#polish fantasy

[krokietnik]

Averange Polish Fantasy SF author of 20 century. You were born in big city, attended big university graduated, got a job in university, got a doctorate, published several papers, then started writting SF, because fantasy wasn't invented yet and it it was it was for childre, women and stupid foreigners. There's a communism, and you have a day job that leaves yu with enough time to write as a hobby. In your stories you write about green men from Mars, but you really mean red people from Moscov. You are very proud that you outsmarted censors. Censor probably saw what was obivous to everyone smarter than preschooler, but didn't care anyways because SF is for eggheads and other sad people. You feel like Lem. Only less popular and poorer because he was relesed in USA and paid in dollars.

You stories become more contived, full of allusions and motifs that can be understood by very serious intellectuals as you and your male pals. In very serious and very popular magazine you publish your intellectual stories and some foreign shit with dragons and nude women. Non printed, non nude women have cooties. Then your magazine makes a contest. The 3rd place goes to unknown 30 something sales representative A.Sapkowski for a story about man murdering/saving princess turned into a monster in pseudomedieval town. Readers want more. Capitalism comes. Suddenly nobody not as much people want your deeply intellectual books that read as a chore. People want dragons and nude women and stories written by real women.

Average British Fantasy Author of the 20th Century: Born in Hong Kong, raised in Singapore, Kingston and Oxford, he kissed his first girl at the tender age of 38. He spent 23 years obsessively writing notes for his epic masterwork, the Sword of Gormenlia series, with elements drawn from Indian mysticism, Arthurian mythos, Surrealist poetry, Victorian racism and Radical beliefs[?]. He died in Cyprus where he owned the world's most beautiful houseboat.

Average American Fantasy Author of the 20th Century: Born on the border between Ohio and Montana, Wizjeremiah VanderMcDercken, better known by his pseudonym John "Wizard" Whiteman, was raised in a ghost town and was the only citizen of his county who could read. At the age of 14, he stole a car and drove 30 hours straight to New York City to send his first story "The Alien was Really a Man" to Astounding Stories, for which he was paid a whopping 12$. A string of successes followed, including "The Man was Really a Robot" "The Alien was Really a Wizard" and "The Wizard is Really a Man When You Think About It". He harassed Samuel R. Delany for twelve years over a mild criticism of one of his now out-of-print novels. Died in Yonkers where he had a condo.

Average Canadian Fantasy Author of the 20th Century: Born just outside of Toronto

Average French Fantasy Author of the 20th Century: Despite publishing over 170 novels over a period of fifty years, no one outside of France, or indeed within France, knows who Jean Messac is. Left on the steps of a convent in the south of France, he soon learned to hate the nuns, the books in the local library, Parisians, Americans, specifically the citizens of Syria, the Dominican Republic and Bulgaria, the French literary establishment, Regionalist writers, Sartre, De Gaulle, Casimir, anyone who appeared on TV, Radio, Newspapers and Photographs. He lived in a shoebox gifted to him as a joke from André Breton. He was a high school teacher and wrote for a variety of magazines and publishers, was institutionalized three times and was a Majdanek survivor. His books have all been translated in Russia and Japan following a popular JRPG adapting his saga "Pox-Children of the Kamchadals". He died in the same city where he spent his entire life at the age of 64.

[iambecomeafangirl]

I'm reading a young adult fantasy/romantasy book, written by a Polish author (in Polish) - Mags Green "Słoneczny Gon" - and the only thing I can think of now, halfway in the story, is that If she was an American or British author, she would already have hundreds of thousand of fans. Her book would most likely be signed with "New York times bestseller".

She just hits so right with the current book market targeted at young women (Sarah J Maas, Leigh Bardugo, Rebecca Yarros, Holly Black). The only thing stopping her, is the fact that she doesn't write in English. I honestly hope that this book gets translated, and her publishing house won't sleep on it.

[mask131]

Fantasy throughout the world

On top of having an article centered around the French fantasy specifically, the "Modern Success" issue of the BNF Fantasy series also has an article (again written by Anne Besson) covering the topic of "Fantasy throughout the world". Here is, once again, a rough translation by your humble servant:

While heavily dominated by an English-speaking production, fantasy literature found its place in numerous European countries, and managed to cross several continents.

Born in England, grown in parallel on the two sides of the Atlantic oceans, and becoming a mass-phenomenon in the United-States, fantasy is without a doubt an anglophone genre. Even today the fantasy market has a MASSIVE unbalance, and the modern fantasy successes prove that the mondialization of the imaginations is dominated by the cultural superpower of the USA. But ever since the 1970s, as the translations of Tolkien spread across the world and role-playing games conquered the heart of teenagers, "native fantasies" started to appear in various European languages.

