Canadian Politics Today

If you have an example of a fantasy story that is deeply affecting or even disturbing please tell me.  I think it would be difficult to put those two attributes together.

I don't think I've ever watched anything more deeply affecting and often disturbing than the Game of Thrones television series.  I'm still processing the program and haven't decided on its merits as anything beyond entertainment, but its ability to be deeply affecting is matched by almost nothing I've ever watched.


I think the Watchmen comic book series is probably the best example. It's a 12 issue limited series that transcends the medium and stands as serious literature.

It's rare when a comic earns critical mainstream recognition, but Watchmen is no ordinary comic. The October 24 issue of Time magazine features a list of the top 100 novels since 1923. The only graphic novel to make the list is Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen.

Book critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo created the list, which includes J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.

Grossman calls Watchmen "A work of ruthless psychological realism."

http://www.ign.com/articles/2005/10/17/watchmen-distinguished-in-time

I read it when I was a teenager when my little brother purchased it.  I was pretty blown away... I bought my own copy, and read it again about 10 years ago when the movie adaptation was released.   And I read it again last winter. Each time I have read it I have found something new... themes and ideas that went over my head the previous time I read it. There is simply so much in the book to chew on. I'd often find myself in idle moments wondering what Moore meant with something he wrote, or why he made some of the choices he made.  The movie adaptation made an effort to highlight some of the main themes but wasn't able to do justice to it... there's far more in the book.  It's a study of humanity and life and the view of humanity it presents is actually very bleak and sometimes disturbing. It's definitely a deeply affecting work, often disturbing. It's almost haunting.


This is hardly an exhaustive list, it's just the first two that came to mind, and the two I'm most emotionally invested in.  Fantasy and science fiction can be powerful vehicles for presenting ideas that are unsettling or disturbing, and to make something "deeply affecting" is just a matter of creating characters and situations that the reader/viewer is emotionally invested in.

No, I think that fantasy films can have something to say but it's still escapism.

Google says escapism is

    the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy.

But I think that science fiction and fantasy can actually be an effective way of presenting unpleasant realities for an audience, and conversely many "real" films are just fantasy.

 -k