Wednesday 15 April 2020

On Disney and Marvel

On the first day of Quarantine my true love gave to me,
a channel full of Disney...

Or rather she gave it to herself and took me along for the ride, no matter what I said, which truthfully wasn't much as I don't really care too much what's on TV most of the time. 

Let me tell you something that occurred to me in the last few weeks.

Going by most definitions of Fantasy out there, nobody is bigger in modern Fantasy than Walt Disney. Not Tolkien, not Gygax, not Dunsany, not Rowling, not Del Rey, but Disney. His work, and the work done by those following his legacy and template, has reached more people, and covered more fairy tales and myths and stories about fantastical happenings, than any other. And they do so younger. Children the age of four and five know and love powerful sorceresses like Elsa and folk-heroes like Maui. Is his work influential outside Disney, in a literary sense? I cannot think of examples easily but I suspect wiser people than me would not struggle. And if there aren't any, then frankly we are staring at the biggest opportunity in Fantasy literature ever; the Fantasy book that will resonate with the audience reared on Disney.

And nobody has a bigger mythological interpretation than Marvel with Thor (which boils my piss to say the least). Or probably a bigger single franchise in SFF geekdom, one that will go on to leave little traces of influence everywhere like LotR and Star Wars before it, both in terms of elements and pacing. Somebody linked to a story template the other day that reads as heavily influenced by the MCU. I doubt its the only one. Sure, its not deviating much if any from the Hero's Journey to begin with, but there's a particular MCU-specific slant.

This isn't talked about much in most of the corners of SFF fandom I inhabit. They're popular but I love in book specific corners, and they're not books. But if there's one thing I think Fantasy authors and those thinking about the genre should be wise to right now is the ever increasing level of cross over between the various forms of media that constitute the genre, and genres in SFF. FF7 is as influential as the Wheel of Time, Sandman as influential as, er, Neil Gaiman's other works... and I don't have a movie because the books feed the screen in Fantasy. But the screen has a greater reach and takes on a life of their own; see Game of Thrones. See the MCUverse.

I think that the most important thing about this is that readers will see tropes, stereotypes and cliches from Disney and Marvel in the Fantasy books they read. If you want to write a story about a snarky genius inventor or ice sorceress scared of their powers, convinced that's fresh in Fantasy, it's not going to be fresh to most of the market at all. Which also means you can riff on them. But there's probably tons of ramifications I'm not getting and in any case, I didn't write this really to talk about what it means for the genre - that, or maybe what these two franchises do for the genre that's good, is a different tale - but more to share my revelation.

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