My brain is not sorted into questions just now. Rambly!
I think a major of non-standard urban fantasy is that it is nonstandard. I know faerie stories. I know selkies and under the hill. I know dragons. And part of urban fantasy is *changing* those, so the selkies are no longer just seal women without their skins (one could argue that this hasn't happened with selkies, but it's the first one to pop into my head). Dragons aren't unilaterally evil lizards with flamethrowers. The reader gets to see traditional folklore in a new light, and this is informed by everything already known about the traditional folklore. We know The Little Mermaid in some form, we know the sirens, we know general mermaidlike things, so urban fantasy generally puts mermaids in the sewers, forces them into Arizona for perfectly valid mermaid reasons, and gives them strange, nonmermaid relationships with the two-footed ones. And unfamiliar folktales don't have the same impact. If you write a story about a Mesoamerican creature, I'm not going to come at it with the same Disneyfied baggage. At least some stories have to be written in the traditional way to give me grounding for when urban fantasy subverts the tropes. Sometimes it seems like authors get around this by using equivalents-- they want a water spirit, but they don't want the traditional European, so they have to use something close enough to what we know that the fact that it's *not* standard Celtic mythology gives it an edge. Which is not exactly what I want to say. There are Russian water spirits (Catherynne Valente has her "Urchins, While Swimming" and that *works*), Irish water spirits, water spirits all over the place, so you can write a story without necessarily having to delineate what makes *this* water spirit different from all *those*-- they're all similar enough. Which makes me wonder what would happen if you have just the same water spirits everywhere, instead of defining them so strictly. If you write a mermaid that's indistinguishable from the standard mermaid, but it's actually Polynesian, how does that change the story, the feel of sources, the diversity?
On a personal level, if source-mixing isn't done well, it pisses me right the hell off. CE Murphy's Urban Shaman, while fun, bugged me; the main character has a mix of Irish and Native American magics, and it didn't feel natural to me. The mix was contrived. A lot of times, it seems like there's the Irish, there's the Native American, and there's *nothing else*, nothing in the middle, no immigration, nothing. Old World vs New World, often working together. De Lint does this a lot, and it doesn't always work. And the trickster is *always* Coyote.
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yati
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Date: 2007-11-07 02:25 pm (UTC)I think a major of non-standard urban fantasy is that it is nonstandard. I know faerie stories. I know selkies and under the hill. I know dragons. And part of urban fantasy is *changing* those, so the selkies are no longer just seal women without their skins (one could argue that this hasn't happened with selkies, but it's the first one to pop into my head). Dragons aren't unilaterally evil lizards with flamethrowers. The reader gets to see traditional folklore in a new light, and this is informed by everything already known about the traditional folklore. We know The Little Mermaid in some form, we know the sirens, we know general mermaidlike things, so urban fantasy generally puts mermaids in the sewers, forces them into Arizona for perfectly valid mermaid reasons, and gives them strange, nonmermaid relationships with the two-footed ones.
And unfamiliar folktales don't have the same impact. If you write a story about a Mesoamerican creature, I'm not going to come at it with the same Disneyfied baggage. At least some stories have to be written in the traditional way to give me grounding for when urban fantasy subverts the tropes.
Sometimes it seems like authors get around this by using equivalents-- they want a water spirit, but they don't want the traditional European, so they have to use something close enough to what we know that the fact that it's *not* standard Celtic mythology gives it an edge. Which is not exactly what I want to say. There are Russian water spirits (Catherynne Valente has her "Urchins, While Swimming" and that *works*), Irish water spirits, water spirits all over the place, so you can write a story without necessarily having to delineate what makes *this* water spirit different from all *those*-- they're all similar enough. Which makes me wonder what would happen if you have just the same water spirits everywhere, instead of defining them so strictly. If you write a mermaid that's indistinguishable from the standard mermaid, but it's actually Polynesian, how does that change the story, the feel of sources, the diversity?
On a personal level, if source-mixing isn't done well, it pisses me right the hell off. CE Murphy's Urban Shaman, while fun, bugged me; the main character has a mix of Irish and Native American magics, and it didn't feel natural to me. The mix was contrived. A lot of times, it seems like there's the Irish, there's the Native American, and there's *nothing else*, nothing in the middle, no immigration, nothing. Old World vs New World, often working together. De Lint does this a lot, and it doesn't always work.
And the trickster is *always* Coyote.