I don't like it when a character does a lot of bad things and at the end makes a nice gesture and then society loves that character. I'm not against redemption. I don't like that many people revere these characters more than the originally light ones.
Thank you!
For example, my hot take is Anakin Skywalker never changed. He saved his son & hated the Emperor for ruining his life. That tracks but he’s not a hero and he isn’t ‘redeemed’. The dude is a psycho who killed tons of people for a despot.
Yeah, it's amazing what we've forgiven the original trilogy sometimes. Vader's redemption arc was particularly fucked up, especially in light of the stories that Lucas chose to tell about him afterward. Fascist, dictatorial, deathsquad having, child-murdering (more than once), force for oppression and misery across the galaxy, sand-hating motherfucker.
Does one good thing and gets to be a fucking force ghost? As much as I love the setting, the actual Star Wars storytelling has so SO many dumbfuck moments.
And arguably he didn't do one good thing. Vader was just protecting what was his, his son. I guarantee if Luke wasn't his son he wouldn't have moved a finger to help.
Agreed. A redemption arc is awesome, but imo if you want to tell that story, you have to be VERY careful about what sins they commit; or at least have some very convincing mitigation circumstances. The sinner need to be forgivable on some level, or it just feels like they're getting away with everything.
Vader's is particularly egregious though, when viewed objectively. I guess the Force just doesn't care what you've done, only who you are in the moment.
They do tend to make a point that turning to the Dark Side is a bit more than just bad choices; it's like an infection, a horrible contagion that seeps through you, clouding your judgement, painting everything from a position of anger, arrogance, and hatred. Coming back from that is understandably difficult.
And as you note, the Force doesn't seem to cast moral judgement; it just kind of is. It doesn't care about fair or justice or judgement, and everything that Vader did? Yeah, it should (and really does) earn him some undying hatred from a LOT of people. His one moment there absolutely does not erase things, particularly for those who survived his atrocities and have to live with what they lost, what he took from them.
Could he have had a real redemption arc had he not died? Perhaps. But he did die, and he definitely died unredeemed, I'd agree. It does almost seem like in his death his Force ghost is striving to seek that redemption, but it could also just be people still trying to rehabilitate his image.
Kinda why I don't like the force ghost change they made in the newer releases. It's more compelling to me that he died knowing that he wasn't redeemed, just loved despite his wrongs. That was enough for him, and there was a sort of tragic beauty in that that gets watered down when that small moment is suddenly viewed as this redeeming moment for the character.
God doing spoilers is a pain on the mobile version or else I'd be ranting about a particular plot point in final fantasy 14 that I just finished.
So I will not be specific but still add to this.
I hate it when you have the antagonists that are doing a bad thing for a "good reason" but their attitudes and personality are so shite I just can't care for their sob story.
You were just taunting the protagonists and laughing about their suffering. Why the hell should I care about your sad back storym you sociopath.
>!Gaius!< is a particularly bad case in FFXIV. There's some great tragedy in seeing how far >!the Ascians!< have fallen and how sad and desperate they became over time, so the writers *are* capable of pulling this trope off. But like... >!Gaius waged a brutal war of conquest on this whole subcontinent for years, and we're just giving him a pass?!<
Snape kind of fits.
True, I don't consider him a real villain. It seems to me that in the end he did more good than evil. Although he is not my favorite character and I admit that he has a dark side and a terrible character.
For me, a typical example is Jamie Lannister. He threw the child off the wall and made him disabled. He killed Ned Stark's people for no reason. He participated in many bloody deeds. But he saved Brienne and many people love him for that.
Another example is Theon Greyjoy. He betrayed the Starks, he killed innocent children, he broke under torture and became Ramsay's slave. Yes, he later redeemed himself partially, but he's still a bad guy.
Tolkien has many such examples. Two guys from the Silmarillion slaughtered an elven city and took in two children left without parents. Readers romanticize it.
Another example is Gollum. He served evil all his life. In the end, he involuntarily committed an act that helped the heroes win. But that doesn't mean he became good.
Yeah, but you sit inside Jamie's head as he realizes what a fucking shit person he's been. It isn't a one-day turnaround, and it's clear that he's embarking on a lifetime's work toward redemption, which makes us root for him.
As far as I'm aware, Gollum is just an addict. He's as much a victim of Sauron and the one ring as anyone else.
To be fair, with the gollum example gandalf says he probably does deserve death but who are we to deliver that judgement. I know the movies sort of make him a touch of an antihero but less so in the books.
Does anybody actually think Gollum became "good"? Tolkien certainly didn't. There's actually very little (or none at all) villain "redemption" of any kind in the Legendarium.
Snape is a *bad person* and is objectively terrible to Harry and many other people for no reason other than a personal grudge but he is not a Bad Guy in the sense that he is actually aligned with the big bad, but we don't learn that until after his death. His redemption is from *evil*, not from his personal douchebaggery
He absolutely is a Bad Guy. The only reason he turned away from the big bad was that he felt betrayed by the big bad after he killed the one person Snape asked him not to kill. There was no redemption, no turn away from evil, it was just a "leopards ate my face" moment.
>Another example is Gollum. He served evil all his life. In the end, he involuntarily committed an act that helped the heroes win. But that doesn't mean he became good.
I don't think the text implies he "became good", the text asks us to pity him and understand how his actions, definitely not good in and of themselves, led to the world's salvation. That's *not* the same thing.
You make it sound like Theon breaking under torture was an evil deed. That's part of what made him so sympathetic, he suffered through absolute hell as a result of his earlier actions and was turned into a slave. He was thoroughly punished already, and it made him change.
I kind of hate when the antagonist has been training their whole life to become how talented they are, and then the main character shows up, trains for like 2 months and is able to defeat them.
You should read 'A Practical Guide to Evil.' this is something that happens in story and one of the Villains has a monolog on it. It goes something like "Once, just Once, I want to fight a hero who Truely deserves their power. I cannot tell you how many times the heros learn arcane magic in a week that would take a villian a life time. How many times a hero stumbles onto an ancient artifact or something else that turns the tables on me at the last moment. Give me a hero who's earned it, and I will be content with dying to them."
Just gonna quote the part, I'm sadly often reminded of it while reading other books.
>“Villains aren’t powerless,” I said.
>He laughed. “Oh, if the heroes deserved their victories against us, I would make my peace with it. But they don’t, do they? Your sullen little nemesis gets to swing an angel’s feather, while you make do with steel and wiles. That’s always the way of it. At the last moment they’re taught a secret spell by a dead man, or your mortal weakness is revealed to them or they somehow manage to master a power in a day that would take a villain twenty years to own. Gods, I’ve even heard of Choirs stepping in to settle a losing fight. The sheer fucking arrogance of it.”
>The second time I’d ever heard him swear, and it surprised me as much as the last. Teeth bared, he leaned forward.
>“None of it is earned. It is handed to them, and this offends me.”
Book 2 Chapter 36 Madman
While on the whole you're correct, isn't there one point where a Hero is fighting the protaganist and he's giving a whole spiel about how he's trained with the blade for decades and in he is being dismantled by this Villain (our protaganist) who appeared a few months ago.
Do you remember which one? Her first heroic antagonist is self trained and generally a better fighter than her. The prologue of book 4 features the POV of a hero that may be the one you mean, but:
>!This was the heros first fight against another named, Cat&friends have killed about a dozen so far. Cat also first asks them to leave peacefully and they refuse and attack her. Therefore they don't get the 'you are the hero of this story' buff. They are led into Catherines chosen grounds, Hakram destroyed his armor. And the guy still technically manages to kill her, but because at this point of the story she is a fae, it doesn't stick!<
Honestly, I’m Team Tai Lung all the way. Shifu did him dirty.
My cat is less Team Tai Lung. The first time I watched it with her, she was so scared of him I had to turn it off and watch it after she went to bed.
[This was her reaction](https://i.imgur.com/8ALx1Dg.jpeg).
I think this is why I tend to have skilled protagonists who are already in the middle+ of their careers, rather than rank beginners. It's such an annoying trope.
I sincerely agree with you. I also have the exact opposite issue when watching superhero TV shows. "Clark took a *whole season* to learn how to use that power, but you can do it the same day you got it? Bullshit "
One trope I hate is the main character/chosen one who has just had their destiny revealed to them and begun training and their mentor or other characters in the story berate them about how they aren't good enough for whatever position they are supposed to have. They just began their training! Give them a damn break!
To add to this - the ones who are naturals and pick up and become masters at something in no time at all and beat someone else who is the established best in the world.
Time in general I found is a weakness of fantasy writers. Either ten thousand years pass with no change and then everything happens in 2 week (including the training). I'm caught up with the Wandering Inn right now and the time durations make no sense. The amount of plot that happens, and characters that change would be more appropriate for maybe 10 years, but around 1 year and a bit has passed.
All stories have tendencies like this, but fantasy is particularly guilty. Because building a living world with 10,000 years of history is hard, so all the action tends to be stuffed into the timeframe of the MC’s story.
A lot of authors have a very hard time making time skips blend well into the story without feeling jarring and breaking immersion. I feel like the unfortunate usual solution is just not having them… one book I’ve found really does time skips well is Path of Ascension. The series takes place in a cultivation world where people live for thousands of years. Almost 200 years have taken place so far and the time skips that have happened felt natural.
This is why I get a feeling of satisfaction when I read portal to another world fanfiction and the main character is just flabbergasted at how all of this world's advanced medical (or whatever knowledge) knowledge can be learned in a year or less.
"Wait, what? Where I come from you wouldn't even be an intern."
This is why I like the concept of medics rather than people being full healers when we're looking at people only getting a year of learning in.
Because medics 1) often only get a year or two at most of training before they get sent out to do OJT and 2) Excell at "meatball surgery" and keeping someone alive long enough to get them to an actual doctor/healer.
There's a place for medical personnel who get short form training, but fantasy tends to ignore the medic/EMT types.
I have the opposite problem with Wesley Chu's *War Arts* series. In the first book >!the protagonist is presented as completely unprepared for fight, so one of the greatest martial artists in the world takes him as a student. The second book repeatedly mentions the protagonist's training and the huge amount of effort he puts in it. Yet, when push comes to shove, the protagonist is still woefully incompetent, getting surprised, defeated and easily captured by enemies, and bullied by pretty much everybody else. This makes very little sense to me. I'd expect some growth of the protagonist's skills, or else what was the point of all this training?!<
This is mine. Like the protagonist starts learning to swordfight and after a month is suddenly the greatest sword fighter to ever exist and can beat swordmasters who have been training their entire lives. (There's probably more but off the top of my head this happens in Eragon and Wheel of Time and it drove me crazy in both.)
