"It's Mythic Science Fiction. It comes with a very healthy dose of Fantasy, and we believe that is ultimately important..."

It's like they reached inside my brain and made a video game out of my hopes and dreams! This could be the most beautiful cross-genre game of all time...

- III

Yeah I've often said to my friends that it feels like Bungie took my childhood fantasies and made it into a video game that the adult me will love.

But the teenager me will pretend to hate it because its so popular, and things that are popular are totally for posers and sheeple and conformists.

-signed me a little over a decade ago.

"It's Mythic Science Fiction. It comes with a very healthy dose of Fantasy, and we believe that is ultimately important..."

I feel like fantasy and science fiction are at odds.

With fantasy, you codify the ignorance of the past, whereas science fiction strives for understanding an knowledge. This is why science fiction is often dealing with interesting philosophical issues, and fantasy rarely so. (Also why science fiction is better).

It's sort of a contradiction if you ask me.

How does fantasy codify ignorance of the past? Can you give an example? I'm just not sure what you mean here.

I get where you're coming from, but I think the confusion stems primarily from the non-exactitude of the terms used.

It's sci-fi because it is in space, has lasers, ships and stuff. However, it also has magic, mysticism and soul-stuff, so it's also fantasy. IMO, it is, by-the-book, just fantasy with hi-tech things.

Still, I'm very excited.

"It's Mythic Science Fiction. It comes with a very healthy dose of Fantasy, and we believe that is ultimately important..."

I feel like fantasy and science fiction are at odds.

With fantasy, you codify the ignorance of the past, whereas science fiction strives for understanding an knowledge. This is why science fiction is often dealing with interesting philosophical issues, and fantasy rarely so. (Also why science fiction is better).

It's sort of a contradiction if you ask me.

Genres have always inspired and informed one another. The moment you have a very clean cut of what can or can't happen based directly on the parameters of other creations, you're potentially creating something uninspired - you're playing into the "consensus universes" of what are generally the agreed upon happenings in each genre.

But we see examples of genre-fusion all the time, they're fun and often just as intelligent. Things don't have to be exclusive. You can take the furnishings from different genres and they can look and feel great together.

Yes, you moment you apply contradicting tropes from "opposing" genres, things can get messy, but that's something a team of writers with a coherent vision would be working around.

For the record, I don't think Destiny is that genre bending. I think it's more parts sci-fi than fantasy, and Bungie is upfront about that - it has fantasy were it counts: There are adventurers crawling dungeons together for old relics whilst in fancy armour, literally blasting the souls out of opposing forces with magic bestowed onto them by a sphere.

"It's Mythic Science Fiction. It comes with a very healthy dose of Fantasy, and we believe that is ultimately important..."

I feel like fantasy and science fiction are at odds.

With fantasy, you codify the ignorance of the past, whereas science fiction strives for understanding an knowledge. This is why science fiction is often dealing with interesting philosophical issues, and fantasy rarely so. (Also why science fiction is better).

It's sort of a contradiction if you ask me.

But it actually makes perfect sense. The game begins at a point in time where humanity is seemingly quite ignorant of its past and is looking to explore those unknowns to reveal the truth and progress into the future.

"It's Mythic Science Fiction. It comes with a very healthy dose of Fantasy, and we believe that is ultimately important..."

I feel like fantasy and science fiction are at odds.

With fantasy, you codify the ignorance of the past, whereas science fiction strives for understanding an knowledge. This is why science fiction is often dealing with interesting philosophical issues, and fantasy rarely so. (Also why science fiction is better).

It's sort of a contradiction if you ask me.

Those are pretty simple, textbook definitions of these styles. I've never viewed fantasy and science fiction as opposing, and in fact, viewed them as two of the most in-bred genres out there.

And "genre" itself is a loose term and both "fantasy" and "science fiction" can contain an infinite number of styles and worlds and stories. "Genres" are only really helpful in organizing a library, and in my opinion, it's not even helpful in that regard. The biggest thing it seems to do is help people stick to the styles they're used to - assisting them in avoiding huge swaths of the library they deem below them.

For example, I lump Kafka and Gogel and other absurdists in with my own vision of "fantasy", as I personally can't tell a difference between fantasy and the stranger literary classics, except that they've ended up on different bookshelves.

Most people's science fiction, from my experience, often turns out to be just fantasy wearing science fiction jackets. Star Wars is the biggest, most known example - it's a classic fantasy set in space. But as I've been watching every episode of every Star Trek in the last year and a half that, though many seem to put the show on a mantle, many episodes, perhaps 30-50%, perhaps even more, tends to be more fantasy than science fiction. These episodes often employ nonsensical technobabble solutions in the last five minutes of the show that measures up to be the same as magic.

Of course, there ARE some great science-fiction episodes, but going in, I thought they'd be a lot more. It's a lot closer to Doctor Who's ratio than I expected...

Anyway, the point is, science fiction can often be escapist nonsense in disguise and by the same token fantasy can delve into deep philosophical issues in ways no other style can, by casting off modern conventions, and potentially have more meaning in your real life than a grounded realistic literary story can. About every time I pick up a Neil Gaiman novel or comic, I tend to look at my own world a little differently. Hell, I can't count the vast number of times that the Lord of the Rings have given me hope and enthusiasm for this life since I first them in middle school. Gaiman and Tolkien both helped me survive that hell called "high school" - not because they took me away to a far off world, but because they showed me new ways of looking at THIS one, and showed me what I can really do in it! :)

"It's Mythic Science Fiction. It comes with a very healthy dose of Fantasy, and we believe that is ultimately important..."

I feel like fantasy and science fiction are at odds.

With fantasy, you codify the ignorance of the past, whereas science fiction strives for understanding an knowledge. This is why science fiction is often dealing with interesting philosophical issues, and fantasy rarely so. (Also why science fiction is better).

It's sort of a contradiction if you ask me.

I definitely see where you're coming from here, but would ultimately have to disagree on several counts pure based on my own reactions to some of my favorite fantasy universes and franchises and what they represent:

Tolkien's works are literally filled with allegorical historical knowledge, be it Biblical in the example of Aragorn's becoming ME's "savior", Illuvatar v. Melkor in the Silmarillion, etc., or racially charged in the examples of the Thorin/Thranduil and Legloas/Gimli relationships, or perhaps the most obvious of historically accurate inspirations; how Saruman and his Orthanc industrial revolution that came out of John Ronald's own horrific experiences in WWI.

Bioware's Dragon Age series is also an extremely historically aware franchise, many of the plot cruxes being based on conflicting moral choices dealing with kingdom politics, royal family feuds, racism, sexism, war-mongering, public distrust, national betrayal, and the contrasts of Monarchies and Theocracies, etc.

Martin's Game Of Thrones (like someone else already mentioned) Is i think the most obvious example of a fantasy universe that is actually hyper-aware of the realities of humanity's brutal and complicated past, with an overwhelming amount of moral, social, economical, political, and religious subplots that can beautifully and sometimes gruesomely capture the true essence of true historical human behavior.

- III