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Reality and Simulacra

Reality, para-reality, simulacra, and illusion are integral to understanding the Elemenstor cycle in its entire scope of Epicness. But as Freud wrote to Herr Baumeister, what is reality when the illusion is so compelling? Let us stand the question of reality and causality on their heads for a moment and pose the following: What if the Elemenstor saga, rather than being created, created itself?

To the face of it, this might seem an absurd, koan-like claim. Of course there is an Elemenstor cycle. There are books, which are printed on paper, which I can hold in my hand. There is a Tycho Brahe who penned them (or had them penned on him?) What does it mean to say that a text created a reality? Does it mean that one morning Tycho Brahe thought to himself: "Gee, what if there were some all-encompassing fantasy cycle that contained, subsumed, pirated, and mimicked the conventions of the genre? What if I created this thing in the absence of an actual book, or better, asked the readers (even though there are no "readers") to create this thing themselves?"

That is an intriguing notion, because it stands our own notions of reality and illusion exactly backwards. Can there be fans when there is no fiction? Can there be fanfic without canon? Can there be spinoffs of nothing? The answer is certainly yes.

To do this, we must rely on the elucidation of Jean Baudrillard, particularly in his examination of the hyperspace of society being explicitly non-Euclidian. Baudrillard writes: "In the Euclidean space of history, the shortest path between two points is the straight line, the line of Progress and Democracy. But this is only true of the linear space of the Enlightenment." The application to the problematic notion of the simulcrated fantasy Elemenstor cycle is readily apparent. We have departed from the tyrannic, fascist Enlightenment causality into the Liberated Geometry of the postmodern universe. Of course we are free to have fans without fiction, fiction without fans, and the appearance of incoherence which is actually its own subtle form of humor. In every real sense, the creation of the Elemenstor cycle is the validation of everything Baudrillard writes, the final triumph of post-modernism over the zombie corpse of the modernist, Whig history.

What the Elemenstor saga does is to create the necessary social structure of a fantasy epic which is pinned to nothing but a commonly-shared hallucination, with causal notions stood in non-Euclidean directions, not parallel nor perpendicular to lines of argument, but in great hyper-planes of argument--sometimes parallel to each other, sometimes conflicting (what does it mean to have conflict over myth? Is this the wellspring of religion?) A social structure which appears coherent, even banal, is in fact the brilliant exculpation of jokes, the eschatology of the notion of Canon. It is for precisely this reason that the power structure rejects serious analysis of the Elemenstor cycle, labelling it as a "kid's show" and "marketing cash cow." Accepting the special absence that lies at the core of the Elemenstor saga would mean that the elaborate facade of any number of social conventions could be shown to be equally specious, and to the personality that is both of oral- and anal-fixation, such an abomination cannot be allowed.

No liberatory theory of fantasy is complete without application to the Elemenstor saga, which is without peer in its ability to refract light on the thousands of issues of illusion.