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Portal ✨ Fantasy
It’s a breezy 💐 Springtime 🌷 Hump 🐪 Day, so throwing open the windows to freshen up the house can bring the enchanting perfume of freshly blooming flowers in to cheer us up…
🀦 Windows To A New Day 🌄
Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet? ~L. M. Montgomery
Yes, it certainly is. Tomorrow always becomes a fresh today.
That’s very symbolic of the current season.
It’s a time for renewal, fresh air entering closed houses, the aroma of reawakened flowers dancing in.
We had some open window days last week, but it got cold again.
The rollercoaster brings us warmer days later this week, so the windows will be open again to welcome the restorative breeze.
⛩️ Portal Fantasies 🔮
What is Portal Fantasy / Isekai? | Subgenres EXPLAINED
I was thinking of windows as windows onto another world.
This is the heart of what’s known as “portal fantasy”.
The foremost example of this for me is The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.
The kids push through a wardrobe/armoire into Narnia from WWII Britain.
That is “portal fantasy” in a nutshell: contemporary characters from the “real world” wind up in some kind of fantasyland such as Narnia, Oz, Wonderland or wherever.
It’s fun escapism and the core attraction is that you have an anchor character or set of characters with whom you can identify dealing with the seemingly nonsensical, archaic or fantastical rules of the new locale.
I don’t see myself writing such a story, but it’s certainly a popular subgenre of fantasy with a lot of beloved examples.
Worldbuilding a Portal Fantasy or Isekai Setting
Work~Life Contrast
Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work. ~Gustave Flaubert
Ha ha, being violent and original in my work is genre-compliant.
When you’re writing a superhero story, violence is not only expected, it’s required.
For now, the violence is akin to the real world. It’s limited and selective because I’m writing a more grounded world than the typical MCU/DCEU donnybrook.
Being more grounded, the violence is surrounded by recovery beats.
A real cop’s experience is not typically equivalent with daily mag-dump warfare.
The statistics on officer shootings in an analog of NYC show low hundreds of occurrences among a population of tens of thousands of cops.
In fact, the most intense violence in the series so far is not centered on the superheroes or the police that support them, but rather a mild-mannered Italian-American family in Washington Heights.
It won’t stay this way for the entire series. The Silver and Bronze Age arcs will be more cartoony and bombastic, but we’re not there yet.
I’ve got two novels in the can (so to speak) and have completed ten chapters of the third novel. Things are proceeding apace…
That’s all for today. See you back on Saturday for singing 🎤🐸🎶 frogs…