Daily Dose of English 18
Fantasy
Daily Dose of English 18
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about fantasy, specifically fantasy books and the genre of media because that's the genre of books that I read the most of. It's my favorite because, I don't know, I just find it the most interesting and engaging. I wanted to talk about it a little bit today because I think it's an interesting genre that a lot of people have experienced in some way, but maybe not much more than when they were young or if they're a big fantasy fan. I want to talk a little bit about it and why I enjoy it. First, what is the fantasy genre? It's actually a pretty big genre that is covered by a lot of different things, but it's generally set in a world without a ton of technology yet. The stories tend to be a lot longer and a little bit slower paced. There's a lot of different ways that fantasy can happen though. That's not a clear definition, but a couple of really popular examples are The Lord of the Rings. It's a pretty old example at this point. The movies are a little bit newer, but those were really popular when they came out. Another example is, oh shoot, what's that? With the dragons and the fire and the Game of Thrones, there we go, oh my God, I got to know the words for the episode I'm going to record. Game of Thrones is really popular when it came out and that solidly sits in the fantasy genre, but then there's other ones that are a little more modern. Harry Potter in a lot of ways is fantasy, adventure, it's got magic and stuff going on and there's a lot of different ways that fantasy can take place, like I said. One of my personal favorites is The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss and that series is absolutely sort of a fantasy. There's also this epic fantasy sub-genre, which is what that falls under and epic fantasy are the book series typically that go on forever. They're really, really long and that's part of the fantasy. The fact that there's a really, really deep, dense world that is being built and that's another common trait of fantasy in general, that the world that the story exists in is often more important than the story itself, right? The story might exist in one point in time in that world, but the world itself is what draws people in and I think that's absolutely true for a lot of the fantasy that I enjoy. One of the series that I read in the past couple years was The Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson and that's another kind of fantasy. It's got a magic system, so there's a lot of magic that goes on and it's an alternate world set in the far past-ish, like there's no technologies emerging throughout the series, but those books are going to go on forever, right? The first three were already very long and then the next five or whatever were also long and then he's planning to write like three more that are going to be even longer and so there's hundreds of hours just in that one world taking place with different characters, different plot lines and that's what generally makes fantasy really stand out against other kinds of books, right? For example, romance novels or crime novels, those typically take place in the real world on earth, right? There's nothing extra about the world that they're in because we all live in that world and so they're a lot more realistic in that sense. Sure, they come up with things that might be fantastical or unlikely to happen, but they're based in reality. There are also fantasy books that are based in our world but with one change. For example, magic exists or there are fairies living among us or I don't know, what if aliens came to live with us and we were all living together, right? There's a lot of different ways that fantasy can look but it's typically got swords and magic and wizards and that sort of thing. I'm not exactly sure what draws me to the genre itself but I think it is the worlds that I specifically like. The world building aspect is something that's very interesting to me. World building is what we call building the world, okay? That's not very clear. That fantasy world, that construction of the world, it's not easy, right? If you're going to build a world that feels coherent, it feels like one piece, coherent is something that makes sense, right? Even though, for example, in this world there's magic and monsters and whatever that's totally not real, it still feels like it could be real and that's what makes good world building but that's not easy to do. That takes a lot of time and effort and then you also have to write a good story on top of that. A good world in itself doesn't just make the story good because you have to express it well and that side really draws me and I like to think about the world and sort of just not exist in it because obviously I don't live there but experience it and that's something that's really interesting to me. The Mistborn series is pretty good. The first three books I really like, the later ones are fine but what I really, really liked about the book series is that the world is cool. The world isn't really neat and it feels like it could exist, right? The characters are maybe a little bit simple but it's interesting to see how they interact with the world. In this specific world, there is a magic system and it functions a lot more like a science, right? There's things you can and can't do. They do tests, they learn things and you kind of learn alongside the characters to understand more about this alternate science and you can guess what might happen. I find that really cool, right? As they learn new things, it changes how they interact with their world in a way that is similar to how in our human history, as we learn more things about science, we started to do things differently, right? A good example is the existence of germs and microorganisms that are really, really small. People didn't know that 100, 200 years ago and they wouldn't really wash their hands. Washing your hands wasn't a thing that was common for most of human history, honestly. Even doctors didn't know that. It wasn't knowledge that existed. When people started saying, hey, maybe we should clean our hands before we do surgery, they were like, why? Why would we do that? There's no dirt on my hands. I don't see anything, so why is that a problem? That's obviously something that does exist. Making developments like that in a fictional world is just a really cool way to see that exploration of new information and things. It's neat. That's all I got for you on that part. Other fantasy stories that are really popular that are on the other side are sci-fi fantasy, so science fiction fantasy. Games like Star Wars or, oh, what's another sci-fi fantasy thing? Oh, no, I can't think of anything else off the top of my head right now. Ender's Game, that's not really fantasy. That's a lot more sci-fi, science fiction, whatever. Star Wars is fine for now because that's so well. Star Trek, eh, I guess it's kind of fantasy. Yeah, we'll call it that. Like I said, the genre is not 100% set and I'm sure that somebody who's a big fan of one of these things will want to argue with me, but whatever. That's not the point of this. But those sorts of other kinds of fantasies way into the future or in a different, totally different universe, you can see how the people interact with very, very different technology. And I think that's also a really neat way just to experience an alternate world that you can never live in, right? In our lifetime, we're not going to be going to other planets and meeting aliens. And so being able to experience that and see that in an interesting way is what makes those things really cool. And then also just there, you typically have good stories connected to them, right? It's a classic hero's journey story in Star Wars and so that's always just fun to experience. And so, yeah, that's generally why I like to read fantasy and watch fantasy things. Right now I'm actually not doing that because I just finished a really, really, really long book and I'm going to let myself find the desire again slowly. But yeah, that's really all that I have to say about fantasy novels and books. Actually no, there's one more thing. I learned to read fantasy in Spanish, which means that I know a whole bunch of words that are not useful. There's so many random words that get used in fantasy books and series that just are completely useless in the day-to-day conversation. And so if you're a fan of fantasy, you're going to learn a lot of words that you don't need in whatever language you're learning, but I still recommend that you go down that path because it is really interesting to you. Specifically in English, there's a lot of fantasy nowadays or not nowadays, but there's a lot of fantasy available because those stories typically take a bigger budget to produce and English language content probably has the biggest budget behind it in the entire world. And so there's plenty of really good stuff out there to watch in the fantasy genre as well as books and stories online. I know some people that read really long web novels that go on for months or years and really like that genre. And so if you like fantasy, go for it. Even though you're going to learn some rare words, it's totally worth it in my opinion. Okay. That's everything that I have to say about fantasy. I really appreciate you coming to listen to this episode where I talk about a random book genre. I hope that you learned something and maybe found it a little bit interesting. Oh my God, I can't speak, but anyways, I'll see you tomorrow for the next episode. Have a good one. Bye.
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