one gestalt setting. But they're really easy to mash together like that.

The Standard Fantasy Setting is a world of vaguely-medieval kingdoms, with vaguely-medieval technology plus magic. It's peopled by whichever the author likes of humans, elves, dwarves, goblins, vampires, and a few other races. In the backstory, there was an Advanced Ancient Civilization that's fallen to ruins; in the present, there's a Dark Lord trying to conquer and/or destroy the world in some way that our protagonist can individually thwart.

Among fantasy fans, this easy gestalt is well-known. In fact, some bestselling authors have played with or parodied it, like Terry Pratchett in Discworld or Diana Wynne Jones in Tough Guide to Fantasyland and Dark Lord of Derkholm (which I recommend).

So where does this Standard Fantasy Setting come from? And is it a good thing to write in?

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Two years ago, Scott Alexander made a guess. After dismissing other ideas such as authors lazily copying Tolkien, he concluded most of the Setting is designed to help the story by giving an average-person protagonist agency to save the world from the Dark Lord.

The rest of the setting - like the specific choices of race to populate the world - he considers boring and pushes writers to throw them aside.

That last part is the same conclusion author Seth Dickinson comes to on his blog: "Be intentional in all your writing decisions", he says; purposefully choose non-standard ways of doing things to build a unique world.

I haven't read Dickinson's fiction, but he attributes this to a tweet-thread by Kate Elliot, and I have read a bit of Kate Elliot. The bit I read is set somewhere peopled largely with humans and elves, with an ancient ruined civilization... in other words, somewhere with many parts of the Standard Fantasy Setting. In other words, she's not taking this manifesto as far as Dickinson phrases it.

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And that's a good thing, according to a recent Tumblr post I came across where Samuel Days defends the Standard Fantasy Universe.

This blogger, a fantasy fan, points out that "Making up lots of new words, or lots of new meanings for existing words, would hamper communication." And this shared vocabulary helps create a shared setting, where "vampires" (and by implication "kingdoms" and "dark lords") mean sort of the same thing in each book.

He's not wrong. But after chewing on his post for a bit, I realized the importance of shared vocabulary goes even deeper than that.

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It's not just readers who often come to understand a book with preconceptions from past books. Often, it's authors too.

When I try to write fantasy stories, a lot of my ideas come from other stories I've read or tried to write. I might wonder what if different things happened, or different characters were there, or this one cultural practice worked in a different way, or things like that. But however big a change I make, I'm starting from the groundwork of an already-written story. The setting that comes out might be different, but - unless I consciously try to change it afterwards - it's probably going to look like a variation of the same Standard Setting.

Published authors often do this too. Just look at the flood of fantasy novels right after Lord of the Rings - one of which, Sword of Shannara, has been openly stated to have started as a Lord of the Rings fanfic! Or, look at the flood of modern novels that explicitly use D&D mechanics. Or from another angle, look at how Bret Devereaux has criticized fantasy armor designers for drifting farther from reality by chasing after past fantasy works.

This does have some bad effects, like the one Devereaux points out. But in other ways, it's a delightful spur to the imagination. When I spend hours in the Standard Fantasy Setting, I'm filling my imagination with material that I can use to write my own books. Perhaps, if I were spending my hours in Norse or Welsh sagas instead (like Tolkien and Lloyd Alexander) I'd have even richer material - but realistically, I'm not going to do that. And even if I did, the sagas would take a lot of translation to make into novels readable in the present day. (Witness the magnificent effort Lloyd Alexander went to in the Prydain Chronicles!) Tales in the Standard Fantasy Setting are already translated.

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A fantasy fan will recognize the Standard Fantasy Setting; too. They'll have read a lot of books in it; they'll be used to it. As the blogger says, when the next novelist makes changes to the Standard Fantasy Setting, the fan will notice and spend some attention keeping track of it. Sometimes, like in the stories Kate Elliot is hoping for in her tweet-thread, that's important to the story, so it's worth it. Other times, like with Greg Egan's sci-fi, it is the whole point of the story.

But other times... Speaking as a sometimes-author, I've written paragraphs about odd politics or agriculture in some imaginary country or other. Sometimes, I end up building subplots around them and so they stay. Other times, I keep them as flashes of interesting color. But other times... they get revised out as distracting.

Elliott and Dickinson would say the interesting color is the point, and the distraction is worth it. That's very real to some extent. There's nothing original in the Standard Fantasy Setting; a book absolutely should add some unique color to it.

But readers can't appreciate interesting color in everything at once. They need something known to grab onto. Tolkien wisely started Lord of the Rings among hobbits, in the familiar environment of a tavern that could easily have fit into a contemporary English village. He wrote before the Standard Fantasy Setting was a thing (and unintentionally helped invent it); now, his successors can write about battle-wizards or thieves' guilds and have readers recognize them almost as familiarly as the tavern. McCaffrey started Dragonriders of Pern with her protagonist looking at the weed-covered castle yard... and later we see that's dangerous due to attracting Thread, but for the moment it's enough to know the castle has just been left to decay. We start among things readers will recognize, even as our authors are striking out for new terrain.

The Standard Fantasy Setting lets readers recognize more things, and so gives authors more opportunity to build up more new things.

And of course, as Elliot and Dickinson say - and Scott Alexander agrees in some ways - they should take that opportunity.

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This, I believe, is how the Standard Fantasy Setting came about.

As Scott Alexander says, it does provide a lot of handy story hooks and aligns nicely with readers' psychology - but that doesn't pin down every point. For instance, why is it usually based on the European Middle Ages instead of the Classical period, steampunk, or some period in ancient China? There's no psychological reason for that, I'm convinced.

Rather, the Standard Fantasy Setting primarily developed because readers and authors were both inspired by previous fantasy works. The gestalt setting came about by looping back on itself and writing more works in close variants of the previous work's settings. Some people have used the results of this gestalt to argue political points, and you can certainly point out political implications of some parts of it, but the actual reason most given authors use it is just tradition. This doesn't quite mean "everyone else has just been remixing the parts [Tolkien] left us" as Scott Alexander puts the idea before dismissing it. It means that authors write what they know, and Tolkien and his successors are now one major thing they know. If they're writing within the genre, they're usually writing inspired by the genre.

And, that's normal. Other genres, from medieval epic poetry to Regency romances to science fiction, have built upon themselves in the same way.

If I write a fantasy novel of my own (as I still hope to do someday), I'm definitely going to put my own spin on the Standard Fantasy Setting. But at the same time, I'm going to be writing in the tradition of the fantasy genre... which probably means I'll be writing an idea developed while thinking about works in that setting.