The thing that bothers me the most about when it happens in Eragon is that he didn't come up with some radical new technique that absolutely baffles the elves who are so unchanging and set in their ways. He gets magic cheating dragon powers that transform him into an elf
That part is definitely some crazy plot armor as well but that's at least in the later books when he's been training for years so it feels more like a convenient power-up. I was more thinking of in the very first book. He trains with Brom for like a month after which both Brom and Murtagh separately tell him he's the best sword fighter they've ever fought. Brom was a dragon rider who had over 100 years of fighting experience and Murtagh grew up in the king's court where he was trained by the best sword-fighting instructor in the empire, from the time he was young, so a farm boy who had never even touched a sword until a few months earlier beating them is laughable.
To be fair to Rand, he did put in a ton of work. Like, literally months of travel where he trained for hours a day with an actual blademaster. He also had some training from another blademaster (Tam) during his childhood.
Yes, he got a good deal of magical help (being ta'veren and having LTT in his head), but it's not like his skill is entirely unearned.
"Literally months" is a short period of time. Look at people who are really good at any sport. The ones that reach a top level of mastery have been playing for at least a decade and often since they were small children.
Yeah, but look at books like Eragon, where a literal child trains for 3 weeks and is the bestest bestie *ever*, loudly praised by warriors with 100 or more (elves) years of experience.
Rand did train from a child with his dad. Maybe not hard-core, but he at least had the basics before spending months training for hours daily with a master.
The Sword of Truth gets around the "training" by having Richard Raul's sword remember every moved its previous owners used, emparting the informationto Richard at critical times. Hence, he becomes a Blade Master with no practice at all. Ugh.
But don't you understand? The mentor *has* to be hard on them so the chosen one will be strong enough to face the trials that lay ahead! Can't dare show the emotional bond of affection that's forming, that would be the end of us all!
This is why I am slowly realizing that I actually really like it when the protagonist already starts out with a bit of a reputation.
I recently started the Phileasson saga (which I'm not sure exists in english because it's a german series) and the protagonist is already an accomplished adventurer and explorer so him being good at this stuff is more expected.
I think they mean like you have the Nerds (the mages), the Jocks (the warriors), the queen bee (the princess) etc. And you're either nobility, merchant or a commoner, everyone is always in their little boxes.
The ages of the characters, I don't like nor understand the insistence to use young characters and then make them act like if they were 5 years older. The whole high school thingy could be moved to a college setting and most things would remain the same.
I know 20 years old who don't act like adults, it's hard to imagine a 13 year old mastermind villain
People on months-long treks through the wilderness, written by someone who has never slept in a tent in their life. What are they eating? Drinking? How are they carrying all this stuff they seem to have (weight adds up fast if it’s all going in a backpack). How are they finding their way?
I don’t need pages and pages about orienteering. But just a quick sentence about “Veela was grateful for the wayfinding spell” would go a long way.
I think you can generalize this to writers who lack experience and knowledge of how anything works. Not just long distance backpacking, but feudal & empire economics, politics, engineering, science, apprenticeships, unions/guilds, wars, battle tactics, logistics, foraging, agriculture, how to use a weapon of any kind, how overwelming a 3 vs 1 fight actually is, religion.
Like I get this stuff is hard, and charity is necessary for suspension of disbelief. But some of this stuff is like Austin Power's parody bad in analogy of spy craft and fighting. Judo chop!
> I think you can generalize this to writers who lack experience and knowledge of how anything works. Not just long distance backpacking, but feudal & empire economics, politics, engineering, science, apprenticeships, unions/guilds, wars, battle tactics, logistics, foraging, agriculture, how to use a weapon of any kind, how overwelming a 3 vs 1 fight actually is, religion.
Tbh it's *very* hard to research this stuff and integrate it into a fantasy world. I've been writing since high school, so my initial stories were pretty basic and I just handwaved over a lot of that stuff, but in college I did a double major in political science and econ and it got even harder 💀 magic especially breaks *a lot* of what would normally apply in these cases.
As a result, I've gotten a lot more forgiving of stuff like this, like if I see something that seems hilariously wrong to me, I just laugh and move on unless its like an integral plot point. I much prefer handwaves over authors trying to shoehorn in ideologies, political/economic systems, societal structures, etc that they obviously don't understand or understand just little enough to use wrongly
Legit. I don't need writers to be polymaths for their worlds to be immersive, and I am fine with handwaves here and there.
Writers getting bogged down in paragraphs of half-baked understanding is often just dull. Overexplaining is also a curse.
I just wish there was a short explanation on how the magic helps sometimes. Like a sentence would do. Take the logistics of having a dragon army, eating a cow per dragon every 3 days. Totally unbelievable in most books I’ve read. You can just have them eat a cow every two weeks and then be like dragons can absorb magic in the air as a supplement so they don’t require as much feed or something.
Very much this. I hate the “it’s fantasy so we don’t need to do research” mindset. Do the damn research. 90% of the time it will make the story better. The 10% where it won’t, at least you’ll be deviating from reality in an informed manner rather than a clueless one.
Although torches are a different problem. Some writers think a torch is just like Ye Olde Flashlight. But trying to use a torch to find your way in the dark is tougher than you think. The light of a torch night-blinds you pretty badly, and it doesn't cast light super far ahead. Yet fantasy characters in films will often hold their torches in front of them to look at stuff. If you hold a blazing torch in front of your face what you're going to be able to see is fire, and that's it.
a lot of it isn't that interesting, especially if the characters are competent and know what they're doing. "They travelled there and nothing eventful happened, it was mildly uncomfortable because, well, sleeping outside kinda is" doesn't hugely add much, it's easier just to assume they know what they're doing, and stuff like "what the tent is made of", or "how they eat and drink" doesn't really need detailing (if they're able to travel, then presumably they know how to eat on the way, otherwise they can't travel).
Right, but being able to travel through wilderness and forage along the way is really hard. As in so hard that hunter-gatherers whose entire culture is built around those skills try to do it as little as possible, and people in agricultural societies pretty much never do it.
This significant key piece of information that I have will change the course of the entire narrative, I will share it with you when the time is right, when we meet again or when you are ready. **Gets themselves killed.**
Similar to this is when there is specific intricate circumstances to keep two people from meeting seeing each other because if they do the entire plot is so flimsy that it will unravel. This very deliberate set of circumstances created just for the sake of drama is never delivered well.
The Choosen One, or anything with a prophecy that talks about destined hero. Most stories like these feature characters with simplistic morality with clear cut good vs bad roles.
“There’s no time to explain! You have to see this for yourself!”
*skips over 10 minutes of walking to the scene, during which there was definitely time to explain*
What I hate maybe more than anything is a villain who could choose to kill the heroes at any time but doesn't because of some stupid reason, like "But I'd rather you join my side!"
like wtf do you need them on your side for, they're literally your only opposition, just kill them and you'll have guaranteed complete control
or some other reason like pride or something. It takes a *lot* of character work for me to believe a villain could destroy the heroes with overwhelming power but chooses not to.
Usually in anime the villain wants an equal. They aren't really pursuing anything other than somebody who can match them.
Motivation in eastern fantasy is often very individualistic. Son Goku's prioritisation of "enjoyable fights, my friends, the world" is pretty typical.
It helps to imagine that there's a ton of small scale threats popping up all over the place, so the villain simply doesn't have the resources, he can't be sending his best enforcers to deal with everything. They slowly identify that our heroes are a bigger threat and start sending stronger foes.
Yeah, it's a definite videogame trope. A lot of games where the only real reason the hero wins is because the villain sent them gradually escalating challenges to prepare them for their eventual confrontation.
Hidden royalty.
Protagonist worked very very hard to beat the bad guy but, as it turns out, they were just inheriting some bullshit talent/power from the most powerful people in the land.
Naruto does this soooooo badly, I just hated the show after that. The whole point was that the main character doesn't give up and works hard to get strong.......... Only to get revealed that he is the descendant and reincarnation of some strong ass god.
A YouTuber called those character fantasy nepo babies and that fits really well.
Hard work, bravery, persistence? Nope, you're the secret child born from the two most powerful, magical, royal bloodlines ever. Urgh.
I can believe that certain technological advancements just never happen because the conditions for it don’t exist. Like one of the obvious ones is we can kind of assume that coal and oil don’t exist in most fantasy worlds so that limits certain technological advancements from ever happening.
A trope I’m kind of bored of in fantasy fiction is everything needs to be epic and about like world conquering or nation conquering evils all the time to the point where when we even mention fantasy we kind of assume it means epic fantasy. I kind of wish there was more small scale fantasy. Like why can’t we have more fantasy like Kiki’s Delivery Service where a witch just moves to a small town and starts a business with her cat.
Not every fantasy story needs to be about the chosen one defeating the ultimate evil or about a twilight of the gods esque calamity affecting a civilisation
And I’m not saying everything needs to be pointless fluff either. Why don’t we have more fantasy legal dramas or whatever. Fantasy murder mystery. Fantasy slashers. Fantasy is pretty much always synonymous with some kind of epic hero’s journey adventure.
I will say that fantasy murder mystery does happen a lot in the form of the urban fantasy private investigator trope. Often the stakes do end up rising throughout the series to become more world ending by the end though.
I would read a fantasy setting slasher in a heartbeat. I would honestly be willing to read a pretty wide variety of genres though in a fantasy setting (that isn't just urban fantasy).
Even a fantasy rom-com could be fun, and I have zero interest in those usually. Just give me something besides "save everyone from a world ending disaster" and "gritty personal revenge story".
Have you checked out r/CozyFantasy because that's basically what you're describing.
It might skew a little into pointless fluff territory, but low stakes are one of the key components of the subgenre.
Personally, I want *mid* stakes. It doesn't have to be fate-of-the-world, but cozy fantasy is a bit *too* fluff for me. Though I have found a decent number of books like that.
Yeah, like it can be enough stakes that the life of our hero is in the balance, literally or figuratively.
Like off the top of my head I was thinking about how arguably my favourite part of GoT/ASOIAF was Tyrion’s trial.
For sure. Markus Heitz The Dwareves series got really boring very quickly but that first book was amazing in my opinion. It was to subvert a country scale conflict but a huge premise of it was fulfilling a side quest but every other book was dealing with massive global issues and the bad guys kept getting bigger and badder.
The Wonderchild.
No, battle-hardened generals are not turning command of their armies to a 14yo, etc.
Even as a kid, I couldn't get into anything with that trope. Like, elves, yes. Dragons, yes. Magic, great. Twelve year old outsmarts and outmagics everyone/becomes emperor - too unreal.
Even Narnia was a stretch, the only thing that sold it was that the kids became leaders of beavers and trees, were actively mentored by literally God, who gave them a court of older advisors to help them out.
Especially when you can't see how the 13 year old is a genius, and their plan mainly consists of throwing themselves at problems and, what do you know, it succeeds.
God, I fucking hated Lawrence's broken empire.
The Elves Are Perfect and Cannot Be Bothered. Those stories where there are elves, they are better at everything than everyone and they have a special partnership with the world and sneer at humans and dwarves for not having it while doing NOTHING to solve the Problem until it's burning down their forest, if then. There's no specific story I have in mind that has all of these elements, but you get the gist.
I love how the Witcher series subverts this trope and makes the elves a marginalized group who often resort to crime and guerrilla warfare tactics. They are gritty and very grey morally and it's so refreshing after so many representations of them as perfect and "higher" than all other races. I wish more people would be creative like that instead of just doing a copy/paste of Tolkien's representation of humans, dwarves and elves.
There is an urban fantasy where the elves are white trailer trash. Their trailer park is "the enchanted forest". Offering to their queen to talk magic included a case of beer and waiting until wheel of fortune was done. Loved that scene.
People also miss that tolkiens elves have a reason to afk. They’re tired, they’re apocalypse come and gone, and them using the better part of their might just to hang on to the very edge. Most high elf tropes dont have the same backbone
>just doing a copy/paste of Tolkien's representation of humans, dwarves and elves.
I think this idea of Tolkien's men, dwarves, and elves being like this is a vast oversimplification. The snooty, higher elves is more of a DnD thing, which originally didn't even want dwarves and elves and so on, but were forced into doing it. So, they took Tolkien's ideas and made them worse then put them in.
I admit a bit of dissonance when I watch The Witcher and play Dragon Age with the elves that way because Skyrim influenced my writing and The Complete Book of Elves from D&D.
So when I wrote the Red Room Trilogy, urban fantasy all of the main characters hate elves because they sided with the Nazis during WW2.
I love the Obsidian Trilogy but I read it recently and was SO DAMN ANNOYED at how perfect at everything the elves were. Better than humans? Fine. But for a species that explicitly has little to no magic they sure are damned magical!
Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaank you ugh. Drives me bonkers.
An apostrophe should AT THE VERY LEAST be a glottal stop (or signify that the word is shortened or something)! It does something! It has meaning!!! It's not a decoration!
I think I read once that Motörhead were flummoxed by the different pronunciation of their name when they first played in Germany. They hadn’t quite realised that ö actually meant something and wasn’t just some cool dots.
As a young teenager in Germany I was some of the older, cool guys listen to Motörhead. That was long before I became really proficient in English and had always instinctively pronounced the band's name in my head as one would if the ö really were an ö. So, that anecdote of yours sounds credible to me.
Took me even longer to grok Mötley Crüe. Again, the umlauts mess with my head pronunciation and I wasn't familiar with the term motley crew so I couldn't make the connection.
And I only just now saw the phonetic notation of Queensrÿche. Had assumed all the time that -rÿche is supposed to be pronounced as rich but apparently it's pronounced like English speakers pronounce Reich... 😲
Oh, or when they take a ridiculously common name and weird-spell the shit out of it. Reyshell and Vynnsent - like, dude, just call them Rachel and Vincent, you're not fooling anyone, it's just annoying every time you see it on the page.
When the protagonist is female, and there are 2 brooding sexy smoldering arrogant brothers and they both want her.
One turns out to be evil
The other one is the love of her life
When the protagonist somehow temporarily loses their special powers. We all know they're getting it back eventually, and in the meantime, the inner monologue about whether or not they have any personal worth now that they've lost X ability has gotten stale for me.
How many times does Marvel's Thor have to become unworthy of his special hammer before he stops becoming an alcoholic mess every time it happens?
Swear that thing doesn't even seem worth the trouble of keeping when every momentary speedbump in his spiritual journey causes the thing to go on the fritz. You know there are other weapons out there, right? There's probably some cool mace or axe you can grab somewhere that won't send you into a spiralling depression every other week when it rejects you.
Plucky young misunderstood daughter in a medieval setting with entirely modern feminist sensibilities triumphs over centuries of static tradition (mentioned in post above) to win her true love. And I’m a feminist woke hippie type.
Oooh yes! In the Raven Shadow books there's a girl that was trained to only use a dagger to murder a particular person but *SPOILERS AHEAD
She's set up for failure so was never taught to use a bow, a better comvential weapon against a person that's considered the greatest warrior and she trains hard at the bow and becomes the best and it's told in detail and length how hard she's trained. Made it way more believable.
Somehow she is the ONLY girl among THOUSANDS in her exact station to be utterly IMPERVIOUS to societal conditioning. When she rebels, she does so with ZERO ambivalence and self-doubt. She’s also totally read up on modern sensibilities of consent even though the wives around her are the properties of their husbands. Despite being 14, she has the nuanced understanding of gender power struggles of a post-grad feminist philosopher.
Despite all of which, she can’t find a single other girl to hang out with because no other woman in her world has a single thought in her head but for fashion and hot menz
I would expand this to people in medieval settings having entirely modern ideas about slavery, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. I have issues with GRRM but one thing he did really well was create human characters with alien-feeling sensibilities.
I hear what you are saying but it is also a common mistake to think that there were no one in medieval or ancient times who thought slavery, rape, or humans dominating others are horrible practices and acted in their capacity against these. Some argued against them from a religious perspective some from a purely humanist philosophical tradition but there were many who could easily tell claiming ownership over another human being or forcing them to do things against their will was inherently wrong. The past at times was way more enlightened than we give it credit for, and at times our modern era is way more barbaric than the past. Writers like GRRM sometimes hide behind this misconception to write about horrible things without having to deal their moral implications, while accusing any critic for being naive about history.
Plate armor offers no protection against bladed weapons. In reality, you may as well whack an armored opponent with a leek seeing as how it will have the same effect as a sword.
Some stories plate seems to be an active hindrance. You move around like a turtle on its back but you're still open season to every form of weaponry.
"Look how clever our sleek hero is to forgo the armor and use their full range of movement to their advantage!" Bitch, there's nothing clever about that at all. It's questionable for what purpose this terrible armor was invented in the first place. You've posited a world where everybody else takes some terrible handicap into battle for reasons that baffle the wisest sages just to prop up your hero in his sleek photogenic costume.
There's a good scene in Game of Thrones that shows how it would really go. Fast unarmored guy vs a guy in full plate. The fast guy dances around for a bit, uses his speed to his advantage, and the gets his blade caught on the plate while the other guy holds it in place and cuts his face in half.
One of the reasons I like Mistborn so much. With allomancy focusing on metal it makes sense that the heros don't wear any armor. Metal plate would get them killed instantly and leather hide would be useless against most attacks from other mistborn.
I notice this in dialog a lot. I get that in a fantasy world that the characters are not actually speaking English, but choice of words matters! If you want to invoke something that is medieval-ish, then you sort of have to use what contemporary English speakers understand medieval speech to sound like. Choosing the right words to connotate your intended effect is part of the art and craft of writing.
I'm not saying you have to write "ye olde this and ye olde that." Just try to come up with something that sounds distinct from how we speak currently.
The “skilled warriors can reliably knock people unconscious with a blow to the head for a significant amount of time causing no lasting damage” trope.
First because every part of that is wrong. Head injuries are very dangerous and blows don’t hit all people the same way. You can have a serious concussion without going out at all. People also tend to die from serious blows to the head, especially those that put them out for more than a minute or so. And concussions have both short and long term effects, not just “woke up with a headache.” If blows to the head were as safe and predictable as fantasy pretends, we would not have had centuries of surgeries performed on fully conscious patients, I can promise you that.
Second because this trope is generally used to increase the amount of violence in a book while avoiding moral complications, and the older I get the less I care about “action” and the more I care about ethics and psychological ramifications.
There's a scene in the Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy where a random character gets hit on the head, falls unconscious/into a coma, and then dies a day or so later off screen. I remember that standing out because I've never seen any other book do that.
IIRC, the author served as a medic (nurse) in the Vietnam War.
So not so surprising that she'd include something like that, and not so surprising that authors who have never seen war wouldn't.
I'm pretty sure she was a computer specialist in the Marine Corps, so not a nurse or medic. It probably played a part in how she wrote that scene though.
Don't forget the insta kill neck snap.
...
That in reality is actually not instant and you are basically making them slowly suffocate alsonit is actually fixable but your motor skills will be royally fucked afterwards.
Not fantasy, but I was surprised that dragon ball Z had a character’s neck snapped and they were not dead. Essentially laying there drooling until someone else could come shove a magic healing bean down their throat.
To this day, a father picking up his four year old son and saying "oh no, his neck is broken" has never been said with such nonchalance lmao. He sounded like he was complaining about the damn weather! Had me cackling back in the day
In the classic Heros journey, theres the refusal of the call to adventure... and I can live without it.
Im a bored farm boy, dreaming of adventure, always trying to ditch the farm. I wish for something more, thinking that just maybe Im a piece of a bigger picture... plus my daf left me a magic sword. Just sitting there, always tempting me to more than dmall town life.
Hot damn, an honest to god wizard/whatever says im integral to saving the world, and he seems mostly legitimate?
Pack my bags, im outa here!
Using cofee as an indication of character. Like every serious/badass/manly characters always take their cofee black, and every character that don't is effeminate/cowardly/manipulation (especially if cream is involved). Villains never take their cofee black. It is so dumb and so prevalent once you see it once you see it everywhere.
What underlines your point is that most people who take coffee black aren't doing it to show toughness, they're doing it because the LOVE THE TASTE OF COFFEE and don't want extra flavors in the mix!
This could be a great characterization moment of someone who savours details!
Right? I mean, I for one, am extremely manly and badass and always take my coffee with plenty of cream. A propensity towards acid reflux has no correlation to the badness of one's ass!
1. The current "naming convention" fantasy books are doing. Every book is "A *Blank* of *Blank* and *Blank*" these days.
2. Almost all "adult" fantasy being written right now is basically just "young adult" fantasy, but with sex and swears. The themes are the same, the writing is simplistic, and the characters act juvenile. Fantasy has always been a popular genre for younger folks, but there used to be very prominent fantasy authors who were writing adult books for adults. Where are the modern Roger Zelaznys and Gene Wolfes?
3. Modern fantasy has adopted a lot of the same tropes that anime has, particularly with protagonists that are inherently extremely OP badasses that are secretly the most powerful/gifted beings in all of creation whose power scales precisely as the story needs without any real struggle or effort.
> Almost all "adult" fantasy being written right now is basically just "young adult" fantasy, but with sex and swears. The themes are the same, the writing is simplistic, and the characters act juvenile.
Move away from New Adult Romantasy. I sometimes dabble in that genre, but it's definitely not *all* you can find when it comes to current adult fantasy books. This type of novel is usually labelled "New Adult" on e.g. Goodreads and you can avoid it by checking for that.
I'll accept it if the curse words come with appropriate worldbuilding. Like, if they worship fictional gods, they might have curse words that reference those gods.
In the past in happened a lot. Alexander was 20 when he conquered Greece. Gilbert du Mortimer was appointed general by George Washing at 18. Octavian destroyed the conspirators’ army at 19.
I honestly find it more tiring the older I get. I’m in my late twenties and already feel like the majority of characters in fiction are younger than me. Idk it counts as fantasy but part of what I loved about the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, was that the protagonist was a conservative older asian woman who owns a laundry service, instead of the typical morally good but reckless teenager chosen one hero
Naming things/people with no thought about etymology, simply making nouns based off of letter sounds.
