Adult portal fantasy - reasons for exploring

[sholio]

I was in a brief discussion elsewhere (locked post) about adult portal fantasy and how it needs to come back, and after that, I got to thinking about character arcs for adult portal fantasy protagonists. I feel like MG/YA portal fantasy usually has a fairly inherently built-in arc - growing up/coming of age - and in addition to that, you don't really need a reason for why kids would leave it all behind to start over in a new world. Kids are inherently curious, investigative, and not very well connected to the world they came from (that is, they don't have jobs/dependents/etc), and naturally have a lot of free time to explore any portals they might find.

So this led to thinking about why adult characters might go through portals to fantasy worlds in the first place - not that one wouldn't want to, necessarily, but you get very different types of characters depending on how and why they got there in the first place.

I ended up with three basic categories of "ways people get to fantasy portal worlds," plus one theoretical one that I can't think of any examples of, but it seems fundamental enough that there OUGHT to be examples.

• Accident (wrong place, wrong time)
• Escape (getting away from enemies, a depressing life, etc)
• Pursuit (went there on purpose because there's something they want)
• Manipulation (the theoretical category: someone made them go there or kidnapped them and took them there)

More on this under the cut, with examples and some random thoughts on the sorts of characters or character motivations you might end up with that way. This is basically brainstorming for some kind of half-assed project that I don't even have a plot or characters for, just kind of spitballing ideas.

These also overlap quite a bit; a lot of canons mix more than one of these.


Accident - The character just happened to be there when a portal opened, fell/jumped/walked/got sucked in, and now they're trapped. This type of character could like their new setting and want to stay, or desperately want to get back, or some combination of the two. Either way, they're completely unprepared for it, physically and emotionally, and have only whatever they have in their pockets and occasionally in their vehicle if they managed to bring one.

There's a pretty straightforward example from Philip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers series - WWII serviceman Paul Janus Finnegan (who, like most of the author's heroes, has the author's initials) stumbles across a portal while exploring a bombed-out farmhouse, steps in, and finds out he can't go back. PJF likes this one, because I can think of at least a couple more of his books/series that are just "some guy falls through a dimensional portal into an alternate Earth/weird magic place/etc."

I have the general feeling that there's a *lot* of this in MG because "kid randomly discovers a portal or falls into one" is so relatable to kids. It's going to be a bit more disorienting or scary and perhaps less of a fun fantasy for most adults. Still, I feel like this one was pretty common in 80s-style portal fantasy of the "ordinary schmoe discovers a fantasy world" variety.


Escape - The character is running from something and the portal is their way out. It could be active pursuit (the law, an enemy, etc) or simply a life that they hate and want to get away from. Either way, the portal offers a step to something they didn't have before: safety, a new life, etc. These characters usually don't want to go back, even if it's just that they have nothing to go back to. They might be unprepared or they might have brought at least some supplies, but either way they're desperate enough that they care less about dangers in the new world than in the one they left behind.

Eddie in Dark Tower is this. Robert Wolfe in World of Tiers is also sort of this (a retiree in a loveless marriage seizing the opportunity to go through a gate in search of something better) with elements of Pursuit which he's not fully aware of yet.


Pursuit - The character really *wants* to get to the fantasy world because there's something there they want. It could just be the world itself; this is the one for people who came from the fantasy world in the first place and are trying to get home. Or maybe something valuable to them has been taken there, and they have to get it back. These characters are probably as well prepared as they can be, and have some supplies, weapons, etc with them. They also usually have at least some idea of what they're going to and what they want to do when they get there.

This is a YA example (but one that would also work for an adult), but the movie Labyrinth is this: Sarah's baby brother has been kidnapped and she wants to get him back. Zelazny's Amber is not precisely portal fantasy, but it's basically this - Corwin doesn't quite realize at first why he wants to leave Earth and go to Amber so badly, but he knows he wants it. (There are also elements of escape, since he's being chased at the time.) And Landover (Terry Brooks) is this: the protagonist bought a magic land, and therefore goes there with the intentional goal of taking possession of the fantasy kingdom and trying to rule it.

I feel like this one is probably common in adult portal fantasy because it gives the protagonist more agency than the other types, and usually some sort of built-in Maguffin, goal, or endpoint.


