Comments by "Daniel Bradford" (@Falconlibrary) on "The reason why we love works of fantasy, such as The Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones" video.

  1. The most popular genres are actually romance (a bookstore manager once punished me for some unfathomable transgression by assigning me full-time to the romance section, which I thought was against the Geneva Conventions) and mystery. The mystery genre has a wide range from the cozies of Christie to the noir of Chandler and all territory in-between, but what they all have in common is that the bad people are punished, or at least someone makes a noble effort to punish them. In reality, murderers and thieves are rich and free whilst good men die like dogs for no good reason, so you can see why people prefer the tidy moral universe of the mystery. Same for fantasy: there's a known good and evil in most fantasy novels, and even if the good guys often don't win, at least they're trying. The villains are also interesting, unlike dullards such as Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, and Sadiq Khan, who are morally vacant bumblers rather than clever malefactors. If you admire any of the men I've just listed, your mother didn't raise you properly.
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  2. Verne created Nemo was a vengeful Sikh.
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