bat out of fantasy

fantasy is stuck in nostalgia. or maybe we’re just not using enough of it.

i was listening to bat out of hell by meat loaf when i started thinking about this article.

this is probably not the intellectual origin story the argument deserves, but it is the one it has.

it isn’t an album i have any particular nostalgia for. i didn’t grow up with it, and i certainly wasn’t around when it first came out. i found it much later, mostly because people kept describing it with the kind of language that immediately gets my attention. too much. completely ridiculous. like a broadway musical that accidentally became a rock album.

they weren’t wrong.

the first thing that struck me wasn’t how original it was. it was almost the opposite. everything on that album already existed. teenage romance. motorcycles. leather jackets. shakespeare. paradise lost. 1950s rock and roll. american highways. religious imagery. gothic horror.

if you wrote those influences down on paper, none of them would surprise anyone. most of them weren’t even particularly fresh in 1977.

and yet bat out of hell feels unlike anything else.

not because it invented something new, but because it refused to treat those influences as sacred. jim steinman wasn’t interested in recreating rock and roll. he treated it like a box of spare parts. he took things that already had histories, collided them together, exaggerated them beyond recognition, and somehow arrived at something that only bat out of hell could be.

that’s probably what nostalgia is supposed to do.

we tend to think of nostalgia as looking backwards, but i don’t think that’s quite right. nostalgia has always been one of our most creative instincts. it gives us something to react to, something to reinterpret, something to argue with. the past isn’t valuable because we can preserve it perfectly. it’s valuable because we can keep finding new ways to use it.

artists have always worked like this. punk borrowed from garage rock. hip-hop sampled soul and jazz. renaissance painters borrowed from antiquity.

every movement inherits something, but inheritance isn’t the same as imitation. every generation changes the material enough that it becomes impossible to mistake for the thing that inspired it.

that’s why i keep coming back to bat out of hell.

it’s an album built almost entirely from things that already existed, but none of those things survive in their original form. they get stretched, distorted, amplified, and rearranged until they become part of a new mythology.

the album isn’t nostalgic because it recreates the past. it’s nostalgic because it uses the past to build something that couldn’t have existed before. i’ve been wondering whether fantasy still does that.

not because fantasy has run out of ideas. i don’t think it has.

something along the way, nostalgia becomes less like inspiration and more like inertia. we inherit the image of fantasy without asking how that image would actually change if all its impossible parts were taken seriously, fantasy stopped borrowing from the world and started borrowing from itself.

and those are very different kinds of nostalgia.

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fantasy wasn’t always nostalgic for itself.

that’s an odd sentence to write, because every genre eventually develops its own traditions. detective fiction has detectives. westerns have frontiers. science fiction has spaceships. genres build a vocabulary over time, and fantasy is no different.

the difference is that fantasy’s vocabulary became so successful that it slowly replaced the things it originally came from.

tolkien wasn’t writing in conversation with fifty years of fantasy novels. he was drawing from mythology, language, folklore, poetry, religion, and history. ursula k. le guin was thinking about anthropology, taoism, and the power of language. michael moorcock was reacting against tolkien as much as he was writing fantasy. even when these authors disagreed with each other, they were still looking outward.

they weren’t trying to preserve fantasy. they were trying to make it. somewhere along the way, that changed.

fantasy became one of the most recognizable genres in popular culture, and with recognition came a kind of gravity. instead of borrowing from the world, fantasy started borrowing from fantasy itself.

the castle remained.

the tavern remained.

the dragon remained.

the dungeon remained.

but why? fantasy became the genre of nostalgia because it has always been obsessed with inheritance. Kings inherit kingdoms. heroes inherit swords. prophecies inherit futures. ancient civilizations leave ruins. the genre already thinks in terms of legacy, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that it eventually began inheriting itself.

again, none of these things are problems. i don’t think fantasy would be better if we collectively decided dragons were illegal. they’re enduring images because they work. they communicate immediately. you don’t need to explain what a castle is or why an adventuring party might meet in a tavern. they have become a shared visual language.

but shared languages have a habit of becoming invisible. the more familiar something becomes, the less often we ask why it’s there. why do wizards live in towers? why are fantasy kingdoms almost always monarchies? why does magic transform combat but leave agriculture, trade, education, and infrastructure almost untouched? why are adventurers still professional tomb raiders?

