Yes, this is more or less my point.
And you miss it if you shift to a technical usage of "fairy tale". This would be like discussing animal rights with a biologist who goes "but scientifically humans are animals". Or discussing racism with an anthropologist who'd go "but this isn't racism because it's not about a race" - which anthropologists usually don't answer (outside a zealously pedantic first year) because they know in which context which broad/narrow/popular/technical usage of the word is the most relevant to communication.
Well, I don't agree with the analogies.
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
We can debate definitions all day, but if everything is a fairy tale, then the term becomes meaningless. Also, you realize that you're the first year student in this analogy, right?
The point here isn't academic textual classification, discussing whether the Hobbit belongs to some oral tradition, or whatever. The relevant thing is that such fantasy tales are processed by the public like they process fairy tales :
I completely disagree. I've never seen anyone approach a fairy tale the same way they do a work of fantasy. I've already explained the differences earlier in the thread.
it's a series of magical premises that aren't debated, a "this creature was evil" is self-sufficient, just like any fairy tale defines a "good king" archetype, a noble "prince charming", an "evil witch". These do not operate on rational real world logic, this logic is suspended like in front of a myth, which importance resides in structures, articulating abstractions (good, evil, stepmotherness, etc).
That's highly debatable.
Fantasy (and sci-fi, to a lesser extent) can get away with the premise of "this creature is evil," but the difference between fairy tales and fantasy is that the latter usually has rationale to justify it, while the former usually presents things "as is." In Little Red Riding Hood (a fairy tale), no-one is going to waste their time asking how wolves can talk, whereas in something like Lord of the Rings, the lore of wolves/wargs is fleshed out. Or since this started about orcs, I can give you an in-universe reason as to why the orcs are the way they are, or elves are the way they are. In contrast, something like 'The Elves and the Shoemaker' doesn't really examine why elves like fixing shoes, or how they came into being, or anything like that, because that's not the crux of the story.
There is a pointless geekery in seeking mechanisms or content beyond the puppets that have been set up by an author :
Except the "mechanisms," as you put them, are already in the text.
In a fairy tale, mechanisms are usually redundent, because they're never brought up, and are generally not relevant - I don't need to know where the Three Little Pigs got their skills in architecture, that isn't the point of the story. In a fantasy setting, on the other hand, an author is generally expected to justify why things are the way they are.
smurfs have no sexuality and no reproduction, they simply "are", and biological coherence is irrelevant to their imaginary universe.
Reproduction or procreation is the ability to create offspring. It is a trait common among many species of animals and is a trait of humans. In mainstream Smurfs media, Smurf reproduction is non-physical, as all baby Smurfs are brought to the Smurf Village from an unknown location on the night...
smurfs.fandom.com
What hasn't been thought up by an author in their universe isn't to be "discovered", it's simply a hollow place that stays hollow because what matters to the story is on the envelope's level.
Okay, and? Fictional lore exists as the author(s) dictate. Difference between the fantasy genre and fairy tales is that one usually has a lot more lore than the other, and is structured differently.
Of course, any cultural production comes from the author's culture and individual beliefs, so there is always a worldview to find and deduce from a text. But again, this worldview is expressed in dreamlike logic, in little touches that don't have to make an exhaustive and coherent system (few fictions would function if they had to be exhaustively logical), and even less be an actual reflexion of the real world : in many fictions, even pseudo-realistic ones, human races exist and determine mentalities, or homosexuality is a sign of weakness and perversion, or women are less capable than men, etc...
In one sense, I agree, any fictional world will usually break down eventually if enough holes are poked in it. However:
1: The difference between good and bad worldbuilding is, among other things, that the setting with bad worldbuilding will collapse with far fewer holes than the one with better worldbuilding.
2: Again, I disagree with this "dreamlike" assertion. "Dreamlike" usually refers to a style of writing, though at times, this can be extended to the context. Alice in Wonderland can be described as dreamlike because among other things, it doesn't really function like a normal book. Lord of the Rings isn't dreamlike, because its writing style is formal, it's operating under a series of rules, it takes itself seriously, everything in LotR definitively happens (to the point where it's stated to be Earth in the distant past), etc. Of all the adjectives you could use to describe LotR or many high fantasy works, "dreamlike' isn't a word I've ever seen.
3: Actually, a fictional world DOES require logical consistency (heck, most writing requires logical consistency, period). You can certainly write a setting without logical consistency, but if people pick up on the inconsistencies, it's not a defence to say "it's fiction," it's just a case of bad writing
These premises make stories (and character ehaviours) that fall apart if analysed in terms of real world analogies, or even in terms of inner logic (because these concepts -like the concepts of ghosts, vampires, zombies, etc- simply don't work if you overanalyse them). The fictional universe is structured differently than the real world, and doesn't require full logical consistency, it exists "as described", plot holes and contradictions included.
Again with the zombies and vampires, and again, you're missing the point.
Zombies and vampires don't exist in the real world, that's true. No-one bar a few loonies would claim otherwise. But if you're writing a work that involves zombies and vampires, then unless these are part of the background, it's generally expected that they have a set of rules that they follow.
