SOMETHING YOU FEEL PASSIONATE ABOUT (free post)

“Kell wore a very peculiar coat”.

That first quote was the one that introduced me to a place some knows as heaven and others as hell. For how I see it, it has a little of both. A place where forming bonds with anyone is a dangerous thing, because they’ll probably end up dead. A place where the rules we know are bent and even broken, so anything is possible. Here, you’ll laugh, you’ll hate, you’ll ugly cry, you’ll want to kill and hug everyone at the same time.

This place is called High Fantasy.

Now, this term can be applied when you’re referring to movies, TV shows, graphic novels, books, etc. I’ll just focus in the last one.

In case you don’t know, High Fantasy is a subgenre of Fantasy. Its main characteristic is that, in difference with Urban Fantasy or Low Fantasy, the entire setting of the story is an imaginary world that has nothing to do with our reality. A clear example of this would be The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.

I now, it sounds amazing. And most of the time, it is.

This type of stories have a really special place in my heart. They give you the opportunity of unplugged from routine. You can dive into this new world where, again, everything is possible. You can be a pirate, or a dragon master, or a royal member. You get to fight the bad guys, go on adventures to distant lands, meet the stories about kingdoms, about wars, about magic. Even now, just writing about this is sending chills up to my arms. Because, come on. Who doesn’t want to be a wizard? Or control elemental magic? Or fly in the back of a dragon?

And even if you’re not interested in any of that, there’s so much more High Fantasy can offer you. Like politic organization, which is always an interesting aspect a book can offer you. Or the social problems within a kingdom. Or how the renegades act against it. After all, even when is a new world built from scratch it will have problems to deal with. Problems that sometimes we can see reflected in our reality.

And because not everything can be sweets and rainbows, there’s a risk in this. As I said before, going into this genre is a dangerous thing to do. It might sound dramatic, but trust me, I know. Because High Fantasy’s authors like to write about this amazing characters you most definitely will fall in love with just so they can crush your hopes and heart at the end of the story. For some reason, they love to kill their own characters and make us feel miserable. I’ve been through a lot of griefs, and they are not fun. So beware.

Going back to the line I started this blog with, it is the first quote of A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab. The book that introduced me to this new genre and made me fall in love with it.