What defines Tolkien's theory also limits it. Things that happen in the fantasy world that cannot possibly happen in ours must be taken with utmost seriousness by the reader:

> There is one proviso: if there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away.

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.

And, when they find out that their recipient is a(n in-universe) fictional character:

> Captain Groenback was a spook for rich kids. It was ridiculous: a magical golden ghost ship looting vessels of their earthly possessions, circling the archipelago forever without hope of a port, looting unwisely crews, who were then cursed by the same fate.

(Of course, in-universe, Captain Groenback was a real person - she was erased from history by becoming a legend. Legends are tricky things - you always learn if the people in the story were real after the fact.)

Here's the thing - we've been telling ourselves stories since before we wrote stuff down. In the absence of anything better to do, when prehistoric humans sat around the fire, we described to each other images *beyond* our earthly reality - things too good to be true. Because it was fun.

The late, great Sir Terry Pratchett reminds us of what the first stories probably were about:

> Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9654148-o-you-re-quite-a-writer-you-ve-a-gift-for-language

I might be talking completely out of my ass, and an anthropologist might know better, but wouldn't the whole point of telling stories about those gods be the extraordinary premise?

Either way, Tolkien's proviso - Thou Shalt Not Desecrate My World of Fantasy - is the very edifice that Pratchett's Discworld shattered into a million pieces. Daniel Luthi explores this is in an essay on Discworld as a 'postmodern playground':

https://dc.swosu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1036&context=mythlore