Eh, I think there's a difference that make both terms useful. Fiction set strictly in the real world with mysterious yet mundane magical/supernatural elements, versus fiction in a fantastical world or a "real world" where the existence of magic™ must be extensively explained.

I think the whole "all fantasy/sci-fi is slop" wasn't that big of a thing in LATAM, so the term isn't some euphemism for making it palatable to elitists.

I also disagree with GP, a lot of what makes One Hundred Years of Solitude good comes from the Colombian setting and it's cultural context. True, it wouldn't be impossible to translate that to a alien planet, Mars isn't fully Mars The Martian Chronicles after all.

> versus fiction in a fantastical world or a "real world" where the existence of magic™ must be extensively explained.

Well now if we're drifting, I don't consider "fantasy" has to explain everything like it were an AD&D manual.

Take Glen Cook's Black Company series where magic just happens without explanation. Compare with something like Brandon Sanderson who describes "magic systems" in great detail always. I find the former enticing and the latter boring.

Lord of the Rings didn't explain anything either.

Sorry, I meant that fantasy usually is in a unrelated-to-our-own fantastical world or it's in the real world (e.g urban fantasy), but the fact that magic exists and the reader "didn't know" about it must be explained (e.g Harry Potter, Dresden Files).

What's the alternative to not explaining here? Is it making the magic subtle/weak/uncommon enough that the answer is "you didn't notice, and this is plausible to claim"? If the magic is blatant enough and there's no explanation, the story becomes even less attached to reality than "there's a lot of magic but it's deliberately kept hidden".

> Lord of the Rings didn't explain anything either.

Yeah, and LOTR is in Middle-Earth, a fantastical world that isn't Earth. The point of the term "magical realism" is that there is still "realism". It's about what happens when something impossible or absurd happens to you and you have to deal with the ramifications in the real world. No one would read The Satanic Verses, think about the themes involved and compare it to LOTR.

I really like magical realism, but mostly ones where everything isn't so depressing like the Night Circus and the Starless Sea books.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is just too depressing. The closest I got was playing through Kentucky Route Zero, which is kind of like a theatrical play in video game form with lots of references to Marquez. A phenomenal game.

*I meant to say that Night Circus and Starless Sea are good examples of books that are not depressing.