"The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere" and the Art of Good Fantasy Conversations
One of the draws of fantasy literature is that it offers comfort and consistency in the form of its tropes. For high fantasy, this might be elves, goblins, and the story of a chosen hero. For low fantasy, it might be a school for wizards, a hidden portal leading to another plane, or an age of magical decline. And for web fantasy, it is often game-like magic systems and a self-insert protagonist getting sent to another world.
But the first chapter of the web serial The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere contains none of these things. There is no familiar tropes, no action, no exposition of the world.
Instead, the protagonist tells a joke.
A depressed and unhappy man decides to sell his soul to a demon. He mistakenly summons four, and each one makes a competing offer for his soul. The first demon offers incredible power. The second demon offers wealth beyond the man’s wildest dreams. The third demon offers unmatched beauty and charisma.
But the fourth demon offers to make his life worse. To burn down his house, inflict his family with diseases, give him terrible luck, and curse his mind to never let him be happy even if somehow he manages to materially turn things around.
Listening to the offers made by the first three demons, the man realizes he has always blamed external forces for his misery. But if he is being honest with himself, his life is not objectively all that bad. He has friends, a family, and a relatively comfortable life. He fears that after taking one of these offers, he would still be miserable but would have nothing left to blame except some inherent wretchedness within himself.
So when he hears the fourth offer, he rejoices and accepts it, as he knows that no matter how hard things get, he will always have someone to blame for his suffering.
The “joke” ends without a punchline, bewildering both listener and reader.
But through her inner monologue, the protagonist implies that the joke in some sense parallels her own experience. It is as though she has accepted an offer similar to those of the first three demons and regrets it, with the fourth demon perhaps revealing her deep desire to have anyone else to blame for her misery besides herself.
Looking in the comments of this first chapter, the majority of readers were baffled by its structure. Why waste the majority of your precious first chapter on a weird joke? Where is the hook for the plot? The setup of the world?
In a certain sense, these criticisms are valid. In most fantasy, even good books like The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, dialogue often feels secondary. Fantasy books need a ton of exposition to set up their sprawling worlds and intricate plots. As a result, their conversations tend to be quite functional in nature.
Take this conversation from The Way of Kings for example:
“Life before death,” Teft said, wagging a finger at Kaladin.
“The Radiant seeks to defend life, always. He never kills unnecessarily, and never risks his own life for frivolous reasons. Living is harder than dying. The Radiant’s duty is to live. Strength before weakness. All men are weak at some time in their lives. The Radiant protects those who are weak, and uses his strength for others. Strength does not make one capable of rule; it makes one capable of service.” Teft picked up spheres, putting them in his pouch. He held the last one for a second, then tucked it away too.
“Journey before destination. There are always several ways to achieve a goal. Failure is preferable to winning through unjust means. Protecting ten innocents is not worth killing one. In the end, all men die. How you lived will be far more important to the Almighty than what you accomplished.”
—Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings
This “conversation” serves a clear purpose: it is an expositional monologue which gives Kaladin and the reader necessary information about the Knights Radiant. In fact, Teft’s whole character and background is clearly set up just to be able to say this. Throughout The Way of Kings, and fantasy in general, dialogue serves to either advance the plot, directly develop characters, or serve as a sort of comic filler between more dramatic sequences. It exists merely as a means to an end.
But what happens when the dialogue itself is treated as an end? When the dialogue has no function, yet the conversation still exists?
This may seem pointless, but literary fiction does this all the time. Conversations often exist not to advance the plot, but to portray the characters as they would interact in a natural setting. They may not tell you anything particularly new or insightful about the characters or affect future events, but they make the story feel more real, as if the characters inhabit the world irrespective of your perception of them as a reader.
As an example, the classic English novel Middlemarch is built off of its conversations, often not about anything particularly important. These conversations don’t exist in service to the plot; instead, the plot exists to force character interactions and create content for delightful conversations. The pompous monologues of Casaubon, the somehow charming, self-indulgent ramblings of Mr. Brooke, and the witty but direct speech of Mary Garth, are far more memorable than any of the novel’s actual events.
This focus on conversation is almost never done in fantasy, and not for no reason. It is already hard enough to keep the story moving at the expected pace without including sections of dialogue with no discernible purpose. Even The Way of Kings, with its aforementioned functional dialogue, is still primarily criticized for being too long and slow-moving.
On the other hand, the potential content of conversations in fantasy is endless. Fantasy worlds have their own culture, politics, art, history, sports, religions, and philosophy, all of which characters can discuss. Even discussions with real-world relevance can feel less didactic, as the fantasy context allows characters to air their political or philosophical opinions free from the noise of contemporary discourse.
And this is what is so enticing about The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere. Despite containing an exceedingly complex mystery plot and well-developed world, it is a fantasy novel that focuses on its conversations. The world exists more-so to set up the next philosophical discussion than the next action sequence and as a result you get some incredible quotes like this:
She looked at me for a moment, a funny glint in the corners of her slightly-wrinkled eyes. "Well, that depends, Utsushikome. Do you believe a pawn is destined only to look across at its rival pieces for eternity, by its very nature?" She stabbed her fork into a tomato, spilling its red fluid. "Or, perchance, might it learn to crane its neck towards heaven?"
—Lurina, The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere
Or this:
People want to be eternally young. But eternal youth isn't just youth of the body. Eternal youth is when the world is not permitted to remind you that you are old. It is a world where you are eternally right, eternally cool, eternally indulged; where reality mirrors the contents of your calcified heart. This is the tip of the pyramid of needs. The ugly wart on the core of human nature.
—Lurina, The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere
Neither of these quotes develop the plot of the story, or even give any significant new information about the characters that speak them. But they justify themselves by taking intellectually complex ideas and expressing them with enough poetic weight to inspire a sense of awe similar to that of a great painting.
Throughout The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere, historical events and magical or technological phenomena are explained which may not be relevant on the plot, but will be referenced in a future political debate or emotional argument. The focus is inverted, and it is instead the plot and world which serve as the means to achieve the end of delightful and engaging conversation.
The cost of doing this is that the story moves at a glacial pace, as despite the intricate plot and worldbuilding, the majority of the story is spent in conversation, reducing the density of action sequences to far below what is standard for fantasy.
The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere is not without its faults: the mechanics of the world are often times overly convoluted, the story is filled with minor grammar errors, and the pacing is sometimes uneven enough to be objectively bad. But for readers who enjoy both fantasy with intricate worldbuilding like The Way of Kings and books with brilliant and evocative writing where not much happens like Middlemarch, then The Flower that Bloomed Nowhere may be worth a read.
There will always be a place for fantasies that use efficient prose to explicate their worlds and set up their pivotal action scenes. But fantasies that give their characters time to live and breathe in them also deserve their place. After all, interesting worlds invite interesting conversations.
