Balloonist of experience ([identity profile] aryky.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] psocoptera 2015-06-23 02:14 am (UTC)

As I've mentioned to you (but not [livejournal.com profile] psocoptera), I actually did reread the book last year. My sense is that the semi-climax of the book/movie ending is ambiguous between the two categories, because, while it's based on Bastian's creativity in imagining new Fantasia/Fantastica, in practice that creativity does not cause an entirely new Fantasia/Fantastica to come into being, as the book (more explicitly, as you get towards the end and read about the fate of the past wishers which makes it very clear that in Bastian's theoretically new Fantastica he is actually passing through the exact same locations that previous wishers went to) and the movie (in showing Atreyu and Falcor at the end) both indicate that the new realm is very heavily based on the old . I would say that the storyline thus blurs the lines between creativity and healing, maybe even suggesting creativity as the only truly successful method of healing - given that only people from outside of Fantasia/Fantastica can heal the land with their imagination, and nothing any of the beings within the realm can do without this creative power will ever heal it.

The book's ending would not come to mind for me as fitting into the framework of the examples [livejournal.com profile] psocoptera gave, or at least the first two, since I haven't read the last one, because it's on an intimate personal scale. It certainly involves healing, but the healing of a single person rather than of a country, world or universe (which, again, I think the mid-book climax does involve). [livejournal.com profile] psocoptera, do you count narratives where the climax involves psychological healing for a single character within your list, or are you only looking at larger-scale healing?

Post a comment in response:

This account has disabled anonymous posting.
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting