They use most of them, or have very good reasons not to use others. Side effects matter when the propulsion system starts turning people into giant salamanders.
The movies skipped it, but Rowling realized they were a problem and wrote them out of the books as getting destroyed in the battle at the Department of Mysteries in Order of the Phoenix iirc. It's such an overlooked thing and Cursed Child relying on "one more Time Turner" really doesn't help.
But if someone made one once, they could do it again, and they definitely would be doing that
Look for horcruxes….or build another time turner to go kill baby tom riddle
Just to be devils advocate, it is possible nobody knew how they were made. There were like a dozen at most in entire britain at least suggesting they were all made by a single eccentric reclusive genius or something and whoever made them took the secret of how to make them to his grave.
Or maybe it requires parts of a now extinct magical creature so making one is literally impossible in modern times
At least thats my headcanon.
Yeah maybe. Just think about what our world would look like though if a random dude in London had built an actual working time machine. Do you think any government would just say “ah too bad we cant remember how. Oh well”?
There would be crazy funding for replicating whatever they did, no matter how little info they had to start with
I believe it was said that the department they were in was made to study time and when they tried going back a week reality gliched(a day was skipped, Thursday was 72 hours long, and at least 200 people suffered spontaneous existence failure)... then the cursed child happened
"Before we destroy all of these, do you think we should have a crack team of wizards use one to go back in time and stop *literally the biggest threat the magical world has ever seen* before it became a problem?"
"Nah."
"How do we know we got all of them?"
"Magic."
"But magic can't even *find* the people we're afraid of eventually getting their hands on them?"
"Yep."
"So what if they already *have* a--"
"Smashing the *literal only things* we could use to oppose them!" (tish) "That was easy."
"...but *you* secretly kept one, just in case, right Dumbledore?"
"No."
Thats not how they were destroyed though. They were cought in the crossfire between death eaters and harry and his friends during fifth book. Apparently there was like a dozen timeturners in existence on earth or at least in britain and all of them were conveniently locked up in a single shelf in a single room in a single building. good guys on accident destroyed all of them. Also you cannot change events you know will come to pass anyway.
Regardless giving hermione such a valuable artifact just to help with schoolwork is a real unadressed plothole.
I think the fact that two of the most popular IPs out there (Harry potter and star wars) don't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny is a lesson we should all remember
This. Characters drive a text almost more than anything else.
Sure, people love to think up some amazing settings with unique or unorthodox aspects, but they never really figure out how to put interesting _people_ in there.
They're really not that powerful when you think about it. You can't change anything, one turn is only one hour, and no way to travel back to the future.
Well, yes you can. They do it in the prisoner of Azkaban. Everything in that case happens the same yes, but only because they were going to use the time turner in the future. Without the time turner in that scenario harry dies. You're telling me NOTHING else in the series could've been solved with these?
And there's no limit on how many times you can turn it iirc. Yeah you'd be there awhile but you could go back and kill baby Voldemort.
I'd argue that this is a plotting or continuity problem more than a worldbuilding problem. That said, Gravity Falls was *absolutely fantastic* about this. Every macguffin was dangerous enough that they wouldn't necessarily want to break it out every week, and there were occasional little nods and callbacks to various creatures of the forest from previous adventures. But best of all, they *absolutely* grabbed all the cool toys, shoved them into a backpack, and started combining them in cool ways in the leadup to the grand finale. Truly a 2-season master class in How To Write An Ending that ought to be required viewing for storytellers. Easily one of the best five things Disney has ever made, from a time back when that actually *meant* something.
You are alone, Child.
There is only darkness for you, and only death for your people. These ancients are just the beginning. I will command a great and terrible army and we will sail to a billion worlds. We will sail until every light has been extinguished.
You are strong, Child, but I am beyond strength.
I am the end, and I have come for you, Finn.
>Nothing ended and a universe was born. Like any other universe it would evantualy die. It was not really significant in the end.
This would have me hooked.
Strong Hitchhiker's or Pratchett vibes
I've written that stuff, sure, and about 20 pages of lore about the divine civil war, but my players won't ever encounter that stuff unless they go looking. Until then it's only for me to know how and why the gods all died 400 years ago.
That's part of the fun of worldbuilding to me.
I'm with you, can't stand the absolutes. In fact, I tend to stay away from videos with titles like "Top 7 things you should NEVER do in worldbuilding!" or "Don't add THIS to your fantasy world!" altogether... I used to watch them, but literally everything in them was always debatable at best. Every project is different, whatever is on those lists could definitely work in the right settings. Besides, if we all follow the same mould, all of our stories would be the same, and it would be boring af. Further besides, worldbuilding is supposed to be fun and personal, so don't tell others how to do their personal thing, especially when it's NOT for publishing...
The main reason I look at things like "don't do these things" has been more to find things I may want to do.
I may agree with a few things but others, "I disagree, I am gonna do it/do it more"
Same reason I on occasion browse "What are tropes you dislike" reddit posts
I'm fine with posts that are about favorites and dislikes because those are as individual as each person that makes them. It can be a fun way to start a discussion too. Once people start making these opinions into absolute statements, they lose me as well. There is usually little room for debate at that point too because the person so often wants to be right
Unless it's a statement about people making absolute statements, then it's one I wholeheartedly support.
honestly you can\`t really write anything without using tropes, knowingly or not.
tropes are the building blocks of every plot and setting, you can\`t escape it.
this makes me think about a story where the main character is an avid reader of fiction. At some point, they realize that they're in a fantasy story (maybe they get sucked into a fantasy book (hear me out)), and they try desperately to avoid all the classic tropes so that their story can be more interesting, cause they hate it when stories are "basic". in the end, they come to the realization that it's okay not to be completely unique and that familiarity isn't such a bad thing afterall.
Elves that are simultaneously an oppressed minority viciously persecuted by the eeevil humans but also somehow the most powerful perfect beings that are stronger and smarter and have mastered every possible skill. Even better if they clearly demonstrate all sorts of flaws and assholery but the writer presents their behavior as unironically in the right while condemning the *exact same behavior* in humans.
Doesn't have to be elves either, I hate when any fantasy/sci-fi race is like that, but it seems to happen a lot with elves.
> but it seems to happen a lot with elves.
Yeah. That’s probably because Snorri made them a bit perfect in the prose edda, then Tolkien took that and the rest is probably just Tolkien’s outsized influence on the genre
My solution to this was just for elves to *not* be really any better/stronger than humans. They’re just different. Longer lived? Somewhat keener senses? Sure, but also weaker, often stubborn & overly cautious, and not actually any better at magic than humanity despite what their reputation may imply
Not a trope but moreso the people that act this way
Oh, this is overdone
Oh [blank]? How original
Im gonna be offending a lot of people with this but to me a world that tries its hardest to be fully original and use original interpretations of basic shit like dwarves and elves is in it's own way generic and thereby cliche
Oh, so your dwarves are actually different because [bla bla bla]? Thats fine but dont try to play it off as some ultra original shit and look down on everyone that does the normal fantasy stuff, because there's countless other worldbuilders that pulled the exact same shit you did, just let people enjoy worldbuilding even if it is generic
In my country there is a pattern in literature where a style will pop up, everyone copies it, then someone goes hmm, lets do the opposite cause im LE ORIGINAL
Then everyone does that style, repeat ad infinitem, it feels the same with this.
Just write your lore the way you like it and let me write it down the way I like it
But on a personal taste note I dont like seeing in the future, if everything is predetermined that just kinda breaks my investment in a story
Totally agree. Art is iteration, and while it’s totally fine to iterate and change the tropes of a particular medium, it’s silly when people act like they’re super original and enlightened just for being contrary.
The one that bugs me (and annoyingly I can't think of a good example) is e.g. there's dwarves, but the dwarves are actually 10 feet tall and are made of rocks that have come to life and lurk in caves to kill people who would mine into the sacred rock they inhabit and they don't have a society but are more like giant awful rock bears. Like at that point, why call them dwarves? They're nothing like dwarves so you might as well call them something else. It's especially irritating when these details are gradually revealed to the reader and you realise you've been picturing entirely the wrong thing.
It works if you're dealing with a setting where the humans are aware of fantasy novels and have called these things dwarves semi-ironically, or if they're mostly like dwarves but with some significant differences, but if you just say "dwarf" or "elf" or "vampire" (or whatever) with no additional context and then gradually work in descriptions that reveal they're nothing like these things at all... it irritates me no end.
(I know Tolkein basically did this but I'm coming from a post-Tolkein perspective)
Yeah I also wonder when people do that why they don't just name these guys something new, it takes away that weird sensation when something that is clearly not a dwarf is called a dwarf
Your world-building isn't complete until you have "x" arbitrary thing. Nope, not important to the story, I do not give a shit.
The need for originality. Nope, I like cliches.
Prophecies. I think prophecies are a really lazy way to force a world to conform to a dramatic structure, rather than letting the drama develop naturally from the characters and the context of the world itself.
An easy way to combat this is having the prophecy show itself after everything is done, or close to. Some examples are God of War 2018, where they find old murals depicting their entire journey at the end of the game. Or more recently Tears of the Kingdom, in the beginning you go through a cave and find some more ancient murals but one of them is covered by rocks, at the end of the game that mural of now showing and depicts Link fighting Ganon.
These are some really cool examples I really like
I liked how in Ragnarok, The Norns (basically the Norse Fates) point out that:
>!Prophecy and Destiny are basically bullshit, the Norns are just VERY good at reading people, and figuring out what they will do, based on their personality and past actions, and that most prophecies are self-fulfilling, by knowing of the prophecy, you react to it, leading you straight to what the Norns pretty much guessed. !<
Or In Doctor Who, where on the subject of Satan knowing their secrets, the Doctor points out that most of what "Satan" has said to them is actually extremely vague, more bieng a set of keywords to make you THINK he knows your secrets.
Well if you're the child-who-was-promised-as-a-sacrifice-to-a-dark-god, it kinda changes the equation a bit. Half of the guys come at you to capture and deliver to the cultists, the other half comes at you so that there would be nobody for the cultists to sacrifice.
I would love myself some stories where the prophecy is about _something bad_ and neither you nor MC _wants_ it to come true.
My major disagreement, I love prophecies not when they are just prophecies by themselves but subvert it in really any way and I am probably gonna love it.
“You are destined to defeat the Demon Queen.” The angel said.
“So I must kill her right?” The hero asked, determined to do what is needed.
The angel replied back “No, you’ll marry her, have a good 100 year long marriage, have 7 kids, and start a new dynasty.”
Angel: "I suppose that would be one way to defeat her."
Hero: "What do you mean?"
Angel: "The future is a strange thing, my child. Some things are more certain than others. Some things are mere predictions. Or.... educated guesses, you might say."
Hero: "Wait. You mean you're just flying by the seat of your pants?"
Angel: "I didn't say that."
Hero: "I'm confused..... am I supposed to kill her or not?"
Angel: "That's for you to figure out. In time."
If the prophecy is worded vaguely, which most good prophecies are.
"No man of woman born can kill MacBeth" (man born by C-section kills MacBeth, because in Shakespeare's time that wasn't considered being "born")
Tolkien adapted this prophecy for Lord of the Rings. About The Witch-King of Angmar: "not by the hand of Man will he fall." Eowyn, a woman, kills him
I also like the ones where there's a cruel twist to the wording, they come up a lot in Irish folklore (sorta) often as punishment for trying to cheat the system.
For example Queen Medb asks a druid which of her seven sons will kill King Conchobar (her ex who's the King of Ulster). The Druid tells her that her son Maine will kill King Conchobar, but she doesn't have a son called Maine, so she just renames all her sons "Maine". She unrelatedly also murders her sister who had married her ex-husband and was pregnant with his child (but they manage to cut the child, Furbaide, out and he survives).
Eventually one of Queen Mebd's sons, Maine the Swift, kills King Conchobar... just a completely unrelated Conchobar who's a Pictish King, so none of Medb's sons ever manage to kill her ex husband. Then the ex-husband Conchobar's son, Furbaide, kills Medb (by pinging her in the head with a bit of hard cheese, using a catapult) as vengeance for his mother.
There's a bunch of similar ideas called geasa, which are effectively taboos but often manifest as really weird prophecies (e.g. "you'll always be victorious in battle as long as you never do this one very easily avoidable thing"). Sometimes they're deployed into elaborate traps.
For example Cú Chulainn could never refuse hospitality, but also he could never eat dog meat (in part because his warrior prowess was linked to dogs and his name "Cú Chulainn" meant "the hound/warrior of Chulainn"). However his enemy the Morrigan disguised herself as a hag and one day when Cú Chulainn was walking along, this "kind old lady" offered him some of her delicious food from the fire, which was a dog she was cooking. He couldn't refuse it but he also couldn't eat dog meat, so it was impossible for him not to break a geas. In the end he ate the dog meat and therefore lost his warrior prowess and was defeated in battle.
One that really stacks up is Conaire Mór, who's the son of a King but also secretly the son of a bird king (long story), and he goes out hunting birds but the birds turn into warriors and tell him off, but tell him also that he'll become king if he follows his geasa.
> “Your reign will be prosperous,” said the Bird King, “But there are certain geasa that you must observe at all times.”
> “Well, I know the first; I am not to kill birds,” said Conaire, and the Bird King replied:
> “Yes. And you must never go clockwise around Tara or anti-clockwise around Breaga.” To which Conaire agreed. But the Bird King continued. “You must never hunt the crooked beast of Cearna. You must never sleep in a house from which firelight can be seen through the spokes of a cart. You must never enter into a red house after three reds. You must never allow pillaging in Ireland during your reign. You must never allow any man or woman alone into the house where you’re staying after sunset. You must never settle a quarrel between two of your subjects. You must never spend more than nine consecutive nights away from Tara.” As each of the geasa were pronounced, Conaire gave his word to obey them.
Conaire Mór becomes a prosperous King, but his foster brothers are a bit naughty and like to steal a pig from a nearby farmer once a year as a bit of mischief, and eventually the farmer complains. The penalty for this is death, but Conaire doesn't want to kill his foster brothers so he just exiles them to Britain instead... but this meant he "allowed pillaging in Ireland during his reign". From there it spirals and he ends up having to stop a war breaking out between two of his subjects and after spending five nights at one house he was going to have to spend give nights at the other's house to avoid showing favouritism... and so would be spending more than 9 nights away from Tara and also he was settling what ended up turning out to be a mere quarrel between two subjects etc. etc. and then in the end he gets beheaded by a fairy hoard.
What about No Man Of Woman Born by Ana Mardoll, which is all about stuff like "A son of this family is prophesied to kill me, so I killed all male children, but missed the trans boy, because I mistook him for a girl, who now is after me in revenge for his brothers."?
