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Neverwhere Gaiman Analysis

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Fantasy has the ability to re-enchant the audience into a world far away from their own, a world that follows different rules and is crowded with imaginary creatures. Or at least that’s the case for high fantasy. 
What I think is compelling about urban fantasy, and why I decided to write in this genre, is that it finds a way to let magic enter our own world, despite the fact that science, facts and experience are what forms the basis of our society, leaving very little space for fairy dust. 
In Neverwhere Gaiman pictured London, a real well-known city, and asked: what if there is a part of London we don’t get to see? And that part is an enchanted London, where Knightsbridge is no longer the shiny residence of Harrods but becomes a mysterious …show more content…

The main character being a mermaid longing for the human world is an homage to Andersen’s fairytale The Little Mermaid, although the contemporary setting allowed me to explore different implications.
Fantasy is excellent for metaphors and parallels - one of its premises is to talk about issues of our society while discussing something that is apparently the furthest away from it. I’ve encountered feminist themes in Angela Carter’s re-imagined fairytales, where she gives women the agency they lacked during her time. The movie Maleficent deals with growth, rape, self-healing and the role of women through a retelling of Perrault’s Sleeping Beauty from the antagonist’s point of view. 
So while Astrid struggles to follow a career she is supposedly not predisposed for, that reflects back into our society’s need to label and categorise and to make assumptions based on qualities people have no control over. For the same reason, I decided to have an hinted queer romance rather than a straight one, giving the final liberation from the “forbidden love” rule a more explicit meaning. 
Overall, fantasy has turned out to be a very interesting genre to work with: it is built on a long tradition of figures, images and plots that readers can pick up on but that a writer can play with and subvert to serve the purpose of a larger story that is ultimately a reflection of our

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