If former UFC champion Robert Whittaker had his way, he'd be living in a fantasy land.
As Whittaker prepares for a rematch with New Zealand's Israel Adesanya in Houston, Texas at UFC 271 next weekend, he's spent just as much time enjoying the fantasy and science fiction stories he loves as he has preparing to try and recapture the UFC middleweight title.
Whittaker says he relates to the downtrodden characters of those tales, who so often start out as nobodies before building themselves into heroes.
"I love reading those books and visualising myself as those guys who fight dragons. Fighting Adesanya seems pretty simple compared to fighting a dragon," Whittaker said.
"When the hero gets knocked down but he gets back up, that sort of crap, I like it. I enjoy a main character who I hate at the beginning of the book because he's a whingeing, complaining little pissant.
"But I sit back and I think about how he's been taken out of his comfort zone and into a foreign environment and he's just coping. I can relate to that, I like a good whinge myself.
"Then you see as the book goes on, he's developing and he's getting stronger and he's not whingeing as much because he's stronger. He becomes confident because he becomes stronger.
"That's why I like fantasy so much, that's why I like sci-fi so much, because you don't see that in the real world, and if you do it's just a paragraph, not the whole story."
Whittaker's own story isn't so far from the fantasy tales. There's a sense of a classic hero's journey to the whole thing.
Change a few details and add a little bit of magic and a few swords and his rise from humble CityRail electrician to becoming Australia's first UFC champion could be the opening act of a fantasy trilogy.
But none of the best stories are all about the rise. The fall has to come soon after.
Our heroes have to be challenged again, and Whittaker has spoken at length about how he was trapped by his own fear, self-doubt and neurosis heading up to the day he lost the belt to Adesanya back in October 2019.
Adesanya is almost as dangerous with a microphone as he is with the gloves on, and the pre-fight psychological battle was a war Whittaker was ill-prepared to fight and could never truly win.
To hear Whittaker tell it, his emotional overload made Adesanya's second-round knockout in front of a record UFC crowd of over 57,000 at Docklands Stadium almost a fait accompli.
Whittaker is sure things will be different this time, even if Adesanya makes good on his claim to retain the title with a more devastating knockout than before.
And while Adesanya is a warm favourite to do just that, the prospect of defeat holds no fear for Whittaker this time.
"He very well could [knock me out again]! He won that first fight pretty well," Whittaker said.
"I'm not training to get that sort of result, but what is he going to say? I should be thankful, that's kind of tame compared to some of the other stuff he said.
"But it doesn't bother me, and because it doesn't bother me I don't pay attention. I wouldn't have known he said that if you didn't tell me.
"Not having that headspace taken up with that sort of stuff, all the stress I was putting on myself and all the thought of what happens outside the Octagon, I've freed up so much space in my head.
"It feels like just another fight to me now, it's just another fight where I'm putting in the work, getting my weight down and coming home. It doesn't feel any bigger than any other fight."
Without the fear and the doubt weighing him down, Whittaker has set himself free. It makes him a far more dangerous fighter, and arguably the fiercest challenge Adesanya has faced at middleweight as champion.
Adesanya has still never been beaten at middleweight and has run through top contenders like Paulo Costa and Marvin Vettori with ease since he took the title.
But he's not unbeatable — he lost to light-heavyweight champion Jan Blachowicz last March and for Whittaker, Adesanya is no longer an unsolvable riddle.
In their first fight, Whittaker was ultra-aggressive, blitzing in with combinations and Adesanya, a wonderful counter-striker, took advantage.
It was a similar strategy that outdid poor, overmatched Costa, who was knocked out by Adesanya in humiliating fashion in his second title defence.
Adesanya isn't one of the dragons from the tales Whittaker loves so much, but charge in with nothing but blind fury and he'll breathe plenty of fire.
Slaying him means overcoming your own fear and trepidation as much as anything else.
"There's some fights of him where he looks untouchable — well really it was just one fight, the Costa fight, he looked unbeatable when he fought Costa. And that was real, I was thinking 'how can I beat him?' after that performance," Whittaker said.
"But after he lost to [Jan] Blachowicz and beat [Marvin] Vettori, let's be real, he didn't look anything like he did against Costa.
"Maybe that was just a good night, that can happen, but it reminded me he's just a man. He's very good at what he does, but he's a man, he can be touched like anybody else. He can lose like anyone else.
"On paper, it is super simple – 'punch him more than he punches you' – but executing it on the night, with what he brings and how I'm feeling and what actually happens, is anyone's guess. It should be simple but let's wait and see what happens."
If it was a fantasy story, Whittaker would win. He gained the throne, only to lose it to a new challenger but was humbled by defeat before rising again, harder and stronger and better.
He's let go of his doubts and embraced his own skills.
The loss to Adesanya would be the final act of the second book of a series, Whittaker's version of the Empire Strikes Back, and returning to vanquish his nemesis and reclaiming the title would be a nice capstone for the third and final book of a series.
But life is not a story, however much we'd like it to be, and the fighting sports can be so cruel to those who believe in fairytales. Even the new Whittaker might not be enough to beat Adesanya.
A second loss to Adesanya would likely shut the door on Whittaker fighting for the title for as long as Adesanya is champion.
Aside from Whittaker, there are precious few fighters left at middleweight who Adesanya has not already beaten or would be expected to utterly dismantle.
So perhaps the stakes are not as high as that day in Melbourne when Whittaker felt the weight of 56,000 people in the stands and the millions watching around the world, but they are still immense.
But Whittaker will not let the pressure in. In the stories, the hero wins at the end because they realise they're special.
Whittaker has a chance of avenging his loss precisely because he's certain of the opposite.
"Sometimes, as fighters, we forget what I fight for. I was fighting for something else when I first started, it was an identity," Whittaker said.
"A lot of guys in my position let it get to their head, they think they're something special and they're not. I'm not special, I just fight well. That's not how I feel, that's how it is.
"I can't build a house, I can barely mow my lawn, but I can fight. I'm just fortunate that what I'm good at is something people love watching.
"I don't see myself as anything special. Anyone with kids knows they're not special, my kids don't give a shit about this fighting stuff.
"I know, regardless of the outcome of the fight, I'm going to be exactly like this on the other end. I know this is who I am, and this is why I'm doing it."