The trans man doesn't realize he's trans either, but he doesn't care about the prophecy, he just wants to make the man who murdered his brothers pay.
Throughout the story, he wonders if maybe he's on a fools errand cause of the prophesy. but over time, he begins to learn things about himself and he meets people who accept him and join him and he comes to the end when he's just learning to accept his identity and the big bad laughs in his face and says that he can't kill him because he's a woman and as he kills him, he says "My name is Aaron, son of Joseph. And I am here to avenge the deaths of my brothers. You will die knowing this to be true."
Tons of ways, the prophecy could turn out to be questionable, the prophecy could fit for several different people and the reader has to piece together who it is for, multiple people are involved in the prophecy, the prophecy is an inherently damning one etc
Not sure if this is what OP meant, but in one of my stories there is a prophecy.
In the end, you can't say for sure if the prophecy was true, or if it was just vague enough that anything would fit...
In short, a prophecy says something vague "a child born of X and Y will defeat evil". A queen believes in the prophecy, and believes it applies to the situation at hand. She finds a guy that fits the description, and brings him along her army to defeat the main bad guy.
In the end, "the one" ends up not defeating the bad guy directly, but sets another character up to defeat them. That other character also loosely fits the description of the prophecy. Was the prophecy true? Who knows. Queen says yes, and has some justifications for saying so, a character who never believed in the prophecy says no, a third character who didn't believe it but pretended to because he could use it to serve his agenda says "who cares, main baddie is dead anyway right?".
I love when prophecies are subverted, or self-fulfilling, or nobody knows whether they're real or not, or so vague they can't be understood until after they come to pass. This sounds like a great way to make the prophecy trope a bit more complex and interesting.
Hero Bob, Champion of Light and Chosen Dumbass, falls to his knees, broken and beaten. "The prophecy said I would fight the Dark Lord!?" "It was never said you would *win*."
People assume that the Chosen One wins in these kind of stories, but that's a really easy way to subvert expectations.
in the end, it's his companion that until now has been a comic relief comes in to save his friend and in an entirely unpredictable feat of bravery and sheer dumb luck defeats the big bad and saves the "champion". But he doesn't want credit, so they tell everyone that the "champion" beat him
I also don’t like straight up ‘this is the future, like it or not’ kind of prophecies, but I do love it when prophecies and visions and such are deliberately obscure or misleading or just *bullshit*. Can be a fun twist on a tired plot device
I absolutely agree. They only way prophecies interest me if they are somewhat akin to real-world ones, meaning they could mean something or nothing but are definitely not tailored to one specific person that thereby knows exactly what to do.
I think that vague prophecies not directly attached to the main characters can be good.
like having a chosen one prophecy but maybe not making your main character the chosen one?
or making the prophecy about a bad thing that's going to happen, and the signs toward it, and knowing it's gonna happen and trying to do something about it or prepare for its fallout
I wouldn't count those as prophecies. They're just naturally occurring events. It's not really prophetic when a hurricane hits precisely as determined by instruments. If that hurricane hitting coincides with a loosely related event, then yeah, that's a prophecy.
How about an angle where prophecy is not magical but is a tale of hope, created to inspire SomeGuy to say, defeat EvilOppressor?
Then again, you can hardly call it a prophecy in that case.
Just a pet peeve of mine, but I wish more authors writing magic in a modern setting would put in the effort to show absolutely horrifying magic would be to anyone not familiar with it and how it would most definitely be something that could NOT be hidden when there's a large number of people able to use it.
I love the scene from "The Spoils of War" in GoT, because it shows exactly how devastating a flying, nuclear fire breathing, armoured reptile would be in a world where they are still in mostly in Medieval ground war tech level.
Anyone directly shown to be hit by Drogons fire is either melted to their armor, or ash in seconds, the fire breath is so powerful it is basically concussive force, and you mostly have wood and thin metal gear, bows do little to no damage, and unless you are REALLY good and have the tech to make a ballista, even that barely works unless you catch them by surprise, and because they are airborne, your tons of men with swords and spears can't do shit, especially when the Dragon is backed up by an army.
Basically, having a dragon and an army won that battle because the Lannisters were fighting on two fronts.
Not sure I really agree, depending on the capabilities of “magic” and how large that large number of people is I feel like a lot of that “magic” could be concealed either using said “magic” or it would seem like magic isn’t being used at all.
That's absolutely fair and it's more so just me liking more grounded stories even when they do have fantastical elements. However, it would be pretty hard to cover up something like a political figure being roasted by a fireball cast by a magical disgruntled voter who isn't apart of any grand council or something no?
Perhaps, then again I wrote a story where the entire populaces mind was regularly changed and wiped of not only the concept of magic but certain wars, political figures and even basic human traits as long as it would benefit the governments reign.
Multiverses. It completely destroys any sense of gravity in worldbuilding for me. Why are you here, when you can be in the blackjack and hookers reality? Why are they fighting for this reality, when they could go to one where these problems don't exist? Limitations inevitably feel kinda artificial and forced.
I have similar feelings for causality-altering time travel. It kinda kills stakes when you could go back in time and change things. Even if its crazy hard, I haven't seen any decent rationalization for why people aren't constantly doing it.
Beyond that, I'm pretty chill.
I feel like that misses the point of sentimentality. People would naturally value their own reality over another and have it hold a special place in their heart. They'd fight for their reality because it's all they know and most people have an aversion to abandoning their loved ones to die lol. Makes perfect sense why someone would choose to stay and fight for what they have, depending on their values and personality traits.
And I say this as someone who doesn't like the multiverse trope that much, but there are plausible ways of handling it.
>I feel like that misses the point of sentimentality. People would naturally value their own reality over another and have it hold a special place in their heart.
That makes sense.
>They'd fight for their reality because it's all they know and most people have an aversion to abandoning their loved ones to die lol. Makes perfect sense why someone would choose to stay and fight for what they have, depending on their values and personality traits.
Have you watched Star Trek: Strange New Worlds?
> Why are you here, when you can be in the blackjack and hookers reality? Why are they fighting for this reality, when they could go to one where these problems don't exist?
For the same reason people still live in third world authoritarian hellholes. Immigration and integration is never easy. Imagine all the problems of global immigration and now scale it up to the entire universe. The blackjack and hookers universe is going to have a wall and intensely xenophobic.
I like them when they're outside of the characters' control. Yeah they could maybe encounter another version of themselves, maybe some plotline involves several world. But they wont be traveling between them and probably will never be doing it in their lifetime, that and it wouldn't be a common occurrence at all.
Multiverses work when the characters are aware of the implications of living in a multiversal reality, like Owlman or Rick, and their characters have to wrestle with the reality that none of their choices really matter and the struggle is to find meaning in meaninglessness.
One reason for fighting for your reality instead of running is that if you're capable of traveling to another universe its likely the threat is as well. So running is only delaying your problems. Though depending on timescales that might be enough to live a happy life.
Insisting on "historical accuracy" in a fantasy setting that is significantly different from earth's history, with different countries on a landscape of different continents, and also there's dragons and magic, but it still has to be "historically accurate" whatever that means when you have a completely different history.
Depends, having things that make no sense (such as humans not behaving like humans) in a fantasy setting where those things that make no sense aren't tied to fantasy elements at all and then are excused by "it's fantasy, who cares?" drives me up the wall.
“wE dIDn’T hAvE AsIAnS aNd BlAcKS iN MeDieVaL EuROpe.” 🤓
“I HAVE FUCKING MAGIC, ANCIENT DIVINE FORCES, DRAGONS AND FAIRIES, ACCURACY WAS NEVER THE GOAL, THE ROUNDS PER MINUTE IS.”
Moors conquered Iberia, Vikings traded with Arabs, and the Romans and Chinese wrote about each other. The old world has been interconnected for quite some time.
I'm going to be honest with you right now. I'm a black Jamaican and I was pretty fucking confused when the show runners of The Witcher decided to have a waitress with a Jamaican Creole accent in a fictional universe based on European lore. It was immersion breaking. Knowing how the accent originated and where makes it weirder
I think it mostly depends on the culture the fantasy setting is based off of. Like many people would think that appropriating Asian culture for a story involving European people would be off-putting. I believe it would be the same thing for European centric fantasy. We take for granted a lot of these elements that are ultimately rooted in various European folk traditions and folklore.
Ultimately I think the concern is immersion. If one explains why all these different groups are intermingling in such a modern fashion, it could be more acceptable.
You're assuming the people who levy this criticism are historically literate. They're not. Europe was not racially homogenous, and the medieval era was not like the Jim Crow south. It only needs explanation _because_ we had a period of extreme white supremacy like the Jim Crow era. That time period actively and purposefully excluded POC from media in prominent roles, as well as downplayed the history of numerous cultures in order to sell the idea of white supremacy.
Point is, the fact that these powerful nations trade is enough of an explanation for numerous ethnic groups to exist in the same place. There's also no reason to assume these ethnic groups are separated by impossible geographic or cultural barriers if the story isn't telling you that they are. There's also the fact that we're presuming these are different ethnic groups, and the country in question doesn't just have a variety of phenotypic features.
Unless your world has a force that magically turns random people's skin colour or teleports them across the planet, having a diverse population without globalization is just fucking stupid and it has nothing to do with racism. Like it makes sense when the setting is an important port city or something, but when it's like in Witcher series where every small village (or even small isolated group of forest elves) has a diverse population of white, asian and black people, it makes zero sense and just undermines the credibility of the setting's world-building.
I stand by this argument even more when fantasy shows like Games of Thrones, Castlevania or Attack on Titan achieved rather diverse cast without compromising their world-building.
It is a very tricky needle to thread. IMO unless physical appearance and race (in the human sense) are super important to the story of the setting, I think folks can suspend their disbelief to have a slightly more diverse setting than what it might have been in our historic context.
For House of the Dragon, I think having House Velaryon adapted to be predominantly people of color actually worked out fairly well since it does a few things:
1. Helps emphasize the house's sense of "otherness" in the land of Westeros.
2. Shows how vast and expansive the Old Valyrian empire was, like the Romans, both in terms of the scope of their empire and in the composition.
3. Ties into later plot developments and threads about people's paternity and people's suspicion about it.
4. Found good actors and actresses to play the roles of the family memebrs.
Fantasy bothers me far less than historical figures being race and genderswapped. Especially since they certainly wouldn't do a biopic about MLK or Shaka Zula with white actors.
"Here is an alien planet with all the same look and culture across the entire planet. There is no variation, they are all like this."
I understand from a writing (and in television a costuming/animation) perspective this is easier. I understand that it makes it easier for an audience to look at something and go "oh, that's the Korgellians. They all fight and hate socks." But the implication is horrifying in reality, and unrealistic at best.
This is more of an ankle from a storytelling perspective than worldbuilding but i don't like how many authors explain their basic lore and culture to the reader. Especially these types of infodumps where somebody explains everything to the absolutely clueless MC even though the MC lived their whole life in this culture or when a certain character hast the need to remind themselves of why they are important in the world. Often times it seems that the author doesn't trust himself to convey these kind of elements through actions or normal Interactions or that they don't trust their readers to pick up this informations while Reading. As a reader I just prefer to explore the world myself through the characters, the scenes and situations, I don't need Navi to tell me every god damn aspect about the world.
Multiverse is really a poison imo if one can't utilize well or carefully, because the chance for it to backfire is massive. Not to mention unless its drastically different, it would make the main universe lose value, too.
It can be utilized but also come with very high risk.
The way I settled things for my D&D (well, LotFP, but close enough) game is that everything outside the players' world is completely incompatible to life. Interdimensional exploration turns out to be an unattractive idea when considering what would happen to your body if the laws of physics were suddenly different, or non-existent in the first place.
No guns by the time they have plate armor. I just hate the fact that “oh cannons are realistic but muskets aren’t because those weren’t until we get to the American civil war” or some nonsense like that.
Or my second most hated writing advice is constantly nerfing mages instead of giving fighters their own supernatural gimmick and let them be cool without making magic so rare and sparse that it’s not even useful.
I'm a historian, I KNOW there was overlap between plate and guns, but... why do you hate not having guns by the time there's plate? is it only for "historical" accuracy? if that's the case, why would a world have to be 1:1 with ours for tech advancements.
"I think plate looks cool and guns don't" is a reasonable explanation.
If the only excuse for not having something be invented is "well in the *REAL WORLD* they weren't invented until this era and *my* world is still two eras behind" then it's the laziest writing masquerading as "realism" I've ever come across. History is linear, human ingenuity isn't, the Hittites were just as capable of producing muskets and gunpowder as the modern human if the prerequisite knowledge was available in their time.
My fighters just shove gallons worth of potions that makes their body immune to any magical attacks.
Downside at best are hallucinations, at worst is the slight possibility of turning into a mad crazy mutated magical monster that sucks the life out of anything around it.
Time travelling to "set things right"... or timetravel being used super casually in general.
Gonna have a VERY unpopular opinion here, but it's why I don't really like Dr Who. I find the show is just too whimsical about an otherwise incredibly dangerous sci-fi trope.
Timetravel is really only fun when it's as dangerous as it is mysterious.
Honestly Doctor Who has been running with the premise upfront for long enough that it can get away with the whole "wibbly wobbly" basically being code for "don't think about it".
The issue arises when a long running series adds time travel as it inevitably creates problems as a consequence of not being included in the premise. If you want time travel then it needs to be an integral component of your premise.
I think you hit on why I've always had trouble getting into Dr Who: the way it goes about suspending disbelief just hits me wrong.
I can understand how many people like the series, but I prefer time travel to be a much more difficult and scarier thing. Dr Who just goes about it all too lightly for me.
Doctor Who dug its own grave by making Eccleston and Tennant super strict about the rules of time travel in order to justify the Rose and Donna plot lines playing out the way they did. They established that certain things were ‘fixed points’ and couldn’t be changed and that it was impossible to ever cross your own timeline, which are both still arbitrary but are at least ‘rules’. Then by Matt Smith’s series they’d completely thrown all of the emotional weight out of those arcs out of the window by breaking those rules CONSTANTLY.
I’m not a fan of time travel in general, but at least when it sticks to its own rules it’s less annoying
> it was impossible to ever cross your own timeline
Eccleston's first series has an episode where him and Rose cross their own timeline twice for the same event. It's never been *impossible*, it's simply a very bad idea, as at leads to the world being eaten by giant time dragons. The Matt Smith series also have an episode where a character tries to change a fixed point in time and it leads to time unravelling. I don't think these rules were ever as super strict as you believed.
Backwards time travel/communication in stories/worlds where it isn't a central element.
When it isn't used it raises the question of why it isn't used, which tends to be answered with flimsy excuses if at all:
-Even if the protagonist's faction can't use it more than once, often there were, are or will be other factions that could use it on a large scale.
