What is fantastic?

What Does fantastic Mean

From the Latin phantastĭcus , the adjective fantastic refers to that which belongs to or is related to fantasy . In the same way, it allows us to name the feigned, which has no reality or that only exists in the imagination.

On a colloquial level, the term fantastic refers to that which is excellent , magnificent or presumptuous . For example: “Manu Ginobili played a fantastic game and gave the victory to the San Antonio Spurs over Dallas Mavericks” , “The party was fantastic, I didn't stop dancing all night” , “What he did was fantastic” .
Fantastic is also a fictional genre whose main elements are supernatural and unreal . The fantasy genre includes characters, situations or scenarios that could never belong to the real world (such as men who fly or animals that talk).

The essence of the fantasy genre is not to prioritize realistic representations. On the contrary, it is in charge of subverting the laws of the real world. It differs from science fiction in that it adduces scientific causes to violate the mechanics of how reality works.
One of the issues that is worth highlighting within the fantasy genre is the fact that different types of worlds are often taken as the stage in it. Specifically, we would have to underline that we will find alternative, parallel or border worlds.
Thus, for example, we would come across the fact that there are movies or books where the characters, simply saying a specific word or making use of a specific object, have the option of entering a different world. This would be the case, for example, of the Harry Potter saga where the protagonists cross a wall of the London train station to fully enter the magical world of Hogwarts.
And we could also say that this is the case of the literary heptalogy entitled "The Chronicles of Narnia" where it is told how the children who are the central characters of it have the possibility of reaching the kingdom of Narnia, through a closet.
Within the world of art, in all its extension, we find other examples of the fantasy genre that have become authentic references within Literature or Cinema, for example. This would be the case of the film saga "Matrix", created by the Wachowski brothers, which tells us about a future in which human beings have been enslaved by machines, robots and artificial intelligences of various types.
In the literary field, however, one of the top works of the fantasy genre is "Alice in Wonderland", written in 1865 by Lewis Carroll.
One of the earliest recorded written texts is the Poem of Gilgamesh , a Sumerian work dating from 2,000 BC This composition already incorporated fantastic elements, such as divine interventions and giants.
It should be noted that, beyond the presence of unreal elements, the fantasy genre presents internal coherence between these elements. The structure, the scenes and the interaction of the characters maintain a logic. Otherwise, the work in question would belong to the surrealist genre .