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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48937
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

 **Low vs High Fantasy: A sliding definition**

Humans love to makeup labels and group things, but some [many? Most?] subjects don't actually play as nice as we might like the deeper we dive into them.

When it comes to grouping and classifying in literature we have some rather awkward issues in drawing lines in the sand and settling on what goes where. If you take any two books, no matter how similar they are and how easily you can come up with a reason to group the two together you can have someone else come along and find some label or reason to split them apart in some kind of subgroup.

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However, being able to split a novel off into a different subgroup from other similar novels _does **not** _ diminish its value or potential as a novel.

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Fantasy is not an easy thing to define, and it can become rather fuzzy. This is especially true when you set it beside similar genres and try to draw 'logical boxes' around them. For example there are very strong and compelling arguments that Star Wars is Fantasy rather than Science Fiction, but that then depends on how specifically you define Science Fiction.

The common definition of High Fantasy tends to be the one most are familiar with. Lots of magic in a world, lots of impact from magic, etc. But Magic in and of itself is not the defining element of Fantasy in general. Having a lower level of magic in a fantasy world does not diminish the elements of Fantasy, just lowers the involvement of magic, and this gives us a sliding scale that is our magical impact on a story's fantasy.

This leads us towards the slightly less well known "Low Fantasy", where magic has a lowered impact as you slide down along the scale all the way to the point that there simply isn't any magic, but you're still on that sliding scale.

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The debate on what other metrics we might measure a story's "fantasy" qualifiers seems best left as another and more focused question.

Original score: 12