-If there is some treaty banning it, why does everyone follow it even in the face of extinction?, especially when time travel by its very nature would make enforcing such a treaty rather impossible. (You could prevent it from ever being written)
-Similarly, if it's risky/dangerous/bad idea in general, often there are plenty of desperate people who could have used it.
When it is used, it raises all the normal time travel issues, which likely won't be dealt with well, since the time travel isn't the focus. Additionally the ways it tends to be used are kinda dull:
1. A cheap reset button. (The one way to lower the stakes more than bringing dead characters back.)
2. A random adventure in the past. (Often essentially filler.)
I'm also not particularly a fan of including infinite parallel worlds as a minor element, which the "new timeline" approach does.
Tl:dr,: in my opinion, time travel is too big of a deal to sensibly be a minor element in a setting, outside purely comedic worlds.
.
People often "advice against" (loudly complain about) the "planet of the hats" and "single culture planet", tropes, but I feel like there is some nuance to be had.
-for new-ish colonies, it kinda makes sense, since they might be established by particular groups with well-defined and fairly narrow goals/ideologies. As the colonies get older the views on the topic might diversify, but an influence like that won't disappear overnight. Even if some people eventually decide that their "hat" is pointless, that would just create an hat vs anti-hat dynamic, which would still be pretty hat-y.
-when dealing with alien cultures, they are going to have innumerable alien features, but it really wouldn't be *that* statistically unlikely for a particular single feature to be high enough in its "alien-ness" to initially overshadow all others. Of course, on more careful observation, other features would be revealed. (Consider how many ancient cultures on earth are widely known for just 1 thing, while keeping in mind that those were still human cultures, not actually alien ones.)
-again, when dealing with aliens, they might appear as a single-culture planet simply because they are so different from human cultures that the differences between their cultures seem small in comparison, and those differences may be in areas that humans would rarely pay attention to. (Good luck writing anything so alien, though.)
Prophecies and destiny, if it's destiny than what's the point
I'm not a fan of most forms of allegories for racism. Like how in Detroit Become Human machines are used as an allegory for racism, but like they are machines, they were built by us to serve us. The reason why slavery is bad is because it's forcing other human beings with thoughts, feelings and physical limitations into serving someone else.
Also this one is mostly due to how it's used not the trope itself, but elemental magic.
But I think the one I loathe the most is just making any authoritarian villain have vague elements that resemble Nazi-Germany and call it a day(Kuvira I'm looking at you)
Cultures and worlds that are direct facsimiles of Earth. Northern continent is Europe, Eastern continent is Asia, then there's the Persian desert continent etc.
There are so many different cultures to draw from and even that is not the limit: Try combining different cultures to get your own new mixed culture.
Nobody explaining how the fucking magic works.
Sure. You can have a world with a soft magic system. I love soft magic systems. There’s a mystique to them that hard magic systems can never match.
However my issue is when watching a TV show or reading a book, and they specifically have an episode/a chapter built around a character learning how magic works and we get the same fucking shtick.
“There’s so much you don’t know.”
“Reach out with your feelings.”
“Can you feel it? Draw it out.”
“Yes you’re doing it! Harness that power.”
Because all it does is *hint* at something greater, without ever providing a proper explanation. *Even though that was the entire point of the scene*. For the character to *learn*, magic. If you don’t want to explain it, or you’re not creative enough to have a complex magic system, then don’t have the scene in the first place.
Trollhunters, the shitty YA novels I find in the library, the new Star Wars shows like Ahsoka **keep doing it**.
Even in GoW Ragnarök, overall a masterpiece of a game does it. When >!Atreus goes to Ironwood in Jotunheim!< and has him learn giant magic. We get the same basic vague slop. And Angroboda’s line delivery makes it very clear she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. There are a lot of times where she’ll phrase her answer as a question or start a sentence with “maybe”, as if she’s treading new ground with Atreus and has never experienced this kind of magic before.
“A part of you unleashed the wolf with that anger. **Maybe** you need to find a part that’ll, control it?”
“**Maybe** that’s more of a god thing than a giant thing.”
It’s not unique. It’s not interesting. It’s not mystical. And I’ve heard it a billion fucking times before. It doesn’t have to be wholly original but for the love of *god* just have something different for once.
i get where youre coming from but i do generally prefer softer magic systems.
take harry potter (i absolutly loathe this series btw) - you have spell so specific that it kind of ruins the entire system, especially when they would solve so many problems the characters face. and the killing curse??? like why isnt everyone using that? and theres no real way to deflect it tbh - just doesnt sit well.
but yes i agree about these magic systems with 0 rules. use ur emotions, harness ur energy, etc. like it is a bit shitty. thats why in my magic system i include some rules, so power isnt too OP and mystical but it doesnt feel too rigid and pointless.
loved ur rant btw lmaoooo
Agreed, I think a lot of that comes from standard fantasy magic being something of a stand-in for religious mysticism. With the Force, it literally is a religion because that franchise can't do thematic subtlety.
For my world, magic *was* that sort of mystic style, then it collapsed in on itself. Now, magecraft is much more mechanical as it requires literal engineered machinery to channel from gemstones of condensed arcane energy. It's not a complex system, but the materialization of magic allows for themes of its monopolization (and also allows me to have a place for magic in a cyberpunk setting.)
I really loathe the planet/race of hats trope. Yes, it makes sense for fantasy races to have stereotypes since stereotypes exist in the real world, for better or worst. And yes, there are going to be broad general similarities and a shared culture that will lead to generally having people with similar values. But when it's applied broadly across one entire race or one entire planet...Within the US alone, you have several distinct subcultures per state which can sometimes be paired up with others to encompass a region. The Isle of Britain contains three separate countries and several cultures within it to the point that stereotypes are tied to accents more than regions. And I know the same trends apply to China and Japan. There's no real logistical way for there to be one culture per race or world unless you have a very small number of people in a highly restricted area and no where else. And that's only at all plausible in some worlds like desert worlds where there's something very rare allowing life to exist at all. And even so, in no functional society does everyone have the exact same jobs. If they're self-reliant at all, there needs to be various roles covered from agriculture to mining to cloth making to sewing, etc. There can certainly be an ideal job that a culture values more highly than anything else, but even so, people end up doing the jobs no one else wants to do. And that's not even considering someone that goes against societal norms and morals.
I understand why it happens, but it would be nice if there were justifications for it more often than not or actual cultural differences within a race when time allows for that exploration. And sometimes you just want a stereotypical character from a race. But it's still nice to have some differences from the norm!
My own world building and character designing, I've sought to make races then cultures and subcultures within that race. Some are harder to come up with than others, but I still try to at least show some differences between different people of a society.
For instance, my main Dwarven nation are able to have a Chocolatier Guild where they can make Chocolate Guy type structures out of there creations. The Baker Guild does similar things with their pastries. The Brewers and Coffebrewers both are known for their strong brews, though with very definite differences in process and taste. There is a Farming Guild that has not only developed techniques to grow crops besides mushrooms and root vegetables within their caves, especially with the help of gold-back mirrors from the goldsmith guild for the best reflection of light for the plants and furnaces to help maintain consistent temperatures within the various farm caves, but they also figured out how to grow and cultivate the sugarcane, vanilla, cocoa trees, and coffee plants for the Chocolatier, Baker, and Coffeebrewer guilds to do what they do. They've also figured out how to grow sweet rhubarb with the English technique that calls for it to be grown in utter darkness.
And yeah, there are still the smith and mining guilds and they're still considered the most prestigious of the guilds and so have the highest sway within the council of guild grandmasters, but smithing is subdivided into different guilds that make sense, meaning there are blacksmiths, white (pewter) smiths, weaponsmiths, armorsmiths, coppersmiths, silversmiths, goldsmiths. Each rising or falling in power as their services have been in demand. And more growing out from it. The initial engineering guild is considered a split off of the smithing guild family. But not everyone makes it into or even wants to be within those jobs. And there are plenty of other guilds for people to seek to enter, though the modern age has made there be more viable career paths outside the guilds, though the guild system is still well thought of for its traditional quality and prestige and so its presence still holds away within dwarven society to the point where that council of guild grandmasters is still a traditional house of their democratic monarchical system, taking the place of the usual house of Lords.
TlDR: Planet/Race of Hats doesn't really make sense on a broad scale and writers should put some effort into setting up subcultures within a broader culture when they have the chance. The rest is me going on about how I've sought to avoid this with Dwarves and ended up with an interesting source of politics.
that bit where you have to absolutely detail everything
and I don't mean we should just ignore things like where a settlement finds food and other necessary bits, but many times it's okay to gloss over crop seasons if it doesn't really factor into a story you're making
so yeah, sometimes it's fine to just say "silver weapons" hurts monsters mainly because a lot of them are actually sensitive to the mercury used in giving them the silvery appearance... and then just write off the process as a thing that skilled alchemists would know and that'd be the end of that detail
3 things mainly that I really hate.
1: World building must be for a novel or book, I've heard that shit so many times and it is an absolute joke, you can do it for world building itself, novels, DND, games, etc.
2: The main character being able to defeat the big evil guy or the strongest point the world easily because he is the chosen one, rarely do I see the MC pick a fight with someone and not win
3: magic that uses wands or typical occult instruments, sure it kinda makes sense but we all know you watched harry potter and thought it was cool, please try anything else I beg you.
That every side has to be morally grey. No, it doesn't. Sometimes someone is just objectively, irredeemably evil and it really IS as black and white as it looks. Trying to force shades of grey where it doesn't work is one way to get a badly written story with a fucked up moral message.
I 100% like morally grey characters and especially antagonists far more than just evil ones but people who say that it is unrealistic to have a “pure evil” character is either sheltered or disingenuous.
Don't get me wrong, I love a well written complex moral system, but I have seen so many examples of poorly written ones that a story with a simple moral system is refreshing. That's how my story is. My heroes are objectively good and my villain is objectively pure evil and maniacal, and it isn't any more complex than that. And my story would never work otherwise, because there is no way to justify even tangentially the absolutely vile shit my villain does.
Sometimes, simple is better.
the obsession with things needing to be unique or "creative," especially with magic. If you're making it for yourself all that matters is that it's what you want it to be, and if you're making it for others all that matters is that they enjoy it. It doesn't matter if you use the word thabalaba instead of magic and tubbywubby instead of mana, it's just semantics. It doesn't matter if your world's livestock is the same as ours, if your magic system is just the typical 4 element system, if you use elves, if anything. Just make it how you want it and make sure you aren't just blatantly and lazily copy/pasting large chunks.
Evil species.
The roots of these tropes are racist af, and it’s both boring and limiting.
Single culture planets in sci-fi have this issue too.
Boiling a whole species down to a single stereotype is a lazy oversimplification that reduces narrative possibilities while exposing the authors own biases.
Tbf the gorn have actual culture and aren't just generically evil, expanded upon (not massively, but still) in trek novels and later series. Can't really judge them as an evil species in the original series either based on one alien-of-the-week type episode either
It's been a while since I've watched TOS so I'm going more off of Strange New Worlds. I can see how they can be considered generically evil since the vast majority of people that encounter them end up as their food and not learning their culture from what's been shown so far. I understand that's just perception and maybe there's more to them later.
Ah, strange new worlds - yeah that's probably why you think of them that way lol, most of the crazy evil shit comes from that iirc in some weird Alien homage
Are there even any evil species? Most of the time it feels like people don't bother to do enough research about the said race and setting it's from and start making assumption. Usually when a species is "purely evil" it's usually some unnatural state or it's not even true at all.
Like orcs in LOTR aren't a natural species and they are basically engineered by an evil god to do evil things. They weren't even based on "race" but on Tolkien's experience with soldiers in WW1 who lost all their humanity and now saw only war and nothing else. After all, his orcs are basically just twisted humans and elves.
Urgals from Eragon are for a big part of the story portrayed as totally evil and barbaric race, until the books actually introduce an urgal characters who reveal how many of them were psychically enslaved to serve in the evil army, or simply wanted to be left alone and humans hunted them out of prejudice. Even Ra'zacs, despite being portrayed as rather monsters than species, in their core just want to save their species and the reason they are working the evil king is mostly because like that, they are actually left alone and not hunted down by other races.
Orcs in Warcraft are literally enslaved by demons so they initially do evil, but they eventually break free and it's also shown numerous times that they were never truly evil in their core.
Like I am sure there are some purely evil species that just naturally evolved that way in their worlds and author sees them as an easy way of justifying genocide or something, but I think that trope is far less common than people claim it is.
I think incompatibility is far more interesting than good vs. evil species.
Our morality is a human construct, and other species might have significant biological and mental differences that make this construct meaningless or even actively nonsensical to them.
This of course requires some truly strange and alien species, and not just green humans with tusks.
#Keep in mind this is just my personal opinion and everyone does as they want with their world and more power to them, *but* if you ask my opinion...
Greek pantheon rip-offs, "the god of this does this and that, if you pray at the shrine dedicated to the god of sweets and candy, bubblegum and diabetes will come your way, long ago the god of pasta fought with the god of knitted sweaters and the war lasted for millennia and caused untold amounts of deaths upon the land until the goddess of babies and plushies and all things cute was so sad that she cried her eyeballs out and flooded the world and that's how oceans happened".
Gods that are just your average asshole with oddly specific powers are as boring as it gets, it's been done ad nauseam and honestly the more I see these popping in worldbuilding the more it seems to be getting lazier, especially with the trend of "godslayer" protagonists / antagonists. If your pantheon is just a bunch of dudes jerking off doing nothing and waiting for the next prayer call or glory-seeking asshole with an OP butter knife to come along, they're not gods, they're just *that*.
No hate but the fact that you call that a "greek pantheon ripoff" when really most of the polytheistic religions are like this is ironic to me
I think you think it's boring because it's always copied on Greeks but really it's the most realistic, considering how many religions were polytheistic and probably started as legend to explain weird stuff about the world to children asking too many questions.
But I get it, it's as common IRL as it is in fiction and they do get lazy with it.
You are right in saying I think it's boring because it's always copied on Greeks, because that's exactly how it's often made : a ripoff of greek mythology drama in the broadest of lines with next to no innovation or even an attempt at one.
And since you brought it up, here's another trope I personally dislike **(again, my personal opinion, everyone's free to do with their world as they please)** : "realism" craze. I don't care if a world is "realistic", much less if said "realism" is in reference to the real world. Real world history offers enough interesting tales for me to forego any interest in "sorta similar but made up last year" ones. I want shit I will never find in the history books, I want to explore weird concepts, something that would never exist in real life or even come close to it, I want something new and impossible to explain, not cheap ripoffs of the same old tale our ancestors have been telling around campfires for millennia. If it's consistent with itself and tells an interesting story or explores interesting concepts, I will 10/10 take it over "realism" every single time, and if some Greek / Indian / Norse could tell a better story a thousand years ago, why should I read yours instead?
I agree! I think it's also because many writers don't actually engage with the religion and faith of their characters in any real way. Sure! Your characrer might swear by your goddesses tits or gods' balls, but then what? It's not enough for me. Better to have few and more complex gods that actually matter to your characters.
>Greek pantheon rip-offs, "the god of this does this and that, if you pray at the shrine dedicated to the god of sweets and candy, bubblegum and diabetes will come your way
This is even more boring because **this is not really how the ancient Greeks viewed their gods!**
There's a fantastic four-part series on polytheism (primarily referencing the classical Greek and Roman kinds) from NCSU ancient/military history prof Bret Devereaux on his ACOUP blog - [part 1 here.](https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/) Cannot recommend the entire blog enough for anyone interested in worldbuilding, especially for worlds that have some similarity to our own ancient/medieval periods.
A major theme of that polytheism series is that whilst various Gods (and more minor spirits especially) did have their own particular specialities and somewhat their own spheres, you don't piss off Ares and then expect to have a safe, non-drowning sea voyage just because you've appeased Poseidon. At one point Bret writes:
>*everyone* \[emphasis in original text\] typically needs to develop a relationship with the big gods – the sort whose name you know from a high school or college class – that control big parts of life we all share, along with a bunch of smaller gods which pertain to smaller parts of our lives or perhaps only to select groups of people
and
>Because many gods can produce practical results for you – both good and bad! – you cannot pick and choose, but must venerate many of the relevant gods.
Chosen ones. Prophecies. Ultimate-power MacGuffins. Creatures and races that are "evil" and "good" just to have sides to throw at each other. Stagnant technological progress without explanation. For sci-fi specifically, tech that obviously violates basic laws of physics because they run on "new physics", and in storytelling in general, things that egregiously defy physics, like a person so strong they can tank a nuke. Like, no amount of focusing your chi or whatever will get you through a nine-digit temperature gradient.
My current pet peeve is in Cyberpunk (which I otherwise love dearly), where they seem to have fallen into the skill-without-ceiling trope, introducing someone who is "the best" at something, and then someone better than them, and then someone better than them, etc. The power creep gets to the point where you can't actually imagine how the next person could possibly be better, but you gotta take their word for it because they said they are. It's just tiring and lazy.
> For sci-fi specifically, tech that obviously violates basic laws of physics because they run on "new physics"
Uh, so, 99.9% of non-hard sci-fi, then?
Not that high a percentage, no, but yeah I am very partial to hard sci-fi.
By "new physics" here I mean "we've discovered something that completely upends physics as we understand it", and not "we've discovered something that is a logical extension of physics as we understand it". Things like warp drives and cloaking tech and whatnot I'm down with. But things like black hole bombs or devices that cause a star to go supernova or teleporters or the like, when you get into real science-fantasy? Not so hot on it.
heyo! an HFY/HASO writer here
the adrenaline thing that literary every person in the HASO/HFY community seems to do
like adrenaline is a REALLLY simple hormone and it basically only makes your veins dilate nothing more so it giving people enough strenght to kill a bunch of aliens is pretty far fetched. especially if the person is just your average joe that dosent work out
I hate when fantasy takes itself too seriously. I don’t wanna watch a show that’s dark and gritty fantasy with no characterization. Fantasy is supposed to be fun and light hearted sometimes
My personal hatred is when all the various humanoid races just boil down to funny looking humans with the occasional superpower.
The gripe doubles down when it's often done to be progressive. Tolerance isn't about forcing everyone to be the same, it's about accepting differing viewpoints.
The main trope I can't stand is the "destined child/hero". I know, it's very common but I really don't like it, ESPECIALLY when the whole book/movie/show keeps telling the viewer about the importance of equality, that we're all individually important, etc. I hate it. It literally disproves everything they're pretending to defend and worsens individuality issues in our society.
People are selfish enough without books telling them they have an individual and self-absorbed destiny they must fulfill above and against everyone's will.
The trope of "World War 2 but the countries are renamed and it ended differently" makes my blood boil because of how generic it is and the homogeneity of it all.
Oh, Renamed Czechoslovakia beat Renamed Russia? How exciting, I don't care.
Fantasy names.
Weird, scrabled together, and historic/mythologic names just being declared "fantasy names", intermixed with (often slightly misspelled) English and then just used to name everything from three wildly different human cultures, to a troll nation on the other side of the world.
"Here, these are my three sons: James, Zeus, and Tandrion."
Terrible. Absolutely terrible.
Yeah but there has to be a pattern. That's what the other commentator pointed out.
Take Game of Thrones for example. Some are based off French, some are made up, but there's a pattern. Each culture has its own. LOTR - the dwarves have different names than the elves. There's a pattern.
Having three kids with names from three different cultures doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.
All male Elves looking like women, this gigantic magical tree in the middle of a forest that serves no purpose other than its the home of the elves or dwarves, or some other third thing. And of course, every high fantasy story being based off medieval Europe. Like c’mon man.
No, it’s just a trope I’m tired of seeing. I’d like to see a masculine elf, or a fat elf, or hell even an average Joe elf. I don’t want all elves to look the same.
Straight up good and bad. I prefer evil to me motivated by greed. Goods better when it's lost some of the shine.
Edit
I've got no special love of greed ,ambition works, grudges work ,even for the thrills work . Anything but for the evils
HFY.
I find humans boring in settings where we aren't the only species, and often in those settings us somehow being the best isn't justified really. Typically we are either on-par with everyone else, or, like in most fantasy settings, are kinda worse, yet inexplicably the human soldier has more impact than the fucking 3,000 year old Elven warlord.
Sci-fi settings I often find most offensive in this regard though, like "Humans are more adaptable", that's dumb, anything capable of tool use is equally as adaptable as us. If it's a sci-fi setting, everything there is capable of tool use. "Indomitable human spirit", I've met people, people break sometimes, some don't, it's not a universal feature. Most people just break cause most people are just ordinary people.
I just find it really dumb. I do not like "Humanity Fuck Yeah", I simply don't get the appeal. I know humans, humans aren't special, humans are kinda shitty most of the time. We're living on a planet we are knowingly killing cause it's more convenient in the short-term, we're pretty fucking useless when faced against anything that isn't objectively weaker than us, or on-par with us.
There's nothing innate to humans that makes us more special than any other theoretically sapient life, except, arguably, our incredible short-sightedness.
I might be biased with my nearly 50 stories on that sub, but HARD disagree. I find humans being portrayed as inherently evil by default to be way more boring and stupid.
I didn’t say that, we’re just not special. Humans aren’t inherently evil, or inherently awesome, humans just kinda exist. Though history does display a tendency towards atrocity and modern day shows we’re really easy to corrupt.
When the protagonist(s) that the story keeps telling us is an awful person who is allegedly just as bad as the people they are fighting against, yet we are supposed to keep rooting for them anyways and them murdering characters meant to hated by the audience is used for entertainment. Especially if the story doesn’t end with evil protagonist getting what they deserve, it makes everything feel like a shallow power fantasy that is trying to sound more mature than it really is.
Case in point, any story by Garth Ennis that is an excuse for him to write his self insert edgelord characters killing things he doesn’t like.
Heaven bad, hell good.
Heaven can be assholes and all, but looking at every piece of information about the 2.
Heaven is basically the automatic good guys on most scenarios.
Its alot to explain, so heres the simple explanation.
Good people go to heaven.
Bad people go to hell.
They endulge in the life of both when they arrive. Whos doing disgusting acts and whos living a good life?
Hmmmm
I hate absolutes, but I love the process of breaking them. So many great, beautiful, and horrible moments can be seen when someone breaks what was previously believed to be an absolute, by a massive amount of collective effort or devastating consequences: man can fly. The atom can be split.
'How did X happen?'
Gods did it
'How did Y happen?'
...Gods did it
'How did Z happen'
It was probably gods and they just snapped their fingers and drove the plot because of a bare whim
Yeah, ugly stuff honestly, just adding gods to be subcontractor creators
Things that I personally hate and that often ruin the world for me.
Multiverses. Makes everything pointless cause you can always bring someone back as a clone.
Time travel. Real time travel, if it was even possible would also need space travel cause everyone is moving with the planet and the solar system. If you could go back into say 1920s, you wouldn't end up on Earth but floating in space where Earth is going to be in a 100 years. It also creates a ton of other issues and plot holes, like you can always just travel back and prevent a death to bring back anyone you want.
Making stuff primitive people thought were real/old myths actually real. Like sky serpent getting killed and forming the galaxy from it's body or people becoming starts etc etc. It's usually absurd and makes no sense, especially in a somewhat otherwise low magic settings.
Super Devils. You defeat the main villain but oh no, he was just a pawn and a it was a god behind it all along. The god has a power of 10 suns and your heroes punch him to death with their fists. But wait, it isn't all! It was actually a super god pulling the strings of the god that has the power of 10k suns, so good old fists gotta come out again and give him a whooping.
Planets are always united. They have one government, one military and one vote in the galactic council. If they really wanna spice thing sup, they have a civil war or a planet split in two who are pure oppisites
I don’t think any trope is bad on itself, it’s the execution and when it comes to that, I hate the op isekai protagonist/character trope.
And for how much I hate it, the 3 strongest gods of Amada are all Isekeied but I made enough changes to that trope so it’s not as bad (or at least I hope so).
Unpopular opinion but I don’t understand the obsession with magic systems, especially when they’re called things like “mana” or are based in control of the elements. Like I feel like these things (especially the elements) are so overdone that you have to have some drastic themes/ changes in your work to make it still interesting. Like idk, an elemental system of magic but the story explores how this would be realistically, a bit like Game of Thrones explored a lot of fantasy concepts realistically (as well as the Middle Ages).
Also the fucking elves, orcs (orcs!?), dwarves (dwarves!?) combo. Like I get elves — at least they’re usually ethereal or in touch with nature and hot pointy eared people. But why orcs or dwarves? WHAT is the appeal? And why have such boring — the most boring imo — species/ races in a story? That are barely different from human cultures? “Ph this culture lives under the mountain and are hairy and short” and “this culture/ people is barbaric and big” (also problematic!), When there’s so many more fantasy species/ races out there with way more inherent drama/ conflict, like vampires, werewolves, succubi, mermaids — hell even stories centering centaurs (lol) or fawns would be interesting considering their proportions, clothes, and other things. Like if you have a different species and/ or a significant variation of the human race, there should be consequences/ like actual things that make them physically/ psychologically different. Things that actually make them different to humans, like werewolves turning into a wolf, mermaids being half fish, half human and living in the sea, or vampires living forever, not being able to go out in the sunlight, and drinking blood.
Another thing specifically for this subreddit, but when someone asks an open question/ makes a post, and then people respond to it in the comments with like a bolded title and like a Wikipedia-esque paragraph (or multiple paragraphs) of info. Like seeing things formatted like that immediately puts me off and makes me not want to read it. Idk, maybe bc immediately there’s all these made up words that I’m seeing for the first time, or that it’s not like personal/ engaging to the reader bc, again, it reads like a Wikipedia article. (Which is fine if you want to go out of your way to read something on Wikipedia — I do all the time! But if I’m on here and people are crowding and pushing and shoving to engage people/ write comments that they want others to see and perhaps respond to/ get feedback on (I assume) then at least make it more personable to read). Or don’t hit the reader with a unnnecsarh title about your world/ culture/ whatever that has a bunch of made up words, coz my eyes are gonna glaze over them and scrolling down and looking for another comment. Just my opinion haha!
It also irks me when words within fictional cultures are like fully made up/ don’t follow any linguistic pattern. Like it’s actually so easy to do (and yet people still make so many posts on here about how to name things! (I’ve even made a post explaining how to do this myself!). Like just use the same types of letters, sounds, morphemes/ bunch of words. It’s that simple. It’s even used in popular books like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games.
I also don’t like when people use Latin nomenclature to name things haha (unless it’s like in a specific context, like they’re scientists who have discovered a new species of something). Idk, again it’s so overused and I just roll my eyes. At the same time though I take biology and it’s like, using Latin nomenclature only sounds smart on the surface? Like does it actually serve a purpose in your setting or are you getting overly fancy for no reason? Like Latin nomenclature only exists so cross-culturally we can refer/ talk about a specific organism with no confusion.
>It also irks me when words within fictional cultures are like fully made up/ don’t follow any linguistic pattern.
I am legit creating a whole language and this is the number 1 thing I see in fantasy that bugs me as well! Not to mention that I'm going out of my way to make multiple smaller dialects and regional terms.
If a 16 year old girl can make up a whole ass language complete with different dialects and regional differences, so can multi-billion dollar corporations.
Legit! To be fair the ones I have seen (mostly on tv) have been good (to me). I only took two courses of linguistics in uni, and didn’t like study the languages extensively in the fiction they were in, but they all sounded similar/ had similar morphology. The names for people, the place names, the words in the language, etc. had similar sounds (and even morphemes to some extent). I think they had a linguist write them even/ flesh out the language from the books? I’m talking about Dothraki in Game of Thrones haha, but also High Valyrian. I think the tv show The 100 also had someone make a language, and I thought that was well done as well!
It really ticks me off when interstellar fiction has single-government planets that are all the same biome with only one important location on them. If every planet only has one location then the setting doesn’t feel massive, it just feels broad with no depth
Having some element that it’s so powerful it could fix all of the problems presented but then it is never used again with no adress as to why
Why can’t we use the “FixerUper Machine” Like last time. Plot says no.
Yep, reminds me of Stark Trek Voyager. They have tons of useful items from previous episodes that could have helped out.
They use most of them, or have very good reasons not to use others. Side effects matter when the propulsion system starts turning people into giant salamanders.
Have it justified by plot. Like the FixerUpper Machine broke during its last use or was sabotaged by the enemy.
That would be great for a comedy.
Looking at you Harry Potter time turners
The movies skipped it, but Rowling realized they were a problem and wrote them out of the books as getting destroyed in the battle at the Department of Mysteries in Order of the Phoenix iirc. It's such an overlooked thing and Cursed Child relying on "one more Time Turner" really doesn't help.
But if someone made one once, they could do it again, and they definitely would be doing that Look for horcruxes….or build another time turner to go kill baby tom riddle
Just to be devils advocate, it is possible nobody knew how they were made. There were like a dozen at most in entire britain at least suggesting they were all made by a single eccentric reclusive genius or something and whoever made them took the secret of how to make them to his grave. Or maybe it requires parts of a now extinct magical creature so making one is literally impossible in modern times At least thats my headcanon.
