High Fantasy vs Low Fantasy

Honestly, our definition is a lot more useful than the "literary" one.

I like my fantasy so high it can't remember what day it is.

Yeah. The second category feels like you could just call it 'Earth Fantasy' for fantasy stories set on earth, and then have it be really self-explanatory for what the other category is.

use of "modern fantasy" to describe harry potter is occasionally seen

>low fantasy
Set in the "real world" - things like World of Darkness, LotR, etc.
>high fantasy
Set in a fantasy setting wholly distinct from the real world.

they are Loose terms used to define subgenres.

>high fantasy
lots of mythical creatures, mythical races are as or more common than humans, magic is easily accessible and powerful magic is well known. magic acts as a substitute for technology in many cases due to its effectiveness.

Examples include: Pathfinder, LOTR

>low fantasy
Magic is exceedingly rare and almost inaccessible. those that do know magic often only know a handful of spells with varying situational effectiveness. Mythical races and beasts are so rare that the centrepoint of many Low fantasy settings is a singular dragon. Civilization is not that different from real world medieval society, as fantasy element don't hold that much effect.

Examples include: A Song of Ice and Fire, Old DnD editions to some extent

low fantasy is much rarer in media desu. its underappreciated.

low fantasy does not need to be set on real world geography and i don't know where this bunch of ingrates invented that from.

"Low Fantasy" is a term used for settings that take place in a fictional world, or fictional version of the real world, that has typical fantasy attributes such as magic, other races, or the bending of typical rules of physics.

Godzilla could be considered "low fantasy" as it is scientifically impossible for a creature the size of Godzilla to actually exist outside of water, let alone be able to jump, move, or house an organic nuclear reactor within him. However the setting largely relies on typical "Sci-Fi" tropes and explanations and exists in a contemporary world.

"High Fantasy" is usually a term for settings that take place in completely fictional worlds. These settings usually have their own fictional rules and physics that don't align with real-world methods.

Magic the Gathering is an obvious "High Fantasy" setting, where none of the worlds really resemble real-world equivalents outside of a few cultural nods, there's planes without a day/night cycle, and yet life thrives, etc. Also, magic.

There's also settings that use both, such as Narnia, where the home of many of the protagonists is an Earth that is largely the exact same as a conventional earth in a fiction setting, however Narnia, Charn, etc all have their own strange rules and physics that put them right into "High Fantasy" territory.

"High Fantasy": Can't walk 2 feet without tripping over a non-human
"Low Fantasy":Non-human? Wha...?

>Non-human? Wha...?
"Have you ever even been hunting? Or are you just some poorfag farmer that subsists entirely on boiled cabbage, and has never seen any animal in their entire life somehow?"

They suffer from some faggot fifty years ago choosing stupid names, the same as "modernism". High and low fantasy referred to a division that is useful to talk about, but the audience has such strong assumptions about the words " high" and "low" that everyone uses it differently.

Low fantasy was originally used to refer to fantasy set on the real Earth, or at least nominally on the real Earth. Stuff like Conan and Lovecraft, but also stuff like Harry Potter or the World of Darkness.

High fantasy was meant to refer to works that took place in a secondary world that was not Earth. Lord of the Ring is the archetypal example, but this is now hugely popular. Game of Thrones, Warcraft, fucking everything these days. The distinction is a bit of a historical relic from the days Low Fantasy was more popular than High Fantasy.

I just don't use them. Some people think they refer to high and low magic, some people think they refer to noble-bright and grim-dark, some people think they refer to story structure, some people use the original meanings. It's all just a mess.

>High fantasy was meant to refer to works that took place in a secondary world that was not Earth. Lord of the Ring is the archetypal example
Lord of the Rings takes place in Europe, you fucking idiot. It's literally supposed to be a mythology/prehistory of Europe. That's the whole reason it was created.

high fantasy: magic is divinely related and often good/evil aligned (LOTR)
low fantasy: magic is secular and amoral, but still mysterious (Conan)

I meant reasoning non-humans.

