My Favorite Things, Part 8.3: Improvements to Daily Life (Community)

AI generated image with prompt "fantasy village"

In my capstone post on my favorite life improvements in speculative fiction, today I'm talking about community.

Why Community?

What's the big deal about community, anyway? Why is this the "capstone" of all my favorite things in fiction?

It's about surviving...

Well, first off, humans are pack animals, not loners. As much as some cultures (especially American ones) value individualism, the truth is, humans simply aren't built to survive in complete isolation. Even I, a 20/10 introvert acknowledge that. No successful person has ever become successful 100% on their own merit, with no help from anybody. (Not to mention absolutely no luck, whatsoever. That's the truth behind the myth of the individualistic American dream: "success," as frequently defined by the world, hugely depends on a support network and luck). No truly happy, peaceful, whole, and fulfilled person I know of has ever become that way by shutting themselves off entirely from absolutely everybody, permanently.

Humans are communal creatures.

So, that's one reason community is huge in real life and thus often is in fiction—and almost always is a theme in my favorite types of fiction. It's the way we're wired for survival. But it's also the way we're wired emotionally, too—and fiction is all about exploring how our inner worlds (memory, emotion, connection) interact with our outer ones and vice versa.

...and thriving

I saw a tweet once that said the reason "we" love reading about magical schools is because they depict what many of us subconsciously yearn for but what is becoming so increasingly rare: a walkable community. So even though I do not usually enjoy reading about any type of school (hence why I put the pronoun in quotes), that tweet was still a major lightbulb moment for me, naming a concept I 100% agree with and thus helping me see one thread that tied much of my favorite fiction together: a community concept that's at least one step better than what we generally have.

Some well-defined place that has everything to fulfill the human's entire hierarchy of needs: sleeping places; personal spaces; food; sanitation; education; recreation; and (this is where cities generally fall short and what the "magic school" genre provides) community cohesiveness, purpose, and bonding.

I said in my previous post about housing that the home is where all the life systems I love improving the most really come together into the master system. Well, I should have said the home is the most fundamental system, the first complete system that forms the basis of all the others, the atomic building block of the human universe. The true master system is the community, where all those homes should come together to form the complete symbiotic ecosystem of human life.

In short, community . . . is life.

And art is where we explore life. Since that tweet opened my eyes, I'm seeing more and more how the best fiction often creates community. Because we are increasingly feeling the lack within our own communities. In the United States, we often cannot walk or even bike them unless we're living in a metro area. But even in metro areas, as I mentioned before, there's a lack of some unifying factor at a manageable level that mimics what the human village once did.

It doesn't take a village just to raise a child. It takes a village to survive. And it takes a good village to thrive.

My favorite communities in fiction

And so that brings me to a few of my favorite explorations of community in fiction.

Sarah Beth Durst's cozy cottage-core romantasy The Spellshop is the perfect example of what I mean by our longing for better communities being translated into fiction, often in the form of the medieval fantasy village. The main character is a solitary librarian who flees revolution in the capital by returning to her childhood village. Accustomed as she is to the bare minimum interaction required with others (and having a lot of secrets to protect), she's at first determined to keep the community at a distance and only get what she needs from them for her survival. But of course, things don't go according to that plan (quite happily so).

Brandon Sanderson has quite a few books with a community theme, and those tend to be the ones of his that I like the best. Elantris, for example, has the main character trying to figure out how to band together a bunch of diseased immortals into a cohesive, mutually beneficial community. The aspects I like best about his Stormlight Archive series and Alcatraz Versus series are the community focused ones. Alcatraz Versus has a lot of light-hearted takes on the problems with our real-wold lifestyles and whimsical, magical solutions to them. The Stormlight Archives does this more seriously as the main characters struggle for their survival (and sanity).

Tamora Pierce often explores community in her world-building, seeming as fascinated as I am with how a bit of magic solves a lot of societal ills (and potentially creates other problems).

A lot of my favorite RPG games have a community focus, even if subtly through "found family," but sometimes overtly in how the characters have to coexist in one setting such as on the Ebon Hawk (basically, the Millenium Falcon) in the Knights of the Old Republic games, or even literally establish a community in the third Dragon Age game, Inquisition. And did I mention before that Hogwarts Legacy is a gorgeous game? (Harry Potter is one of my exceptions to my dislike of school settings, perhaps because that love was established long before my loathing of school was.) Though not an RPG, one of the things I like best about Valheim is the necessity of banding together and building what amounts to villages for survival.

Finally, I have to end once again on Stephenie Meyer's The Host, because, as I've mentioned several times before, it's my favorite book, and the community theme is one of the reasons why. Not only is Wanderer yet another loner who embraces the benefits of community, the community she joins is almost entirely self-contained—by necessity, but that creates some fascinating problems and solutions, tensions and resolutions as Wanderer and the community together go from surviving to thriving.