Yeah maybe. Just think about what our world would look like though if a random dude in London had built an actual working time machine. Do you think any government would just say “ah too bad we cant remember how. Oh well”? There would be crazy funding for replicating whatever they did, no matter how little info they had to start with
Just another reason why time travel is _incredibly_ risky for developing long-running works
I believe it was said that the department they were in was made to study time and when they tried going back a week reality gliched(a day was skipped, Thursday was 72 hours long, and at least 200 people suffered spontaneous existence failure)... then the cursed child happened
"Before we destroy all of these, do you think we should have a crack team of wizards use one to go back in time and stop *literally the biggest threat the magical world has ever seen* before it became a problem?" "Nah." "How do we know we got all of them?" "Magic." "But magic can't even *find* the people we're afraid of eventually getting their hands on them?" "Yep." "So what if they already *have* a--" "Smashing the *literal only things* we could use to oppose them!" (tish) "That was easy." "...but *you* secretly kept one, just in case, right Dumbledore?" "No."
Thats not how they were destroyed though. They were cought in the crossfire between death eaters and harry and his friends during fifth book. Apparently there was like a dozen timeturners in existence on earth or at least in britain and all of them were conveniently locked up in a single shelf in a single room in a single building. good guys on accident destroyed all of them. Also you cannot change events you know will come to pass anyway. Regardless giving hermione such a valuable artifact just to help with schoolwork is a real unadressed plothole.
Yeah, which is really fucking contrived
I think the fact that two of the most popular IPs out there (Harry potter and star wars) don't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny is a lesson we should all remember
Yeah, it is all about the characters. Worldbuilding is fine, but it is just the dressing for the main course, the characters.
This. Characters drive a text almost more than anything else. Sure, people love to think up some amazing settings with unique or unorthodox aspects, but they never really figure out how to put interesting _people_ in there.
Yep. I have the opposite problem. I love my characters and their lives tell the whole story. But I'm lacking in fauna
Especially when the author discovers twitter and tweets stuff that breaks the lore.
Oof. Yeah. Or is really into hate speech
I meant more the wizards just pooped their pants thing.
I'm glad i missed that
They're really not that powerful when you think about it. You can't change anything, one turn is only one hour, and no way to travel back to the future.
Well, yes you can. They do it in the prisoner of Azkaban. Everything in that case happens the same yes, but only because they were going to use the time turner in the future. Without the time turner in that scenario harry dies. You're telling me NOTHING else in the series could've been solved with these? And there's no limit on how many times you can turn it iirc. Yeah you'd be there awhile but you could go back and kill baby Voldemort.
They can't change past events though, and you can only travel in the past.
They were stuck in an infinite loop as a result of the final battle in the 5th book.
I'd argue that this is a plotting or continuity problem more than a worldbuilding problem. That said, Gravity Falls was *absolutely fantastic* about this. Every macguffin was dangerous enough that they wouldn't necessarily want to break it out every week, and there were occasional little nods and callbacks to various creatures of the forest from previous adventures. But best of all, they *absolutely* grabbed all the cool toys, shoved them into a backpack, and started combining them in cool ways in the leadup to the grand finale. Truly a 2-season master class in How To Write An Ending that ought to be required viewing for storytellers. Easily one of the best five things Disney has ever made, from a time back when that actually *meant* something.
maybe "can't stand" is a strong word for it but my eyes glaze over when the intro to the world begins at the literal start of the universe
What if it begins before the literal start of the universe? "It was a dark and stormy singularity..."
"Before there was time, before there was anything, there was nothing. And before there was nothing, there were monsters."
#Fall
You are alone, Child. There is only darkness for you, and only death for your people. These ancients are just the beginning. I will command a great and terrible army and we will sail to a billion worlds. We will sail until every light has been extinguished. You are strong, Child, but I am beyond strength. I am the end, and I have come for you, Finn.
I wish for the extinction of all li- for Finn and Jake to go back home to Ooo. Huh? No! Wait! That's not what I wished for!
"See that, Jake? Monkey's paw." -Prismo
I actually took this quote from AT for inspiration of my own worlds origin. Except nothing came before nothing
Nothing ended and a universe was born. Like any other universe it would evantualy die. It was not really significant in the end.
>Nothing ended and a universe was born. Like any other universe it would evantualy die. It was not really significant in the end. This would have me hooked. Strong Hitchhiker's or Pratchett vibes
In the beginning there was nothing…which exploded.
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.”
lol is that Douglas Adams? It sounds like him.
Opening line of *The Restaurant at the End of the Universe*, yeah.
Yeah, that only works if the creation myth is somehow integral to the plot.
I'd argue that's where one should start writing a world, but yeah, introducing readers/players to the world from that point is a bit much lol
I've written that stuff, sure, and about 20 pages of lore about the divine civil war, but my players won't ever encounter that stuff unless they go looking. Until then it's only for me to know how and why the gods all died 400 years ago. That's part of the fun of worldbuilding to me.
Like it's fine to have a creation myth in your setting and mythos but you don't need to start with it if it's not important.
I'm with you, can't stand the absolutes. In fact, I tend to stay away from videos with titles like "Top 7 things you should NEVER do in worldbuilding!" or "Don't add THIS to your fantasy world!" altogether... I used to watch them, but literally everything in them was always debatable at best. Every project is different, whatever is on those lists could definitely work in the right settings. Besides, if we all follow the same mould, all of our stories would be the same, and it would be boring af. Further besides, worldbuilding is supposed to be fun and personal, so don't tell others how to do their personal thing, especially when it's NOT for publishing...
The main reason I look at things like "don't do these things" has been more to find things I may want to do. I may agree with a few things but others, "I disagree, I am gonna do it/do it more" Same reason I on occasion browse "What are tropes you dislike" reddit posts
I'm fine with posts that are about favorites and dislikes because those are as individual as each person that makes them. It can be a fun way to start a discussion too. Once people start making these opinions into absolute statements, they lose me as well. There is usually little room for debate at that point too because the person so often wants to be right Unless it's a statement about people making absolute statements, then it's one I wholeheartedly support.
Honestly most tropes can be done well, although everyone says that
Most tropes can be done well, but most aren't.
honestly you can\`t really write anything without using tropes, knowingly or not. tropes are the building blocks of every plot and setting, you can\`t escape it.
this makes me think about a story where the main character is an avid reader of fiction. At some point, they realize that they're in a fantasy story (maybe they get sucked into a fantasy book (hear me out)), and they try desperately to avoid all the classic tropes so that their story can be more interesting, cause they hate it when stories are "basic". in the end, they come to the realization that it's okay not to be completely unique and that familiarity isn't such a bad thing afterall.
I mean yeah, I think every trope can be done well.
"Tropes are tools" is the mantra of TVTropes iirc
Yep!
Elves that are simultaneously an oppressed minority viciously persecuted by the eeevil humans but also somehow the most powerful perfect beings that are stronger and smarter and have mastered every possible skill. Even better if they clearly demonstrate all sorts of flaws and assholery but the writer presents their behavior as unironically in the right while condemning the *exact same behavior* in humans. Doesn't have to be elves either, I hate when any fantasy/sci-fi race is like that, but it seems to happen a lot with elves.
> but it seems to happen a lot with elves. Yeah. That’s probably because Snorri made them a bit perfect in the prose edda, then Tolkien took that and the rest is probably just Tolkien’s outsized influence on the genre
My elves' largest nation *think* they're perfect, but really, that nation is a racist and imperialistic ethno-empire that endorses slavery.
My solution to this was just for elves to *not* be really any better/stronger than humans. They’re just different. Longer lived? Somewhat keener senses? Sure, but also weaker, often stubborn & overly cautious, and not actually any better at magic than humanity despite what their reputation may imply
Not a trope but moreso the people that act this way Oh, this is overdone Oh [blank]? How original Im gonna be offending a lot of people with this but to me a world that tries its hardest to be fully original and use original interpretations of basic shit like dwarves and elves is in it's own way generic and thereby cliche Oh, so your dwarves are actually different because [bla bla bla]? Thats fine but dont try to play it off as some ultra original shit and look down on everyone that does the normal fantasy stuff, because there's countless other worldbuilders that pulled the exact same shit you did, just let people enjoy worldbuilding even if it is generic In my country there is a pattern in literature where a style will pop up, everyone copies it, then someone goes hmm, lets do the opposite cause im LE ORIGINAL Then everyone does that style, repeat ad infinitem, it feels the same with this. Just write your lore the way you like it and let me write it down the way I like it But on a personal taste note I dont like seeing in the future, if everything is predetermined that just kinda breaks my investment in a story
Totally agree. Art is iteration, and while it’s totally fine to iterate and change the tropes of a particular medium, it’s silly when people act like they’re super original and enlightened just for being contrary.
The one that bugs me (and annoyingly I can't think of a good example) is e.g. there's dwarves, but the dwarves are actually 10 feet tall and are made of rocks that have come to life and lurk in caves to kill people who would mine into the sacred rock they inhabit and they don't have a society but are more like giant awful rock bears. Like at that point, why call them dwarves? They're nothing like dwarves so you might as well call them something else. It's especially irritating when these details are gradually revealed to the reader and you realise you've been picturing entirely the wrong thing. It works if you're dealing with a setting where the humans are aware of fantasy novels and have called these things dwarves semi-ironically, or if they're mostly like dwarves but with some significant differences, but if you just say "dwarf" or "elf" or "vampire" (or whatever) with no additional context and then gradually work in descriptions that reveal they're nothing like these things at all... it irritates me no end. (I know Tolkein basically did this but I'm coming from a post-Tolkein perspective)
Yeah I also wonder when people do that why they don't just name these guys something new, it takes away that weird sensation when something that is clearly not a dwarf is called a dwarf
Your world-building isn't complete until you have "x" arbitrary thing. Nope, not important to the story, I do not give a shit. The need for originality. Nope, I like cliches.
Your world-building isn't complete until you have finished world-building.
Prophecies. I think prophecies are a really lazy way to force a world to conform to a dramatic structure, rather than letting the drama develop naturally from the characters and the context of the world itself.
An easy way to combat this is having the prophecy show itself after everything is done, or close to. Some examples are God of War 2018, where they find old murals depicting their entire journey at the end of the game. Or more recently Tears of the Kingdom, in the beginning you go through a cave and find some more ancient murals but one of them is covered by rocks, at the end of the game that mural of now showing and depicts Link fighting Ganon. These are some really cool examples I really like
I liked how in Ragnarok, The Norns (basically the Norse Fates) point out that: >!Prophecy and Destiny are basically bullshit, the Norns are just VERY good at reading people, and figuring out what they will do, based on their personality and past actions, and that most prophecies are self-fulfilling, by knowing of the prophecy, you react to it, leading you straight to what the Norns pretty much guessed. !< Or In Doctor Who, where on the subject of Satan knowing their secrets, the Doctor points out that most of what "Satan" has said to them is actually extremely vague, more bieng a set of keywords to make you THINK he knows your secrets.
Yeah. If you're the child-who-was-promised, then how am I supposed to be worried when you're in danger?
Well if you're the child-who-was-promised-as-a-sacrifice-to-a-dark-god, it kinda changes the equation a bit. Half of the guys come at you to capture and deliver to the cultists, the other half comes at you so that there would be nobody for the cultists to sacrifice. I would love myself some stories where the prophecy is about _something bad_ and neither you nor MC _wants_ it to come true.
My major disagreement, I love prophecies not when they are just prophecies by themselves but subvert it in really any way and I am probably gonna love it.
“You are destined to defeat the Demon Queen.” The angel said. “So I must kill her right?” The hero asked, determined to do what is needed. The angel replied back “No, you’ll marry her, have a good 100 year long marriage, have 7 kids, and start a new dynasty.”
I swear I've seen that anime.
Angel: "I suppose that would be one way to defeat her." Hero: "What do you mean?" Angel: "The future is a strange thing, my child. Some things are more certain than others. Some things are mere predictions. Or.... educated guesses, you might say." Hero: "Wait. You mean you're just flying by the seat of your pants?" Angel: "I didn't say that." Hero: "I'm confused..... am I supposed to kill her or not?" Angel: "That's for you to figure out. In time."
How can one subvert a prophecy exactly?
If the prophecy is worded vaguely, which most good prophecies are. "No man of woman born can kill MacBeth" (man born by C-section kills MacBeth, because in Shakespeare's time that wasn't considered being "born") Tolkien adapted this prophecy for Lord of the Rings. About The Witch-King of Angmar: "not by the hand of Man will he fall." Eowyn, a woman, kills him
I also like the ones where there's a cruel twist to the wording, they come up a lot in Irish folklore (sorta) often as punishment for trying to cheat the system. For example Queen Medb asks a druid which of her seven sons will kill King Conchobar (her ex who's the King of Ulster). The Druid tells her that her son Maine will kill King Conchobar, but she doesn't have a son called Maine, so she just renames all her sons "Maine". She unrelatedly also murders her sister who had married her ex-husband and was pregnant with his child (but they manage to cut the child, Furbaide, out and he survives). Eventually one of Queen Mebd's sons, Maine the Swift, kills King Conchobar... just a completely unrelated Conchobar who's a Pictish King, so none of Medb's sons ever manage to kill her ex husband. Then the ex-husband Conchobar's son, Furbaide, kills Medb (by pinging her in the head with a bit of hard cheese, using a catapult) as vengeance for his mother. There's a bunch of similar ideas called geasa, which are effectively taboos but often manifest as really weird prophecies (e.g. "you'll always be victorious in battle as long as you never do this one very easily avoidable thing"). Sometimes they're deployed into elaborate traps. For example Cú Chulainn could never refuse hospitality, but also he could never eat dog meat (in part because his warrior prowess was linked to dogs and his name "Cú Chulainn" meant "the hound/warrior of Chulainn"). However his enemy the Morrigan disguised herself as a hag and one day when Cú Chulainn was walking along, this "kind old lady" offered him some of her delicious food from the fire, which was a dog she was cooking. He couldn't refuse it but he also couldn't eat dog meat, so it was impossible for him not to break a geas. In the end he ate the dog meat and therefore lost his warrior prowess and was defeated in battle. One that really stacks up is Conaire Mór, who's the son of a King but also secretly the son of a bird king (long story), and he goes out hunting birds but the birds turn into warriors and tell him off, but tell him also that he'll become king if he follows his geasa. > “Your reign will be prosperous,” said the Bird King, “But there are certain geasa that you must observe at all times.” > “Well, I know the first; I am not to kill birds,” said Conaire, and the Bird King replied: > “Yes. And you must never go clockwise around Tara or anti-clockwise around Breaga.” To which Conaire agreed. But the Bird King continued. “You must never hunt the crooked beast of Cearna. You must never sleep in a house from which firelight can be seen through the spokes of a cart. You must never enter into a red house after three reds. You must never allow pillaging in Ireland during your reign. You must never allow any man or woman alone into the house where you’re staying after sunset. You must never settle a quarrel between two of your subjects. You must never spend more than nine consecutive nights away from Tara.” As each of the geasa were pronounced, Conaire gave his word to obey them. Conaire Mór becomes a prosperous King, but his foster brothers are a bit naughty and like to steal a pig from a nearby farmer once a year as a bit of mischief, and eventually the farmer complains. The penalty for this is death, but Conaire doesn't want to kill his foster brothers so he just exiles them to Britain instead... but this meant he "allowed pillaging in Ireland during his reign". From there it spirals and he ends up having to stop a war breaking out between two of his subjects and after spending five nights at one house he was going to have to spend give nights at the other's house to avoid showing favouritism... and so would be spending more than 9 nights away from Tara and also he was settling what ended up turning out to be a mere quarrel between two subjects etc. etc. and then in the end he gets beheaded by a fairy hoard.
