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I think this is a good question, but I immediately have two follow-up questions: how long is the vacation, and how much money do I have in that world’s currency?

For the sake of actually answering the prompt, I’m going to say I have a decent amount of money and I’m staying for a month. Long enough to actually experience the world, but short enough that I eventually have to come home.

Whenever questions like this come up, there are a few fictional worlds my brain immediately goes to. The problem is that I’m slowly realising most of them would make terrible vacation destinations.

The first is Skyrim.

Skyrim was such a huge part of my childhood that, given any hypothetical opportunity to visit a fictional world, it’s almost always my first answer. Not necessarily because I think it’s the greatest fictional world ever created- although, to be fair, it’s pretty good- but because I grew up with it. There are characters, places and stories in that game that have been with me for such a significant part of my life that the idea of actually getting to see them would be incredible.

But would Skyrim be a good vacation?

Fuck no.

There are no modern comforts. Travelling anywhere involves walking, riding a horse (Ok this is right up my alley though) or paying some guy with a carriage. Bandits are everywhere. Giant spiders just exist and so do actual giants. Dragons are actively trying to kill people.

I would love to wander through some of Skyrim’s landscapes, though. There are parts of that game that I still think are genuinely beautiful. I’d love to see Sovngarde.

I’d love to visit some of the areas from the DLCs that I’ve always found ridiculously picturesque. I’d want to walk into the cities I’ve spent hundreds of hours running around and see what they would actually feel like.

More than anything, though, I’d want to meet the characters.

I think that’s where I keep getting stuck with this question. I’m choosing worlds because I want to meet the heroes and characters I’ve grown attached to, rather than because I actually want to vacation there.

The same thing happens when I think about The Legend of Zelda. Give me Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule and I’d be thrilled. I’d want to explore everything. I’d want to see the places I recognise and meet the characters I’ve known through the games.

But again: monsters. No plumbing. Questionable healthcare. Ganon.

Not exactly a relaxing month away.

There are also plenty of fantasy books I’ve read where I’d desperately love to experience the world for myself. Let me see a dragon. Let me meet a unicorn. Let me experience magic being a normal part of life for a while.

But then I run into another problem: what if I don’t want to leave?

It’s only a vacation. At the end of the month I’m getting kicked back into reality, so maybe the perfect answer isn’t somewhere I’d want to build an entirely new life. It needs to be somewhere incredible to experience for a few weeks, but somewhere I’d eventually be happy to leave.

For a moment I actually considered one of the League of Legends hot-spring skin universes.

I don’t even need to know that much about the lore. Just look at the backgrounds. Give me a month of sitting in magical hot springs, drinking tea and doing absolutely nothing. That sounds fantastic. Also Sett, my favourite League champ, has a skin in this line so heeellllooo!

But I could also just… go to a really nice hot spring in real life. If I’m getting one fictional vacation, I want something I genuinely can’t experience here.

Which brings me to what I think is probably my actual answer:

Pandora from Avatar.

Pandora feels like the perfect balance. I don’t think I’d want to live there permanently. I enjoy electricity, air conditioning, my computer and all the other extremely modern comforts that I’ve become accustomed to. But for a month? I think it would be incredible.

The Avatar movies have always completely captured me visually. Imagine actually standing in those forests at night and seeing everything glowing around you. Seeing the floating mountains. Swimming through those oceans. Seeing all of those plants and animals that don’t exist anywhere on Earth.

More than that, I’d love the opportunity to experience an entirely different way of living. A month is enough time that it wouldn’t just be sightseeing. You could actually learn things, meet people and experience a little bit of what life there is like before eventually returning home.

Obviously, I’m assuming this vacation comes with the very important condition that I’m visiting during one of the periods where nobody is trying to destroy Pandora.

Although it’s funny, every time I’m asked a question like this, no matter how much I think about the practicalities or try to come up with the objectively “best” answer, my brain eventually wanders back to Skyrim.

Maybe that’s the difference between the world I’d most like to vacation in and the fictional world I’d most like to visit.

Pandora would probably be the better vacation. But if somebody opened two portals in front of me- one to Pandora and one to Skyrim?

Yeahhh… I’m probably walking into Skyrim.