Empires, Myths, and Memory: What Fantasy Can Teach Us About History

An island burns. A nation slaughtered. Later, textbooks will reduce the massacre to a sterile phrase like "a necessary act of war." But in The Poppy War, we feel the heat of the flames. We taste the ash. We watch the birth of vengeance in a survivor's heart.

Why does fantasy often feel more honest than the historical records it mirrors? Why do readers find deeper truth in dragons and magic than in a sanitized textbook chapter?

The answer lies not in fantasy's escape from reality—but in its refusal to look away. Fantasy can illuminate emotional, political, and psychological truths that history—flattened by politics, nationalism, or limited archives—often glosses over or omits altogether. In the space between fact and fiction, fantasy offers something rare: a sharper, more human understanding of how empires rise and fall, how trauma lingers, and how the stories we tell shape who we become.

History Is a Story We Tell Ourselves

History is not just a collection of facts. It's curation. It's interpretation. It's narrative.

As Yuval Noah Harari argues in Sapiens, civilizations are built on shared myths—religion, money, nationhood. These stories give us structure and belonging, but they also shape what we remember—and what we conveniently forget.

Take the American Revolution. In U.S. textbooks, it's a righteous fight for liberty. In British ones, it's a colonial rebellion. Same events, different stories. History is written by the victors—or at the very least, by those with access to the mic.

Fantasy understands this and runs with it. Authors have the freedom to flip the script. They build worlds where the conquered write the history books, where morality isn't binary, and where violence isn't glorified—it's interrogated.

When Pierce Brown creates a caste-based society in Red Rising, where Reds mine beneath the surface of Mars under the illusion of purpose while Golds rule from above, he's not just building a world. He's holding up a mirror to the way empires manipulate belief systems to secure compliance.

And when George R.R. Martin presents the same battle from multiple, conflicting perspectives in A Song of Ice and Fire, he isn't just playing with structure. He's reminding us: history isn't objective—it's personal, political, and perpetually up for debate.

Fantasy as Emotional Truth

In The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang draws directly from the Sino-Japanese War and the Rape of Nanking—one of the most brutal atrocities of the 20th century. But instead of retelling it beat-for-beat, she distills its psychological impact: on a girl, a nation, a people.

Through Rin, we witness how genocide breeds vengeance, how colonial humiliation curdles into nationalism, how trauma doesn't end with the war—it becomes the war. We watch a character turn monstrous not out of evil, but because survival demanded it.

Fantasy can go where history won't. It can give voice to the emotional fallout. It can compress time and expand perspective. When Rin makes her final, devastating choice in The Dragon Republic, it doesn't feel like a plot twist—it feels inevitable. The history she carries has given her no other way out.

This is what emotional history can do. It shows not just what happened, but what it meant. It gives us context. Consequence. Humanity. And in that space, it often tells a truth that dates and timelines can't.

Myths Make Empires—and Erase Them

Rome had Romulus and Remus. Britain painted its colonial project as benevolence. America clings to the narrative of meritocracy and freedom. These are not just cultural stories—they're tools of power.

Imperial myths elevate certain histories while erasing others. They create heroes, justify violence, and disguise structural inequality as individual failure.

Fantasy sees that. And it dramatizes it.

In Zodiac Academy, Lionel Acrux seizes power not by merit but manipulation—framing dissenters as threats, spreading fear about Nymph attacks, and even using mind control on Tory Vega to force her to surrender the throne. His regime isn't a natural evolution of power—it's a carefully constructed myth of protection and order. He rewrites the narrative in real-time, and the realm falls in line.

In The Poppy War, the empire of Nikan defines itself against the memory of Mugen occupation. That shared trauma is weaponized. Memory becomes a rallying cry, a justification for revenge and cruelty.

Josephine Quinn's How the World Made the West dismantles the myth of Western exceptionalism. It reveals a more entangled origin story—one shaped by migration, exchange, and yes, conquest. Great civilizations weren't born in isolation. They were forged in contact, often violent, and shaped by the same dynamics fantasy novels frequently explore: trade, war, empire, assimilation, and resistance.

Fantasy doesn't just mirror these truths. It strips them of their patriotic polish. And in doing so, it lets us question the myths we still live inside.

Fantasy as Imagination—and Resistance

The best fantasy doesn't replicate history's patterns—it resists them. It gives us the space to imagine alternatives, to play out the consequences of unchecked power, to ask: What if it didn't have to be this way?

This isn't escapism—it's rehearsal. It's critical thinking dressed in dragons.

Fantasy is often clearer about consequences than history is. Institutions fail. Power corrupts. The hero falls. The villain bleeds. In The Poppy War, Rin's power comes at the cost of her soul. In Red Rising, rebellion brings its own kind of tyranny. These worlds aren't tidy—but neither is ours.

Fantasy challenges the idea that history is the domain of great men and inevitable outcomes. It reminds us that systems are built—and therefore, can be unbuilt. That resistance matters, even when it fails. That stories aren't just how we explain the past—they're how we imagine the future.

Reading Between the Lines

History evolves. So does fantasy. Both respond to the moment. Both shift as new voices emerge, as silenced perspectives are finally heard, as we collectively question what we've been told—and why.

Fantasy matters because it dares to say the quiet parts out loud. It reminds us that empires are built on stories, that memory can be weaponized, and that power is never neutral. And it does this not by abandoning reality—but by leaning into it, reframing it, and re-enchanting it with just enough distance to make us finally look.

At its best, fantasy isn't about escaping history. It's about re-seeing it.

Because maybe the most dangerous stories aren't the ones with monsters and magic.

Maybe they're the ones we've been taught to believe are true.