Tad Williams, To Green Angel Tower.

Now this is truly fantasy and not because there's elven creatures (sithe), magic and low tech setting. But because the characters are incredibly simplistic, straightforward. All personality traits are exaggerated. The characters are caricatures. It can be thought of as a major key. Music in a major key is more simplistic. The fractions being smaller whole integers. So is this. And when the writer just has a few of the same characters over and over again, we can call it repetitive.

There is one hell of a beauty in making it so simplistic. These character caricatures appeal to the conservative within us, whom wants to decide he's got the final answer, the final judgment on someone, that he's got all the answers about life. Paragraph after paragraph the caricatures stream on and on, and we can read it and hardly notice and yet be soothed by it. Straight white and black. Good and evil. Like being clearly consonant or dissonant.

It has very very little to do with reality, and that's what makes it enjoyable to read. The more real, the more less enjoyable it would become.

Or so it seems, and this is a problem that I must solve.

Writing must both be an immediate short term enjoyment to do and yet something of use to the real world beyond other's short term entertainment in reading. The two seem to go exactly against each other.

It's not that it's a fantasy setting, it's that it's fantasy people. Truly fantasy people. Not in their physical appearance, but in how they act.

As instead shades of gray pop up, as things quit being so simple and straightforward,
as it's not so clearly good versus evil, it's no longer something worth leaving the real world for.

And so George Eliot's Middlemarch sits halfway read after probably a good month now. Wonderfully detailed and realistic characters. But just not as much keeping one interested in it. The insights are interesting. But not quite interesting enough....

Make 2D simplisticity, with bad guys to root against, and it becomes something to escape to... but the insights are gone. Interesting insights into human nature have no place in a simplistic escape story. As the real escape isn't from the planet, it's from how people actually are.

Can the characters be like in a George Eliot novel while still being something one would want to escape to?