Darken Rahl and his Trip to the Underworld (or, eat it, antigamers)

[downandoutnow]

30. "SCI-FI/Fantasy is telling. It is properly termed "adult fantasy", and your improper classification"

"...the fact you call the sequence I've related here SCI-FI/Fantasy is telling. It is properly termed "adult fantasy", and your improper classification tells me you don't know what you're talking about.."

Nonsense! Embarrassing nonsense! First, a speedy Googling alleges that the books you're referring to are "epic fantasy":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_the_Winds

Some professor has a site up about fantasy - again, one of the first Google hits - under fantasy subgenres, this "adult fantasy" doesn't appear, although allegedly there are Contemporary, Dark, Heroic and High varieties:

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/beyond/subjects/fantasysubgenres/index.html

How about Wiki's list of fantasy subgenres? Not there either, although "Young Adult Fantasy" does make an appearance:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fantasy_genres

But this matters not at all. --- "It is properly termed 'adult fantasy'" you snort, as though I mistook a symphony for a concerto, or a Cezanne from a Renoir, as though particular knowledge about subgenres of contemporary pulp fiction is de rigeur for the well-rounded, fully-educated person of discernment.

It is to laugh! I'll have to admit, my education has grievous holes: I'm not particularly up on the difference between furries and plushies either. Or the variations of dubstep.

But then, maybe I'm not missing much --

"Again, no video game would ever touch this part of this story, mostly because of people such as yourself, who would never allow a game in which a man and man woman who are dearly beloved to each other to be forced into marrying other people, and then consummating that marriage then and there in order to stop a plague that would kill millions. They do: the man and woman beloved are paired to each other, but someone switched them, so they're together, but the woman imagines it being the other man, and in so doing, betrays her true beloved, thus opening the way to the Hall of the Betrayed and allowing her true love to stop the plague."

What juvenile, melodramatic rot.

Finally, I have to admit that though I guess I'm not missing much, I'm still kind of missing your point. I know that videogames generally these days are little more than every variety of gory murder obsessively repeated. So you're complaining that this constant gore isn't supported by the kind of turgid melodramatic backstory you find in certain fantasy books? Because we anti-gamers have prevented it? I'm sure if some game-maker wanted to serve his violence on a bed of fantasy (sorry, sorry! "Adult" fantasy) he would be able to do so.

Where's the beef?