My preoccupation with escapist fantasy, and where it stands in the puzzle of media consumption, primarily derives from my own justification for considering writing in the genre. To be taken seriously in a literary setting, it probably won’t get any aspiring writer very far to indulge in their dirtiest, most incestuous erotic fantasies – usually it requires not just quality writing, but also a conscious or conveniently unconscious development of critical cultural or literary ideas that are identified and explored in an interesting way. For example, Octavia Butler doesn’t just write about aliens and parasitic worms, but uses them, intentionally or not, as analogies for slavery and as tools for underscoring major themes about humanity. Good literary analysis of Butler involves lots of cultural theory – such as Foucault and Hartman – as well as thematic analysis across her other works because of this.
So what is it exactly about escapist fantasy that necessarily avoids this? Certainly it should be possible to write compelling, entertaining escapism that investigates fundamental truths about the human condition – and indeed this has been demonstrated over and over across media. The final arc of the anime Hunter x Hunter, for example, critically engages Foucalt’s theory of biopower in arguably a more explicit and investigative way than even Butler does in any one of her works. To be fair, however, much of this arc expands beyond the escapist aspects that were decidedly more defined earlier in the show – specifically dealing with sacrifice of power and bringing in parallel character developments to enhance the major themes that some individuals may find overwhelming or uninteresting.
The true danger of escapism in any critical setting is, frankly, the degree to which reality is often disregarded – even though this is the entire point of escapism. This does not mean that a fantasy show or book or comic can not engage with reality in an analytical way. In fact, often fantasy or science fiction can serve as hyperbole to emphasize certain truths about the world, and this can be considered ‘literary’. The actual concern is the degree to which escapism is emphasized over other aspects of a story – in other words, the rationalization or details of your self-insert’s 100 woman harem could, believe it or not, get in the way of any literary substance to your short story. In my experience, many of the best works of art engage with some truth that is ill-defined and ambiguous, and serves as some sort of investigation into the murky contradictions and paradoxes that create an interesting topic representative of life (i.e. Nabokov and pedophilia, or the aforementioned Butler’s exploration of pleasure in domination in settings parallel to slavery). So when reality is disregarded intentionally to serve as an escape from its dreariness, many of these interesting topics are left along with it, at the cost of potentially interesting stories.
This being said, there is certainly room for critique of humanity’s tendency towards escapism, and there is fantastic media out there that deals with this (the music video MEMEME! comes to mind, where pornographic consumption and obsession is explored through the very pornographic content it criticizes). This is where interesting writing or media production can flourish – the intersection of creating escapism and dealing with the underlying desires and needs that necessitated it. Similarly, perhaps the best way to create a foundation of this in any given plot is by being escapist, and then subverting those expectations or somehow examining reality through this established lens of escapism.
So, in the future it could be interesting to write something like this – a betrayal of the things I consider escapism paired with some meta-acknowledgement that, somehow, might forgive it. So keep your eyes peeled folks.
The Scenic Climax 