Manipulation - The character is being coerced, forced, or manipulated by someone whose main goal is to get them to the fantasy world. It seems like there HAVE to be examples of this, but I'm drawing a blank on anything. Obviously the protagonist has little agency here, which might be why it's rare.

Update: Actually, I *did* think of a couple of these, where the mechanism for getting to the fantasy world is that they were magically snatched from their original world by someone who thought they were important or necessary. Alan Dean Foster's Spellsinger books are this - I was thinking of them as the "accident" type, but actually now that I'm thinking about it, the protagonist was effectively kidnapped from our world into a fantasy world by a wizard who thought he had magic powers.


Edit - new type supplied in comments:

Punishment - Characters forced to go through portal by the legal system as a mandated punishment.



Thoughts, examples, anything I've forgotten?

Comments

[yhlee]

I'm 90% sure that Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame portal fantasy is Manipulation - in book 1, The Sleeping Dragon, the characters (a group of college RPG players) are kidnapped into the fantasy world by the GM, who is also a wizard in the other world. They spend the rest of book 1 trying to get back home, and then the rest of the series takes place in the magical world because they decide to stay.

I feel like isekai (anime or manga or light novel) actually has a LOT of Manipulation or similar. IIRC in Sword Art Online, all the characters are basically VR MMO players who get trapped in the fantasy world by the malicious and/or possibly psychopathic programmer who designed the system. Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, which is a deconstruction of the genre, might be a partial example - not only do the characters wake up in their medievaloid fantasy world without having chosen to go there, they seem to mostly have amnesia about their former lives (hinted at hauntingly through things like a character whittling an airplane) and never recover their memories. (It's a deconstruction for other reasons, like the revelation that the mook goblins that they've been killing for cash quests in typical murder hobo fashion have a culture and mourn their dead.) I'll ask Joe in the morning if he can think of other examples - he watches/reads more isekai than I do.

Terry Brooks' Magical Kingdom for Sale - Sold is mostly Escape, I think - Ben Holiday is leading a miserable loveless life after his wife died, and he wants to start over.

I desperately want to write a portal fantasy novel now. *sob* I think I could have so much fun with one!!

[rydra_wong]

I've been thinking a lot about rachelmanija's Haunting of Hill House post and the discussion there, and it occurs to me that Eleanor is really a prime candidate for portal-ing, and Hill House does in the end kind of sort of act as a portal in a horrific way (categories: Escape, and certainly Manipulation).

[yhlee]

I am dying to read that book and have it on hold at the library! (I don't care about spoilers.) I am SO CURIOUS. XD

[rydra_wong]

It's so good! I will be fascinated to know what you make of it.

[yhlee]

I'd have to reread to be sure and I'm, uh, reluctant to do so for reasons that will become obvious, but Jack L. Chalker's Changewinds books MIGHT have a Manipulation component - one of the two girls is blah blah some kind of key to a prophecy, wizard persuades or snatches her to cross over with her friend.

[helen_keeble]

I think Die (the comic) falls into the Manipulation category - initially it seems to be an accident (teenagers playing an RPG with haunted/eldritch dice that pull them into the game world), but later on things get considerably more complex. In a way that means I, uh, am still not entirely sure what the heck was meant to be going on, but I enjoyed the ride anyway!

[helen_keeble]

What was the Charlie Stross series with someone from our world discovering portals to a parallel fantasy realm with congruent geography, which ended up getting exploited for real world benefit in increasingly unexpected ways across the series? It kinda took portal fantasy and ran it through a hard SF “let’s think of the consequences of this technology” lens.

I bring it up because it’s one of the rare examples I can think of where the protagonists can _freely_ travel between the two realms via portals, rather than in taking a lot of effort to get from one to the other. I kinda wonder if that free-travel system makes it easier to do adult protagonists, since (if you want your protags to end up in the fantasy realm) one doesn’t have to go through great contortions to explain why a full grown adult has no ties keeping them in the real world.

[philomytha]

The Merchant Princes series! That was the first thing I thought of, taking a portal fantasy and having the characters move back and forth with technology transfers and so on.

ETA: As with a lot of Stross's series, I really liked the first couple of books, but then it got increasingly depressing and dismal as everything seems to tend towards More Awful and the fun goes out of it.

