Arctic Light

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.

( Character noodling )

Thoughts, examples, anything I've forgotten?

This month's submission theme at Crossed Genres is "ensemble", and I'd really like to submit something to it, although that means writing something before the 30th -- which I'm not sure is an achievable goal, but hey, worth a try, right?

So here's a question for you guys. What would you like to see more of in ensembles -- i.e. groups of characters, and stories focused on them? One of the posts on my reading list this morning talked about how rare it is to get the viewpoint of grumpy-mentor characters in fantasy, which made me go "hmmmm" and prod my creative brain a bit.

What are some of yours? Favorite tropes? Tropes you'd like to see subverted/avoided?