Podcast Reaction: Planetary Edition

Not that Planetary.

This week on the podcast, Ryan and Watson discussed numbers and such.  Yawn.

They also debuted the Meerkat thingamajig, but I don’t have a twitter account, so that means nothing to me.

But then there was a game where Watson was challenged to see if he could recognize various fictional planets and their source material.  Ryan did call him to task for not knowing Earthsea.  To be fair, while I do know Earthsea is the product of Ursala K. Le Guin, that’s about all I know.  Plus, Earth-C is a legitimate homonym.  Captain Carrot deserves better.

But then I got to thinking about other things…

Ryan mentioned Fantasia.  And while I instantly knew he meant the sadly misnamed nightmare fuel that is The Neverending Story, something else occurred to me.  Since when was Fantasia considered a planet?

See, logically I know that, most likely, Fantasia is a planet.  But like a lot of fantasy settings, I don’t think fans often think of Fantasia as a planet.  The same holds true for many other places, some of which Ryan did mention in the game.  There really are only so many options for these places.  They can be planets or maybe a flat plane of some kind that goes on forever.  Given the size of the maps often included in books like these, if there is a book, it seems there may be whole swaths of the planet where Sauron isn’t even someone with name recognition.  No one outside Westeros probably has to worry about a White Walker.  Heck, Voldemort doesn’t even seem to be much of a threat outside of Europe.  You just know some gun-slingin’ America wizard would just blast him to bits while holding out his National Wand Association membership card.

“Do you feel lucky? Well do you, Death Eater Punk?”

What it really comes down to is, while most fantasy settings are on planets, even if we associate planets more with fantasy’s cousin science fiction, that doesn’t make it any less true.  Fantasia is a planet.  We just maybe don’t think of it that way.