Fantasy literature is an Escape. Fantasy literature is a Reflection. Fantasy literature takes the hopes and the anxieties of a time and a culture and reflects it back without the limitations of our world. From JRR Tolkien’s anxieties about industrialization and globalization overwhelming a largely mythical traditional pastoral utopia manifesting in Mordor’s Orcs ravaging the pastures and woodlands of Middle Earth, to isekai power fantasies like Sword Art Online reflecting the dream of agency flared up against the fear of powerlessness in a 21st century neoliberal late-stage capitalist world, fantasy literature lets its authors and its audiences grasp at the world they live in and both escape from it for a time into a world where the actions of individuals can at least ensure their own well-being, or to turn back a lens upon some aspect of our world that they long to praise or criticise, free from the dirty complications that real life provides.
Yet in fantasy, especially in the power fantasies of the Isekai subgenre, these worlds are often Feudal. The authors roll back the clock to create worlds of Knights and Kings, Bards and Peasants, Medieval Merchants and Mystic Mages. Worlds so often reflecting Medieval Europe with a detail or two changed, with magic and monsters added. And in this we normally discover a problem with both the Escapist and Reflectionary aspects of Fantasy: Feudalism is a bygone time. We live in a world so far past Feudalism that the idea of serfs being bound to their liege-lord's land feels like slavery--to such an extent that people have a hard time building a difference in their minds’ eyes between the “serf” and the “slave”. When we turn our eyes back, we either have to wash over the power structures that existed, or risk those power structures forcing the powerful into archetypes of the cruel, of lionizing the poor, and turning the whole setting into a morality play. After all, we know that those power structures were not justified. We know that the divine right of rule did not give a King the right to dictate the lives or reap the labors of his subjects. We know that Monarchy is not eternal, that advancement in communications can and will threaten to destroy those structures.
Feudalism is not Real, in the sense of Real used in the phrase Capitalist Realism. Capitalist Realism is an idea within left-wing thought that is summarized by the phrase “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism.” The idea that our Capitalist economy is a natural one, that rather than markets and money and wealth being social constructs and relationships that have arisen out of our common social attempts to fulfill our material needs, markets and money and wealth are natural things, and deviations from those (planned economies, barter, poverty, etc) are artificial perversions brought about by greed and a lust for power.
In that sense, Capitalism is Real, but Feudalism is not Real.
We cannot help but read the feudal lords of our fantasy novels as a Fantastical element: either an ideal held up in contrast to the dirty reality of our neoliberal capitalist world -- a sort of ideal past which our sins have stripped away from us -- or as the dark barbarism that once was -- a warning of what might return if we fight too hard against what “progress” has given us. Yet neither is a reflection of what Feudalism was: a power structure that arose to fulfill the material needs of a people at a time, constrained by the technologies of that time, and in response to the collapse of a previous centralized imperial power structure. A power structure that, in its time, was Real.
Ascendance of a Bookworm, a series of isekai novels by Japanese author Miya Kazuki and translated into English by quof [not capitalized], does something different. While it initially feels like the story is going to re-tread the dark age warning of falling back into a Feudal world, showing the reader an impoverished underclass of workers slaving their lives away in medieval urban poverty, terrified of any potential conflict with nobility, over time Kazuki achieves something that Tolkien, Martin, and others have failed: she makes the Feudal society feel Real, in the same sense as we now feel Capitalism is Real. By the end of her series of novels, it becomes almost impossible to imagine her world following our world past Feudalism without destroying the world utterly. In fact, we see areas of her world that are almost post-apocalyptic, a Feudal reflection of our post-apocalyptic dystopias where capitalist accumulation and market forces remain, as though they were forces of nature rather than social relations. And her secret is how she uses magic and mana in the world.
This work will consider that through an explicitly (although modified) Marxist viewpoint, taking the Marxist concepts of the Base and Superstructure and considering how they interact with Kazuki’s imagined world of mana and nobility, and how they create a sense of a world where a strict political and economic division between those with a talent for Mana -- the Nobility -- and those without it -- the Commoners -- is a natural and inevitable state of the world. Then it will poke at that structure, looking for the holes that reveal the convincing Feudal Realism that Kazuki has built is as much as a lie as our sense of Capitalist Realism is, showing how Kazuki has managed, almost certainly unintentionally, to throw a reflection on our sense of economic inevitability.