I dislike most fantasy. Intensely. I find that it does not map to my experience of reality, or the experience that most pre-modern writings indicate. If fantasy is to be accurate to the general experience of humanity, the experience of supranatural good things has to be even more stressful and frightening to meet the supranaturally bad ones. Meeting an angel is scarier than meeting a demon. The good entities attempt to limit the damage they do by just showing up, because they actually care about the world and know that their advent changes things. And it may not be a good idea if they do so.
If anything the good ones showing up is categorically *worse* for the world. They’re more powerful, much more inherently destructive.
They leave magic items linked to them behind so they can help without literally breaking existence in half (see the sinking of Beleriand)
Horror focuses on one emotion
Fantasy focuses on putting them all together, at full blast, in paradox. At its best anyway
Horror is easier coz one emotion, but the dread and stress of running into supranatural things, the *vital* thing, is kept easier
Like if you meet an evil thing you run or try to fight it. You think you have a chance.
You meet a good thing in Scripture *you throw yourself at its feet and worship it coz you have absolutely no hope of beating or escaping it*
And the good thing says the totally unintuitive: “Please don’t worship me. Don’t be afraid.”
There’s a loss of agency when you meet the good ones too lol. If anything it’s *more* profound.
Gene Wolfe describes it best in Short Sun. There is a character who is so good it scares everyone silly… coz they realize he’s good and they’re not. And the fear is that he’ll do something about *and you will let him*
Because, in the end, you’re a blight upon the earth, and even if you’re reassured that you’re loved and calmed there will always be that moment you will always remember: when you were fine with being killed, simply to not *offend*
Isaiah shouts “WOE IS ME PLEASE LET ME DIE” because he knows he doesn’t deserve to see the Face of God and live. In the account an angel brings him a fiery coal and touches it to his mouth. Whether or not it actually changes Isaiah might be for debate. But what is not up for debate is that angel was trying to help Isaiah feel like it was okay to be there.
"Father was good. That is the hard part to explain to everyone . . . . If somebody frightens people, everyone thinks he has to be But when you were around Father you were practically always scared to death, scared that he might really find out one day the way you were and do something about it… Father knew exactly how bad we were but he loved us just the same. Deep down, I think he loved everybody… and until you meet someone like him, you will never know how scary that was."
This understanding of divine terror is where most modern fantasy fails. By defaulting to comforting, anthropomorphized angels and 'good guys' who are just humans with bigger powers, the genre sacrifices awe for accessibility. Wolfe shows that true literary impact lies not in making good easy to digest, but in forcing the reader to confront the unnerving, existentially challenging reality of perfection.
A more compelling fantasy would dare to present goodness as a force so pure, so potent, and so overwhelming that its presence is a crisis in itself—a narrative where salvation is less a relief and more an ordeal that demands nothing less than the surrender of the self.
Ultimately, for fantasy to achieve the emotional complexity it claims as its strength, it must stop treating goodness as merely the opposite of evil, but rather as something wholly other. It should be a sublime and terrifying force that shatters our comfortable notions of morality and power. Goodness and niceness are not don't overlap, but frequently are opposed. Until the genre embraces the notion that the highest good is a consuming fire that demands free self-annihilation of the ego, it will remain, to me, a sanitized, shallow reflection of the profound and terrifying human spiritual experience.
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