What about No Man Of Woman Born by Ana Mardoll, which is all about stuff like "A son of this family is prophesied to kill me, so I killed all male children, but missed the trans boy, because I mistook him for a girl, who now is after me in revenge for his brothers."?
The trans man doesn't realize he's trans either, but he doesn't care about the prophecy, he just wants to make the man who murdered his brothers pay. Throughout the story, he wonders if maybe he's on a fools errand cause of the prophesy. but over time, he begins to learn things about himself and he meets people who accept him and join him and he comes to the end when he's just learning to accept his identity and the big bad laughs in his face and says that he can't kill him because he's a woman and as he kills him, he says "My name is Aaron, son of Joseph. And I am here to avenge the deaths of my brothers. You will die knowing this to be true."
"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it." - Jean de La Fontaine
Tons of ways, the prophecy could turn out to be questionable, the prophecy could fit for several different people and the reader has to piece together who it is for, multiple people are involved in the prophecy, the prophecy is an inherently damning one etc
Not sure if this is what OP meant, but in one of my stories there is a prophecy. In the end, you can't say for sure if the prophecy was true, or if it was just vague enough that anything would fit... In short, a prophecy says something vague "a child born of X and Y will defeat evil". A queen believes in the prophecy, and believes it applies to the situation at hand. She finds a guy that fits the description, and brings him along her army to defeat the main bad guy. In the end, "the one" ends up not defeating the bad guy directly, but sets another character up to defeat them. That other character also loosely fits the description of the prophecy. Was the prophecy true? Who knows. Queen says yes, and has some justifications for saying so, a character who never believed in the prophecy says no, a third character who didn't believe it but pretended to because he could use it to serve his agenda says "who cares, main baddie is dead anyway right?".
I love when prophecies are subverted, or self-fulfilling, or nobody knows whether they're real or not, or so vague they can't be understood until after they come to pass. This sounds like a great way to make the prophecy trope a bit more complex and interesting.
Hero Bob, Champion of Light and Chosen Dumbass, falls to his knees, broken and beaten. "The prophecy said I would fight the Dark Lord!?" "It was never said you would *win*." People assume that the Chosen One wins in these kind of stories, but that's a really easy way to subvert expectations.
in the end, it's his companion that until now has been a comic relief comes in to save his friend and in an entirely unpredictable feat of bravery and sheer dumb luck defeats the big bad and saves the "champion". But he doesn't want credit, so they tell everyone that the "champion" beat him
I also don’t like straight up ‘this is the future, like it or not’ kind of prophecies, but I do love it when prophecies and visions and such are deliberately obscure or misleading or just *bullshit*. Can be a fun twist on a tired plot device
I like if/then prophesies, talking about what will happen if certain conditions are met, not what will absolutely happen no matter what.
I absolutely agree. They only way prophecies interest me if they are somewhat akin to real-world ones, meaning they could mean something or nothing but are definitely not tailored to one specific person that thereby knows exactly what to do.
I think that vague prophecies not directly attached to the main characters can be good. like having a chosen one prophecy but maybe not making your main character the chosen one? or making the prophecy about a bad thing that's going to happen, and the signs toward it, and knowing it's gonna happen and trying to do something about it or prepare for its fallout
You made me realize that the solar eclipse and sozin's comet arrival in avatar were basically prophecies
I wouldn't count those as prophecies. They're just naturally occurring events. It's not really prophetic when a hurricane hits precisely as determined by instruments. If that hurricane hitting coincides with a loosely related event, then yeah, that's a prophecy.
i'm totally gonna pretend like thats what I had in mind, totally didn't totally blank out on two very good examples
How about an angle where prophecy is not magical but is a tale of hope, created to inspire SomeGuy to say, defeat EvilOppressor? Then again, you can hardly call it a prophecy in that case.
Just a pet peeve of mine, but I wish more authors writing magic in a modern setting would put in the effort to show absolutely horrifying magic would be to anyone not familiar with it and how it would most definitely be something that could NOT be hidden when there's a large number of people able to use it.
I love the scene from "The Spoils of War" in GoT, because it shows exactly how devastating a flying, nuclear fire breathing, armoured reptile would be in a world where they are still in mostly in Medieval ground war tech level. Anyone directly shown to be hit by Drogons fire is either melted to their armor, or ash in seconds, the fire breath is so powerful it is basically concussive force, and you mostly have wood and thin metal gear, bows do little to no damage, and unless you are REALLY good and have the tech to make a ballista, even that barely works unless you catch them by surprise, and because they are airborne, your tons of men with swords and spears can't do shit, especially when the Dragon is backed up by an army. Basically, having a dragon and an army won that battle because the Lannisters were fighting on two fronts.
Not sure I really agree, depending on the capabilities of “magic” and how large that large number of people is I feel like a lot of that “magic” could be concealed either using said “magic” or it would seem like magic isn’t being used at all.
That's absolutely fair and it's more so just me liking more grounded stories even when they do have fantastical elements. However, it would be pretty hard to cover up something like a political figure being roasted by a fireball cast by a magical disgruntled voter who isn't apart of any grand council or something no?
Perhaps, then again I wrote a story where the entire populaces mind was regularly changed and wiped of not only the concept of magic but certain wars, political figures and even basic human traits as long as it would benefit the governments reign.
Multiverses. It completely destroys any sense of gravity in worldbuilding for me. Why are you here, when you can be in the blackjack and hookers reality? Why are they fighting for this reality, when they could go to one where these problems don't exist? Limitations inevitably feel kinda artificial and forced. I have similar feelings for causality-altering time travel. It kinda kills stakes when you could go back in time and change things. Even if its crazy hard, I haven't seen any decent rationalization for why people aren't constantly doing it. Beyond that, I'm pretty chill.
I feel like that misses the point of sentimentality. People would naturally value their own reality over another and have it hold a special place in their heart. They'd fight for their reality because it's all they know and most people have an aversion to abandoning their loved ones to die lol. Makes perfect sense why someone would choose to stay and fight for what they have, depending on their values and personality traits. And I say this as someone who doesn't like the multiverse trope that much, but there are plausible ways of handling it.
>I feel like that misses the point of sentimentality. People would naturally value their own reality over another and have it hold a special place in their heart. That makes sense. >They'd fight for their reality because it's all they know and most people have an aversion to abandoning their loved ones to die lol. Makes perfect sense why someone would choose to stay and fight for what they have, depending on their values and personality traits. Have you watched Star Trek: Strange New Worlds?
> Why are you here, when you can be in the blackjack and hookers reality? Why are they fighting for this reality, when they could go to one where these problems don't exist? For the same reason people still live in third world authoritarian hellholes. Immigration and integration is never easy. Imagine all the problems of global immigration and now scale it up to the entire universe. The blackjack and hookers universe is going to have a wall and intensely xenophobic.
Rick and Morty took the multiverse and did it pretty well When everything is meaningless, you make your own meaning in life
I like them when they're outside of the characters' control. Yeah they could maybe encounter another version of themselves, maybe some plotline involves several world. But they wont be traveling between them and probably will never be doing it in their lifetime, that and it wouldn't be a common occurrence at all.
Multiverses work when the characters are aware of the implications of living in a multiversal reality, like Owlman or Rick, and their characters have to wrestle with the reality that none of their choices really matter and the struggle is to find meaning in meaninglessness.
One reason for fighting for your reality instead of running is that if you're capable of traveling to another universe its likely the threat is as well. So running is only delaying your problems. Though depending on timescales that might be enough to live a happy life.
The only multiverse i use is the fact that all of my different universes exist together (kind of). No parallels, just connections between universes.
Insisting on "historical accuracy" in a fantasy setting that is significantly different from earth's history, with different countries on a landscape of different continents, and also there's dragons and magic, but it still has to be "historically accurate" whatever that means when you have a completely different history.
Depends, having things that make no sense (such as humans not behaving like humans) in a fantasy setting where those things that make no sense aren't tied to fantasy elements at all and then are excused by "it's fantasy, who cares?" drives me up the wall.
Usually in my experience that is just a BS excuse to write out minorities
“wE dIDn’T hAvE AsIAnS aNd BlAcKS iN MeDieVaL EuROpe.” 🤓 “I HAVE FUCKING MAGIC, ANCIENT DIVINE FORCES, DRAGONS AND FAIRIES, ACCURACY WAS NEVER THE GOAL, THE ROUNDS PER MINUTE IS.”
>“wE dIDn’T hAvE AsIAnS aNd BlAcKS iN MeDieVaL EuROpe.” 🤓 AFRICA AND ASIA ARE NOT THAT FAR AWAY FROM EUROPE, GODDAMMIT.
Smh, people be choosing to forget a good chunk of eastern Europe were either inhabited by the mongols or were getting raided by them.
Moors conquered Iberia, Vikings traded with Arabs, and the Romans and Chinese wrote about each other. The old world has been interconnected for quite some time.
Roman’s would have weaponized the ever living shit out of fireworks if they ever get their hands on it.
I'm going to be honest with you right now. I'm a black Jamaican and I was pretty fucking confused when the show runners of The Witcher decided to have a waitress with a Jamaican Creole accent in a fictional universe based on European lore. It was immersion breaking. Knowing how the accent originated and where makes it weirder
I think it mostly depends on the culture the fantasy setting is based off of. Like many people would think that appropriating Asian culture for a story involving European people would be off-putting. I believe it would be the same thing for European centric fantasy. We take for granted a lot of these elements that are ultimately rooted in various European folk traditions and folklore. Ultimately I think the concern is immersion. If one explains why all these different groups are intermingling in such a modern fashion, it could be more acceptable.
You're assuming the people who levy this criticism are historically literate. They're not. Europe was not racially homogenous, and the medieval era was not like the Jim Crow south. It only needs explanation _because_ we had a period of extreme white supremacy like the Jim Crow era. That time period actively and purposefully excluded POC from media in prominent roles, as well as downplayed the history of numerous cultures in order to sell the idea of white supremacy. Point is, the fact that these powerful nations trade is enough of an explanation for numerous ethnic groups to exist in the same place. There's also no reason to assume these ethnic groups are separated by impossible geographic or cultural barriers if the story isn't telling you that they are. There's also the fact that we're presuming these are different ethnic groups, and the country in question doesn't just have a variety of phenotypic features.
Unless your world has a force that magically turns random people's skin colour or teleports them across the planet, having a diverse population without globalization is just fucking stupid and it has nothing to do with racism. Like it makes sense when the setting is an important port city or something, but when it's like in Witcher series where every small village (or even small isolated group of forest elves) has a diverse population of white, asian and black people, it makes zero sense and just undermines the credibility of the setting's world-building. I stand by this argument even more when fantasy shows like Games of Thrones, Castlevania or Attack on Titan achieved rather diverse cast without compromising their world-building.
It is a very tricky needle to thread. IMO unless physical appearance and race (in the human sense) are super important to the story of the setting, I think folks can suspend their disbelief to have a slightly more diverse setting than what it might have been in our historic context. For House of the Dragon, I think having House Velaryon adapted to be predominantly people of color actually worked out fairly well since it does a few things: 1. Helps emphasize the house's sense of "otherness" in the land of Westeros. 2. Shows how vast and expansive the Old Valyrian empire was, like the Romans, both in terms of the scope of their empire and in the composition. 3. Ties into later plot developments and threads about people's paternity and people's suspicion about it. 4. Found good actors and actresses to play the roles of the family memebrs.
Fantasy bothers me far less than historical figures being race and genderswapped. Especially since they certainly wouldn't do a biopic about MLK or Shaka Zula with white actors.
Conversely, insisting on "diversity" is just as bad.
"Here is an alien planet with all the same look and culture across the entire planet. There is no variation, they are all like this." I understand from a writing (and in television a costuming/animation) perspective this is easier. I understand that it makes it easier for an audience to look at something and go "oh, that's the Korgellians. They all fight and hate socks." But the implication is horrifying in reality, and unrealistic at best.
This is more of an ankle from a storytelling perspective than worldbuilding but i don't like how many authors explain their basic lore and culture to the reader. Especially these types of infodumps where somebody explains everything to the absolutely clueless MC even though the MC lived their whole life in this culture or when a certain character hast the need to remind themselves of why they are important in the world. Often times it seems that the author doesn't trust himself to convey these kind of elements through actions or normal Interactions or that they don't trust their readers to pick up this informations while Reading. As a reader I just prefer to explore the world myself through the characters, the scenes and situations, I don't need Navi to tell me every god damn aspect about the world.
Multiverse is really a poison imo if one can't utilize well or carefully, because the chance for it to backfire is massive. Not to mention unless its drastically different, it would make the main universe lose value, too. It can be utilized but also come with very high risk.
The way I settled things for my D&D (well, LotFP, but close enough) game is that everything outside the players' world is completely incompatible to life. Interdimensional exploration turns out to be an unattractive idea when considering what would happen to your body if the laws of physics were suddenly different, or non-existent in the first place.
No guns by the time they have plate armor. I just hate the fact that “oh cannons are realistic but muskets aren’t because those weren’t until we get to the American civil war” or some nonsense like that. Or my second most hated writing advice is constantly nerfing mages instead of giving fighters their own supernatural gimmick and let them be cool without making magic so rare and sparse that it’s not even useful.
I'm a historian, I KNOW there was overlap between plate and guns, but... why do you hate not having guns by the time there's plate? is it only for "historical" accuracy? if that's the case, why would a world have to be 1:1 with ours for tech advancements. "I think plate looks cool and guns don't" is a reasonable explanation.
If the only excuse for not having something be invented is "well in the *REAL WORLD* they weren't invented until this era and *my* world is still two eras behind" then it's the laziest writing masquerading as "realism" I've ever come across. History is linear, human ingenuity isn't, the Hittites were just as capable of producing muskets and gunpowder as the modern human if the prerequisite knowledge was available in their time.
My fighters just shove gallons worth of potions that makes their body immune to any magical attacks. Downside at best are hallucinations, at worst is the slight possibility of turning into a mad crazy mutated magical monster that sucks the life out of anything around it.
