Whether you call it weird fiction, sword and sorcery, or just plain nerd stuff, the fantasy genre is pretty incredible. Who among us can truly say they never dreamed of discovering that they were secretly an abused wizard child or a weird steampunk guy with gears on his top hat? Not us, that’s for sure, and we’ve had sex plenty of times.
But as fun as it would be to dive through the wardrobe and explore fantastical new worlds, we have to admit, we’d be goners going to pretty much any fairy tale kingdom. We don’t know shit about swords, how to ride a horse, or how many silver flagons there are in one gold sovereign or whatever.
We’ve ranked the most gorgeously realized fantasy worlds in literature, film, and video games in order to figure out how quickly we’d be murdered by trolls or eaten by a dragon or some shit.
Onward!
50. Myst
Kicking things off with Myst, the mysterious (get it? The 1990s were stupid) deserted island world full of talking books and complicated, deeply boring puzzles that are somehow supposed to be more fun than doing sword stuff. There’s pretty much no one on Myst, so we’d probably survive for a long time until we stumbled into the water while trying to catch a fish and drowned.
49. Kingdom of Daventry
Daventry is your pretty standard, off-the-rack fantasy kingdom from the King’s Quest game, and we think we’d do pretty well. Nothing happens to anyone who isn’t a member of the Royal Family, which seems pretty classist but still suits us fine.
48. Mushroom Kingdom
Oh yeah, we’d last a while, stomping on Toad’s head, throwing fireballs at turtles, and doing basically everything we’ve ever dreamed. Eventually, Bowser would eat us, though. He’d probably start with our feet or some weird shit, too. He seems like a freak.
47. Destiny Islands
Like a dragon is going to eat us when Goofy is standing right over there with Chirithy, and you know he’s got some meat on his bones. Wise up, Goofy always dies first. That’s basically all that Goofy is, cannon fodder.
46. Arendelle
Disney came up with this world, but modern-day wimp Disney, not “Black Cauldron,” terror Disney. We could probably last a few days before dying of frostbite or being stabbed to death with Olaf’s nose. At least we wouldn’t have to sing any songs.
45. Deltora
Oh, the Shadow Lord has the island of Deltora in a crushing grip of economic freefall and political repression? Give us a fucking break, we’re already doing way worse than that here, at least they’re on an island.
44. Equestria
You might not think it, but the land of My Little Pony actually has a lot of dragons. However, they’re mostly concerned with friendship and fun, and as long as we could prove we’re not some kind of Brony pervert, we’d be fine for a long-ass time.
43. Xanth
Xanth is basically magical Florida, with all the barely-veiled misogyny and not-at-all-veiled child abuse that implies. We wouldn’t last long here because we would gladly ask a dragon to bite our head to get out of this Chameleon-spelling hellhole.
42. Ingary
The world of “Howl’s Moving Castle” is constantly at war, but also, the worst witch in the entire kingdom doesn’t have anything better to do than fuck with a hatmaker. We’d do fine here as long as we don’t fall in love with a mysterious wizard and get squashed by his castle, which we definitely would.
41. Star Wars
A galaxy far, far away seems pretty far down on this list for a place with laser swords and spaceships piloted by howling dog-men, but it really feels like as long as you mind your own business and stay out places described as “wretched hives of scum and villainy,” you’d do fine. Also, we would have given those droids up in a heartbeat if it meant a few Imperial Credits in our weird belt pouch.
40. Discworld
This place is just too goofy to be really dangerous, even if it is full of dangerously random magic and giant elephants on top of turtles. Chances are we’d be torn apart by an enraged orangutan for spilling Yoohoo on a library book before a dragon got us. We’d probably still show up in a sequel, though.
39. Jumanji
Look, if dumbass Robin Williams can survive in the jungle when he was a spoiled rich kid, we think we’ll be able to last quite a long time. Double goes for Kevin Hart, because if it were actually dangerous in Jumanji, something would be eating his fucking guts right now.
38. Hyrule
We won’t mince words: Hyrule can be pretty freaky. That weird moon face in “Majora’s Mask” freaked us out for weeks, and we’re not going to pretend that Ganon’s pig-guy form didn’t make us lay off the Cheetos for a few days. But, ultimately, Hyrule has waaay too convoluted of continuity for us even to know what we are going to get killed by. A demon from another universe? A dude who wants to bring back another dude, but it turns out he’s the soul of a sword somehow? Pick a lane, Hyrule.
37. Earthsea
Okay, in Earthsea, there’s so, so, so many dragons. Like, this place is lousy with dragons, but they’re the kind where if you figure out what their name is, you can just be like, “Hey, don’t eat me,” and they have to do it. Oh, they want to eat you. They want to. But they can’t, because you know their stupid dragon name!
36. Cybertron
Is there such a thing as a Transformers dragon? Of course there fucking is, and Stanley Tucci made it kill a bunch of Saxons in the Fifth Century, but, as far as we know, there are no dragons on Cybertron, the machine world of the Autobots. We’d still probably get run over by a jeep that has a surfer accent or a racist-coded motorcycle or something, though.
35. The Labyrinth
The Labyrinth couldn’t even stop a whiny 16-year-old girl. While we’re no Jennifer Connelly, we’re also pretty sure we could beat up David Bowie if push came to shove. Worst case scenario: we get lost, and we end up eating Hoggle and using goblins for firewood to stay warm.
34. Terabithia
God, this one is depressing. We could probably last a bit of time in Terabithia because we’re grown-ass adults, and this place only kills children without self-preservation instincts. Wait, what if the children that are killed are actually our own innocence, and we’re already dead? No, that’s stupid. We’ll be fine here.
33. Berk
Now we’re starting to get into some gorgeously realized, carefully world-built deathtraps! Yeah, the “How to Train Your Dragon” world has a lot of dragons, and we’d almost certainly get killed after we covered ourselves in loose wool to pretend to be sheep. For…our own reasons. That or the Vikings would kill us because of the sheep thing.
32. Dinotopia
A remote island filled with talking dinosaurs who survived extinction and have built a magnificent civilization of harmonious peace and advanced technology sounds good, but at the end of the day, some T. Rex is going to get tired of the lizard equivalent of tofu and swallow us whole. It’s just what’s going to happen, get used to it.
31. Barsoom
We’re not going to last all that long on this desolate version of Mars because a world in which a racist-ass Confederate soldier becomes a hero is probably not going to be all that hospitable to us. We’d probably accidentally mention that slavery was abolished in America, and a Green Martian would rip off our heads or something.
30. Albion
Honestly, we think we’d be fine in the world of Albion from the “Fable” games because you can do anything you want there except be a non-White person. It would probably be pretty easy just to hide out beneath a rock someplace while everyone else is trying to kill their father’s murderer like the game designers just expected us to have never seen “The Princess Bride.”