Your definition of low fantasy covers the Third Age in Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit. Especially when it comes to magic and the places most of the story occurs in.

It's really not because "Epic Fantasy", "Heroic Fantasy", "Sword and Sorcery", "Anime Bullshit", etc all are more descriptive and better than the video game definitions used on Veeky Forums

If people actually used High Fantasy and Low Fantasy more campaigns would actually be low fantasy which is something you rarely see for no good reason.

And yet it's a completely different setting, with its own rules, physics, creation, animals, characters, etc. It's fantasy that takes place in another world apart from our own. That's High Fantasy, dumbshit.

Then Odyssey and Iliad are High Fantasy by that logic.

You could definitely make that argument, however there's a clear difference between the Illiad and LotR, the primary one being that the Illiad has places that actually exist or existed at one time and features cultures that actually exist or existed at one time, whereas Middle-Earth is almost entirely fictional in every notable aspect, merely having a slight "basis" of Europe.

Illiad and Odyssey are based in Classical/Ancient Greek with nations, peoples, and cultures from that era.

Middle Earth has some similarities to Europe's layout, but is based on Midgard, a setting that was already a fictional version of Earth to begin with.

If you're excluding LOTR on the basis of Middle-Earth being totally fictional then you have to exclude Conan as well. Also Lovecraft depending on how much of a stickler you are about the definitions.

Middle Earth is explicitly our Earth in a mythological past.

>Excluding
From what?

>exclude Conan as well
Ok.

>Also Lovecraft depending on how much of a stickler you are about the definitions.
Lovecraft is not high fantasy. It doesn't take place in a completely different setting from Earth.

>Middle Earth is explicitly our Earth in a mythological past.
So what? It has absolutely no references to anything that's ever been real. The whole of LotR's history is entirely fictional and it exists in a world that does not, at all, share any kind of physical basis as ours. Fictional people, placers, cultures, powers, races, metals, etc. It's High Fantasy, period.

Lovecraft not only posits a completely different history of the world replete with fictional people, places, cultures, powers, races, metals, etc, he also posited a completely fictional basis of reality and physics. Plus he and Howard referenced each other on occasion.

High- Heroes perform heroic acts and go on adventures.
Low-Regular people who may or may not do individual acts that seem heroic to some others and may or may not be treated as heroes and idolized by certain groups.

Alternatively:

High-Fucktonnes of magic and or bureaucracy, characters of high social standing, some form of absolute morality even if most characters, even viewpoint characters, are not "good".
Low-Regular people doing regular people things in a fantasy world.

Pretty sure the only reasons anyone uses either term is to shitpost.

And yet, it's not High Fantasy, it's horror fiction with elements of fantasy, because it has a clear basis in a world that is very similar to ours.

>Racial kitchen sinks where pretty much anything goes as long as the race chosen by the players doesn't involve game breaking shit
>Magic is fairly common and average joe can learn some very basic magic in their spare time if they work reasonably hard at it

However
>Zero gods
>General power level of the heroes and even villains to an extent is pretty low
>Magic, while fairly common, is very limited in terms of power

Would this still qualify as high fantasy?

Both authors explicitly state that their works are set on Earth, the only difference is that Lovecraft's works used contemporaneous geography and culture.

I think these terms have evolved so much in the past 30 years that their original meanings are irrelevant.

Low fantasy focuses more on versimilitude; not realism per se, but believable and relatable. Less emphasis on fantastic monsters, magics, deities, etc. and more emphasis on humanity and its struggles. Even if it may not align with our expectations from Earth, there is a defined idea of what is possible within the fantasy (and it is usually pretty close to our own, save a few variables).

High fantasy, by contrast, is about larger-than-life characters, magics and events. The emphasis is on adventure, excitement and variety. Things are overblown by design and trade focus for potpourri. Anything is possible, even if it is mostly unrelated.

Low fantasy is often more about ideas and themes, where high fantasy is more about events and characters to the exclusion of other things.

