Fantasy map

Abstract: In fantasy literature, the setting is as important to the story as are characters and plot; but although many fantasy scholars have pointed this out, there is very little criticism that explores the role of the setting in fantasy. The aim of this study is to use a topofocal (place-focused) perspective to examine four aspects of the fantasy setting, including the way in which settings function in terms of their respective worlds and stories. Chapter 2 considers the division of a setting into text and image by investigating the fantasy map through a survey of a random sample of fantasy novels, as well as through a close reading of two maps from The Lord of the Rings. Fantasy maps, while generally adhering to a pseudomedieval aesthetics, may reveal much about the world of their respective works. Chapter 3 explores geographical divisions which also divide different realities. Borders between, for instance, mundanity and Faerie, and between the realms of life and death, may appear to be sharp demarcations but are often gradual transitions from one reality to another. Other areas – polders – are particular realities protected from the outside world by a boundary. These polders are bubbles of the past which extend the world’s topology as well as its history. The chapter demonstrates how a fundamental function for such boundaries and borders is to join opposing realities rather than keep them apart. Chapter 4 examines the relation between nature and culture in four fantasy cities. Each city portrays a highly dissimilar relation compared to the others: where nature is a symbol of just governance in one place, the element of opposition is used as part of a social critique in another; the two domains dissolve into each other in the third, and in the fourth city, nature is a liminal phenomenon between various cultural zones. In each story, however, the nature/culture relation displays a connection to a key theme or concern. Finally, chapter 5 shows how the fantasy genre allows the division between ruler and realm to be bridged, discussing the direct link between them. After an overview of such links, some specific tropes are considered, including the Fisher-King figure and the Dark Lord, and the importance of a non-metaphorical reading of the ruler/realm connection is demonstrated. The topofocal approaches in the four chapters reveal much about the works under consideration, such as their underlying attitudes and central concerns, and prove to be valuable critical strategies in demonstrating how plot, character, and setting are interwoven.

Abstract: This paper deals with cartographic representations as means of communicating the imaginary using maps in fantasy role-playing games as an example. Drawing on SCHUTZian accounts of intersubjectivity and communication we understand maps as one of many strategies to deal with the problem of "medium transcendencies" posed by communicating with others. The methodology of "sociological hermeneutics" (SOEFFNER) is introduced as means of approaching maps and the interactions they are involved in. In our analyses of maps used in role-playing games we can then show that maps are not only a means of locating oneself but also a means of actively creating a meaningful place in which we are entangled. Thus, maps help to form a sense of belonging in (imaginary) territories which are only given to us in mediated form.

Abstract: The first entirely computer-animated, photorealistic feature-length film based on the principles of live-action cinema, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001, henceforth Final Fantasy) was a commercial failure. Produced by Square USA, Inc. and directed by Sakaguchi Hirobu, the award-winning executive producer of the popular interactive game software Final Fantasy series, the film was praised for the beauty and technological achievement of its computer graphics but widely derided for its uninspired screenplay. Its box-office record was so poor that Square was compelled to scrap all plans to make further Final Fantasy movies and to withdraw from the film business altogether.' This essay argues that Final Fantasy is a transitional film that marks a turning point in the history of moving-image media, as well as in the history of science fiction. I will show that the significance of Sakaguchi's film lies less in its largely successful attempt to create cinematic digital animation than in the variegated, often intriguing ways in which it illuminates the conceptual history of representation of life in the cinema, in animation, and in contemporary new media cultures. Final Fantasy demonstrates that that which provides continuity, desire, and cross-fertilization between analog and digital moving image media, on the one hand, and between these media and the information-based life sciences, on the other, is a contingent, historically, and media-specific notion of life (and of death) as artificial life, or a-life. The essay is divided into two sections. The first discusses the notion of a-life in early cinema and film theory, as well as in early animation (in particular in a category of animated films that I shall call "cinemation" that foregrounds the interaction between live-action cinema and animation), to which Final Fantasy's envisioning of the Phantom invasion-and to a lesser extent its CGI humans-calls attention. The common characteristic of the conceptualization and representation of life in these various media histories is life excess-a concept that designates the excessive vitality or liveliness of ghosts and resurrected dead characters, animism, and a phenomenology of frantic motion. The second section of the article traces Final Fantasy's remediation2 of the notion of life in the neo-vitalistic, evolutionary biology of Lynn Margulis and in contemporary theories of Artificial Life. I argue that the film's endeavor to replicate, and simultaneously to transcend and reinvent, these imaginaries produces an uncanny effect because it relies on the double repression embodied in Freud's suppression of the potential aliveness, and hence subversive significance, of the doll Olympia in his reading of E.T.A Hoffmann's novella "The Sandman" in Das Unheimliche (1919). Another operation of double suppression-which becomes a wellspring for uncanny effects and aesthetics in its own right-consists in Final Fantasy's attempt to camouflage science fiction's own abduction and substitution