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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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Discworld is self-aware. It knows that you know it's ridiculous. It agrees. Pratchett was never afraid to take the piss out of the world that he created. His footnotes are often a way for the narrator to take you aside and make fun of the new piece of Lore that's just been introduced:
> The idea that Winter could actually be enjoyable would never have occurred to Ramtop people, who had eighteen different words for snow.*
*(All of them, unfortunately, unprintable.)
- Wyrd Sisters, p88
Content warning thread 23/wyrd sisters' theatre scene
Talking of Wyrd Sisters, there's one scene in my mind that sticks out as pure Mum.
Our three protagonists - Esme 'Granny' Weatherwax, Gytha 'Nanny' Ogg, and Magrat '' Garlick, all witches - go to see a play. It's touted as a professional production, but Pratchett frames everything as though it were a Punch and Judy show - just sacking curtains and planks of wood laid over barrels.
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And yet:
> [The theatre] had also managed to become The Castle, Another Part of the Castle, The Same Part A Little Later, The Battlefield, and now it was A Road Outside the City.
Granny Weatherwax watches a king being murdered in the play, and calls bullshit:
> "He's killed him," she hissed, "Why isn't anyone doing anything about it? […] right up there in front of everyone!"
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Magrat grounds her fellow witch to limited success. The next scene in the play is a long soliloquy by the murderer, and how he's filled with so much regret:
> Granny was not to be distracted. "What'd he go and kill him for, then?"
Nanny Ogg jumps in as the mediator:
> "I reckon," she said slowly, "I reckon it's all just pretendin'. Look, he's still breathing."
[…]
The corpse tried to shuffle its feet behind a cardboard bush.
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But Granny's one of Discworld's sharpest minds. She doesn't need Nanny's comments to know the charlatans on stage are 'purveyors of untruth and artifice.' In a later scene, the actor playing the dead king fills the role of a soldier. Granny calls bullshit once more, and looks for the actor who previously played the murderer (presumably he's in a different garb - maybe he isn't):
> "He done it!" she shouted triumphantly, "We all *seed* 'im! He done it with a dagger!"
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Things don't just stop there, though - no, no, no. It's a well-known fact on #Discworld that Witches can go wherever they like. The three of them head backstage…
> "You!" [Granny Weatherwax] shouted. "You're dead!"
That, he was. And there, after a fake bush meets a Lancre steel-capped boot and bursts into splinters, she exposes the lie to the world at large:
> "See?" […] "Nothing's real! It's all just paint, and sticks and paper at the back."
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At first, you might think this whole affair ridicules the sorts of hackneyed scenes that are ONLY (and I repeat, ONLY) possible in entertainment. One example soaps have been leaning on since we could put phones in our pocket:
> If your character is going to be killed off, you WILL show the viewer their forgetting to charge their phone, and it WILL run out of juice when they need it most.