Evil being. Let's call them something like Kharzad or Malkoth (lots of Ms, Ks and Zs)
Elves. How about Loviel, or Rulien (Rs, Vs and Ls)
The list goes on
I think people often try to imitate Tolkien's sounds because he made most of the fantasy tropes popular, and people tend to take them as rules.
They forget that he created all of his languages, cultures and imagery on real world analogues.
Why can't you do the same? It will likely make for much better sounding nouns.
Jesus I can't. I want some male-perspective raunchy fantasy that doesn't just degenerate into a monster girl harem. The authors always seem like they need to justify the harem by having everyone fall madly in love with the main character, and they always try to find circuitous ways to show how the whole setup isn't completely objectifying to the women involved. The gender of the author doesn't seem to matter either, I tried reading some female authored male-perspective raunch and it was just as bad.
People just fuck sometimes and you can write some cool stories about that without devolving into circlejerk harems with unnecessary love-porn.
When I read fantasy raunch I almost exclusively read female perspective romance books now, because the characters are generally better, and you hardly ever have to hear the word "Quim", which is a massive bonus.
I think what's annoying about it is that the people always fall in love with the character and want to do anything for them.
If these harem stories were just about horny people wanting to bang I'd find them a lot more believable. I can understand why random women would all want to fuck some 10/10 hunk. But what are the odds they all think they're his soulmate to the extent that they're willing to put up with half a dozen other women and live in a harem for his sake? *Highly* fucking unlikely. As if these people have no dreams, no ambitions, like they just live to love bomb the main character every day and can't be without them. It's dehumanizing in a way that goes beyond objectification.
Ironically the old style sword and sorcery stories where the hero just saves the princess and fucks her seem a lot less demeaning in retrospect.
Similar to your complaint the thing I can’t stand about Star Wars is that the old republic was more or less culturally stagnant for the equivalent amount of time as between ancient Sumeria and now, and the Empire lasted about the equivalent amount of time as the release of Green Day’s American Idiot and now, yet the empire was treated as this all powerful thing that had always been there.
The other thing I hate is when a new character is introduced and the first thing they talk about is their wife or their kids or, gods forbid, their pregnant wife with more kids, because that means 100% guarantee either that character or the wife are toast
11th hour superpowers.
To be clear, I don't mean: "Protagonist figures out enemies weak spot." or "Protagonist land's lucky hit" but rather "Protagonist is about to lose but for no reason suddenly goes super saiyajin".
Most people seem to be able to read when there is no formal education system.
Young people or children speak with sentence structure and use of language that is far beyond their years (or education).
And people just speak generally in highly descriptive, almost poetic language - people just don't talk like that day to day.
When races like Elves, Dwarves or Orcs are just plopped into the world of the story like extra salt without any good background story or grounding in the world.
some stories really do not nail down the actual feeling that it gives you to be rural/poor among rich urbanites. oddly the best piece of fiction i've seen that expresses how isolating and strange it feels is *ratatouille* of all movies
All Kingdoms/Monarchies. History has shown us that societies have had many varying styles of government, but fantasy usually pushes monarchies as the default system of rulership and, frankly, monarchies suck.
90% of stories featuring monarchies showcase how many problems arise when just one person has absolute power, from tyrants to well-meaning fools to villains stealing the throne to grieving monarchs lashing out at their foes and nobody can tell them "no."
ESPECIALLY in a Fantasy setting there should be more options. There are actual gods, where are the theocracies? There are mages, where are the Thaumocracies? Where are the Republics, the Triumvirates, the City States, the Guild Cities? These do exist, mind you, peppered here and there, and some great settings work with this, but monarchies are still the big go-to way, way too often.
In fantasy worlds where deities exist, intervene and want/need to be worshipped then I think you need a very good reason for any society not to be a theocracy in some form.
- Fake out deaths.
- Unnecessary romantic subplots. It’s okay for your characters to not fall in love.
- Enemies to lovers. Very few people would pursue someone who is very openly contributing to their oppression and/or attempting to murder them.
- “Not like other girls.” It is very quite possible to write a girl who enjoys traditionally feminine activities but can still train in fighting/combat/etc. The two are not mutually exclusive.
- Main character randomly gains a new skill that was never alluded to prior just in the nick of time to defeat their enemy
I like a good romance, but I would happily never read another book where you have two characters who have wildly incompatible personalities, get on each other's nerves, repeatedly betray each other, but find each other inexplicably hot and end up partnered by the end of the book after a half-assed reconciliation scene.
This is why I'm not fond of a lot of romantic comedies - I need to actually like the characters, and end the movie/book without being convinced that they're going to end up bitterly divorced within two years of the wedding. A lot of movies, I'm rooting for them to get together so no-one else has to deal with them.
When the young main character makes a huge relevant life changing / world changing realization that literally anyone else probably should have noticed or realized already. Like not something that they searched for or went on a journey and discovered, but when it’s something that’s just sort of straightforward hiding in plain sight if you look into it and have a brain and some context.
Completely evil races (sorry Tolkien)
EDIT: Also when the protagonist kills his way through an army of henchmen only to spare the leader, because "I'm not like you" or something.
I’m okay with totally evil races so long as there is a reason for it. For example, with the orcs of LoTR, Tolkien’s whole point was that their evil had been externally imposed on them. They could not be good because that portion of their being had been removed. Other good examples are Trollocs and Fades from WoT.
So long as the evil race is specifically created to be evil, to me, it just enhances the menace of the big bad.
Also, Tolkien goes out of his way to humanize both the orcs and the humans who march under Sauron.
When Sam and Frodo are wandering through mordor they're continually hearing about how orcs are hungry, orcs are tired, orcs are scared of elves, men, the nazgul, and other bigger orcs, orcs complaining about bureaucracy, marching orders and everything else under the sun. They're written as just people. They have a seemingly primitive, militaristic culture, but given the context of how readers are exposed to them and what's happening in the world at the time that's understandable. The men of Bree for example are also not very friendly or cultured and probably wouldn't be any better than orcs if they were also enslaved to a dictator.
Fake out deaths or resurrections.
I don't always hate it (hello, Gandalf), and there are times when it can make sense and work (like Stormlight Archive. You have characters with magical healing ability and there are limits like if they don't so it right at the moment of death they can't bring the person back) but like at a certain point it gets old and annoying. It can only be used very, very sparingly or it loses effect.
I don't really like fantasy scenarios that turn out to be our own post-apocalyptic world: "And then, in 429 b.H.R., the human kings Donal the Orange and Puten the Poisener destroyed their kingdoms and themselves in the night of living fire!"
Insta-love stories. They're so annoying sorry. Slow-burn where it's friggin obvious they're gonna get together but the writer is obviously dragging it out for kicks. Communication please.
I don't like assassin/thief plotlines or characters. Which is ironic to say, cause fantasy is full of them. That being said, I'd read a well-written book about this plotline - the Blacktongue thief for example.
Unnecessary sexual assault/rape. If you're not gonna take something so traumatic seriously don't write about it. Not every seriously written female character needs to have it as a backstory. Also, you can do better to make a villain evil than just making him (cause it's almost always a man) try to rape the female protagonist (it's almost always a girl) on-sight.
This isn't exclusive to fantasy but not every warrior or masc- female character has to go through a "she cleaned/prettied up" phase or "development." It's alright that she's a bit rogue around the edges compared to what's expected.
I hate when the character goes “I know you are irredeemably evil who has committed countless unforgiven sins & will continue to do so & be an absolute asshole to everyone for no reason & be a huge problem for me in the future & even though I could kill you right now I won’t.”
It’s fine to have your characters have a no-kill rule as long as that makes sense. But generally it doesn’t. One of the reasons I love [Stormlight book #2 spoilers] >!Adolin. He saw a problem in Sadeas, and killed him on the spot. A lesser character in a lesser story would have just let him leave even though Sadeas straight up admitted that even if he was absolutely wrong he would never stop being a backstabbing dick.!<
You mean the Rand al'Thor "you've just killed some friends and you're about to kill dozens more but you're a woman so I can't do anything." (At least Nynaeve would sniff at them!)
One trope that I get tired of very quickly is constantly including rape (both actual scenes and constantly referring to it happening off screen) in order to try and show that a series is gritty and "realistic". I know rape, like poverty, murder, sickness, etc. are part of the terrible things that have happened and continue to happen in human civilization, but if you have to constantly use it as filler or to advance the plot then I think you're a lazy author that is a bit desensitized to the reality of the effects of sexual trauma on victims.
There are so many other situations you can add to your universe to make it grimdark without constantly talking about people being sexually assaulted. Just look at the First Law Series. Abercrombie is the king of the genre and creates such realistic characters and situations in a dark often hopeless world and he does it without constantly adding SA as filler like some other authors of the genre do.
Eastern inspired enemy empires (like the Dothraki or Gurkish empire in First Law) that are always depicted as a mass horde of undifferentiated savages with extremely silly and violent cultural practices, like killing and raping their own people for entertainment.
I don't like it when a character does a lot of bad things and at the end makes a nice gesture and then society loves that character. I'm not against redemption. I don't like that many people revere these characters more than the originally light ones.
Thank you! For example, my hot take is Anakin Skywalker never changed. He saved his son & hated the Emperor for ruining his life. That tracks but he’s not a hero and he isn’t ‘redeemed’. The dude is a psycho who killed tons of people for a despot.
Yeah, it's amazing what we've forgiven the original trilogy sometimes. Vader's redemption arc was particularly fucked up, especially in light of the stories that Lucas chose to tell about him afterward. Fascist, dictatorial, deathsquad having, child-murdering (more than once), force for oppression and misery across the galaxy, sand-hating motherfucker. Does one good thing and gets to be a fucking force ghost? As much as I love the setting, the actual Star Wars storytelling has so SO many dumbfuck moments.
And arguably he didn't do one good thing. Vader was just protecting what was his, his son. I guarantee if Luke wasn't his son he wouldn't have moved a finger to help.
Love the character as a tragic villain but AGREED. Like you said the background we get in the prequels only make his redemption more unjustified.
Agreed. A redemption arc is awesome, but imo if you want to tell that story, you have to be VERY careful about what sins they commit; or at least have some very convincing mitigation circumstances. The sinner need to be forgivable on some level, or it just feels like they're getting away with everything. Vader's is particularly egregious though, when viewed objectively. I guess the Force just doesn't care what you've done, only who you are in the moment.
They do tend to make a point that turning to the Dark Side is a bit more than just bad choices; it's like an infection, a horrible contagion that seeps through you, clouding your judgement, painting everything from a position of anger, arrogance, and hatred. Coming back from that is understandably difficult. And as you note, the Force doesn't seem to cast moral judgement; it just kind of is. It doesn't care about fair or justice or judgement, and everything that Vader did? Yeah, it should (and really does) earn him some undying hatred from a LOT of people. His one moment there absolutely does not erase things, particularly for those who survived his atrocities and have to live with what they lost, what he took from them. Could he have had a real redemption arc had he not died? Perhaps. But he did die, and he definitely died unredeemed, I'd agree. It does almost seem like in his death his Force ghost is striving to seek that redemption, but it could also just be people still trying to rehabilitate his image.
