As of writing, the Sunday before last was Mother's Day in the UK. Last time I wrote about Mum, it was about her #fantasy problem - she is a self-described realist:

https://brologue.net/2023/11/05/fantasy-for-mums/

Now, she's got no problem with fantasy, the genre, per se. Her problem, she told me the other day, is that she can't *immerse* herself in fantasy. She tried watching #GameOfThrones, thinking it was a period drama; she checked out when dragons started turning up.

She won't watch #GoT because it's about a place, people, and creatures that aren't real. She has watched all of #Outlander, because, even if the characters in the show are fictional, and even though time travel isn't possible, everything is firmly planted on Planet Earth.

Past Me never really did answer that question directly - "What would I want in fantasy, if I were a Mum?" - because Past Me didn't even diagnose the problem.

But he did leave that all-important measure:

> Anything pertaining to the fantastical and or supernatural [is] a no-go. Be there dragons, aliens, masked and costumed men, or wizards, she’ll have no truck with it.

This is an issue that we can explore through the suspension of disbelief; secondary worlds; and simulacra/simulation.

In his essay, "On Fairy Stories," J. R. R. Tolkien wrote that for one to immerse themselves in fantasy, one must imagine the fantasy as a secondary world where what we are shown is possible:

https://coolcalvary.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf

> The storymaker proves a successful "sub-creator." He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true:" it accords with the laws of that world.

For the hard of fantasy, that's not an easy bridge to cross - and one could argue that us fantasy writers don't make it any easier. As a genre, over the last 150 years, say, we've developed a set of assumptions about what our readers expect. Chances are, if I wrote a high fantasy epic with all the trimmings, I'd expect my readers to know and accept the plausibility of dragons in that world.

Mum does not take the magic seriously. But that doesn't mean she can never get into fantasy. After all, we already know she likes Outlander. And she *can* immerse herself within stories. For example: she refused to watch A Thousand Blows because it was billed as being incredibly violent. She'd empathise too much with the characters on-screen getting hurt.

Paradoxically, one way the hard of fantasy might be coaxed into a story is to explicitly draw attention to a ridiculous premise. Have a character introduce it from their POV, and slowly explain how this one weird thing affects their life. This way, the character becomes an audience surrogate.

This is how I approached the protagonist of my first Boardmier story. Courier B2-1, a human given no name because of their caste, can time-travel - but not in the way they expect!

https://brologue.net/2024/12/05/the-talisman-of-aubaum/

While Courier B2-1 doesn't outright call it absurd, they do actively question the nature of this uncontrollable power, comparing it to what they know to be true in stories (see next posts):

> Strolling at a leisurely pace, the Courier figured it took as much time for a pot of rice to boil, and yet, even when they wormed through the desert, on their belly, they always returned to find that little time ever passed for everyone else. Duration halted – but time marched on. It wasn’t like in stories, where time slowed like diluting a pint of beer in a lake; things kept going like they were borrowing beer from someone else’s pint entirely.

> That was Roy’s strangest euphemism. “Gift” triggered images of those time-travel stories again – those made-up mé féiners, indulging themselves in paralysed spacetime, like being in a real-life painting. They’d witness life, en vivan, as gods, en vitro, and all they could do was exclaim – “Wow! People actually live here!”

> *That* was more a “gift” than reality…