these aren’t criticisms as much as they are absences. they’re questions that no longer need answers because the genre already answered them decades ago.

or at least, it feels like it did.

i think that’s the subtle difference between nostalgia and convention. nostalgia invites reinterpretation. convention asks for repetition.

once a convention becomes strong enough, it stops feeling like a creative decision and starts feeling like the natural state of the world. eventually, a fantasy setting without castles begins to feel like the unusual one, even though castles have no special claim over fantasy as a genre.

that’s what i mean when i say fantasy became nostalgic for itself.

not because it loves dragons. because it started treating dragons as furniture.

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one of my favorite things about worldbuilding isn’t coming up with a new magic system. it’s asking what happens after the magic system has been around for three hundred years.

fantasy is full of impossible things. dragons fly. people return from the dead. wizards bend reality. cities float. gods answer prayers.

these are extraordinary ideas, but they’re often treated as extraordinary events. they happen to the protagonists, they solve the immediate problem, and then the world quietly returns to normal.

i’ve always been more interested in the normal.

what does a normal day look like in a world where resurrection exists? not for adventurers, but for everyone else.

fantasy usually treats it as convenience. a spell that helps the heroes travel faster.

but if teleportation became reliable enough, why would cities develop the way they do? why would trade routes still matter? why would anyone build roads across continents if distance itself had become optional?

magic shouldn’t just change adventures. it should change civilization.

this is something science fiction has always been surprisingly comfortable with. introduce one new technology, then spend the next three hundred pages asking how society reorganizes itself around it. the interesting part isn’t the spaceship. it’s the politics that emerge because spaceships exist.

fantasy often stops one step earlier.

it gives us enchanted swords, magical academies, ancient relics, and forgotten prophecies, but the society around them often looks remarkably familiar. kingdoms remain kingdoms. economies remain economies. people still organize themselves in ways that feel suspiciously medieval, despite living in worlds where the laws of reality have clearly been rewritten.

i don’t think this is because fantasy lacks imagination. i think it’s because the genre inherited more than its aesthetics.

we take inspiration from the past, but only from a very narrow part of it. even “medieval fantasy” often means a collection of modern assumptions dressed in european stonework. the medieval world itself contained trade networks, religious debates, scientific exchange, cities, migration, labour, disease, bureaucracy, poetry, technological change, and cultures constantly colliding with one another.

that is already more interesting than the default kingdom. and we do not need to stop there.

what would solarpunk fantasy look like? not simply elves with solar panels, although honestly that could be fun. i mean a fantasy world built around collective maintenance, renewable magic, ecological repair, and communities trying to live inside systems that cannot expand forever.

perhaps druids are not isolated guardians of untouched wilderness, but engineers working with farmers, spirits, and local councils to restore damaged land. perhaps the central conflict is not defeating an evil empire, but deciding who controls the magical infrastructure that keeps a city alive. perhaps adventurers travel between settlements not to kill monsters, but to repair broken ecosystems, negotiate with rivers, and recover technologies abandoned after an age of magical extraction.

what about cyberpunk medieval fantasy? again, not only knights with neon swords.

imagine feudalism where noble houses own not just the land but access to magical information. spells are licensed. memories are stored in illuminated manuscripts. saints function like artificial intelligences, answering prayers according to instructions written centuries earlier. peasants hack holy relics. mercenary scribes steal identities by altering the official genealogies of kings.

the cathedral is also the server. the monastery is also the data centre. the wizard does not sit alone in a tower because he is mysterious. he sits there because the tower contains the only magical network node for several hundred kilometres.

or perhaps fantasy could draw from glam rock, disco, pulp science fiction, brutalist architecture, game shows, public bureaucracy, tropical cities, reality television, labour movements, pop music, or the extremely specific emotional experience of being trapped in an airport at three in the morning.

a dungeon could be a folded piece of paper that has accidentally become spatially infinite.

hell could be a television studio where the recently dead compete for a second chance.

a kingdom could operate through prophetic customer service centres. a dragon could own an insurance company.

the purpose of these combinations is not randomness for its own sake. “weird” does not automatically mean thoughtful, and novelty alone is not a substitute for a world that has something to say.

the point is to use the freedom fantasy gives us.

when two ideas collide, they force us to reconsider both. putting cyberpunk into a medieval world can reveal how information, ownership, and surveillance already function within feudal structures. putting solarpunk into fantasy can make us ask why magical worlds are so rarely concerned with sustainability, despite being filled with people who can literally communicate with nature.

the combination becomes useful when it creates a new question.