[lunabee34]

The Outlander series begins as the accident type.

[anna_wing]

Andre Norton, Witch World - Escape category. Post WWII protagonist is running from some serious enemies, finds a fixer who promises a way out, which turns out to be the Siege Perilous, which turns out to a one-way gateway to another reality. Subsequent books in the series would probably be considered YA today, but this one had fully-adult protagonists. Also the heroine of Barbara Hambly's Antryg Windrose novels, and the protagonists of her first three Darwath books.

I'd think that most portal fantasies involving adults, that aren't about accidentally falling through, would be about adults who are in some way disengaged from their milieux. Otherwise, your average first-world person with career and family responsibilities is probably more likely to report the portal to the nearest appropriate municipal authority or media organisation than to pack their pocket-handkerchief and a Swiss Army knife and go adventuring.

[epeeblade]

I just wanted to recommend some classic Barbara Hambly novels. She has two series I would consider adult portal fantasy, and while one is extremely dated now, I still highly recommend them. That's the Silicon Mage. The other series is The Time of Dark Series. And I realize she has a third series that would work as well: The Rainbow Abyss.

[ursula]

Die and Max Gladstone's Last Exit both have a setup where the protagonists visited another world as young people (teens for Die, early twenties for Last Exit), something went wrong, and now they have to go back to fix what they broke.

You're right that Die fits Manipulation, and I think the initial visits in Last Exit fit Escape/exploration, but "you broke it, you fix it" kind of feels like a trope on its own.

[ursula]

There's a newish Merchant Princes sequel trilogy that I think is a lot better balanced--it mostly stays in Le Carré territory rather than swinging suddenly from puzzles to "Rocks fall, everybody dies." (Though Le Carré territory can be quite dark!)

Also Stross is a more mature writer and it's easier to tell his characters apart now than it was in early Merchant Princes.

[ursula]

I reviewed Kate Elliott's forthcoming novella The Keeper's Six recently. This is a Pursuit story (the protagonist's adult son has been kidnapped and she needs to negotiate for his release); the background involves a family business centered around using and guarding portals.

[heavenscalyx]

I think the Thomas Covenant books were manipulation type -- IIRC he was essentially summoned.

[ducened]

Rachel Neumeier's Death's Lady series, starting with A Year's Midnight, is definitely an adult portal fantasy. IIRC it has two varieties of categories - I don't remember which of those four, because it's been a while since I've read, but I believe pursuit is not one of them.
I appreciate the series because on both sides of the portal people are competent & have lives; no one is ~pining~ to be carried away on a Calgon-scented wave of fluff.

[snickfic]

I think Piranesi would count for your theoretical category.

[sholio]

Rainbow Abyss is actually the other one I was thinking of for the Manipulation category! It absolutely threw me for a loop when I read it as a teen; at that time I was not used to fantasy going that dark in a real-world way. (I think it would be less startling now, though I suppose nothing really prepares you for "your protagonist is helping with the Holocaust.")

Time of the Dark is a longtime favorite which I haven't reread in a really long time!

[sholio]

I'd think that most portal fantasies involving adults, that aren't about accidentally falling through, would be about adults who are in some way disengaged from their milieux. Otherwise, your average first-world person with career and family responsibilities is probably more likely to report the portal to the nearest appropriate municipal authority or media organisation than to pack their pocket-handkerchief and a Swiss Army knife and go adventuring.

Yeah, that's basically what I was thinking, and why I started wondering how other adult portal fantasy handled that problem! There's a lot more of a built-in reason for kids and teens to go exploring, but most adult lives make it more difficult.

[sholio]

Oh, that's right! Actually I think nearly all time travel romance and a lot of portal-ish romance in fantasy and SF romance is basically this - everygirl heroine (usually) falls into hero's world.

[sholio]

There's definitely portal horror! I was thinking about that writing the above, actually; I think it's at least as common there as it is in fantasy, except the portal worlds are usually horrible.

[edenfalling]

Norton did portal fantasies several times, to varying degrees of success.

Knave of Dreams has a guy accidentally bodyswapped with his double in an alternate world, because people needed to assassinate his double; they stuffed the double's soul into the protagonist's body and arranged a car crash... but something went wrong and the protagonist didn't die and instead wound up in his double's place. So that's a combination of Manipulation and Accident.

