Meet Captain Jack Sparrow, professional escapist.

My interests are wide-ranging, as longtime readers of this blog know – anime, sci-fi TV shows, fantasy movies, video games, RPGs, cosplay, comics, fiction literature, and so on. One thing binds all of these interests: they are all escapist forms of entertainment.

According to the great font of all knowledge, Wikipedia:

Escapism is mental diversion by means of entertainment or recreation, as an “escape” from the perceived unpleasant or banal aspects of daily life.

The term ‘escapist’ is usually used in a derogatory fashion, meaning someone who would rather escape to an alternate reality instead of accepting the reality he or she is handed. This tends to be a charge leveled by self-proclaimed realists, people who believe that anyone who isn’t fully engaged in the ‘real world’, meaning the ‘family-workplace-church-potluck-country-club-buddies real world’, is a social cripple who fails or is unwilling to make any ‘meaningful connections’.

But as anyone who reads sci-fi or fantasy knows, good speculative fiction is a way of making a commentary on the ‘real world’ by the allegory of the alternate world. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, particularly the first book, is a study of the progression of the rise and fall of empires presented on a galactic scale. EVE Online, an MMORPG I used to play constantly, is simply a hypercapitalist sandbox set in space. George Orwell’s Animal Farm illustrates, through the decidedly-unrealistic device of talking animals, that any revolution can be undone by the corruption and short-sightedness of its leaders. The thoroughly unrealistic anime Gurren Lagann, an anime ostensibly about giant robots, is actually a parable about what it means to be human.

J.R.R. Tolkien himself, in his celebrated essay ‘On Fairy Stories’ noted that telling stories that are ‘not real’ was a way of recognizing the reality of the mundane world without having to mindlessly submit to the way things are:

It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. . . . For creative fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun, on the recognition of fact but not slavery to it… If men could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy-tales about frog-kings would not arise.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor of Escapism at Rivendell University

As Joseph Campbell (of Hero of a Thousand Faces fame) has always asserted, humanity has always told itself stories and myths to escape reality long enough to see it from a different perspective, like climbing a mountain to see the broader view. In the Books of Magic, Titania explains to Timothy Hunter:

“The places you will visit, the places that you will see, do not exist. For there are only two worlds – your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: Their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power, provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist, and thus they are all that matters. Do you understand?”

Besides, as C. S. Lewis said, the usual enemies of escape are jailers.

Welcome to the 'real world'.

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