A lot of people here, including myself, are fantasy lovers. It's a curious thing how fantasy came into my life, almost by mere luck. During my high school years I devoured Japanese entertainment (anime, games, you name it). However, something happened and the Japanese stuff that I loved became unpalatable. The change was very gradual, but it came naturally. I heard about a certain game called Baldur's Gate and I was extremely curious. I typed the words "Baldur's Gate buy" on Google and one of the first results that showed up was Gog. The game cost $9.99 and I decided to sign up for the site and make the purchase. After two hours of waiting for the game to download, I started it and I was enchanted right away. I created a character (a crappy one by any standard) and now years later I've played several fantasy games and read several fantasy books (including The Lord of the Rings, of course). The things that all these fantasy works have in common are an ability to evoke a sense of wonder and enchantment and make you forget about the troubles of the real world for a while. Exploring the unknown, defying physical and even logical laws are all part of what fantasy is about. Today, I just played the first portion of Undermountain in Neverwinter Nights: HoU and you can resurrect certain characters and I chuckled thinking about a huge, technical discussion about how resurrection in the strict sense is metaphysically impossible. However, it didn't matter at all. I was totally able to suspend disbelief. That's what good fantasy does. It pulls you into its world no matter how different from our actual world. There are silly moments as well (one that comes prominently to mind is the fact that in Might and Magic II you can order roast peasant). As a genre, fantasy has been considered a lesser one, not worthy of much attention. But in my opinion, it's one of the most prolific and interesting ones out there.

Pretty much like all fiction. And yet I agree that fiction on the whole and fantasy in particular allow so many people not only to get away from the problems of reality and rest for a while, but also to create communities based on their favourite worlds thus finding friends and people who simply share their views and interests.

I've always found Fantasy (Sword & Sorcery) more interesting. Not to take away from Sci-Fi, where you can beam around and fly through space, but it's more like compartmentalized and less personal, while magic is inherit to everyone on the planet, and you don't have to rely on machines, although you may rely on equipment, it doesn't feel dirty or drift towards Cyberpunk.

Not that other genres or worlds aren't interesting, but i prefer D&D to Star Trek or Star Wars. Though Shadowrun might be interesting as a middle-ground, but that's getting more into systems and how they technically work rather then the genre.

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Ah, no. On the bright side, if you believe that, then it means there's a lot of good fantasy out there that you haven't heard of. I mean, fantasy has been a fairly big deal since at least the 1980s (I don't remember the 70s well enough to say with certainty). What medium do you want? Games, books, film? Ask, and ye shall receive.
(information, not gifts. I'm skinflint)

Kind of ironic that you left out the "s" on film...

While there's an abundance of really good books and games in the fantasy genre, I find it hard to name more than a handful of really good movies especially in the "classic" "dragon, elves, dwarves, mages" category. Even worse is the situation with TV serials.

It's the same in German, but I assumed "countable" since you used it for the other two media. If you had written "gaming, literature, film" I would have gotten it. :-)

Still... not many good movies - which would you recommend?

I think the big problem with movies is that it's a lot easier (and thus cheaper) to make believable space ships (both in CGI and mechatronics) than fantasy creatures - organic is hard. For instance the first Jurassic Park (1993, dragons!!) was mind-blowing when it came out but nowadays many scenes look "cheap CGI", while the space battles of Star Wars (1977) hold up pretty well today, even in their original version.

Yeah, in a lot of ways English is almost a dialect of German =) I'm not sad that we didn't keep cases as prominently, though that did make learning Russian a kick in the junk for the first several months.

Fantasy movies? Well, lemme start with the 80s. Labyrinth, Willow, The Last Unicorn, Dark Crystal, Princess Bride, Neverending Story, Ghostbusters 1&2, Beetlejuice, Star Wars 5&6 and the Indiana Jones series (*if* you count those as fantasy, no harm if you don't), Gremlins, Secret of NIMH, Castle in the Sky (first Studio Ghibli film to be dubbed into English, IIRC).

90s? Dark City, Groundhog Day, several Disney movies (Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Lion King), Toy Story 1&2, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Mummy, Hook. I may have missed a lot in that decade, or it may have been a dry spell for the genre.

00s? Harry Potter series, Lord of the Rings series, Pirates of the Carribean series, Donnie Darko, Hellboy, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless MInd, Pan's Labyrinth, Stardust, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, the Dozor series (Night Watch, Day Watch), Monsters Inc, Lilo & Stitch, Avatar (if you consider it fantasy, no harm if not), 300, Golden Compass, Narnia series, The Fountain.

And a whole bunch more, but those are just that ones that i think probably have real value for a wide audience, and not just amusing to people like me with a low bar for entertainment (I mean, for personal taste I'd put Army of Darkness up there in a heartbeat, but it *is* kitschy)

While I can agree for Indiana Jones and Ghostbusters to be sort of fantasy due to the presence of the supernatural, why in the world you consider Castle in the Sky fantasy? It's basically sci-fi.

Also, what's your problem with Star Wars 4?

Star Wars Episode 4 was worse than every Star Wars movie released prior to it. (If you're going to dispute this claim, name one Star Wars movie that Episode 4 was not worse than, and that was released prior to Episode 4.)

WUT?! Star Wars Episode 4 was The New Hope. There were NO episodes released prior to it!

That's true, and it does not contradict my point. Choose any movie and it is worse than every movie in the empty set; if that were not the case, then there would be a movie in the empty set that it is not worse than; therefore there would be a movie in the empty set, which is a contradiction.

Hence, Star Wars Episode 4 was worse than every previous Star Wars movie and you can't prove me wrong.

(Note: This exact argument holds true if we replace "worse" with "better". Think about that.)

Count-ability of words in the various languages is an interesting concept that is absolutely horrid for asians. But, if you understand "mass nouns" and how they're different from regular nouns, it makes sense. I'll try to explain this in english, for once, since i'm used to explaining it in Japanese.

Most things, we don't have a really distinct border or separation, so it becomes ambiguous whether it's singular or plural, thus we don't count them. Gas, liquid, solids that were once liquid, etc. Now, if the lab has gas leaking, but you can see red gas and blue gas, you see 2 gasses, a red gas and a blue gas.

Better, is what we see with "film" above. In english, we rarely promote nouns to mass nouns, but it happens in interesting situations, but it's usually not required. Throughout history, for example, Italians were known for eating cats. Is cat still consumed in Italy today? There is a clear violation of grammar, there, though: it lacks parallel construction. In the statement about italy, you are meant to envision cats themselves, while in the question you are meant to envision mystery meat that is made out of the felis catus animal, which could be in any form from the animal's shape to ground cat. Some people who don't like this type of construction, since they're not used to hearing regular nouns being promoted will likely take "cat" and replace it with "cat meat."

It came out in 1977 and I was listing movies from the 80s >.>