Hi. I have a story about an old Scottish nobleman working towards a just future, who then got spirited away to an alien world. As he learns more about the alien world, it too has social injustice. The nobleman eventually gets allies there and they defeat the bad guys. (Mostly the good aliens, I don’t want the human to be a white savior). When the conflict is over, the human nobleman gets the chance to go home, but he then chooses to stay in the alien world since he found new friends there.
The thing is, the guy has a family and friends at home. How do I write the nobleman’s decision so that he doesn’t come off as cruel for leaving his old life behind?
Tektalox
Hey Tektalox, great to hear from you again!
This is the classic dilemma authors face at the end of any portal fantasy story. On the one hand, readers really want the protagonist to stay in the magical world, unless it’s a really terrible world. Chances are this is where novelty is highest, and it’s also where readers have built their attachment. Going back to the real world is basically anti-wish fulfillment, or “wishbusting,” as we call it.
On the other hand, it’s often hard to justify why the character would choose to leave their original home behind. Just because readers are more attached to the magical world doesn’t mean the character suddenly stops loving their friends and family. In most cases, this isn’t an issue of cruelty so much as the reader’s desire clashing with the character’s motivation. The main reason it would be cruel is if the character had people depending on them back in the real world, people they’d be abandoning.
To reconcile this choice, you have easy options: either create a hero with little to go back to or don’t make them choose in the first place.
In the first scenario, the hero has few or no personal ties holding them to the real world. They could even be in a really bad spot, though that’s not necessary. Ambivalence will do the job just fine. Their family is either gone or estranged, and they have no close friends. Now it’s perfectly believable that they’d want to stay in the magic land.
In the second scenario, they can come and go as they please. There’s no actual rule that the portal has to close at story’s end; it’s just a common convention. Instead, your hero can spend most of their time in the magical world, but still return to Earth to hang out with friends and family. Or, you could try a variation on this, where the hero brings the people they care about with them into the magical world – although then you have to think about everyone those people care about, which gets complicated.
It’s always possible to do something more involved. Maybe the character does have loving parents, but after seeing how much happier the magical world has made their child, the parents give them their blessing to stay in the magical world. Or, maybe they have a deep character arc where returning to the real world is the satisfying albeit bittersweet conclusion. But if you’re looking for something simple, the two options I’ve outlined are your best bet.
Hope that answers your question, and good luck with your story!
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If they spent a long time in the magical world, they could also briefly view or visit their homeworld and find out that their family and friends have mourned them, but they have moved on and are happy now.
That way they can decide to stay in the magical world without being cruel.
One way the variation of the second scenario could work is putting such loved ones in the first scenario themselves. As in, the only ties the people the protagonist care about have to their own world are going to go to the protagonist’s world too.
“wishbusting”
I’ve never heard this word, but I love it and will use it as needed from now on
It’s a very useful term that, naturally, Chris came up with!
What strikes me most is the fact of an aristocrat fighting for social justice which would undermine the very basis of his power and capability to fix such injusctices. He staying on the alien world would mean noone would fight for social justice in his homeworld, so i see where the cruelty would come into play. Having fixed the alien world problem, they would still need him on earth, and refusing to get back can pass over as selfish.
I could see confronting that though, where the character is a privileged noble *playing* at fixing injustices, but in the new world they don’t have any of that and legitimately have to work at addressing them as part of the underclass there. Realizing that they’re more effective where they are, without their former privilege, could take a long, hard journey to get to, and realizing that they weren’t actually fixing much in the old world, but just practicing self-indulgent to feel like a saviour.
But that arc would push him to actually want to go back to the original world and use their priviledge to fix things.
Also, a character that just take matters into their hands only when it affects them personally is the epythome of selfishness.
In Lord of the Rings, Frodo says this at the end:
“We set out to save the Shire, Sam. And it has been saved. But, not for me.”
I do like the idea that a hero cannot go back (or doesn’t want to) because he has changed so much during the journey.
Or maybe because, after all that he has seen, home just has become too small for him.
I’d be wary making the main character start out as a person of privilege working for a just future in their own world who… just abandons that effort in favor of going to a dimension that’s more fun for them. What happens to the people still living under injustice in their home world?
This might just be how it comes across from your summary, though.
I say yes to that.
I’m having my characters both stay and return to the magical world (and in the latter’s case, the return echoes the changing seasons).
Especially my Heroines. Why should they give up a fantastic life to go back the mundane world? to be good little children and chattel, and mothers and wives. They refuse to go back on the shelf, to be another Dorothy, Alice Wendy, Jane, Susan and Lucy.