German fantasy is a good example of one of those "local takes" - it does help that Germany has a literary background including the Romantic movement, and the brothers Grimm fairytales. After the enormous success of Michael Ende's Never-Ending Story in 1979, the German fantasy did not stop. Many successful authors appeared. Wolfgang Hohlbein gained an internal fame, with his 1982 Märchenmond or his 1999's Chronicles of the Immortals. Cornelia Funke was a famous German youth author, with her trilogy "Inkworld" in 2003. Kai Meyer reworked Germanic legends in his 1998's Loreley or his 2001's Nibelungengold. Walter Moers created the continent of Zamonia, and popularized the character of Captain Blue-Bear (hero of a 1993's children television show, of two novels, and of a 1999's movie).

But very often, international fame only latches on one specific author that is well-known outside of their country's frontiers. In Poland, this author would be Andrzej Sapkowski with his 1986's Witcher series, adapted in 2007 as a video game, and in 2019 as a television series). In Spain, it would be Javier Negrete with his 2003's Tramorea.

Crossing the continents, it becomes very tempting to mix together the magic of fantasy literature with specifically cultural supernatural domains - the Hindu pantheon, the Chinese ghost stories, the kami and the yokai of Japan, the witchcraft of Africa or the Caribbean Isles...

South-America is rich of a literary tradition that in France we compare to our own "fantastique": the short stories of Argentina's authors Jose Luis Borges or Adolfo Bioy Casares in the 40s, the magical realism of Alejo Carpentier in Cuba (The Century of Lights, 1962), of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Columbia (A Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) or Carlos Fuenta in Mexico (Terra Nostra, 1975).

On the side of the African continent, The Road of Hunger, in 1991, by Nigerian author Ben Okri, is also part of this more "legitimate" current, a form of fantasy much closer to "general literature", but there is a new African generation, dominated by English-speaking women (Nnedi Okorakor, Nisi Shaw, Lauren Beukes) that fully appropriate and absorb the fantasy genre.

Up until a very recent date, it was considered more respectful to not assimilate these works, born of very different cultures, with a genre that is both modern and Anglo-Saxon. However, the numeric world and the mondialized economy have today destroyed a lot of cultural frontiers, and today we assist to a true "meeting of the imaginations" mixing various cultures together. The author of this article mentions as an example several works coming from East-Asia: the Japanese manga Full Metal Alchemist by Arakawa Hirowu, the other Japanese manga Witch Hat Atelier, or the Sino-American movie The Great Wall (2016).

[nosnexus]

Is this Justice? Is this a new dawn?

[macabresymphonies]

Never letting polish nerds recommend me fantasy books, holy shit is the one I’m currently reading bad.

[maratycznie]

[ashipiko]

LOVE IS STORED IN THE. WAFFLES? I THINK.

[sharpenededges]

Krzysztof Powałka - Wara - (2023)

[isvoc]

Hello to annual spooky creature feature! This year it's a chicken from hell! The Cockatrice! I felt like playing around with a bit more local folklore for this bundle. Greetings from wonderful, autumnal slavic forests. 🫀 Print and sticker are available in October on my patreon.

[iambecomeafangirl]

I love Maximus Opoka. The first thing this bitch does after waking up on the train is lying to an old woman, coming up with an entire made up story about his non-existing love interest, just to hide the real reason, why he is on his way to a shithole, and then wishing it was real. Lmao.

Also why is my boy always beat up in the beginnings of the books?

[tifart]

Day 1: Lost

Happy Sephiroth Week!

Work is killing me so I probably won't be able to finish anything else, but I'll see what I can do <3

[genesis-rhapsodass]

Just a found family on their way to a gentler life (hopefully)

So there's this really good fanfic by @eaymtb of Cloud being sent back in time together with child remnants that's got me SO hooked, I've been wanting to draw something for it for ages so here's some art of the boys on their way to Wutai

[alrauna]

Natalia Noszczyńska ↟ Mix Media Artist (@natalia.noszczynska.illu)

[grzybjek]

A collage I made for one of the characters from my newest story. His name is Kundel by the way hes an absolute manfail and a menace

[maratycznie]

"𝘛𝘰 𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨

𝘛𝘰 𝘴𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵

𝘛𝘰 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘯 𝘢 𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘵

𝘛𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘺"

[niko-ur-local-moron]

So I came across this clip and my very first thought was "I NEED this to be Fantasy AU Katsuki doing this with his cape to freezing Izuku" so I rushed to my drawing app and roughly put this together in like 15 minutes cuz I needed to share my vision with the world