To Write Fantasy

Ancient quests describe their heroes in minute, assemblage-detail. Limbs are said to be endowed specifically as limbs, as are the weapons, the abilities, the armor, each seen as a set of distinct pieces assembled to form the already exceptional person of the hero into being one fully endowed with all the material extensions of their status. The hero makes a secondary corpus atop their flesh, in order to construct the abstract-body of the hero. The same is seen again and again, continuing from ancient sources onto the medieval era through modern fantasy, where this appears in the concept of gear and equipment in modern RPGs.

The fight in a JRPG or CRPG is a completely symbolic one. The heroes arrange themselves, represented by their abstract-bodies, their beings an amalgamation of statistics and qualities derived from their equipment, against a foe who arranges itself in the same fashion, its being drawn to be a wholly abstract representation, its statistics and qualities hinted at it in its surreal visage. The battle is a battle which occurs on this plateau, that of the symbolic forms attacking each other representationally as their abstract-bodies do damage unto each other by way of hidden mathematical calculations. While novel to video games, this in itself has nothing truly unique in it. In the same fashion as the abstract-body emerged, so does the abstract-challenge, the arena of the fight as the staging area for these invisible calculations. Such is shown in the intensely symbolic nature of traditional settings, the ritualisms encountered by Christian Rosenkreutz or the various symbolic encounters of The Quest of the Holy Grail. 

The obvious answer here is to say that this is an act of downwards manipulation, ie, that the story is a vehicle for performing these transformations within itself, as is the case with those who follow the Campbell school of mythic criticism. This would be false, however. The reverse is true. Consider what occurs in the abstract-arena. The flows (the things being calculated) are represented backwards, with the story acting as an index of access to them. The text branches outwards from itself to interact with flows and ideas larger than itself. Rather than the story being a vehicle for the change of its components, the components are all the larger elements which are manipulated by the story in order to achieve the ends of the story. Esoterica is referenced, reinterpreted, drawn upon, presented, all in a ritual-form by its being processed through the story, the same mechanic as when those very things are processed in more traditional ritual or magic.

A certain act of ritual-creation takes place in the magician’s mind as they enter the fantasy-world. Worldbuilding is through all of this, identical to the building of Solomon’s temple. The fantastical world reaches out and affixes-to, the demons from outside, by being branded by the sigil of Solomon - entrapped and interacted with via the index-function of the worldbuild. The worldbuild, fully inhabited by the author, becomes the Solomonic Temple, the ritual space of working. Such is the reason behind the “pantheon” structure of many such worldbuilds, as well as their non-linear “canon” opposing and superseding any linear stories which they may contain. All fulfilling the same function, of allowing the worldbuild to be freely traversed and its index-contents accessed and written and read in free correspondence with that unwritten beyond.