Coming off recent private chats about fantasy's obsession with nobility... I really, really wish we had more large-scale or epic stories from the perspective of the working class equivalent (or lower).

Now I know the first response here is "farmboy fantasy", but bear with me...

While farmboy fantasy stories may feature protagonists raised in poorer environments, they tend to undercut that message that every opportunity.

The protags are often revealed as secretly a king/emperor/noble/etc. Or they're adopted into High Society by chapter 6.

While the former can explore the nature/nurture debate, it also tends to contribute towards the idea of Important Bloodlines.

In the latter case, these stories are no longer about working class issues. The focus is still on higher society, though as experienced by an outsider.

This is not to say that there isn't some worth in these stories. A Memory Called Empire (while not strictly fantasy) did exactly this, while also exploring the complex feelings someone from a colonised culture felt towards their coloniser. And it was incredibly well done, imo.

My frustration is not with these stories. It's with the lack of an alternative.

If I want to read about common folk fighting the good fight and making the world better... I struggle to find a book with more than maybe 5 important common characters in it.

There are tons of books out there that focus on a revolution, but all-too-often it's from the perspective of a character who "graduates" into an "important" position, where they mingle with the powerful.

I reject the idea that where that character was beforehand is unimportant.

Give me more stories where characters affect change from where they are. From within their community. From building something up rather than jumping ship and borrowing someone else's power.

I'll probably come back to this intermittently, but this kind of shit has been weighing on my mind for ages.

The idea that you can't make change, that you can't be important, unless you get the blessing of the powerful? Fuck that. I expect more imagination, and a lot more hope.

Jumping back into this for a second... there's this idea that stories about the working class equivalent can't be told because they would be "boring".

I don't know where this idea came from. But surely, like... history would prove otherwise.

The idea that only the rich, powerful, "important" people can be interesting is something that pisses me off a little bit. It reaffirms the status quo. Suggests that change can only take place if powerful people accept it.

Yeah, no.

You can say that this is the case in real life, and while (history aside) it can sometimes be hard to argue against that given our current hellscape... People read fantasy for escapism.

If a prince can fly on a dragon, then a serving girl and her community can topple an empire.

I just really, really dislike the internalised assumption that characters can't interesting if they don't have ties to some romanticised ideals of monarchy, power, money, or whatever the fuck.

I'm making typos and misplacing words all over this thread, but the point still stands.

I think there's really interesting stories to be told about so many aspects of this dynamic. There's some already, but I'm greedy and I want MORE.

Seth Dickinson's Baru books do a really interesting and self-aware exploration of how to thwart the powerful when they're the ones with all the power.

Self-aware in that Baru really, really tries to hang on to her roots, but it's clear that connection is eroding.

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Firewalkers was another I read recently, which handled the idea a fight against the ruling class without "becoming" them very well, imo.

Baru/Firewalkers are very different books with different takeaways, but it shows the variety of what could be mined here.

And it doesn't have to be all revolutions and head-chopping, either. There are plenty of ways to center the stories of common folks and show the importance of them. Both large and small scale.

Could be a baker feeding a village, or a healer containing a plague.

Maybe wait a few years for that last one, though.