Once again, the peculiarities of Elfwood's acceptance policy leave me boggled. Actually, they seem to just want to save storage space, so that makes it understandable. But that got me thinking.
I'm referring, of course, to the infamous excuse of 'great pic, but there aren't any visible fantasy elements'. So that got me thinking. What is the fantasy genre? How do we define it, how do we recognise it? I once wrote that I believe the fantasy genre has a style of its own, a certain use of colours and generic shapes that, regardless of the actual elements portrayed, make it fantasy and more than a period artwork. And by the way, I think a Medieval-
looking piece needs to be a hell more than that to qualify as period artwork. If you haven't done extensive research to make sure your Medieval assassin looks exactly the way actual Medieval assassin's looked, then it's unrealistic and should be considered fantasy. Maybe.
So you see, my viewpoint is that it's more the style than the theme that decides whether a work of art is fantasy or not. Or rather, it can be fantasy
despite a certain theme, or lack of such.
Maybe I'm wrong. One of my main issues is that the acceptance of a painting as 'fantasy' is decided by trivial details and not the whole impression. A horse that is uber realistic and still has an unlikely-looking pointy horn on its forehead is still fantasy. Somehow that doesn't seem right to me, but as I've said, maybe I'm wrong - maybe it IS those trivial details that make the piece unbelievable and thus, fantasy.
Regardless, one of my points in this is that a policy on determining the genre of a picture should be as internally consistent as possible. And here, one of the main problems is that many paintings without obvious fantasy elements - paintings of rogues, of raging barbarians, of druids -
automatically get accepted as fantasy because of the way such persons were used in fantasy fiction and DnD, forever associating them with fantasy, whereas artwork of technically the same type - say, of a jester, or of a goldsmith - is questioned and eventually rejected, simply because there is no class (that I know of, at least XD) in DnD of a jester or a woodsmith.
As a friend of mine once brilliantly put it, "Why should some things be accepted without question when they're no closer to (or further from) being fantasy than other things that
are questioned? " I believe that hits the nail on the head. This is what makes the definition of fantasy vary so much from person to person and randomly benefit and hinder certain artists.
I'd love to know your thoughts on this. O_o
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My collections:
Order of the Stick
[link]Neverwinter Nights
[link]Some people with a great style:
Fellow Oblivion fanatics:
Fellow Thief fans:
Best friend:
Clubs I'm now in:
Gallery update, Order of the Stick
Content
) would be interesting in joining?
Relief
Tired
One thing I considered doing with my spiffy new ability is scannning some of those numerous pencil sketches I always do at school and upload the lot of it into scraps.... I'm probably going to do it anyway but I just wondered if anyone would actually be interesting in looking at them. XD
Dead
I mean, seriously? I guess it's just an everyday real life occurence for people in strange robes to grab a rose-overgrown scythe and climb to the top of their local church. Wow, I didn't know. O___o I hereby stand enlightened. XD