I tend to think of Lord of the Rings, the original high fantasy, now being modern low fantasy and something like pic related being archetypal high fantasy.

The "official" definitions are worthless.

Low fantasy covers everything from Harry Potter to supernatural to the Odyssey to Conan to the Witcher to all 2e d&d settings to golarion to star wars.

Low fantasy or high fantasy under such a definition tells me nothing useful.

But it has decades of tradition backing it up.

Best to avoid the worthless terms.

LOTR takes place in Europe.

To clarify, this is because the official definition is a worthless "Does Earth Exist in Canon".

It doesn't matter if the story is set on earth, only that earth exists. Narnia is a classic well studied example of a work of "Low Fiction"

Oh, DBZ is also Low fantasy, since it's set on a weird earth.

>But it has decades of tradition backing it up.
I think because these terms refer to pop culture, and pop culture has changed so much so quickly, it stands to reason that decades of precedence isn't really that big a deal. "Fantasy" as a genre has been around less than a century, of course the terms we use to describe it will change quickly.

But the decades of tradition acts as both a source of resistance and confusion in using the terms for anything useful.

It doesn't literally take place in Europe. It takes place somewhere that's obviously supposed to be Europe and Tolkien was openly trying to create a modern European mythology, but it doesn't claim to be real. Contrast with Conan, that does explicitly claim to take place in a forgotten period of history.

As I said, the definition is pretty stupid. Conan is low and Lord of the Rings is high, that's the definition.

Actually as I recall Tolkien did intend for it to be the mythic past of our world - he estimated the 1950s were the 7th Era.

I can't be assed to find the quotes again from my phone, but this came up last thread.

The low fantasy and high fantasy Wikipedia pages include quotes from Tolkien himself where he says LOTR is set in literal prehistory Europe.

It also mentions Tolkien calling scholars who called his work high fantasy, wrong.

Yeah, I use the terms, and here's how I use them

Low fantasy is a world where fantastical elements have a minimal effect on day-to-day and is usually very shocking when they happen.

High fantasy is a world where the fantastical elements are overt enough to have an effect on society/the world. It can still amaze, horrify, and surprise, but nearly everyone comes into contact with it relatively often.

It's High Magic vs Low Magic.
Although that applies to non magicall things.

A skilled warrior in a high fantasy setting can kill a hundred men. In a low magic one a skilled fighter struggles to hold off more than a couple of opponents.

Our DM does something like this. 5e with quite a few rule shifts to stop at level 10. Magic is commonplace but never truly powerful. A plethora of races. Gods technically exist, or at least used to, but never interfere and there's a lot of debate if they're even still around or not. Characters are powerful, but still very, very mortal. Challenging something like an ancient dragon or a powerful demon is right out for a regular party, and mindflayers, liches, and vampires are still immensely deadly.

Been kinda fun.

>Do any anons use the terms "high fantasy" or "low fantasy". What do they even mean?
Barely. To me, "high fantasy" is like D&D, and when I think "low fantasy", I think Conan (which is really sword & sorcery). I think true "low fantasy" would be like lotr.

However, I could make an argument about middle earth being a lot like a D&D world, it's just that you only see a few specific parts of it. I mean, look what they encounter in traveling a few thin lines across the continent.

what a contentious cunt

Many non-nerd types (especially, it seems, academic ones?) tend to see a very distinct difference between describing our world, or something that could feasibly happen in it, or even something that couldn't feasibly happen in it (but does anyway in the fiction) - - and something that is meant to be "entirely a fantasy."

It's not actually just about semantics and nitpicking, but rather comes from the simple and important fact that normies find it difficult to give a flying fuck about anything that doesn't have a clear and self-evident framing/grounding in the real world.

Low fantasy is the gateway drug version of fantasy for these people. Even if stuff like Harry Potter or the chronicles of Narnia sometimes barely even touch on the real world and then completely abandon it for 95% of the story, their worlds still aren't "a total fantasy".

