Footnote #14 - Thinning

The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!

Alex is once again in the spotlight for Footnote #14 as he explains to Chris the notion of ‘thinning,’ a term recommended on social media as a potential subject for a bite-sized Fantasy/Animation podcast. Topics in this brief instalment include the representation within fantasy storytelling of so-called ‘thinned’ worlds that articulate spaces via loss and deprivation; the role played by magic in supporting a desire for restoration and the return to the world as it once was; thinning as both a repeating narrative device or motif and an element of world creation; how thinning helps to define fantasy and its fables of recovery; and how fantasy is a melancholic force that corrects worldly fractures and fissures to replace that which has been lost.

**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**

Suggested Readings

  • Clute, John, and John Grant, eds. 1999. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.

  • Young, Joseph R. 2019. “Look with Your Eyes” – Immersion and Thinning.” In George R.R. Martin and the Fantasy Form, 67-100. London: Routledge.

  • Young, Joseph R. 2022. "Sterner Stuff; Sansa Stark and the System of Gothic Fantasy." Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature 40, no. 2, available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol40/iss2/6.

FOOTNOTE PODCASTChristopher Holliday and Alexander SergeantFANTASY, WORLD, MYTH, MAGIC, FOLKLOREComment