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…

(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

Even in the earliest Discworld novels, which were more heavy on parodying fantasy literature, Pratchett was never afraid to break the immersion of his world to tell a joke.