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the strange thing is that tabletop roleplaying games have already shown us many ways out.

not every ttrpg begins with a kingdom, a dungeon, and four people who have independently decided that treasure hunting is a reasonable career. some games have started asking what else fantasy can be about, and what kinds of play become possible when we stop treating heroic adventure as its only natural form.

Wanderhome, for example, is a pastoral fantasy game about travelling animal-folk, changing seasons, and a world slowly recovering from war. its fantasy is not built around defeating an ultimate evil. it is built around movement, place, memory, and the people encountered along the way. (⁠Possum Creek Games)

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast turns fantasy toward domestic life. it is about a witch, a strange house, and the people who gradually make that house their home. the magical world is not merely scenery for combat. it becomes a way to talk about belonging, change, and the accumulation of shared history. (⁠Possum Creek Games)

.dungeon takes familiar fantasy adventuring and places it inside a dying massively multiplayer online game. the dungeon is still there, but now it is polygonal, unstable, and entangled with online identity, loneliness, trolls, and the knowledge that the entire world may eventually shut down. (⁠itch.io)

then there are games like Patchwork World, which describes itself as weird fantasy without traditional playbooks or stats, or the many small games where players become paranormal mercenaries, bureaucrats, cryptids, doomed cartoon animals, or people exploring worlds that refuse to settle into one recognizable genre. (⁠itch.io)

these games are not interesting merely because they are unusual.

they are interesting because changing the world also changes the questions players are asked.

a game about wandering through a healing landscape asks different questions from a game about conquering a wilderness. a game about maintaining a home produces different relationships from a game about extracting treasure from ruins. a game set inside a dying online world makes nostalgia itself part of the landscape.

the setting is not only visual.

it determines what actions feel natural, what problems seem important, and what kind of person the player is allowed to become.

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i don’t think fantasy needs fewer dragons. i don’t think it needs fewer castles, or fewer knights, or fewer old forests hiding forgotten things.

those images have survived for a reason. they’re beautiful. they’re recognizable. they’ve become part of a language that millions of people understand almost instinctively.

languages aren’t the problem. using the same sentences forever is.

maybe that’s what i’ve been circling this whole time. nostalgia isn’t supposed to tell us what to build, it’s supposed to remind us what building feels like.

the fantasy writers i admire weren’t preserving fantasy because there wasn’t any fantasy to preserve. they inherited myths, histories, religions, landscapes, languages, and stories, then asked what else those things could become.

they inherited questions. somewhere along the way, we started inheriting answers. the castle became the answer. the kingdom became the answer. the adventuring party became the answer. the dungeon became the answer.

instead of asking what kind of world magic would create, we inherited a world where someone else had already decided.

that’s why i find tabletop so encouraging, because the medium still behaves as though every setting has to justify itself.

it still begins with what if? what if fantasy wasn’t organized around violence? what if the world was recovering instead of collapsing? what if magic wasn’t a weapon but infrastructure? what if the interesting story belonged to the people who kept the world running instead of the people destined to save it?

and i think fantasy has always been at its healthiest when it asks new questions.

i’d love to see more fantasy that borrows from places it hasn’t looked in a while. solarpunk that imagines magic as ecological stewardship instead of extraction. cyberpunk feudalism where information, not land, becomes the source of power. fantasy inspired by disco, public transportation, bureaucracy, tropical cities, labour movements, reality television, or the architecture of shopping malls.

not because those combinations are inherently better. because each one forces fantasy to think again.

to ask what changes. to ask what stays. to ask what kind of people would actually live there.

maybe that’s the real gift of nostalgia.

it isn’t a catalogue of things we should keep rebuilding. it’s proof that people before us were willing to imagine worlds that had never existed.

the best way to honour that tradition probably isn’t to preserve their worlds.

it’s to build our own.