What is point of view?
Every story is told from somewhere. The question of where — whose eyes we see through, whose thoughts we hear, how close we are allowed to get — is the question of point of view. It is one of the most fundamental craft decisions a writer makes, and in speculative fiction it carries particular weight.
Point of view — often abbreviated to POV — refers to the narrative perspective through which a story is told. It determines the reader's relationship to the characters, the information they have access to, the intimacy they feel, and the degree to which they are inside or outside the events of the story. Different point of view choices create radically different reading experiences from the same raw material — and the choice is never neutral.
First person point of view places the reader directly inside a single character's experience. The narrator is the protagonist — or at least a participant — and everything is filtered through their perception, their voice, their limitations. First person creates an intimacy that is unmatched by any other perspective, but it also creates constraints: the reader can only know what the narrator knows, sees, thinks, and feels. In fantasy and romantasy, first person is often used to create the intoxicating closeness of a singular, distinctive voice — one that pulls the reader so far inside a character's experience that the world is felt rather than observed. Many romantasy novels use close first person precisely for this reason: the emotional intensity of the romantic arc is heightened almost unbearably when the reader is living inside it rather than watching it from outside.
Third person limited is the most widely used point of view in contemporary fantasy and science fiction. The narrator is outside the character — using he, she, or they — but closely aligned with a single character's perspective, thoughts, and feelings at any given time. It offers more narrative flexibility than first person while retaining the intimacy of a close perspective. Multi-POV fantasy — following several different characters through third person limited sections — is a defining feature of the genre's most ambitious works, from George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire to Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings. The power of multi-POV storytelling is that different perspectives on the same events reveal different truths, and the gaps between what different characters believe to be true generate irony, tension, and complexity.
Third person omniscient gives the narrator access to any character's thoughts and a perspective that stands above the story rather than inside it. It was the dominant mode of Victorian fiction and has its adherents in fantasy — Terry Pratchett used it brilliantly, with a narratorial voice that was itself a character. But it is less common in contemporary speculative fiction, where the trend is strongly toward interiority and emotional immediacy.
Second person — you walk into the room, you feel the cold — is rare in long-form fiction but appears in interactive fiction, certain experimental science fiction, and occasional short form work. Its effect is to collapse the distance between reader and character entirely, which can be deeply unsettling, which makes it a natural fit for horror-adjacent speculative fiction.
Dark academia tends to favour first person or close third, because the genre's preoccupation is with interiority — with the texture of obsession, with the quality of a particular kind of consciousness encountering a particular kind of world. The point of view is the atmosphere.
Point of view is not just a technical choice — it is a philosophical one. It determines what kind of truth the story can tell, and how closely the reader is invited to inhabit it. Choose it with the same care you give to every other element of the work.