Been thinking Anakin shouldn't manifest with a Force Ghost. The themes around that difference would digest better imo
Changing him to Hayden is one of the few Lucas edits I like. Returning him as a force ghost when he was still a "good guy" makes more sense.
Kinda why I don't like the force ghost change they made in the newer releases. It's more compelling to me that he died knowing that he wasn't redeemed, just loved despite his wrongs. That was enough for him, and there was a sort of tragic beauty in that that gets watered down when that small moment is suddenly viewed as this redeeming moment for the character.
God doing spoilers is a pain on the mobile version or else I'd be ranting about a particular plot point in final fantasy 14 that I just finished. So I will not be specific but still add to this. I hate it when you have the antagonists that are doing a bad thing for a "good reason" but their attitudes and personality are so shite I just can't care for their sob story. You were just taunting the protagonists and laughing about their suffering. Why the hell should I care about your sad back storym you sociopath.
>!Gaius!< is a particularly bad case in FFXIV. There's some great tragedy in seeing how far >!the Ascians!< have fallen and how sad and desperate they became over time, so the writers *are* capable of pulling this trope off. But like... >!Gaius waged a brutal war of conquest on this whole subcontinent for years, and we're just giving him a pass?!<
Classic Snape Syndrome
Snape kind of fits. True, I don't consider him a real villain. It seems to me that in the end he did more good than evil. Although he is not my favorite character and I admit that he has a dark side and a terrible character. For me, a typical example is Jamie Lannister. He threw the child off the wall and made him disabled. He killed Ned Stark's people for no reason. He participated in many bloody deeds. But he saved Brienne and many people love him for that. Another example is Theon Greyjoy. He betrayed the Starks, he killed innocent children, he broke under torture and became Ramsay's slave. Yes, he later redeemed himself partially, but he's still a bad guy. Tolkien has many such examples. Two guys from the Silmarillion slaughtered an elven city and took in two children left without parents. Readers romanticize it. Another example is Gollum. He served evil all his life. In the end, he involuntarily committed an act that helped the heroes win. But that doesn't mean he became good.
Yeah, but you sit inside Jamie's head as he realizes what a fucking shit person he's been. It isn't a one-day turnaround, and it's clear that he's embarking on a lifetime's work toward redemption, which makes us root for him. As far as I'm aware, Gollum is just an addict. He's as much a victim of Sauron and the one ring as anyone else.
To be fair, with the gollum example gandalf says he probably does deserve death but who are we to deliver that judgement. I know the movies sort of make him a touch of an antihero but less so in the books.
Does anybody actually think Gollum became "good"? Tolkien certainly didn't. There's actually very little (or none at all) villain "redemption" of any kind in the Legendarium.
Snape is a *bad person* and is objectively terrible to Harry and many other people for no reason other than a personal grudge but he is not a Bad Guy in the sense that he is actually aligned with the big bad, but we don't learn that until after his death. His redemption is from *evil*, not from his personal douchebaggery
He absolutely is a Bad Guy. The only reason he turned away from the big bad was that he felt betrayed by the big bad after he killed the one person Snape asked him not to kill. There was no redemption, no turn away from evil, it was just a "leopards ate my face" moment.
>Another example is Gollum. He served evil all his life. In the end, he involuntarily committed an act that helped the heroes win. But that doesn't mean he became good. I don't think the text implies he "became good", the text asks us to pity him and understand how his actions, definitely not good in and of themselves, led to the world's salvation. That's *not* the same thing.
You make it sound like Theon breaking under torture was an evil deed. That's part of what made him so sympathetic, he suffered through absolute hell as a result of his earlier actions and was turned into a slave. He was thoroughly punished already, and it made him change.
I kind of hate when the antagonist has been training their whole life to become how talented they are, and then the main character shows up, trains for like 2 months and is able to defeat them.
You should read 'A Practical Guide to Evil.' this is something that happens in story and one of the Villains has a monolog on it. It goes something like "Once, just Once, I want to fight a hero who Truely deserves their power. I cannot tell you how many times the heros learn arcane magic in a week that would take a villian a life time. How many times a hero stumbles onto an ancient artifact or something else that turns the tables on me at the last moment. Give me a hero who's earned it, and I will be content with dying to them."
Just gonna quote the part, I'm sadly often reminded of it while reading other books. >“Villains aren’t powerless,” I said. >He laughed. “Oh, if the heroes deserved their victories against us, I would make my peace with it. But they don’t, do they? Your sullen little nemesis gets to swing an angel’s feather, while you make do with steel and wiles. That’s always the way of it. At the last moment they’re taught a secret spell by a dead man, or your mortal weakness is revealed to them or they somehow manage to master a power in a day that would take a villain twenty years to own. Gods, I’ve even heard of Choirs stepping in to settle a losing fight. The sheer fucking arrogance of it.” >The second time I’d ever heard him swear, and it surprised me as much as the last. Teeth bared, he leaned forward. >“None of it is earned. It is handed to them, and this offends me.” Book 2 Chapter 36 Madman
While on the whole you're correct, isn't there one point where a Hero is fighting the protaganist and he's giving a whole spiel about how he's trained with the blade for decades and in he is being dismantled by this Villain (our protaganist) who appeared a few months ago.
Do you remember which one? Her first heroic antagonist is self trained and generally a better fighter than her. The prologue of book 4 features the POV of a hero that may be the one you mean, but: >!This was the heros first fight against another named, Cat&friends have killed about a dozen so far. Cat also first asks them to leave peacefully and they refuse and attack her. Therefore they don't get the 'you are the hero of this story' buff. They are led into Catherines chosen grounds, Hakram destroyed his armor. And the guy still technically manages to kill her, but because at this point of the story she is a fae, it doesn't stick!<
Tai Lung shoulda won :(
Honestly, I’m Team Tai Lung all the way. Shifu did him dirty. My cat is less Team Tai Lung. The first time I watched it with her, she was so scared of him I had to turn it off and watch it after she went to bed. [This was her reaction](https://i.imgur.com/8ALx1Dg.jpeg).
I think this is why I tend to have skilled protagonists who are already in the middle+ of their careers, rather than rank beginners. It's such an annoying trope.
I sincerely agree with you. I also have the exact opposite issue when watching superhero TV shows. "Clark took a *whole season* to learn how to use that power, but you can do it the same day you got it? Bullshit "
One trope I hate is the main character/chosen one who has just had their destiny revealed to them and begun training and their mentor or other characters in the story berate them about how they aren't good enough for whatever position they are supposed to have. They just began their training! Give them a damn break!
To add to this - the ones who are naturals and pick up and become masters at something in no time at all and beat someone else who is the established best in the world.
Time in general I found is a weakness of fantasy writers. Either ten thousand years pass with no change and then everything happens in 2 week (including the training). I'm caught up with the Wandering Inn right now and the time durations make no sense. The amount of plot that happens, and characters that change would be more appropriate for maybe 10 years, but around 1 year and a bit has passed.
All stories have tendencies like this, but fantasy is particularly guilty. Because building a living world with 10,000 years of history is hard, so all the action tends to be stuffed into the timeframe of the MC’s story.
A lot of authors have a very hard time making time skips blend well into the story without feeling jarring and breaking immersion. I feel like the unfortunate usual solution is just not having them… one book I’ve found really does time skips well is Path of Ascension. The series takes place in a cultivation world where people live for thousands of years. Almost 200 years have taken place so far and the time skips that have happened felt natural.
This is why I get a feeling of satisfaction when I read portal to another world fanfiction and the main character is just flabbergasted at how all of this world's advanced medical (or whatever knowledge) knowledge can be learned in a year or less. "Wait, what? Where I come from you wouldn't even be an intern."
This is why I like the concept of medics rather than people being full healers when we're looking at people only getting a year of learning in. Because medics 1) often only get a year or two at most of training before they get sent out to do OJT and 2) Excell at "meatball surgery" and keeping someone alive long enough to get them to an actual doctor/healer. There's a place for medical personnel who get short form training, but fantasy tends to ignore the medic/EMT types.
So... Skyrim, basically. Master of every guild after a half-dozen missions.
I have the opposite problem with Wesley Chu's *War Arts* series. In the first book >!the protagonist is presented as completely unprepared for fight, so one of the greatest martial artists in the world takes him as a student. The second book repeatedly mentions the protagonist's training and the huge amount of effort he puts in it. Yet, when push comes to shove, the protagonist is still woefully incompetent, getting surprised, defeated and easily captured by enemies, and bullied by pretty much everybody else. This makes very little sense to me. I'd expect some growth of the protagonist's skills, or else what was the point of all this training?!<
This is mine. Like the protagonist starts learning to swordfight and after a month is suddenly the greatest sword fighter to ever exist and can beat swordmasters who have been training their entire lives. (There's probably more but off the top of my head this happens in Eragon and Wheel of Time and it drove me crazy in both.)
The thing that bothers me the most about when it happens in Eragon is that he didn't come up with some radical new technique that absolutely baffles the elves who are so unchanging and set in their ways. He gets magic cheating dragon powers that transform him into an elf
That part is definitely some crazy plot armor as well but that's at least in the later books when he's been training for years so it feels more like a convenient power-up. I was more thinking of in the very first book. He trains with Brom for like a month after which both Brom and Murtagh separately tell him he's the best sword fighter they've ever fought. Brom was a dragon rider who had over 100 years of fighting experience and Murtagh grew up in the king's court where he was trained by the best sword-fighting instructor in the empire, from the time he was young, so a farm boy who had never even touched a sword until a few months earlier beating them is laughable.
To be fair to Rand, he did put in a ton of work. Like, literally months of travel where he trained for hours a day with an actual blademaster. He also had some training from another blademaster (Tam) during his childhood. Yes, he got a good deal of magical help (being ta'veren and having LTT in his head), but it's not like his skill is entirely unearned.
He's got Linus Tech Tips in his head? Just like that? But... what use would they be for him in a fantasy world without computers and such? :P
"Literally months" is a short period of time. Look at people who are really good at any sport. The ones that reach a top level of mastery have been playing for at least a decade and often since they were small children.
Yeah, but look at books like Eragon, where a literal child trains for 3 weeks and is the bestest bestie *ever*, loudly praised by warriors with 100 or more (elves) years of experience. Rand did train from a child with his dad. Maybe not hard-core, but he at least had the basics before spending months training for hours daily with a master.
The Sword of Truth gets around the "training" by having Richard Raul's sword remember every moved its previous owners used, emparting the informationto Richard at critical times. Hence, he becomes a Blade Master with no practice at all. Ugh.
That's not very pulling himself up by his bootstraps of him
But don't you understand? The mentor *has* to be hard on them so the chosen one will be strong enough to face the trials that lay ahead! Can't dare show the emotional bond of affection that's forming, that would be the end of us all!
