Promethean fantasies are popular everywhere, methinks. The famous Chinese webnovel, I Shall Seal the Heavens, is about a young scholar who is kidnapped into a secretive cult of would-be immortals, and then over the course of many lengthy books becomes increasingly and increasingly powerful. It is almost a pure power fantasy. And yet I would hesitate to call it a complete power fantasy. The author occasionally acknowledges that things are not right in this world; Meng Hao's full-throated power is depicted as a response to the trauna of powerlessness. But these asides are only occasional.
I Shall Seal the Heavens is an erstwhile heir of earlier Chinese stories such as Journey to the West, where most of the heroes are already insanely powerful, and when they encounter trouble they head over to Heaven to recruit an even more powerful being to help out. I don't think it fits into either of the categories you suggest. I wouldn't even call it a Buddhist fantasy, because I have the suspicion that it is a subtle satire.
Indeed, where would fall legends where the gods, who already possess the power, seek to use it?
Returning to modern works, I would argue many anime do not fall so simply either. Frequency themes include that the quest for immortality is futile and dangerous, that the virtue of hard work and persistence can do anything, and that possessing power does not make you a better person. I would argue almost all mecha anime is about the heroic flaws of the main heroes and villains, with the giant battle robots as merely the means to showcase the tragedy.
Or, perhaps more accurately, the giant battle robots are to sell the giant battle robot toys, and the writers write heroic tragedies set around their pilots. Which I would suggest is a bigger reason why power fantasies tend to be more popular: it's easier to sell a story about a wizard becoming more powerful than a hobbit falling from grace. But I'm also not sure even that is true, because the market is fickle and arbitrary. Shakespeare was the common entertainment of his day!
Gah! Wrote all that and missed a point. I would argue for a third category: power is not good or even actually evil, but there is no choice but to use it due to being trapped in an even more unjust situation. Thus, the ever-popular death game trope, which I did write about. Call it, if you will, shiv or prison gang fantasy: a tragedy of people making bad choices because to choose otherwise means death.
Hmmm. Not sure if that is a third category. Is there a difference between the temptation of Christ in the desert and the temptation of Christ on the cross? I'm not convinced that there is. No matter the situation in which you find yourself, the offer of power is still either a power that can be mastered or a power that will corrupt.
But you have put another thought into my mind, re the death-game trope, that there are times in which an author puts a story in a genre not because the story is native to the genre or requires its conventions to work, but simply because the genre is popular or the author has a following in that genre. In other words, you can tell any story on another planet, or in another world, even if the same story could be told in this world. It is couched as SF or fantasy for commercial reasons, not literary ones. Such stories are not going to fit analytical categories designed to get at the nature of the genre itself.
Which is fine. The purpose of literary analysis and the categories it creates in not to lay down rules or boundaries for writers. It is only to help readers understand what is going on in certain types of stories.
I think it would be reasonable to see the Promethean fantasy dividing into two branches, which we might perhaps name after Daedelus and Icarus, in which power is something that can be mastered, but which an individual protagonist may succeed or fail in mastering because of their personal virtues or failings. This would then give us the Promethian comedy and the Promethian tragedy (Icarus). We might then compare these to the lapsarian comedy, such as LOTR or Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, and lapsarian tragedy, (of which I can't immediately think of an example), in which power could never be mastered, but might either be grasped disastrously, or foresworn salvificly.
Promethean fantasies are popular everywhere, methinks. The famous Chinese webnovel, I Shall Seal the Heavens, is about a young scholar who is kidnapped into a secretive cult of would-be immortals, and then over the course of many lengthy books becomes increasingly and increasingly powerful. It is almost a pure power fantasy. And yet I would hesitate to call it a complete power fantasy. The author occasionally acknowledges that things are not right in this world; Meng Hao's full-throated power is depicted as a response to the trauna of powerlessness. But these asides are only occasional.
I Shall Seal the Heavens is an erstwhile heir of earlier Chinese stories such as Journey to the West, where most of the heroes are already insanely powerful, and when they encounter trouble they head over to Heaven to recruit an even more powerful being to help out. I don't think it fits into either of the categories you suggest. I wouldn't even call it a Buddhist fantasy, because I have the suspicion that it is a subtle satire.
Indeed, where would fall legends where the gods, who already possess the power, seek to use it?
Returning to modern works, I would argue many anime do not fall so simply either. Frequency themes include that the quest for immortality is futile and dangerous, that the virtue of hard work and persistence can do anything, and that possessing power does not make you a better person. I would argue almost all mecha anime is about the heroic flaws of the main heroes and villains, with the giant battle robots as merely the means to showcase the tragedy.
Or, perhaps more accurately, the giant battle robots are to sell the giant battle robot toys, and the writers write heroic tragedies set around their pilots. Which I would suggest is a bigger reason why power fantasies tend to be more popular: it's easier to sell a story about a wizard becoming more powerful than a hobbit falling from grace. But I'm also not sure even that is true, because the market is fickle and arbitrary. Shakespeare was the common entertainment of his day!
Gah! Wrote all that and missed a point. I would argue for a third category: power is not good or even actually evil, but there is no choice but to use it due to being trapped in an even more unjust situation. Thus, the ever-popular death game trope, which I did write about. Call it, if you will, shiv or prison gang fantasy: a tragedy of people making bad choices because to choose otherwise means death.
Hmmm. Not sure if that is a third category. Is there a difference between the temptation of Christ in the desert and the temptation of Christ on the cross? I'm not convinced that there is. No matter the situation in which you find yourself, the offer of power is still either a power that can be mastered or a power that will corrupt.
But you have put another thought into my mind, re the death-game trope, that there are times in which an author puts a story in a genre not because the story is native to the genre or requires its conventions to work, but simply because the genre is popular or the author has a following in that genre. In other words, you can tell any story on another planet, or in another world, even if the same story could be told in this world. It is couched as SF or fantasy for commercial reasons, not literary ones. Such stories are not going to fit analytical categories designed to get at the nature of the genre itself.
Which is fine. The purpose of literary analysis and the categories it creates in not to lay down rules or boundaries for writers. It is only to help readers understand what is going on in certain types of stories.
I think it would be reasonable to see the Promethean fantasy dividing into two branches, which we might perhaps name after Daedelus and Icarus, in which power is something that can be mastered, but which an individual protagonist may succeed or fail in mastering because of their personal virtues or failings. This would then give us the Promethian comedy and the Promethian tragedy (Icarus). We might then compare these to the lapsarian comedy, such as LOTR or Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight, and lapsarian tragedy, (of which I can't immediately think of an example), in which power could never be mastered, but might either be grasped disastrously, or foresworn salvificly.