Early and classic portal fantasies were cruel to the kids. The authors treated it like a rite of passage, but realistically, banning the child from a world that they were emotionally invested in would make either go mad or deny it ever happened. Sort of like a magical PTSD soldier returning home. And it sounds like a much more depressing version of the Garden of Eden, only with kids at a young vulnerable age.
Dorothy went back to Oz several times, and eventually straight up moved there with her family. She’s not like Susan at all.
And with Alice, it’s an open question whether it was real or not. “It was all a dream” is a valid interpretation.
Portal fantasies? I don’t know about you, but I would prefer to call them Isekais
Not the books. The movie, with its famous “No place like Home” line.
Hardly anyone thinks of Book Dorothy, only movie Dorothy.
In Japanese Isekai stories, the protagonist typically stays in the Magical World, with the biggest justification probably being that they died prior to their transportation.
Truck-kun jokes aside, protagonist having died before being spirited away is a nice way to sever all ties to the previous world.
Perhaps something similar happened to the nobleman. Like say, his peers didn’t like his ideas and he was sentenced to death. The aliens then save him from the execution and whisk him away.
Essentially, while the Nobleman could return home, on Earth he’s either dead or an outlaw, with his family and friends having forced to move on. And even if he wasn’t a convicted criminal, it is by now obvious that the Nobleman and his ideas wouldn’t have a place back home, so he stays.
“Truck-kun jokes aside,”
Notice me, Sem-i!
You should remember that sudden death & disappearance was often par for the course given the right decade.
It might take more time for his family to move on if they don’t have anyone to replace him role-wise, but its dependent on inheritance break downs.
If he has a trustworthy brother/cousin back home, or his family is in line with his views, the difference of one man, when the others are willing or even shrewder in his stead might be the difference between six of one and half-dozen of the other.
Give reasons to assume that his family still has the chance at a good life without him, and whether he goes back or not might have less dissonance than having him reappear and strain a burgeoning new dynamic.
Having him acknowledge it would make it all the clearer.
The 1990s anime the Vision of Escaflowne has the heroine return to the normal world of late 20th century Japan despite previously expressing no desire too. A lot of fans inside and outside Japan really seem to hate this ending and wished the heroine remained in the magic world.
There isn’t really a good answer to the question that isn’t heavy handed. Unless the protagonists had a really bad life on earth than abandoning their friends and family seems at least kind of callous to most people. Since most portal fantasies don’t involve protagonists that had a life this bad on earth, the protagonist of Escaflowne seemed to have no issues greater than that of any other middle class teenage girl in 1990s Japan, many in the audience is going to wonder about this.
At the same time, you can’t help wonder how an ordinary person is going to successfully readjustment to a humdrum life on earth when they were a great person in another world and higher up on the social scale than they would be on earth even if they lived their best life. I can’t imagine people who were romanced by hot powerful high up people easily getting into a good romantic relationship with more ordinary humans when they go back home. Even platonic relationships will be hard to maintain or find satisfaction in.
Either you have the protagonists look bad for abandoning people who love them on earth or you have to deal with the depression of being nobody on earth when you could have been a somebody elsewhere.
This is a question I have also struggled for a while, hope that you can find a solution that suits your story!
This setup kind of reminds me of the most extreme example I’ve ever seen about a portal fantasy solving the problem of the protagonist wanting to return home: DESTROYING THE HOME.
The villain essentialy wins in the first installment and drains the life of the protagonists world before being stopped. The main conflict for the next installment consists of the survivors trying to adjust to the life on the other world.
Other similar example is something that one could call “The planet of the apes twist” in which the protagonist traveled to the future after some sort of apocalypse, and going back is impossible.
As you can imagine, either of these examples are probably way darker than the tone you are looking for. Like I said before, hopefully you can find a solution that fits your story!
If you want to have him stay in the new world wilingly, him being there for a long time (a year or two, at least) would make it more believable. Long enough that the people and places he left behind would be alien to him if he were to return. If he has been living and fighting in this new world for years, changing in the process, building relationships, then returning ‘home’ seems less and less appealing the more time passes.
I agree with those saying it’s odd to establish he has an interest in social justice but is willing to abandon it. If he’s a noble on earth, though, perhaps what he could learn from being a nobody on the portal world is that nobility is antithetical to social justice, and he could return to earth just long enough to dissolve the power structure he’s the head of. then having made himself obsolete he’s free to go back to the portal world.
The problem is that dissolving a power structure from the top down leaves a lot of questions that also need to be answered. (Let’s assume we’re referring to installing a democracy.)