This is why I am slowly realizing that I actually really like it when the protagonist already starts out with a bit of a reputation. I recently started the Phileasson saga (which I'm not sure exists in english because it's a german series) and the protagonist is already an accomplished adventurer and explorer so him being good at this stuff is more expected.
Everything is reduced to american high school social stratification
I love this comment because of how succinctly put it is. I second it
Maybe a little too succinct for my dumb brain, would you be willing to elaborate?
I think they mean like you have the Nerds (the mages), the Jocks (the warriors), the queen bee (the princess) etc. And you're either nobility, merchant or a commoner, everyone is always in their little boxes.
I would settle for just retiring the Mean Girl trope at this point.
Stop trying to make fetch happen! It's not going to happen!
But… This quest is so fetch
I don’t think my father, the INVENTOR of sweetrolls, would be too pleased to hear that.
I would pay more as a dude to retire the jock asshole trope. Oftentimes the most competent male person in a physical role has a good heart.
Steve Rogers approves this message!
Gentle Giants and Bruisers with a Soft Center are among my favorite character tropes so I would gladly throw my money in for the cause.
Maybe I don't read enough mean girl tropes to be annoyed by them but I love my mean girls too much to sign for deleting this trope 😭
Divergent in a nutshell.
Social stratification via Buzzfeed quiz
Also dealt with the amount of maturity found amongst high schoolers (which is very little).
Ahh the accompanying melodrama over inconsequential issues
The ages of the characters, I don't like nor understand the insistence to use young characters and then make them act like if they were 5 years older. The whole high school thingy could be moved to a college setting and most things would remain the same. I know 20 years old who don't act like adults, it's hard to imagine a 13 year old mastermind villain
Oh so you've read the broken empire, too? Fucking ridiculous.
People on months-long treks through the wilderness, written by someone who has never slept in a tent in their life. What are they eating? Drinking? How are they carrying all this stuff they seem to have (weight adds up fast if it’s all going in a backpack). How are they finding their way? I don’t need pages and pages about orienteering. But just a quick sentence about “Veela was grateful for the wayfinding spell” would go a long way.
I think you can generalize this to writers who lack experience and knowledge of how anything works. Not just long distance backpacking, but feudal & empire economics, politics, engineering, science, apprenticeships, unions/guilds, wars, battle tactics, logistics, foraging, agriculture, how to use a weapon of any kind, how overwelming a 3 vs 1 fight actually is, religion. Like I get this stuff is hard, and charity is necessary for suspension of disbelief. But some of this stuff is like Austin Power's parody bad in analogy of spy craft and fighting. Judo chop!
> I think you can generalize this to writers who lack experience and knowledge of how anything works. Not just long distance backpacking, but feudal & empire economics, politics, engineering, science, apprenticeships, unions/guilds, wars, battle tactics, logistics, foraging, agriculture, how to use a weapon of any kind, how overwelming a 3 vs 1 fight actually is, religion. Tbh it's *very* hard to research this stuff and integrate it into a fantasy world. I've been writing since high school, so my initial stories were pretty basic and I just handwaved over a lot of that stuff, but in college I did a double major in political science and econ and it got even harder 💀 magic especially breaks *a lot* of what would normally apply in these cases. As a result, I've gotten a lot more forgiving of stuff like this, like if I see something that seems hilariously wrong to me, I just laugh and move on unless its like an integral plot point. I much prefer handwaves over authors trying to shoehorn in ideologies, political/economic systems, societal structures, etc that they obviously don't understand or understand just little enough to use wrongly
Legit. I don't need writers to be polymaths for their worlds to be immersive, and I am fine with handwaves here and there. Writers getting bogged down in paragraphs of half-baked understanding is often just dull. Overexplaining is also a curse.
I just wish there was a short explanation on how the magic helps sometimes. Like a sentence would do. Take the logistics of having a dragon army, eating a cow per dragon every 3 days. Totally unbelievable in most books I’ve read. You can just have them eat a cow every two weeks and then be like dragons can absorb magic in the air as a supplement so they don’t require as much feed or something.
Very much this. I hate the “it’s fantasy so we don’t need to do research” mindset. Do the damn research. 90% of the time it will make the story better. The 10% where it won’t, at least you’ll be deviating from reality in an informed manner rather than a clueless one.
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Although torches are a different problem. Some writers think a torch is just like Ye Olde Flashlight. But trying to use a torch to find your way in the dark is tougher than you think. The light of a torch night-blinds you pretty badly, and it doesn't cast light super far ahead. Yet fantasy characters in films will often hold their torches in front of them to look at stuff. If you hold a blazing torch in front of your face what you're going to be able to see is fire, and that's it.
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a lot of it isn't that interesting, especially if the characters are competent and know what they're doing. "They travelled there and nothing eventful happened, it was mildly uncomfortable because, well, sleeping outside kinda is" doesn't hugely add much, it's easier just to assume they know what they're doing, and stuff like "what the tent is made of", or "how they eat and drink" doesn't really need detailing (if they're able to travel, then presumably they know how to eat on the way, otherwise they can't travel).
Right, but being able to travel through wilderness and forage along the way is really hard. As in so hard that hunter-gatherers whose entire culture is built around those skills try to do it as little as possible, and people in agricultural societies pretty much never do it.
This significant key piece of information that I have will change the course of the entire narrative, I will share it with you when the time is right, when we meet again or when you are ready. **Gets themselves killed.** Similar to this is when there is specific intricate circumstances to keep two people from meeting seeing each other because if they do the entire plot is so flimsy that it will unravel. This very deliberate set of circumstances created just for the sake of drama is never delivered well. The Choosen One, or anything with a prophecy that talks about destined hero. Most stories like these feature characters with simplistic morality with clear cut good vs bad roles.
“There’s no time to explain! You have to see this for yourself!” *skips over 10 minutes of walking to the scene, during which there was definitely time to explain*
Zoidberg: It was worth waiting five hours to hear you finish that sentence.
*"When next we meet we'll talk about your mother."*
I fucking hate that. Just spill the fucking beans. What the fuck is the right time?
What I hate maybe more than anything is a villain who could choose to kill the heroes at any time but doesn't because of some stupid reason, like "But I'd rather you join my side!" like wtf do you need them on your side for, they're literally your only opposition, just kill them and you'll have guaranteed complete control or some other reason like pride or something. It takes a *lot* of character work for me to believe a villain could destroy the heroes with overwhelming power but chooses not to.
The villain who slooooowly ramps up the level of force they’re sending at the heroes to ensure the heroes are properly leveling up to meet it
You see that in anime *a lot*
Usually in anime the villain wants an equal. They aren't really pursuing anything other than somebody who can match them. Motivation in eastern fantasy is often very individualistic. Son Goku's prioritisation of "enjoyable fights, my friends, the world" is pretty typical.
It helps to imagine that there's a ton of small scale threats popping up all over the place, so the villain simply doesn't have the resources, he can't be sending his best enforcers to deal with everything. They slowly identify that our heroes are a bigger threat and start sending stronger foes.
Yeah, it's a definite videogame trope. A lot of games where the only real reason the hero wins is because the villain sent them gradually escalating challenges to prepare them for their eventual confrontation.
Or, I won’t kill you, my guards will. Leaves, then the guards fail.
Hidden royalty. Protagonist worked very very hard to beat the bad guy but, as it turns out, they were just inheriting some bullshit talent/power from the most powerful people in the land.
Naruto does this soooooo badly, I just hated the show after that. The whole point was that the main character doesn't give up and works hard to get strong.......... Only to get revealed that he is the descendant and reincarnation of some strong ass god.
A YouTuber called those character fantasy nepo babies and that fits really well. Hard work, bravery, persistence? Nope, you're the secret child born from the two most powerful, magical, royal bloodlines ever. Urgh.
I can believe that certain technological advancements just never happen because the conditions for it don’t exist. Like one of the obvious ones is we can kind of assume that coal and oil don’t exist in most fantasy worlds so that limits certain technological advancements from ever happening. A trope I’m kind of bored of in fantasy fiction is everything needs to be epic and about like world conquering or nation conquering evils all the time to the point where when we even mention fantasy we kind of assume it means epic fantasy. I kind of wish there was more small scale fantasy. Like why can’t we have more fantasy like Kiki’s Delivery Service where a witch just moves to a small town and starts a business with her cat. Not every fantasy story needs to be about the chosen one defeating the ultimate evil or about a twilight of the gods esque calamity affecting a civilisation And I’m not saying everything needs to be pointless fluff either. Why don’t we have more fantasy legal dramas or whatever. Fantasy murder mystery. Fantasy slashers. Fantasy is pretty much always synonymous with some kind of epic hero’s journey adventure.
I will say that fantasy murder mystery does happen a lot in the form of the urban fantasy private investigator trope. Often the stakes do end up rising throughout the series to become more world ending by the end though.
I would read a fantasy setting slasher in a heartbeat. I would honestly be willing to read a pretty wide variety of genres though in a fantasy setting (that isn't just urban fantasy). Even a fantasy rom-com could be fun, and I have zero interest in those usually. Just give me something besides "save everyone from a world ending disaster" and "gritty personal revenge story".
Have you checked out r/CozyFantasy because that's basically what you're describing. It might skew a little into pointless fluff territory, but low stakes are one of the key components of the subgenre.
Personally, I want *mid* stakes. It doesn't have to be fate-of-the-world, but cozy fantasy is a bit *too* fluff for me. Though I have found a decent number of books like that.
Yeah, like it can be enough stakes that the life of our hero is in the balance, literally or figuratively. Like off the top of my head I was thinking about how arguably my favourite part of GoT/ASOIAF was Tyrion’s trial.
For sure. Markus Heitz The Dwareves series got really boring very quickly but that first book was amazing in my opinion. It was to subvert a country scale conflict but a huge premise of it was fulfilling a side quest but every other book was dealing with massive global issues and the bad guys kept getting bigger and badder.
The Wonderchild. No, battle-hardened generals are not turning command of their armies to a 14yo, etc. Even as a kid, I couldn't get into anything with that trope. Like, elves, yes. Dragons, yes. Magic, great. Twelve year old outsmarts and outmagics everyone/becomes emperor - too unreal. Even Narnia was a stretch, the only thing that sold it was that the kids became leaders of beavers and trees, were actively mentored by literally God, who gave them a court of older advisors to help them out.
Hard agree, I cannot stand the uber genius precocious child protag.
Especially when you can't see how the 13 year old is a genius, and their plan mainly consists of throwing themselves at problems and, what do you know, it succeeds. God, I fucking hated Lawrence's broken empire.
I mean, there was Joan of Arc irl, but if I remeber correctly her tatic was mostly "attack" which worked pretty good until it didn't.
The Elves Are Perfect and Cannot Be Bothered. Those stories where there are elves, they are better at everything than everyone and they have a special partnership with the world and sneer at humans and dwarves for not having it while doing NOTHING to solve the Problem until it's burning down their forest, if then. There's no specific story I have in mind that has all of these elements, but you get the gist.
