Categories: Beginner's GuideFantasyWorldbuilding

Types of Popular Fantasy Themes

Types of Popular Fantasy Themes

Sunfire

CONTENTS

The Premise

Every work in the fantasy genre, regardless of the medium used, tells a story. The story is the driving force to introduce the audience to the world, its characters, and its lore. Each tale has a conflict of some kind, typically caused by the villain, that brings different groups of people and characters together to stand against evil. The constant war between good and evil is one of many fantasy themes.

You might be wondering what kind of tale should I tell? The truth of the matter is, it’s up to you to decide that. Nearly every work has a variation of the eternal struggle between good and evil. The endless war between good and evil is a central trope in fantasy, one where everyone can easily recognize.

However, this article isn’t going to examine the various kinds of stories you might run across. Instead it’ll delve into common fantasy themes.

Fantasy themes help bring a three-dimensional aspect to the world as they convey a message to the audience that they might otherwise not notice.

Magic vs. Reason

While it’s true that magic is a dominant aspect of the genre, it’s also one of the top fantasy themes. Further breaking it down, stories explore the polar opposites of magic and reason. In many of these settings, magic was used to explain the unexplainable. A gravely ill person suddenly recovering in one day? Ravaged croplands full of new crops in one day?

People would say it was the deity who used his magic to fix them. Since religion played a large role in people’s lives, people looked to the supernatural for explanations and not question them, out of fear of angering the deity they worshipped.

Reason would work to find a plausible answer to explain the unexplainable. No matter what, there was a logical answer for everything. Perhaps the sick person was already on the mend and was back to normal the next day? A new generation of plants were already growing when the croplands were destroyed?

This theme shows how magic and reason clash and how different types of people might have different interpretations of the same event, which invites conflict as they work to prove that their belief system is right.

Magic vs. Reason is explored in many works across the genre.

Survival

Many settings feature communities struggling to stay afloat. Survival is one of the most explored fantasy themes. This story theme explores how societies must contend with the environment, terrain, and other communities to survive.

Despite have no access to amenities such as air conditioning and refrigeration, people survive by wearing cool, light clothes in summer and heavy clothes during the cold months. They  go to great pains to protect themselves during a heat wave or a brutal snowstorm.

With no refrigeration, food spoils quickly. That means, it must be consumed fast lest it goes bad and food tends to be scarce, especially during the winter months. The amount of food sources determine the future of a city/town, more meaning it stands a better chance of surviving and growing in the future.

They also have to deal with all kinds of weather. Thunderstorms and snowstorms come without warning and can kill. Same with tornadoes and hurricanes. Structures made with light materials are more susceptible to be blown off the surface from high winds than those built with heavy materials.

Relations with other communities impact how a place thrives. If a place has hostile neighbors, it’s likely to be attacked with a chance of being wiped off the map. If a community has friendly relations with its neighbors, it’s more likely to get help in the form of food and aid.

Surviving in a fantasy world requires great work and determination to make the future better. This theme explores how different species and people face many headwinds in their goal to create a better future for those coming after them and how they never give up.

Nature vs. Industry

Nature and Industry constantly clash. The poison in the pond represents how industry can ruin the pristine beauty of Nature.

Many works examine how nature and industry come into conflict. Nature vs. industry is another of numerous fantasy themes. Many settings have picturesque places where the people live in harmony with nature, taking only what they need to survive and nothing more. They tend to eschew technology.

Industry, or advancing in technology, focuses on the consumption of many resources to create a civilization that’s technologically advanced. Such civilizations then grow in power and invade many lands to add to what they already control. A lot of natural resources are consumed in the process, bringing ruin to pristine land.

Industry also tends to enslave people. Workers are needed to mine ores, chop down trees, and so on to sustain the growing civilization. They work hard to the bone, waking up at dawn to go to work to going home when nighttime comes with little or no breaks. Workers also live in shoddy places or have their own quarters in towns.

But industry has its own benefits. It brings more riches to people, enabling them to live better lives than before. New building materials are developed, which in turn gives people more stable structures to live in. New classes such as merchants come into being as new products are created to sell to an ever-growing number of affluent people. 

This theme explores how societies progress at the expense of nature. While it’s an admirable goal to develop a technologically-advanced civilization without harming nature, practicalities dictate otherwise.

Social Strife

Present in many works, this story theme focuses on the inner workings of a society and the tension it generates among its various classes. Nearly every world has its own social hierarchy, with the royalty and nobility at the top and the peasants at the bottom. The peasants work for meager pay whereas the royalty and nobility dictate the path the nation takes. The tension between the classes is also one of the most explored fantasy themes.

While they outnumber the royalty and nobility, peasants have no voice, no right to help decide their nation’s path. Instead, they’re forced by their superiors to do the thankless tasks in keeping the nation running, from working in the mines to growing food that will be consumed by the leaders of society.

The royalty sets the course a country will take and the nobility works to enact the king’s will. If the king declares war on a neighboring nation, the nobility will force the peasants to enlist in the army or work to feed the army and keep it running. The royals and nobles use their great power to keep the peasants in line, fully aware that they’re in the minority in terms of numbers.

The chance of a peasant uprising is ever present and all it takes is just one event to ignite it. The heads of society always work to prevent it from happening but the resentment in peasants continually grows, making such a conflict inevitable at some point.

War and Politics

Wars and politics impact the story in many ways. One is how war chokes the life out of the land and bring nothing but ruin and misery to many people.

War and peace is one of the most important fantasy themes. While the previous story theme examined the inner workings of a nation, this one looks outward, delving into how countries interact with each other. Many nations have diplomatic relations with each other from hostile to friendly. It’s common for like-minded nations to form alliances. 

All countries aspire to be the dominant power in the world. Schemes, political maneuvering, and meddling in another nation’s internal affairs are several components of a country vying to dominate its neighbors. A country will betray its ally if it believes such an act is in its best interests.

War is typically the vehicle in which the contenders striving for supremacy takes, considering that they see no other option in which to settle their differences. Consequently, such wars tend to be destructive, bringing nothing but misery and ruin to the land and their people. The people of the defeated power are either subjugated or killed by the victorious power, breeding resentment among them that may lead to a brutal war down the line.

Countries who ally with each other help them when they’re needed. A nation suffering from famine may get food from its ally, who has an abundance of it. But such alliance isn’t necessarily restricted to helping with domestic matters. They can form military alliances with the provision that in the event one is attacked, the other will come to its aid.

Attacking a country with a military alliance runs the risk of widening the war for the aggressor as the friends of the nation being attacked are likely to enter it against the attacker. Depending on the aggressor’s relations with the other nations, being at war may cost it food and resources it may need to prevail or the aggressor may have decided that the prize outweighed the risks.

How nations interact with one another is a prevalent theme in many works and those relationships can drive the story in unexpected ways. 

Tying it all Together

Among fantasy themes, the conflict between good and evil is the most prevalent, appearing in nearly every work in the genre. While good and evil takes center stage in the story, add some others. Having multiple themes only enhances the tale, making these worlds feel realistic. It also makes them more dynamic and vibrant.

When designing the story, have a theme in mind you wish to communicate to the audience and do it in an articulate — or subtle, if you wish — fashion. And do so in a way that’s easy to understand.

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Thanks for reading this and until the next time,

Sunfire

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Sunfire
Tags: Storytelling
2 years ago

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