The fantasy genre is characterized by the inclusion of unreal or supernatural elements.
From the Latin phantastĭcus , the adjective fantastic refers to that belonging to or relating to fantasy . In the same way, it allows us to name what is fake, that has no reality or that only exists in the imagination.
At a colloquial level, the term fantastic refers to that which is excellent , magnificent or presumptuous . For example: “Manu Ginobili played a fantastic game and gave the San Antonio Spurs victory over the Dallas Mavericks,” “The party was fantastic, I didn't stop dancing all night,” “What he did was fantastic.”
Fantastic as a genre of fiction
Fantastic is also a genre of fiction whose main elements are supernatural and unreal . The fantasy genre includes characters, situations or settings that could never belong to the true world (such as men who fly or animals that talk).
The essence of the fantasy genre is not to prioritize realistic representations. On the contrary, it is responsible for subverting the laws of the real world. It differs from science fiction in that it adduces scientific causes to violate the mechanics of how reality works.
different worlds
One of the issues worth highlighting within the fantasy genre is the fact that it frequently takes various types of worlds as settings. Specifically, we would have to emphasize that we will encounter alternative, parallel or border worlds.
Thus, for example, we would come across the fact that there are movies or books where the characters, simply saying a specific word or using a specific object, have the option of entering a different world. This would be the case, for example, of the Harry Potter saga where the protagonists cross a wall at the London train station to fully enter the magical world of Hogwarts .
And we could also say that this is the case of the literary heptalogy titled “The Chronicles of Narnia” where it is told how the children who are the central characters of it have the possibility of reaching the kingdom of Narnia , through a closet.
“Alice in Wonderland” is a classic of the fantasy genre.
Classics of the fantasy genre in cinema and literature
Within the world of art, in its entirety, we find other examples of the fantasy genre that have become authentic references within literature or cinema, for example. This would be the case of the “Matrix” film saga, created by the Wachowski brothers, which tells us about a future in which human beings have been enslaved by machines, robots and artificial intelligences of various types.
In the literary field, however, one of the masterpieces of the fantasy genre is “Alice in Wonderland” , written in 1865 by Lewis Carroll .
One of the first written texts on record is the Poem of Gilgamesh , a Sumerian work that dates back to 2,000 BC . This composition already incorporated fantastic elements, such as divine interventions and giants.
It should be noted that, beyond the presence of unreal elements, the fantasy genre presents internal coherence between these elements. The structure, the scenes and the interaction of the characters maintain a logic. Otherwise, the work in question would belong to the surrealist genre.