Faux realism is an alternate reality genre with a focus on the familiarity of the unfamiliar. Faux realism is familiar and ordinary rather than fantastical or spectacular in scope. While a lot of speculative fiction goes out of its way to demonstrate how strange or unusual it is, faux realism endeavors to maintain a sense of familiarity and commonality. These settings often focus on dramatic or slice of life elements but can also incorporate adventure or action just as easily. Many faux realism settings are also quite self-aware and humorous in tone. Faux realism settings often make artificial versions of real world elements in an intentionally comedic or referential manner. My favorite manifestation of faux is best exemplified in anthro media – where contemporary worlds are often explored through the personal, colorful perspectives of bestial characters that are deeply intimate and even wholesome at times.
Faux realism is a term I’m using to describe a style of fiction that despite being very common has not been adequately defined in fiction or popular culture as a whole. This term, and the encounters I’ve had with it, is born out of decades of my own experiences with creative media – including books, television, video games, music and even works of visual art. Faux realism settings are those that feel eerily similar to our own, but despite having fundamental differences to our world, these alternate realities still retain a strong sense of familiarity that make us eagerly want to live in them. Faux realism exists at the threshold of the familiar and the unfamiliar, but it lacks the tedium or timelines, the spectacle of magical systems or a reliance on technology to drive the plot. Though exotic technologies can be introduced, in faux realism they should be used in a manner that helps connect the reader to the characters of the setting – something that a lot of speculative fiction fails to do.
Another way to look at faux realism is to think about aesthetic or thematic tropes in various genre media. For anyone that has watched their fair share of sitcoms or dramas – particularly from the nineties and noughties, they should be quite familiar with the trope of cities that are everywhere but nowhere at the same time. A particular show might allude to taking place in a specific region – especially somewhere in the United States, but the writers often don’t specify the exact location in the series. A notable animated example of this might be The Simpsons in the earlier seasons. These pieces of media are often classified as fictionalized settings. In such fictionalized, faux realist settings, you can easily introduce things that do not exist in our world – like different flora or fauna, cultures or histories, while still maintaining the eerie and almost generic familiarity of that fictionalization in the media you’ve introduced them into.
In faux realism, you don’t need elaborate, physics breaking magic or outlandish technologies to produce inviting, whimsical worlds to explore. Faux realism is meant to demonstrate that the highest escapism you can actually have as a reader is not in pure realism or pure fantasy – but in the plausible yet improbable threshold between them. You could have a mirror world inhabited by furry characters that still manages to have eerily similar contemporary businesses to those in our world. In another one, you could find yourself transported to a place where, instead of unrealistic fantasy dragons, massive, prehistoric monitor lizards survived into the present day – to be hunted or tamed. Faux realism settings often feel like realistic yet improbable dreams that are so vivid you end up questioning your reality when you wake up.
Though a faux realism setting could take place in the past or future, the focus of faux realism is to produce a sense of familiar unfamiliarity. Regardless of chronological alignment, if the setting manages to convey a sense of the contemporary with a touch of the improbable, it is successful as faux realism. Conversely, focusing on one’s experience of this threshold is also why excessive social or political commentary is incompatible with faux realism. While focusing too much on the unfamiliarity of the past or future is problematic, so is focusing too much on the familiarity of current events. Both extremes ruin the emersion and escapism that is essential to faux realism.
To summarize, faux realism is a genre grounded in plausible realism with a touch of the improbable or artificial. Liminal fiction settings mostly take place in fictionalized, contemporary, and often wholesome slice of life settings – with eerily similar histories yet improbable changes to that reality that produce appealing escapism for the reader. Faux realism settings emphasize the magic of the mundane and the familiarity of the unfamiliar through relatable characters and situations – without the use of fantastical elements that often define much of the speculative fiction genre. Successful faux realism should create a sense of nostalgia, yearning or sehnsucht and focus on optimistic and intimate themes whenever possible.