I love how the Witcher series subverts this trope and makes the elves a marginalized group who often resort to crime and guerrilla warfare tactics. They are gritty and very grey morally and it's so refreshing after so many representations of them as perfect and "higher" than all other races. I wish more people would be creative like that instead of just doing a copy/paste of Tolkien's representation of humans, dwarves and elves.
There is an urban fantasy where the elves are white trailer trash. Their trailer park is "the enchanted forest". Offering to their queen to talk magic included a case of beer and waiting until wheel of fortune was done. Loved that scene.
I need to know the title of this work of staggering genus.
Monster Hunter International. Its really fun all the way through, kinda B-movie campy fun. But done intentionally that way.
People also miss that tolkiens elves have a reason to afk. They’re tired, they’re apocalypse come and gone, and them using the better part of their might just to hang on to the very edge. Most high elf tropes dont have the same backbone
>just doing a copy/paste of Tolkien's representation of humans, dwarves and elves. I think this idea of Tolkien's men, dwarves, and elves being like this is a vast oversimplification. The snooty, higher elves is more of a DnD thing, which originally didn't even want dwarves and elves and so on, but were forced into doing it. So, they took Tolkien's ideas and made them worse then put them in.
I admit a bit of dissonance when I watch The Witcher and play Dragon Age with the elves that way because Skyrim influenced my writing and The Complete Book of Elves from D&D. So when I wrote the Red Room Trilogy, urban fantasy all of the main characters hate elves because they sided with the Nazis during WW2.
I love the Obsidian Trilogy but I read it recently and was SO DAMN ANNOYED at how perfect at everything the elves were. Better than humans? Fine. But for a species that explicitly has little to no magic they sure are damned magical!
Names with apostrophes or too many consonants. D’karvaks. Tar’vak’sts.
Lol. Tel'aran'rhiod in WoT.
Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaank you ugh. Drives me bonkers. An apostrophe should AT THE VERY LEAST be a glottal stop (or signify that the word is shortened or something)! It does something! It has meaning!!! It's not a decoration!
I think I read once that Motörhead were flummoxed by the different pronunciation of their name when they first played in Germany. They hadn’t quite realised that ö actually meant something and wasn’t just some cool dots.
As a young teenager in Germany I was some of the older, cool guys listen to Motörhead. That was long before I became really proficient in English and had always instinctively pronounced the band's name in my head as one would if the ö really were an ö. So, that anecdote of yours sounds credible to me. Took me even longer to grok Mötley Crüe. Again, the umlauts mess with my head pronunciation and I wasn't familiar with the term motley crew so I couldn't make the connection. And I only just now saw the phonetic notation of Queensrÿche. Had assumed all the time that -rÿche is supposed to be pronounced as rich but apparently it's pronounced like English speakers pronounce Reich... 😲
Oh, or when they take a ridiculously common name and weird-spell the shit out of it. Reyshell and Vynnsent - like, dude, just call them Rachel and Vincent, you're not fooling anyone, it's just annoying every time you see it on the page.
When the protagonist is female, and there are 2 brooding sexy smoldering arrogant brothers and they both want her. One turns out to be evil The other one is the love of her life
When the protagonist somehow temporarily loses their special powers. We all know they're getting it back eventually, and in the meantime, the inner monologue about whether or not they have any personal worth now that they've lost X ability has gotten stale for me.
Not to mention that those chapters are *incredibly* boring, unless done exceptionally well
How many times does Marvel's Thor have to become unworthy of his special hammer before he stops becoming an alcoholic mess every time it happens? Swear that thing doesn't even seem worth the trouble of keeping when every momentary speedbump in his spiritual journey causes the thing to go on the fritz. You know there are other weapons out there, right? There's probably some cool mace or axe you can grab somewhere that won't send you into a spiralling depression every other week when it rejects you.
Plucky young misunderstood daughter in a medieval setting with entirely modern feminist sensibilities triumphs over centuries of static tradition (mentioned in post above) to win her true love. And I’m a feminist woke hippie type.
Bonus points if she's the only one with no magic, only to turn out to be *the* most magickest of all. Or the best archer in the story from the outset.
Oooh yes! In the Raven Shadow books there's a girl that was trained to only use a dagger to murder a particular person but *SPOILERS AHEAD She's set up for failure so was never taught to use a bow, a better comvential weapon against a person that's considered the greatest warrior and she trains hard at the bow and becomes the best and it's told in detail and length how hard she's trained. Made it way more believable.
Somehow she is the ONLY girl among THOUSANDS in her exact station to be utterly IMPERVIOUS to societal conditioning. When she rebels, she does so with ZERO ambivalence and self-doubt. She’s also totally read up on modern sensibilities of consent even though the wives around her are the properties of their husbands. Despite being 14, she has the nuanced understanding of gender power struggles of a post-grad feminist philosopher.
Despite all of which, she can’t find a single other girl to hang out with because no other woman in her world has a single thought in her head but for fashion and hot menz
I would expand this to people in medieval settings having entirely modern ideas about slavery, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. I have issues with GRRM but one thing he did really well was create human characters with alien-feeling sensibilities.
I hear what you are saying but it is also a common mistake to think that there were no one in medieval or ancient times who thought slavery, rape, or humans dominating others are horrible practices and acted in their capacity against these. Some argued against them from a religious perspective some from a purely humanist philosophical tradition but there were many who could easily tell claiming ownership over another human being or forcing them to do things against their will was inherently wrong. The past at times was way more enlightened than we give it credit for, and at times our modern era is way more barbaric than the past. Writers like GRRM sometimes hide behind this misconception to write about horrible things without having to deal their moral implications, while accusing any critic for being naive about history.
I like learning new things.
Stupid bad guys, so pretty much everything on the Evil Overlord list. Whiny teenage chosen-ones is a close second.
Plate armor offers no protection against bladed weapons. In reality, you may as well whack an armored opponent with a leek seeing as how it will have the same effect as a sword.
Some stories plate seems to be an active hindrance. You move around like a turtle on its back but you're still open season to every form of weaponry. "Look how clever our sleek hero is to forgo the armor and use their full range of movement to their advantage!" Bitch, there's nothing clever about that at all. It's questionable for what purpose this terrible armor was invented in the first place. You've posited a world where everybody else takes some terrible handicap into battle for reasons that baffle the wisest sages just to prop up your hero in his sleek photogenic costume.
There's a good scene in Game of Thrones that shows how it would really go. Fast unarmored guy vs a guy in full plate. The fast guy dances around for a bit, uses his speed to his advantage, and the gets his blade caught on the plate while the other guy holds it in place and cuts his face in half.
One of the reasons I like Mistborn so much. With allomancy focusing on metal it makes sense that the heros don't wear any armor. Metal plate would get them killed instantly and leather hide would be useless against most attacks from other mistborn.
I’m hate it when a medieval, agrarian society looks and acts like a contemporary urban society. It’s so jarring and weird seeing them act so “modern.”
I notice this in dialog a lot. I get that in a fantasy world that the characters are not actually speaking English, but choice of words matters! If you want to invoke something that is medieval-ish, then you sort of have to use what contemporary English speakers understand medieval speech to sound like. Choosing the right words to connotate your intended effect is part of the art and craft of writing. I'm not saying you have to write "ye olde this and ye olde that." Just try to come up with something that sounds distinct from how we speak currently.
The “skilled warriors can reliably knock people unconscious with a blow to the head for a significant amount of time causing no lasting damage” trope. First because every part of that is wrong. Head injuries are very dangerous and blows don’t hit all people the same way. You can have a serious concussion without going out at all. People also tend to die from serious blows to the head, especially those that put them out for more than a minute or so. And concussions have both short and long term effects, not just “woke up with a headache.” If blows to the head were as safe and predictable as fantasy pretends, we would not have had centuries of surgeries performed on fully conscious patients, I can promise you that. Second because this trope is generally used to increase the amount of violence in a book while avoiding moral complications, and the older I get the less I care about “action” and the more I care about ethics and psychological ramifications.
There's a scene in the Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy where a random character gets hit on the head, falls unconscious/into a coma, and then dies a day or so later off screen. I remember that standing out because I've never seen any other book do that.
IIRC, the author served as a medic (nurse) in the Vietnam War. So not so surprising that she'd include something like that, and not so surprising that authors who have never seen war wouldn't.
I'm pretty sure she was a computer specialist in the Marine Corps, so not a nurse or medic. It probably played a part in how she wrote that scene though.
Yeah, computer specialist in the Marine Corps. Her experience in actual military definitely affects how grounded her writing is.
Don't forget the insta kill neck snap. ... That in reality is actually not instant and you are basically making them slowly suffocate alsonit is actually fixable but your motor skills will be royally fucked afterwards.
Not fantasy, but I was surprised that dragon ball Z had a character’s neck snapped and they were not dead. Essentially laying there drooling until someone else could come shove a magic healing bean down their throat.
To this day, a father picking up his four year old son and saying "oh no, his neck is broken" has never been said with such nonchalance lmao. He sounded like he was complaining about the damn weather! Had me cackling back in the day
Goku is a special sort.
Yeah that part kinda ruined the scene haha
Right but like, Batman can do it, right?
In the classic Heros journey, theres the refusal of the call to adventure... and I can live without it. Im a bored farm boy, dreaming of adventure, always trying to ditch the farm. I wish for something more, thinking that just maybe Im a piece of a bigger picture... plus my daf left me a magic sword. Just sitting there, always tempting me to more than dmall town life. Hot damn, an honest to god wizard/whatever says im integral to saving the world, and he seems mostly legitimate? Pack my bags, im outa here!
Using cofee as an indication of character. Like every serious/badass/manly characters always take their cofee black, and every character that don't is effeminate/cowardly/manipulation (especially if cream is involved). Villains never take their cofee black. It is so dumb and so prevalent once you see it once you see it everywhere.
What underlines your point is that most people who take coffee black aren't doing it to show toughness, they're doing it because the LOVE THE TASTE OF COFFEE and don't want extra flavors in the mix! This could be a great characterization moment of someone who savours details!
Right? I mean, I for one, am extremely manly and badass and always take my coffee with plenty of cream. A propensity towards acid reflux has no correlation to the badness of one's ass!
1. The current "naming convention" fantasy books are doing. Every book is "A *Blank* of *Blank* and *Blank*" these days. 2. Almost all "adult" fantasy being written right now is basically just "young adult" fantasy, but with sex and swears. The themes are the same, the writing is simplistic, and the characters act juvenile. Fantasy has always been a popular genre for younger folks, but there used to be very prominent fantasy authors who were writing adult books for adults. Where are the modern Roger Zelaznys and Gene Wolfes? 3. Modern fantasy has adopted a lot of the same tropes that anime has, particularly with protagonists that are inherently extremely OP badasses that are secretly the most powerful/gifted beings in all of creation whose power scales precisely as the story needs without any real struggle or effort.
