Common Application
Shelves upon shelves, pages upon pages, words upon words. I would live in a Barnes and Noble store if I could. My love of reading and books knows no limits. I have stayed up into the late hours of the night and the early hours of the morning trying to satisfy my need for literature. I devour books from all genres: sci-fi, historical, nonfiction, contemporary, romance, but the one genre that always wins out for me is fantasy. If you asked me to choose a specific Barnes and Noble aisle to live in, I’d choose fantasy in a heartbeat because it always satisfies my need to discover and explore new worlds.
I love seeing characters react and navigate their way through situations that I will never find myself in such as casually arguing about chocolate with a god of evil or fighting a bunch of sentient chess pieces with a guitar. But what I arguably love the most, is seeing characters make their way through an entirely made-up world: The kingdoms and countries they journey through, the different cultures they encounter, the religions they practice, the political systems they fight against, the food they eat. As a self-proclaimed foodie, mouthwatering depictions of food get me every time. Or sometimes a character is just magically transported to a whole new world. I feel the same awe and excitement (or uncertainty and anxiousness) as characters do when they experience of something new for the first time.
One of my favorite series that’s created with countless fine details yet still keeps delivering is the Japanese manga One Piece are by Eiichiro Oda. It follows a pirate captain made out of rubber and his crew of equally eccentric friends on their adventures through the sea trying to achieve their dreams. But below all the wacky elements and the hopeful dreams of the protagonists, One Piece also contains themes ranging from racism and social hierarchy to philosophical ones such as the definition of justice. Themes that are deeply connected to the real world. The best fantasy stories always have elements of reality in them and it’s those elements of worldbuilding that pull me because they are what make the story feel relatable and realistic. Because while magic and superpowers come from the imagination absolute monarchies and religions stem from the real world. I’ll never experience fighting a fire-breathing dragon but I do experience the social injustices of the world imagine and I can fight back against them and work to help others in the same situation as me just like a fantasy protagonist trying to triumph over the malicious villain.
The immense amount of worldbuilding an author has to do to create a functional and captivating world ranging from creating characters, history, magic systems, lore, with its religion to working out economics and politics is such intricate work that makes me enchanted with fantasy works. An author must completely understand every aspect of their world so that when they portray it, I, a reader, can also fully comprehended it. Understanding and there being able to take every small is detail into account to create a bigger, cohesive story is a skill that applies not only to fiction but to reality as well and it’s a skill that I’ve acquired after reading countless stories that while I have mostly used for theorizing about many a book series, I hope that I will be able to put it to greater use explore ing and analyzing the actual, authentic world around me.