The main issue is that, if the character is more progressive than the rest of the population, then the resulting power structure will enforce more reactionary policies. This creates an ethical dilemma. To a lesser degree, we can see this in, for example, the United States following the Civil War. The federal government allowed Southern states more autonomy, in an effort at reconciliation; free to act as it wished, the South continued to pursue various means to oppress Black people.
Then, there’s the matter of who will lead. This is pretty messy; for the reason mentioned earlier, they are less likely to be progressive, and, at worst, might be demagogues. An attempt by the noble to ensure more progressive leadership gets elected in the first election could be considered unethical, given his power and influence leading up to that.
There are some others, but those two stand out the most to me. This isn’t to advocate for totalitarian governments; rather, it’s to point out that the issues are things which must be addressed in some way. The solutions are unlikely to be simple.
Resources play a role in how much autonomy a group has. When your fastest means of communication is “person on horse” anyone more than a few days away is going to have very broad latitude to act as they wish, whether you want them to or not. This can undercut anything the central government wants to do. See the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages. This often leads to brutal oppression, on the grounds that the central authority (senate, king, oligarchs, whatever), in order to maintain authority, must make challenging that authority an unappealing option.
How the characters fight this tendency is usually too boring for literature. It depends a LOT on interpersonal relationships between leaders at various levels.
Most fantasy is written in a pseudo-Medieval setting. This makes staying in the fantasy world easy: It’s dangerous to travel, and most people simply didn’t very often. Remember, people routinely died traveling. You could literally starve on the road (the average person can carry about 10 days of supplies on them, with significant training; if you’re 14 days from the nearest source of food, you’re in trouble). Often staying in the magical world is the only option.
Alternatively, going to the magical world could be the point. For example, they could be migrating due to some issue at home–think the Irish Potato Famine, or South Americans migrating to the USA due to unrest in their home countries. Everyone talks about the battles in fantasy worlds, but how often do you hear of the refugees? And again, in a pseudo-medieval world traveling a few hundred miles often means there’s no going back. Even if you did, the nature of Medieval warfare means that all your stock seed has been eaten and your homes burned off the face of the Earth; there’s nothing to go back to. If your human protagonist is fleeing from an invasion and heads into an elven kingdom, most of them are staying in that elven kingdom. See how Rome dealt with Germanic refugees fleeing the Huns. If you really want to make it clear there’s no going back, have them sail there (again, see the Irish Potato Famine).
That would give you a chance to make the noble fight for justice. Use the war as setting, not plot. The plot is the noble person’s fight for justice. Initially that fight is within the systems, but once the war drives them out of their home the noble works to set up a better system with the refugees. You have an excuse to destroy the system and to stay in the magical world.
In The Rifter series by Ginn Hale, [mild spoilers]
Because of the way the portal works, it is not possible for the protagonist to go home to modern-day Earth without most likely destroying the magical world he landed in. Also, he is clearly needed more on an ongoing basis in the magical world than he is on Earth. So it makes sense for him to stay there. (The issue with the portals is also a major part of the throughline.) So it’s possible to support your desired outcome via worldbuilding.
The Casefiles of Henri Davenforth made it impossible for Jamie to go home because her magical core is severely disrupted due to all the witch who captured her and pulled her into the other world did to her body. It needs regular realignment and our earth doesn’t have magic and/or magic users. While Henri and Sherard manage to locate earth and even connect to it, Jamie can never go back, although she can talk to her family in later books.
I think The Owl House is a good example of this. Luz does have a loving mom, but nothing else. She doesn’t have any connections with peers, her dad is dead, she is lonely and isolated and not understood by the school system. In the demon realm she finds a calling and friends and family who do understand her.
So she has a whole conflict with not wanting to make her mom sad, and still wanting to see her mom. The finale hasn’t aired so I’m not sure how they will resolve it but it is clear that she is going to stay in the demon realm and her mom understands this and supports her, I just don’t know if she will be forever separated or be able to go back and forth.
Perhaps the protagonist has developed obligations in the fantasy world. Oaths of loyalty, marriage, children, etc that prevents them from returning even if they wanted to. Or you could go the MCU Iron Man route and they have a magical item that keeps them alive or cures an ailment. I remember in Thomas Convent the Unbeliever, the protagonist (I refuse to call him a hero) had leprosy and the magical world cured him of that, but when he returns so did the disease. In the Guardians of the Flame series some RPGers are changed to their characters. One of them was in a wheelchair and became a dwarf. Something like this could make for some interesting writing for when a person makes a character that is their ideal self then becomes that character.