To these readers, it really DOES matter whether the earth exists in the fiction, because if it doesn't they couldn't care what happens. They require connectedness, not just with real world themes, but also with the representation of the physical place as a whole.

And to them, that is what is meant by Low Fantasy: it is a fantasy to a low(er) degree, and thus provides an excuse so they can care about it.

Reason why Veeky Forums et. al. uses the term wrong, is because people who visit Veeky Forums are on average much less likely to actually give a shit about, or put any authority in, Eng Lit as a subject of academic interest/study. Even if this was outlined in your English Lit class or whatever, you wouldn't give enough of a fuck to pay attention to it anyway.
But the term is catchy and easy to like, so it sneaks into usage, and thus gets used wrong. Widely.

What we really mean to say is usually High Magic or Low Magic.

Something you won't see me defend is these same academic types putting fantasy under the umbrella of science-fiction. That's just idiotic.

According to who?

>Something you won't see me defend is these same academic types putting fantasy under the umbrella of science-fiction. That's just idiotic.
Doesn't it all fall under the umbrella of "speculative fiction" anyway?

Sure, further up the taxonomy, but often people will put fantasy underneath sci-fi, as fantasy was a group of genres contained within science-fiction. That is; all fantasy is necessarily science-fiction.

What if the "low fantasy" that focuses on very human and realistic characters/plots/factors isn't even fantasy?

What if the fantasy is actually the one we live ourselves?

Nerds use the term wrong because Companies didn't give a fuck about genre definitions in he 80s and 90s when those genres were used to sell products like video games and schlocky movies.

Also, because the actual definition of the term has literally no practical value for us. It tells us nothing useful about a setting.

Whether the 2e D&D settings canonically have/had a means of traveling to earth, tells us nothing useful about the way the setting operates.

Any category that includes everything from Dragon Ball Z, Star Wars, Narnia, Conan, Lord of the Rings, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Buffy, and Marvel Comics, is so broad to be of no practical value.

And it *Excludes* other properties, like game of thrones.

The one criteria that it considers important is of 0 value to us.

Personally, I'd rather see people just stop using the worthless terms. But that's clearly not happening.

Well the you should use actual genres like

I already do.

I just wish everyone else would stop using these garbage terms.

Not using the term at all also solves the problem of miscommunication due to using it wrong, so there's certainly no skin off my back on that one.

As I said, what you're looking for is usually "high magic" or "low magic" or something along those lines, and using those instead would save us a lot of grief.

I don't think we need to really correct each other directly, but if we just always make sure to use other less ambiguous terms (particular genres, describing particular themes for clarity, high magic, low magic, and so on) even in response to the people who say "high magic" and "low magic" they'll probably get it eventually.

I mean, if they google it they'll see they were using it wrong, just like with any other defined term.

Uncommon, Corrupting Magic, Terran, Sword and Sorcery Fantasy.

I much prefer people who use terms that aren't vague and useless.

>normies
Didn't read after this

I like to think about it as a way of distinguishing the heroes from the civilians.

In a low fantasy, the difference between the protagonists and the average folks are fairly low.

In a high fantasy, the differences are high. Most people can't shoot fireballs or slay huge dragons singlehandedly, but both are common to the protagonists.

I've heard the difference between high fantasy and low fantasy can also be in themes. High fantasy tries broader, but more unified themes, an exploration more of ideas themselves whereas low fantasy concerns more of the choices the characters make for themselves. In this example, LotR is high fantasy since the key theme of renunciation of power is something we see reflected on a lot of characters, Sam, Frodo, Galadriel, Faramir. It's about the morality of creation. On the other hand, ASOIAF doesn't really deal with the way the universe is. If it has any central theme it is "people are huge assholes" but it deals much more profoundly with the choices the characters make and how that affects them personally.

Isn't that because way back there was literally no difference between most science fiction and fantasy, so they were pretty much the same thing? And that usage just maybe persisted to this day even though it no longer makes sense?