Wraiths of Time has a woman pulled into another world (somewhat by accident) and then forced to impersonate her now-dead counterpart in order to foil a complicated political plot. That's another example of Manipulation and Accident.

There's another book whose title I forget where a photographer trespasses on a military research site and is accidentally zapped into another world/an alternate past (it's unclear) where he has adventures in Mu and Atlantis. That book is frankly a mess, but it's a good example of Accident.

[skygiants]

lol, I am attempting to draft one of these right now! my gimmick revolves on the 'actually came from/tied to the portal world originally' which I guess you have under the 'pursuit' subheading? The Princess Diaries of portal fantasy -- it turns out my father was secretly a prince of the realm etc. and now I've got to go assume my responsibilities -- which I feel like must be an existing portal fantasy trope but maybe I've just mentally ported it in over from Ruritanian romance ...

Anyway the aspect I'm leaning on while trying to write an adult portal fantasy is much more of a riff on the YA portal fantasy, in that the primary portaler is a young adult with a Destiny and the POV character/protagonist is her mother who refuses not to be involved in the situation; this is Our portal fantasy adventure now! What I really want to do is try to use portal fantasy to mess around with feelings about immigration and diaspora and culture clash, but we'll see whether I actually achieve any of it.

Anyway: adult character, children's book, but the backstory for both Howl and Wizard Suliman in Howl's Moving Castle appears to be escape, lol ....

(Would you count older gate-to-fairyland variations like Lud-in-the-Mist as portal fantasy? 'there's a gate over there and everyone knows about it' is slightly different, I suppose, than 'there's a hole in the world right here and nobody knows about it but me.')

[genarti]

I might add Altruism -- someone decides to go because they think the fantasy world needs help they can provide -- although there's certainly overlap with Manipulation and/or Pursuit, there. (And of course, as others have said, the protagonist needs to be disconnected from their ordinary life enough to sign up to go, although it's possible they think this is a short-term trip, and even that it actually is.)

Barbara Hambly's Darwath books probably fit more under Manipulation than anything else, but altruism is a factor too. (And then, of course, Pursuit is what keeps them there.)

Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry might be YA or adult -- I'm not sure how it was originally marketed -- but either way it's got protagonists in grad school and reads to me as fairly adult , just of its era. (Either way, I think if it were being rewritten in the modern day it'd be easier to shade it adult than to shade it modern YA, though ymmv.) A wizard invites the protagonists to come to the fantasyland for a week because he needs to present the king with otherworldly visitors for a festival for internal political reasons, which he's quite open about, though there's room for interpretation in terms of how truthful he's being about underlying motives; anyway, then the plot happens, and they stay rather longer than a week and a whole lot more happens than a festival, but the original plan was a short-term visit for reasons that had nothing to do with grand destinies and saving the world.

(Also, I love portal fantasies and hope they make a comeback! Would love to write one, too. Some of my unfinished childhood stories were attempts to do something interesting with the portal fantasy tropes, although since I was like 14 the word "interesting" can only be used with affectionately generous airquotes.)

[recessional]

Manipulation - The character is being coerced, forced, or manipulated by someone whose main goal is to get them to the fantasy world. It seems like there HAVE to be examples of this, but I'm drawing a blank on anything. Obviously the protagonist has little agency here, which might be why it's rare.

I'd say Neverwhere, if you're glossing "coercion" under this heading. Richard Mayhew is dragged into the whole thing through largely other people's choices and goals and as part of [spoiler]'s manipulations.

The Fionavar Tapestry is quite CLASSICALLY this - while you could argue there are tinges of your "pursuit" in that the manipulation that Loren Silvercloak uses is "hey did you know there's an AMAZING fantasy world that you could come explore as Special Guests?", it's still Silvercloak doing it, he's absolutely manipulating the SHIT out of them for his own purposes (which are arguably noble, but are still his own), and Dave in particular is literally dragged along at the finish.

Being as all of Lyra and Will's actions were "meant" to bring them to the point of being the next Adam and Eve, arguably the portal elements of that work match this, tho that's less clearly an "adult" book.