For instance, a classic rule of zombies is that they need to be killed through a bullet to the head (or something similar). If your zombie story starts with this rule, then later, zombies are killed through chestshots, that's an error. Semantics as to the believability of zombies are just a distraction.
There's a geeky habit of trying to bring fiction to reality-level of cohesion (one hilarious archetypal example was aliens nerds debating for years to rationalize biologically the difference of design between the first two movies - while the real answer is how cool it looked to different directors). It can be a fun creative mind game, but it makes no sense to treat it as a revelation of an original work's hidden reality instead of a fan-created addendum.
Well, I've never seen anyone debate that - the drone(s) in Alien and Aliens are clearly the same species. But even then, it's a non sequitur, because we know that xenomorphs take on the traits of their implantee, so you've got a potential "out" there already.
You're right, in a real-world sense, any error between works is down to writers in the real world either making mistakes or retconning. No-one denies this. But if we're talking about Aliens, part of the reason why there is debate is that Aliens canon is a mess. Not even the films are entirely consistent with themselves (contrast AvP vs. Prometheus for example). Simply saying "it's fiction" as to why these errors exist is just a cop-out.
Now some people might not even mind, and more power to them, but it's not over-analyzing to see that the IP has major consistency issues.
Just like inventing stories where dracula is some ("humanized", "realisticalized") tormented lovestruck soul, adding pyschological complexity to orcs is an example of this : it expands an universe into another, fan-created around the first. Even if it's to include "more logical", "less fairy-tale-ish" things to it. Less, I say it, "childish" things.
Dracula isn't a good example of this.
Dracula actually comes closer to being a fairy tale because the original text (Dracula, by Bram Stoker) isn't definitive in the same way that LotR is. In part due to public domain, in part because of differences in setting, but that Dracula acts in one way in the original novel has no bearing on how he acts in another product, because they're effectively different continuities.
Precisely, orcs are vague (imagine how many details a Stephen King would have described), they are catch-all boogeymen, like ogres in fairy tales, about which all you need to know (be told and take as granted) is that they are terrible. They are the bad.
Orcs aren't really that vague. Maybe in visual descriptions, but that's it. They aren't creatures of a fairy tale, they're definitive, real, operate on rules, etc.
Now you're free to make of them what you want in your own headcanon or in your own fanfictions, or independent works. Just like vampires can be romantic conflicted souls or one-dimension predatory revenants. In fact their vagueness (and relative abstraction) is also what allows projections, and efficiently universalizes them. But inserting components of your own (in their "hollowness") and declaring this to be some underyling objective truth is wrong. And useless. Complexifying them is interesting, but this complexification doesn't have to be presented as something inherent to that work. It's an extension in its own. Like, say, Tournier's own personal take on Defoe's Robinson.
Who's inserting what?
First, I've never claimed that any piece of fanfiction I've ever written is canon to a setting. It's canon to my own writing (this is better explained on my homepage), but I've never deployed the argument of "I wrote X, therefore X is canon," because of course it isn't canon. I've never seen any fanfic author claim that what they've written is canon, and if they did, they'd be wrong, unless the fanfic was canonized.
Second, again, who's inserting what? That orcs are evil? That's not me inserting anything, that's the nature of the text itself. Heck, if I DID write LotR as an original work, there'd probably be more moral ambiguity, but I didn't. So it's why when I write for LotR, I've never had a 'good' orc because that's breaking canon,* whereas there's a handful of stuff I've written from an Easterling/Haradrim POV, where they most definitively aren't, because the setting allows for that. It's part of why 'A Shadow in the East' is my favorite GW LotR campaign because we see things from the Haradrim's perspective, and it syncs in perfectly with canon, even if it isn't canon itself.
*Not including crackfics or anything similar
But not every fictional character (or creature) has a revealing psych-analysable childhood. Most of them are just structural functions. Single ideas on legs. Heck, sometimes even stories that mean to say truths work better with abstractions and reductionisms. After all, myths and fairy takes do convey messages about the human condition that are often valid. And they convey them through minimalist, technically false, impossible, reductive components. Like a proverb would. "Fleshing out" a tale isn't necessarily a path to increased accuracy. It depends on what its grammar demands.
Not really. Look at any fictional character widely known and/or beloved, and they'll usually be a fleshed out character. Added complexity adds to character reciprocation most of the time.
(Also, I and most of my friends have read Tolkien during childhood. I don't think it's a work that belongs to an age bracket, but it does have something childish to them and I really mean it in the most wholesome, noble sense of the term. I think it describes a world with a sense of marvel that gets lost with age. And capturing it, indirectly capturing/transposing childhood awe and anxieties, makes a large part of its power.)
Obviously I can't comment on your own experiences, but for me, it's the opposite. LotR is something that gets better with age, because as you get older, you're able to better appreciate its complexities. That's generally true of fiction in general though - the exception is stuff explicitly designed for children that, when viewed as an adult, loses a lot of its lustre.