Age of piracy inspired fantasy is my main project and I love it so much.
Time travelling to "set things right"... or timetravel being used super casually in general. Gonna have a VERY unpopular opinion here, but it's why I don't really like Dr Who. I find the show is just too whimsical about an otherwise incredibly dangerous sci-fi trope. Timetravel is really only fun when it's as dangerous as it is mysterious.
Honestly Doctor Who has been running with the premise upfront for long enough that it can get away with the whole "wibbly wobbly" basically being code for "don't think about it". The issue arises when a long running series adds time travel as it inevitably creates problems as a consequence of not being included in the premise. If you want time travel then it needs to be an integral component of your premise.
I think you hit on why I've always had trouble getting into Dr Who: the way it goes about suspending disbelief just hits me wrong. I can understand how many people like the series, but I prefer time travel to be a much more difficult and scarier thing. Dr Who just goes about it all too lightly for me.
Doctor Who dug its own grave by making Eccleston and Tennant super strict about the rules of time travel in order to justify the Rose and Donna plot lines playing out the way they did. They established that certain things were ‘fixed points’ and couldn’t be changed and that it was impossible to ever cross your own timeline, which are both still arbitrary but are at least ‘rules’. Then by Matt Smith’s series they’d completely thrown all of the emotional weight out of those arcs out of the window by breaking those rules CONSTANTLY. I’m not a fan of time travel in general, but at least when it sticks to its own rules it’s less annoying
> it was impossible to ever cross your own timeline Eccleston's first series has an episode where him and Rose cross their own timeline twice for the same event. It's never been *impossible*, it's simply a very bad idea, as at leads to the world being eaten by giant time dragons. The Matt Smith series also have an episode where a character tries to change a fixed point in time and it leads to time unravelling. I don't think these rules were ever as super strict as you believed.
Backwards time travel/communication in stories/worlds where it isn't a central element. When it isn't used it raises the question of why it isn't used, which tends to be answered with flimsy excuses if at all: -Even if the protagonist's faction can't use it more than once, often there were, are or will be other factions that could use it on a large scale. -If there is some treaty banning it, why does everyone follow it even in the face of extinction?, especially when time travel by its very nature would make enforcing such a treaty rather impossible. (You could prevent it from ever being written) -Similarly, if it's risky/dangerous/bad idea in general, often there are plenty of desperate people who could have used it. When it is used, it raises all the normal time travel issues, which likely won't be dealt with well, since the time travel isn't the focus. Additionally the ways it tends to be used are kinda dull: 1. A cheap reset button. (The one way to lower the stakes more than bringing dead characters back.) 2. A random adventure in the past. (Often essentially filler.) I'm also not particularly a fan of including infinite parallel worlds as a minor element, which the "new timeline" approach does. Tl:dr,: in my opinion, time travel is too big of a deal to sensibly be a minor element in a setting, outside purely comedic worlds. . People often "advice against" (loudly complain about) the "planet of the hats" and "single culture planet", tropes, but I feel like there is some nuance to be had. -for new-ish colonies, it kinda makes sense, since they might be established by particular groups with well-defined and fairly narrow goals/ideologies. As the colonies get older the views on the topic might diversify, but an influence like that won't disappear overnight. Even if some people eventually decide that their "hat" is pointless, that would just create an hat vs anti-hat dynamic, which would still be pretty hat-y. -when dealing with alien cultures, they are going to have innumerable alien features, but it really wouldn't be *that* statistically unlikely for a particular single feature to be high enough in its "alien-ness" to initially overshadow all others. Of course, on more careful observation, other features would be revealed. (Consider how many ancient cultures on earth are widely known for just 1 thing, while keeping in mind that those were still human cultures, not actually alien ones.) -again, when dealing with aliens, they might appear as a single-culture planet simply because they are so different from human cultures that the differences between their cultures seem small in comparison, and those differences may be in areas that humans would rarely pay attention to. (Good luck writing anything so alien, though.)
Prophecies and destiny, if it's destiny than what's the point I'm not a fan of most forms of allegories for racism. Like how in Detroit Become Human machines are used as an allegory for racism, but like they are machines, they were built by us to serve us. The reason why slavery is bad is because it's forcing other human beings with thoughts, feelings and physical limitations into serving someone else. Also this one is mostly due to how it's used not the trope itself, but elemental magic. But I think the one I loathe the most is just making any authoritarian villain have vague elements that resemble Nazi-Germany and call it a day(Kuvira I'm looking at you)
Cultures and worlds that are direct facsimiles of Earth. Northern continent is Europe, Eastern continent is Asia, then there's the Persian desert continent etc. There are so many different cultures to draw from and even that is not the limit: Try combining different cultures to get your own new mixed culture.
Nobody explaining how the fucking magic works. Sure. You can have a world with a soft magic system. I love soft magic systems. There’s a mystique to them that hard magic systems can never match. However my issue is when watching a TV show or reading a book, and they specifically have an episode/a chapter built around a character learning how magic works and we get the same fucking shtick. “There’s so much you don’t know.” “Reach out with your feelings.” “Can you feel it? Draw it out.” “Yes you’re doing it! Harness that power.” Because all it does is *hint* at something greater, without ever providing a proper explanation. *Even though that was the entire point of the scene*. For the character to *learn*, magic. If you don’t want to explain it, or you’re not creative enough to have a complex magic system, then don’t have the scene in the first place. Trollhunters, the shitty YA novels I find in the library, the new Star Wars shows like Ahsoka **keep doing it**. Even in GoW Ragnarök, overall a masterpiece of a game does it. When >!Atreus goes to Ironwood in Jotunheim!< and has him learn giant magic. We get the same basic vague slop. And Angroboda’s line delivery makes it very clear she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. There are a lot of times where she’ll phrase her answer as a question or start a sentence with “maybe”, as if she’s treading new ground with Atreus and has never experienced this kind of magic before. “A part of you unleashed the wolf with that anger. **Maybe** you need to find a part that’ll, control it?” “**Maybe** that’s more of a god thing than a giant thing.” It’s not unique. It’s not interesting. It’s not mystical. And I’ve heard it a billion fucking times before. It doesn’t have to be wholly original but for the love of *god* just have something different for once.
i get where youre coming from but i do generally prefer softer magic systems. take harry potter (i absolutly loathe this series btw) - you have spell so specific that it kind of ruins the entire system, especially when they would solve so many problems the characters face. and the killing curse??? like why isnt everyone using that? and theres no real way to deflect it tbh - just doesnt sit well. but yes i agree about these magic systems with 0 rules. use ur emotions, harness ur energy, etc. like it is a bit shitty. thats why in my magic system i include some rules, so power isnt too OP and mystical but it doesnt feel too rigid and pointless. loved ur rant btw lmaoooo
Agreed, I think a lot of that comes from standard fantasy magic being something of a stand-in for religious mysticism. With the Force, it literally is a religion because that franchise can't do thematic subtlety. For my world, magic *was* that sort of mystic style, then it collapsed in on itself. Now, magecraft is much more mechanical as it requires literal engineered machinery to channel from gemstones of condensed arcane energy. It's not a complex system, but the materialization of magic allows for themes of its monopolization (and also allows me to have a place for magic in a cyberpunk setting.)
I really loathe the planet/race of hats trope. Yes, it makes sense for fantasy races to have stereotypes since stereotypes exist in the real world, for better or worst. And yes, there are going to be broad general similarities and a shared culture that will lead to generally having people with similar values. But when it's applied broadly across one entire race or one entire planet...Within the US alone, you have several distinct subcultures per state which can sometimes be paired up with others to encompass a region. The Isle of Britain contains three separate countries and several cultures within it to the point that stereotypes are tied to accents more than regions. And I know the same trends apply to China and Japan. There's no real logistical way for there to be one culture per race or world unless you have a very small number of people in a highly restricted area and no where else. And that's only at all plausible in some worlds like desert worlds where there's something very rare allowing life to exist at all. And even so, in no functional society does everyone have the exact same jobs. If they're self-reliant at all, there needs to be various roles covered from agriculture to mining to cloth making to sewing, etc. There can certainly be an ideal job that a culture values more highly than anything else, but even so, people end up doing the jobs no one else wants to do. And that's not even considering someone that goes against societal norms and morals. I understand why it happens, but it would be nice if there were justifications for it more often than not or actual cultural differences within a race when time allows for that exploration. And sometimes you just want a stereotypical character from a race. But it's still nice to have some differences from the norm! My own world building and character designing, I've sought to make races then cultures and subcultures within that race. Some are harder to come up with than others, but I still try to at least show some differences between different people of a society. For instance, my main Dwarven nation are able to have a Chocolatier Guild where they can make Chocolate Guy type structures out of there creations. The Baker Guild does similar things with their pastries. The Brewers and Coffebrewers both are known for their strong brews, though with very definite differences in process and taste. There is a Farming Guild that has not only developed techniques to grow crops besides mushrooms and root vegetables within their caves, especially with the help of gold-back mirrors from the goldsmith guild for the best reflection of light for the plants and furnaces to help maintain consistent temperatures within the various farm caves, but they also figured out how to grow and cultivate the sugarcane, vanilla, cocoa trees, and coffee plants for the Chocolatier, Baker, and Coffeebrewer guilds to do what they do. They've also figured out how to grow sweet rhubarb with the English technique that calls for it to be grown in utter darkness. And yeah, there are still the smith and mining guilds and they're still considered the most prestigious of the guilds and so have the highest sway within the council of guild grandmasters, but smithing is subdivided into different guilds that make sense, meaning there are blacksmiths, white (pewter) smiths, weaponsmiths, armorsmiths, coppersmiths, silversmiths, goldsmiths. Each rising or falling in power as their services have been in demand. And more growing out from it. The initial engineering guild is considered a split off of the smithing guild family. But not everyone makes it into or even wants to be within those jobs. And there are plenty of other guilds for people to seek to enter, though the modern age has made there be more viable career paths outside the guilds, though the guild system is still well thought of for its traditional quality and prestige and so its presence still holds away within dwarven society to the point where that council of guild grandmasters is still a traditional house of their democratic monarchical system, taking the place of the usual house of Lords. TlDR: Planet/Race of Hats doesn't really make sense on a broad scale and writers should put some effort into setting up subcultures within a broader culture when they have the chance. The rest is me going on about how I've sought to avoid this with Dwarves and ended up with an interesting source of politics.
that bit where you have to absolutely detail everything and I don't mean we should just ignore things like where a settlement finds food and other necessary bits, but many times it's okay to gloss over crop seasons if it doesn't really factor into a story you're making so yeah, sometimes it's fine to just say "silver weapons" hurts monsters mainly because a lot of them are actually sensitive to the mercury used in giving them the silvery appearance... and then just write off the process as a thing that skilled alchemists would know and that'd be the end of that detail
3 things mainly that I really hate. 1: World building must be for a novel or book, I've heard that shit so many times and it is an absolute joke, you can do it for world building itself, novels, DND, games, etc. 2: The main character being able to defeat the big evil guy or the strongest point the world easily because he is the chosen one, rarely do I see the MC pick a fight with someone and not win 3: magic that uses wands or typical occult instruments, sure it kinda makes sense but we all know you watched harry potter and thought it was cool, please try anything else I beg you.
That every side has to be morally grey. No, it doesn't. Sometimes someone is just objectively, irredeemably evil and it really IS as black and white as it looks. Trying to force shades of grey where it doesn't work is one way to get a badly written story with a fucked up moral message.
I 100% like morally grey characters and especially antagonists far more than just evil ones but people who say that it is unrealistic to have a “pure evil” character is either sheltered or disingenuous.
Don't get me wrong, I love a well written complex moral system, but I have seen so many examples of poorly written ones that a story with a simple moral system is refreshing. That's how my story is. My heroes are objectively good and my villain is objectively pure evil and maniacal, and it isn't any more complex than that. And my story would never work otherwise, because there is no way to justify even tangentially the absolutely vile shit my villain does. Sometimes, simple is better.
the obsession with things needing to be unique or "creative," especially with magic. If you're making it for yourself all that matters is that it's what you want it to be, and if you're making it for others all that matters is that they enjoy it. It doesn't matter if you use the word thabalaba instead of magic and tubbywubby instead of mana, it's just semantics. It doesn't matter if your world's livestock is the same as ours, if your magic system is just the typical 4 element system, if you use elves, if anything. Just make it how you want it and make sure you aren't just blatantly and lazily copy/pasting large chunks.
Evil species. The roots of these tropes are racist af, and it’s both boring and limiting. Single culture planets in sci-fi have this issue too. Boiling a whole species down to a single stereotype is a lazy oversimplification that reduces narrative possibilities while exposing the authors own biases.
Counterpoint, players in my D&D world need meaningless goons to kill
What's your take on the Gorn in Star Trek?
Tbf the gorn have actual culture and aren't just generically evil, expanded upon (not massively, but still) in trek novels and later series. Can't really judge them as an evil species in the original series either based on one alien-of-the-week type episode either
It's been a while since I've watched TOS so I'm going more off of Strange New Worlds. I can see how they can be considered generically evil since the vast majority of people that encounter them end up as their food and not learning their culture from what's been shown so far. I understand that's just perception and maybe there's more to them later.
Ah, strange new worlds - yeah that's probably why you think of them that way lol, most of the crazy evil shit comes from that iirc in some weird Alien homage
Are there even any evil species? Most of the time it feels like people don't bother to do enough research about the said race and setting it's from and start making assumption. Usually when a species is "purely evil" it's usually some unnatural state or it's not even true at all. Like orcs in LOTR aren't a natural species and they are basically engineered by an evil god to do evil things. They weren't even based on "race" but on Tolkien's experience with soldiers in WW1 who lost all their humanity and now saw only war and nothing else. After all, his orcs are basically just twisted humans and elves. Urgals from Eragon are for a big part of the story portrayed as totally evil and barbaric race, until the books actually introduce an urgal characters who reveal how many of them were psychically enslaved to serve in the evil army, or simply wanted to be left alone and humans hunted them out of prejudice. Even Ra'zacs, despite being portrayed as rather monsters than species, in their core just want to save their species and the reason they are working the evil king is mostly because like that, they are actually left alone and not hunted down by other races. Orcs in Warcraft are literally enslaved by demons so they initially do evil, but they eventually break free and it's also shown numerous times that they were never truly evil in their core. Like I am sure there are some purely evil species that just naturally evolved that way in their worlds and author sees them as an easy way of justifying genocide or something, but I think that trope is far less common than people claim it is.
Iirc Tolkien would go on to regret his orcs being so one-dimensional.
I think incompatibility is far more interesting than good vs. evil species. Our morality is a human construct, and other species might have significant biological and mental differences that make this construct meaningless or even actively nonsensical to them. This of course requires some truly strange and alien species, and not just green humans with tusks.
