The greatest fantasy stories creates a world to be immersed. In my opinion, J.R. Tolkien gets the grand prize for creating a world in literature. He not only created races, towns, and handy map, but also created a culture and language for all these various races. Anyone who read his books had a race they could connect and belong to. I also believe that Avatar created the best visual world in movies/tv. When you saw Pandora for the first time, it was like nothing seen before. The creative filming techniques combined with the inventive flora and fauna were breathtaking.
So, as a partaker of stories, do you need a visual image of the fantasy world to connect to it? Is creating a world in your minds-eye too much to ask for in a digital age? There definitely can be overexplaining to the point of boredom in literature, sorry Scarlet Letter fans. Do these descriptions add to the story, or take away? While Pandora was amazing and new in the first movie, by the second, it didn’t seem so amazing any more. Do we want others to do the creative lifting for us?
