Fantasy is metaphor, I still think–it casts light upon human nature and the human world by using things that don’t exist anywhere in that world, and this is not a sort of unintended side effect of the genre; it’s something mre central. But even so, metaphor isn’t the only thing fantasy does, and the existence of metaphor doesn’t mean that the story itself stops mattering, or that I don’t immerse myself deeply in those stories when I read them.
All of which is an excuse to quote this bit from tnh‘s post today:
When everything in a story means a specific something else, and it means that something-else more than it means itself, what you have is allegory: a kind of writing almost no one does well.
Which is a really useful way of putting it. It’s not that everything (or many things) in a fantasy story can’t mean something else; it’s that the story can’t mean other things more than it means itself. That makes much sense to me.