What is fantasy for?
I’m probably just a chronic overthinker, but I’ve never been able to do things without interrogating my reasons. If I’m writing fantasy—and I am, I always am—then it must be particularly suited to my tricksy purposes. But how?
I used to have a good answer: fantasy is a laboratory for thought experiments. You establish your counterfactual parameters, like setting up a rat maze, and then run your characters through it and see what happens. Fantasy is intellectual exercise, where you rigorously think through every implication, where every effect must have its cause—an overthinker’s dream!
[Running thought experiments, however, is not the only thing fantasy is particularly suited to…]