Just to clarify what I mean, a lot of early fantasy would have no problem throwing in a spaceship or aliens, basically science fiction elements, and on the other hand the actual science fiction had things like psionics and other things that we would now consider fantasy.

>Do any anons use the terms "high fantasy" or "low fantasy".

Yes, they're useful classifications.

>What do they even mean?
There are various conflicting definitions around; I I found the most useful one being based around the frequency of fantastical elements (magic, monsters, etc.) in a fantasy setting.

this definition is less useful in games, which is why it doesn't take hold. that Earthdawn, for example, is set in Terra's past doesn't affect gameplay much, whereas whether it includes lots of magic or not, has a direct and significant impact on each session.

see now GTFO

Wikipedia also claims that the terms high fantasy and low fantasy relate to whether the work takes place in a fantasy world or not and has nothing to do with the amount of magic or mystical elements in the setting. This might have been the original definition but it's not what people mean when they use the terms today, especially in a colloquial sense.

A low fantasy setting would be one in which magic is rare. People might know about wizards, and they might appreciate their presence and art, but normal people have no understanding of it, but don't own any magical items themselves, and certainly aren't capable of doing anything remotely magical, and likely don't even have the potential to ever be able to.

High fantasy would instead be a setting in which magic is something common. Normal people don't only know about it, but even the most common of common folk likely owns at least one magical item that helps them with their chores, if they don't outright know some simple cantrip, and everyone -- or close to it -- has the potential to become a wizard if they just study hard enough.

>gets used wrong
Linguistic prescriptivism is a tumor on society.

And what if the civilians also have crazy powers, and the difference in our between the players and NPCs is still low?

Literally?

heh.

>Do any anons use the terms "high fantasy" or "low fantasy". What do they even mean?

I the literary world it means close to our reality or not so. In roleplaying game jargon it usually means Dungeons & Dragons vs Basic Roleplaying, with Ars Magica in between (being of both worlds) and not actually how much of our own world that's still remains with in the story.

>the only difference is that Lovecraft's works used contemporaneous geography and culture.
Which is why it's not High Fantasy.

You will pretty much never get an answer here because the concepts are so muddled as to be nigh-impossible to decide. Using the literary definition of the word would mean Elric of Melnibone is low fantasy. Along with the covenant of Thomas Covenant.

If you go by the idea of how much magic is around then you can easily hit cases where the world itself is very gritty but magic is very powerful.

>If you go by the idea of how much magic is around then you can easily hit cases where the world itself is very gritty but magic is very powerful.
Like many tabletop settings - Glorantha, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, etc.

I like to definte "high fantasy" as "doesn't take place on Earth" and "low fantasy" as "takes place on Earth", because that really gets the autists riled.

>To these readers, it really DOES matter whether the earth exists in the fiction, because if it doesn't they couldn't care what happens.
I would contest that it's less about the readers and more about the companies. Big businesses tend to be scared of taking anything even remotely near a risk, so they assume that the audience is stupid and scared of change.

George RR Martin has talked about writing for the Twilight Zone. He says he wanted to adapt a story about Merlin and Lancelot, but the producers said it needed to have some kind of normal person involved, to give the audience an in. The episode ended up having a street punk tagging along as Lancelot's sidekick.

>Neither useful, nor correct under any definition.
I can see how that would annoy a lot of people.

>Do any anons use the terms "high fantasy" or "low fantasy". What do they even mean?

Of course they do.

"low" fantasy = good
"high" fantasy = shit

Fairly simple, user.

One thing you have to keep in mind is that the common understanding of what fantasy means has changed a lot since the 70s. Today you hear the word fantasy and usually immediately think of wizards and elves. Back then, however, low fantasy would have primarily referred to stories like Mr. Pudgins or The Indian in the Cupboard. Stories that modern audiences might not even consider to be fantasy at first blush.

I think it's more about context.

Not to mention that classic greeks believed the Illiad to be history and it was wrote in that sense, not as fantasy.