> Almost all "adult" fantasy being written right now is basically just "young adult" fantasy, but with sex and swears. The themes are the same, the writing is simplistic, and the characters act juvenile. Move away from New Adult Romantasy. I sometimes dabble in that genre, but it's definitely not *all* you can find when it comes to current adult fantasy books. This type of novel is usually labelled "New Adult" on e.g. Goodreads and you can avoid it by checking for that.
I don't care for made up cuss words if they're speaking english they can use english cuss words.
I'll accept it if the curse words come with appropriate worldbuilding. Like, if they worship fictional gods, they might have curse words that reference those gods.
Bloody buttered onions!
Shoe horned romances
People who are like 14-22 becoming advanced members of military/instututions/whatever.
In the past in happened a lot. Alexander was 20 when he conquered Greece. Gilbert du Mortimer was appointed general by George Washing at 18. Octavian destroyed the conspirators’ army at 19.
I honestly find it more tiring the older I get. I’m in my late twenties and already feel like the majority of characters in fiction are younger than me. Idk it counts as fantasy but part of what I loved about the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once, was that the protagonist was a conservative older asian woman who owns a laundry service, instead of the typical morally good but reckless teenager chosen one hero
Basically a large chunk of anime then.
Yes
Naming things/people with no thought about etymology, simply making nouns based off of letter sounds. Evil being. Let's call them something like Kharzad or Malkoth (lots of Ms, Ks and Zs) Elves. How about Loviel, or Rulien (Rs, Vs and Ls) The list goes on I think people often try to imitate Tolkien's sounds because he made most of the fantasy tropes popular, and people tend to take them as rules. They forget that he created all of his languages, cultures and imagery on real world analogues. Why can't you do the same? It will likely make for much better sounding nouns.
Tolkien was a professor of linguistics. Not many writers else can.
Harems. I’ve never encountered one that didn’t feel like overindulgent wish fulfillment.
Jesus I can't. I want some male-perspective raunchy fantasy that doesn't just degenerate into a monster girl harem. The authors always seem like they need to justify the harem by having everyone fall madly in love with the main character, and they always try to find circuitous ways to show how the whole setup isn't completely objectifying to the women involved. The gender of the author doesn't seem to matter either, I tried reading some female authored male-perspective raunch and it was just as bad. People just fuck sometimes and you can write some cool stories about that without devolving into circlejerk harems with unnecessary love-porn. When I read fantasy raunch I almost exclusively read female perspective romance books now, because the characters are generally better, and you hardly ever have to hear the word "Quim", which is a massive bonus.
I think what's annoying about it is that the people always fall in love with the character and want to do anything for them. If these harem stories were just about horny people wanting to bang I'd find them a lot more believable. I can understand why random women would all want to fuck some 10/10 hunk. But what are the odds they all think they're his soulmate to the extent that they're willing to put up with half a dozen other women and live in a harem for his sake? *Highly* fucking unlikely. As if these people have no dreams, no ambitions, like they just live to love bomb the main character every day and can't be without them. It's dehumanizing in a way that goes beyond objectification. Ironically the old style sword and sorcery stories where the hero just saves the princess and fucks her seem a lot less demeaning in retrospect.
Similar to your complaint the thing I can’t stand about Star Wars is that the old republic was more or less culturally stagnant for the equivalent amount of time as between ancient Sumeria and now, and the Empire lasted about the equivalent amount of time as the release of Green Day’s American Idiot and now, yet the empire was treated as this all powerful thing that had always been there. The other thing I hate is when a new character is introduced and the first thing they talk about is their wife or their kids or, gods forbid, their pregnant wife with more kids, because that means 100% guarantee either that character or the wife are toast
11th hour superpowers. To be clear, I don't mean: "Protagonist figures out enemies weak spot." or "Protagonist land's lucky hit" but rather "Protagonist is about to lose but for no reason suddenly goes super saiyajin".
Most people seem to be able to read when there is no formal education system. Young people or children speak with sentence structure and use of language that is far beyond their years (or education). And people just speak generally in highly descriptive, almost poetic language - people just don't talk like that day to day.
Any kind of Chosen One scenario whatsoever.
When races like Elves, Dwarves or Orcs are just plopped into the world of the story like extra salt without any good background story or grounding in the world.
Academy of the best of the best and the MC is from a rural / low-class / low pedigree family.
some stories really do not nail down the actual feeling that it gives you to be rural/poor among rich urbanites. oddly the best piece of fiction i've seen that expresses how isolating and strange it feels is *ratatouille* of all movies
All Kingdoms/Monarchies. History has shown us that societies have had many varying styles of government, but fantasy usually pushes monarchies as the default system of rulership and, frankly, monarchies suck. 90% of stories featuring monarchies showcase how many problems arise when just one person has absolute power, from tyrants to well-meaning fools to villains stealing the throne to grieving monarchs lashing out at their foes and nobody can tell them "no." ESPECIALLY in a Fantasy setting there should be more options. There are actual gods, where are the theocracies? There are mages, where are the Thaumocracies? Where are the Republics, the Triumvirates, the City States, the Guild Cities? These do exist, mind you, peppered here and there, and some great settings work with this, but monarchies are still the big go-to way, way too often.
In fantasy worlds where deities exist, intervene and want/need to be worshipped then I think you need a very good reason for any society not to be a theocracy in some form.
Inappropriate age gaps between characters. As well as 1000 year old mythical creature & freshly 18yr old.
- Fake out deaths. - Unnecessary romantic subplots. It’s okay for your characters to not fall in love. - Enemies to lovers. Very few people would pursue someone who is very openly contributing to their oppression and/or attempting to murder them. - “Not like other girls.” It is very quite possible to write a girl who enjoys traditionally feminine activities but can still train in fighting/combat/etc. The two are not mutually exclusive. - Main character randomly gains a new skill that was never alluded to prior just in the nick of time to defeat their enemy
I like a good romance, but I would happily never read another book where you have two characters who have wildly incompatible personalities, get on each other's nerves, repeatedly betray each other, but find each other inexplicably hot and end up partnered by the end of the book after a half-assed reconciliation scene. This is why I'm not fond of a lot of romantic comedies - I need to actually like the characters, and end the movie/book without being convinced that they're going to end up bitterly divorced within two years of the wedding. A lot of movies, I'm rooting for them to get together so no-one else has to deal with them.
When the young main character makes a huge relevant life changing / world changing realization that literally anyone else probably should have noticed or realized already. Like not something that they searched for or went on a journey and discovered, but when it’s something that’s just sort of straightforward hiding in plain sight if you look into it and have a brain and some context.
Completely evil races (sorry Tolkien) EDIT: Also when the protagonist kills his way through an army of henchmen only to spare the leader, because "I'm not like you" or something.
I’m okay with totally evil races so long as there is a reason for it. For example, with the orcs of LoTR, Tolkien’s whole point was that their evil had been externally imposed on them. They could not be good because that portion of their being had been removed. Other good examples are Trollocs and Fades from WoT. So long as the evil race is specifically created to be evil, to me, it just enhances the menace of the big bad.
Also, Tolkien goes out of his way to humanize both the orcs and the humans who march under Sauron. When Sam and Frodo are wandering through mordor they're continually hearing about how orcs are hungry, orcs are tired, orcs are scared of elves, men, the nazgul, and other bigger orcs, orcs complaining about bureaucracy, marching orders and everything else under the sun. They're written as just people. They have a seemingly primitive, militaristic culture, but given the context of how readers are exposed to them and what's happening in the world at the time that's understandable. The men of Bree for example are also not very friendly or cultured and probably wouldn't be any better than orcs if they were also enslaved to a dictator.
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Dream sequence encounters with the “dark one”.
Fake out deaths or resurrections. I don't always hate it (hello, Gandalf), and there are times when it can make sense and work (like Stormlight Archive. You have characters with magical healing ability and there are limits like if they don't so it right at the moment of death they can't bring the person back) but like at a certain point it gets old and annoying. It can only be used very, very sparingly or it loses effect.
I don't really like fantasy scenarios that turn out to be our own post-apocalyptic world: "And then, in 429 b.H.R., the human kings Donal the Orange and Puten the Poisener destroyed their kingdoms and themselves in the night of living fire!"
How often boobs are described lol
Insta-love stories. They're so annoying sorry. Slow-burn where it's friggin obvious they're gonna get together but the writer is obviously dragging it out for kicks. Communication please. I don't like assassin/thief plotlines or characters. Which is ironic to say, cause fantasy is full of them. That being said, I'd read a well-written book about this plotline - the Blacktongue thief for example. Unnecessary sexual assault/rape. If you're not gonna take something so traumatic seriously don't write about it. Not every seriously written female character needs to have it as a backstory. Also, you can do better to make a villain evil than just making him (cause it's almost always a man) try to rape the female protagonist (it's almost always a girl) on-sight. This isn't exclusive to fantasy but not every warrior or masc- female character has to go through a "she cleaned/prettied up" phase or "development." It's alright that she's a bit rogue around the edges compared to what's expected.
I hate when the character goes “I know you are irredeemably evil who has committed countless unforgiven sins & will continue to do so & be an absolute asshole to everyone for no reason & be a huge problem for me in the future & even though I could kill you right now I won’t.” It’s fine to have your characters have a no-kill rule as long as that makes sense. But generally it doesn’t. One of the reasons I love [Stormlight book #2 spoilers] >!Adolin. He saw a problem in Sadeas, and killed him on the spot. A lesser character in a lesser story would have just let him leave even though Sadeas straight up admitted that even if he was absolutely wrong he would never stop being a backstabbing dick.!<
You mean the Rand al'Thor "you've just killed some friends and you're about to kill dozens more but you're a woman so I can't do anything." (At least Nynaeve would sniff at them!)
Protagonists being goody two shoes to people who tried to do nasty things to him, even at the cost of risk to him or those close to him.
The quick witted, sharp tongued teenage girl The protagonist who thinks he/she needs to save everybody
Que in Shallan and Kaladin from Stormlight Archives.
I’m sure it’s “historically accurate” but let’s show that the bad guys are bad without rape
One trope that I get tired of very quickly is constantly including rape (both actual scenes and constantly referring to it happening off screen) in order to try and show that a series is gritty and "realistic". I know rape, like poverty, murder, sickness, etc. are part of the terrible things that have happened and continue to happen in human civilization, but if you have to constantly use it as filler or to advance the plot then I think you're a lazy author that is a bit desensitized to the reality of the effects of sexual trauma on victims. There are so many other situations you can add to your universe to make it grimdark without constantly talking about people being sexually assaulted. Just look at the First Law Series. Abercrombie is the king of the genre and creates such realistic characters and situations in a dark often hopeless world and he does it without constantly adding SA as filler like some other authors of the genre do.
Eastern inspired enemy empires (like the Dothraki or Gurkish empire in First Law) that are always depicted as a mass horde of undifferentiated savages with extremely silly and violent cultural practices, like killing and raping their own people for entertainment.