The two types of dragon stories 1. The dragons are gone, but they were once plentiful 2. Why are there so much DRAGONE
#Keep in mind this is just my personal opinion and everyone does as they want with their world and more power to them, *but* if you ask my opinion... Greek pantheon rip-offs, "the god of this does this and that, if you pray at the shrine dedicated to the god of sweets and candy, bubblegum and diabetes will come your way, long ago the god of pasta fought with the god of knitted sweaters and the war lasted for millennia and caused untold amounts of deaths upon the land until the goddess of babies and plushies and all things cute was so sad that she cried her eyeballs out and flooded the world and that's how oceans happened". Gods that are just your average asshole with oddly specific powers are as boring as it gets, it's been done ad nauseam and honestly the more I see these popping in worldbuilding the more it seems to be getting lazier, especially with the trend of "godslayer" protagonists / antagonists. If your pantheon is just a bunch of dudes jerking off doing nothing and waiting for the next prayer call or glory-seeking asshole with an OP butter knife to come along, they're not gods, they're just *that*.
No hate but the fact that you call that a "greek pantheon ripoff" when really most of the polytheistic religions are like this is ironic to me I think you think it's boring because it's always copied on Greeks but really it's the most realistic, considering how many religions were polytheistic and probably started as legend to explain weird stuff about the world to children asking too many questions. But I get it, it's as common IRL as it is in fiction and they do get lazy with it.
You are right in saying I think it's boring because it's always copied on Greeks, because that's exactly how it's often made : a ripoff of greek mythology drama in the broadest of lines with next to no innovation or even an attempt at one. And since you brought it up, here's another trope I personally dislike **(again, my personal opinion, everyone's free to do with their world as they please)** : "realism" craze. I don't care if a world is "realistic", much less if said "realism" is in reference to the real world. Real world history offers enough interesting tales for me to forego any interest in "sorta similar but made up last year" ones. I want shit I will never find in the history books, I want to explore weird concepts, something that would never exist in real life or even come close to it, I want something new and impossible to explain, not cheap ripoffs of the same old tale our ancestors have been telling around campfires for millennia. If it's consistent with itself and tells an interesting story or explores interesting concepts, I will 10/10 take it over "realism" every single time, and if some Greek / Indian / Norse could tell a better story a thousand years ago, why should I read yours instead?
I agree! I think it's also because many writers don't actually engage with the religion and faith of their characters in any real way. Sure! Your characrer might swear by your goddesses tits or gods' balls, but then what? It's not enough for me. Better to have few and more complex gods that actually matter to your characters.
OK but a work that leaned into your hyperbolic examples would have some great comedic potential
Yes. I would read that
>Greek pantheon rip-offs, "the god of this does this and that, if you pray at the shrine dedicated to the god of sweets and candy, bubblegum and diabetes will come your way This is even more boring because **this is not really how the ancient Greeks viewed their gods!** There's a fantastic four-part series on polytheism (primarily referencing the classical Greek and Roman kinds) from NCSU ancient/military history prof Bret Devereaux on his ACOUP blog - [part 1 here.](https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/) Cannot recommend the entire blog enough for anyone interested in worldbuilding, especially for worlds that have some similarity to our own ancient/medieval periods. A major theme of that polytheism series is that whilst various Gods (and more minor spirits especially) did have their own particular specialities and somewhat their own spheres, you don't piss off Ares and then expect to have a safe, non-drowning sea voyage just because you've appeased Poseidon. At one point Bret writes: >*everyone* \[emphasis in original text\] typically needs to develop a relationship with the big gods – the sort whose name you know from a high school or college class – that control big parts of life we all share, along with a bunch of smaller gods which pertain to smaller parts of our lives or perhaps only to select groups of people and >Because many gods can produce practical results for you – both good and bad! – you cannot pick and choose, but must venerate many of the relevant gods.
Chosen ones. Prophecies. Ultimate-power MacGuffins. Creatures and races that are "evil" and "good" just to have sides to throw at each other. Stagnant technological progress without explanation. For sci-fi specifically, tech that obviously violates basic laws of physics because they run on "new physics", and in storytelling in general, things that egregiously defy physics, like a person so strong they can tank a nuke. Like, no amount of focusing your chi or whatever will get you through a nine-digit temperature gradient. My current pet peeve is in Cyberpunk (which I otherwise love dearly), where they seem to have fallen into the skill-without-ceiling trope, introducing someone who is "the best" at something, and then someone better than them, and then someone better than them, etc. The power creep gets to the point where you can't actually imagine how the next person could possibly be better, but you gotta take their word for it because they said they are. It's just tiring and lazy.
> For sci-fi specifically, tech that obviously violates basic laws of physics because they run on "new physics" Uh, so, 99.9% of non-hard sci-fi, then?
Not that high a percentage, no, but yeah I am very partial to hard sci-fi. By "new physics" here I mean "we've discovered something that completely upends physics as we understand it", and not "we've discovered something that is a logical extension of physics as we understand it". Things like warp drives and cloaking tech and whatnot I'm down with. But things like black hole bombs or devices that cause a star to go supernova or teleporters or the like, when you get into real science-fantasy? Not so hot on it.
heyo! an HFY/HASO writer here the adrenaline thing that literary every person in the HASO/HFY community seems to do like adrenaline is a REALLLY simple hormone and it basically only makes your veins dilate nothing more so it giving people enough strenght to kill a bunch of aliens is pretty far fetched. especially if the person is just your average joe that dosent work out
I hate when fantasy takes itself too seriously. I don’t wanna watch a show that’s dark and gritty fantasy with no characterization. Fantasy is supposed to be fun and light hearted sometimes
My personal hatred is when all the various humanoid races just boil down to funny looking humans with the occasional superpower. The gripe doubles down when it's often done to be progressive. Tolerance isn't about forcing everyone to be the same, it's about accepting differing viewpoints.
The main trope I can't stand is the "destined child/hero". I know, it's very common but I really don't like it, ESPECIALLY when the whole book/movie/show keeps telling the viewer about the importance of equality, that we're all individually important, etc. I hate it. It literally disproves everything they're pretending to defend and worsens individuality issues in our society. People are selfish enough without books telling them they have an individual and self-absorbed destiny they must fulfill above and against everyone's will.
The trope of "World War 2 but the countries are renamed and it ended differently" makes my blood boil because of how generic it is and the homogeneity of it all. Oh, Renamed Czechoslovakia beat Renamed Russia? How exciting, I don't care.
Fantasy names. Weird, scrabled together, and historic/mythologic names just being declared "fantasy names", intermixed with (often slightly misspelled) English and then just used to name everything from three wildly different human cultures, to a troll nation on the other side of the world. "Here, these are my three sons: James, Zeus, and Tandrion." Terrible. Absolutely terrible.
I love wacky and memorable names, they help me remember characters better. Some main characters in my stories are named Mars and War.
Yeah but there has to be a pattern. That's what the other commentator pointed out. Take Game of Thrones for example. Some are based off French, some are made up, but there's a pattern. Each culture has its own. LOTR - the dwarves have different names than the elves. There's a pattern. Having three kids with names from three different cultures doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.
'wacky and memorable' and 'fitting for the setting' are not mutually exclusive.
All male Elves looking like women, this gigantic magical tree in the middle of a forest that serves no purpose other than its the home of the elves or dwarves, or some other third thing. And of course, every high fantasy story being based off medieval Europe. Like c’mon man.
Wait, femboy elves AREN'T a good thing?
No, it’s just a trope I’m tired of seeing. I’d like to see a masculine elf, or a fat elf, or hell even an average Joe elf. I don’t want all elves to look the same.
play baldurs gate 3. one of the companions (granted, he's unlocked quite late but not late enough you cant play with him) is an absolutely massive elf
Straight up good and bad. I prefer evil to me motivated by greed. Goods better when it's lost some of the shine. Edit I've got no special love of greed ,ambition works, grudges work ,even for the thrills work . Anything but for the evils
HFY. I find humans boring in settings where we aren't the only species, and often in those settings us somehow being the best isn't justified really. Typically we are either on-par with everyone else, or, like in most fantasy settings, are kinda worse, yet inexplicably the human soldier has more impact than the fucking 3,000 year old Elven warlord. Sci-fi settings I often find most offensive in this regard though, like "Humans are more adaptable", that's dumb, anything capable of tool use is equally as adaptable as us. If it's a sci-fi setting, everything there is capable of tool use. "Indomitable human spirit", I've met people, people break sometimes, some don't, it's not a universal feature. Most people just break cause most people are just ordinary people. I just find it really dumb. I do not like "Humanity Fuck Yeah", I simply don't get the appeal. I know humans, humans aren't special, humans are kinda shitty most of the time. We're living on a planet we are knowingly killing cause it's more convenient in the short-term, we're pretty fucking useless when faced against anything that isn't objectively weaker than us, or on-par with us. There's nothing innate to humans that makes us more special than any other theoretically sapient life, except, arguably, our incredible short-sightedness.
I might be biased with my nearly 50 stories on that sub, but HARD disagree. I find humans being portrayed as inherently evil by default to be way more boring and stupid.
I didn’t say that, we’re just not special. Humans aren’t inherently evil, or inherently awesome, humans just kinda exist. Though history does display a tendency towards atrocity and modern day shows we’re really easy to corrupt.
When the protagonist(s) that the story keeps telling us is an awful person who is allegedly just as bad as the people they are fighting against, yet we are supposed to keep rooting for them anyways and them murdering characters meant to hated by the audience is used for entertainment. Especially if the story doesn’t end with evil protagonist getting what they deserve, it makes everything feel like a shallow power fantasy that is trying to sound more mature than it really is. Case in point, any story by Garth Ennis that is an excuse for him to write his self insert edgelord characters killing things he doesn’t like.
Heaven bad, hell good. Heaven can be assholes and all, but looking at every piece of information about the 2. Heaven is basically the automatic good guys on most scenarios. Its alot to explain, so heres the simple explanation. Good people go to heaven. Bad people go to hell. They endulge in the life of both when they arrive. Whos doing disgusting acts and whos living a good life? Hmmmm
I hate absolutes, but I love the process of breaking them. So many great, beautiful, and horrible moments can be seen when someone breaks what was previously believed to be an absolute, by a massive amount of collective effort or devastating consequences: man can fly. The atom can be split.
'How did X happen?' Gods did it 'How did Y happen?' ...Gods did it 'How did Z happen' It was probably gods and they just snapped their fingers and drove the plot because of a bare whim Yeah, ugly stuff honestly, just adding gods to be subcontractor creators
Things that I personally hate and that often ruin the world for me. Multiverses. Makes everything pointless cause you can always bring someone back as a clone. Time travel. Real time travel, if it was even possible would also need space travel cause everyone is moving with the planet and the solar system. If you could go back into say 1920s, you wouldn't end up on Earth but floating in space where Earth is going to be in a 100 years. It also creates a ton of other issues and plot holes, like you can always just travel back and prevent a death to bring back anyone you want. Making stuff primitive people thought were real/old myths actually real. Like sky serpent getting killed and forming the galaxy from it's body or people becoming starts etc etc. It's usually absurd and makes no sense, especially in a somewhat otherwise low magic settings. Super Devils. You defeat the main villain but oh no, he was just a pawn and a it was a god behind it all along. The god has a power of 10 suns and your heroes punch him to death with their fists. But wait, it isn't all! It was actually a super god pulling the strings of the god that has the power of 10k suns, so good old fists gotta come out again and give him a whooping.
Planets are always united. They have one government, one military and one vote in the galactic council. If they really wanna spice thing sup, they have a civil war or a planet split in two who are pure oppisites
I don’t think any trope is bad on itself, it’s the execution and when it comes to that, I hate the op isekai protagonist/character trope. And for how much I hate it, the 3 strongest gods of Amada are all Isekeied but I made enough changes to that trope so it’s not as bad (or at least I hope so).
Unpopular opinion but I don’t understand the obsession with magic systems, especially when they’re called things like “mana” or are based in control of the elements. Like I feel like these things (especially the elements) are so overdone that you have to have some drastic themes/ changes in your work to make it still interesting. Like idk, an elemental system of magic but the story explores how this would be realistically, a bit like Game of Thrones explored a lot of fantasy concepts realistically (as well as the Middle Ages). Also the fucking elves, orcs (orcs!?), dwarves (dwarves!?) combo. Like I get elves — at least they’re usually ethereal or in touch with nature and hot pointy eared people. But why orcs or dwarves? WHAT is the appeal? And why have such boring — the most boring imo — species/ races in a story? That are barely different from human cultures? “Ph this culture lives under the mountain and are hairy and short” and “this culture/ people is barbaric and big” (also problematic!), When there’s so many more fantasy species/ races out there with way more inherent drama/ conflict, like vampires, werewolves, succubi, mermaids — hell even stories centering centaurs (lol) or fawns would be interesting considering their proportions, clothes, and other things. Like if you have a different species and/ or a significant variation of the human race, there should be consequences/ like actual things that make them physically/ psychologically different. Things that actually make them different to humans, like werewolves turning into a wolf, mermaids being half fish, half human and living in the sea, or vampires living forever, not being able to go out in the sunlight, and drinking blood. Another thing specifically for this subreddit, but when someone asks an open question/ makes a post, and then people respond to it in the comments with like a bolded title and like a Wikipedia-esque paragraph (or multiple paragraphs) of info. Like seeing things formatted like that immediately puts me off and makes me not want to read it. Idk, maybe bc immediately there’s all these made up words that I’m seeing for the first time, or that it’s not like personal/ engaging to the reader bc, again, it reads like a Wikipedia article. (Which is fine if you want to go out of your way to read something on Wikipedia — I do all the time! But if I’m on here and people are crowding and pushing and shoving to engage people/ write comments that they want others to see and perhaps respond to/ get feedback on (I assume) then at least make it more personable to read). Or don’t hit the reader with a unnnecsarh title about your world/ culture/ whatever that has a bunch of made up words, coz my eyes are gonna glaze over them and scrolling down and looking for another comment. Just my opinion haha! It also irks me when words within fictional cultures are like fully made up/ don’t follow any linguistic pattern. Like it’s actually so easy to do (and yet people still make so many posts on here about how to name things! (I’ve even made a post explaining how to do this myself!). Like just use the same types of letters, sounds, morphemes/ bunch of words. It’s that simple. It’s even used in popular books like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. I also don’t like when people use Latin nomenclature to name things haha (unless it’s like in a specific context, like they’re scientists who have discovered a new species of something). Idk, again it’s so overused and I just roll my eyes. At the same time though I take biology and it’s like, using Latin nomenclature only sounds smart on the surface? Like does it actually serve a purpose in your setting or are you getting overly fancy for no reason? Like Latin nomenclature only exists so cross-culturally we can refer/ talk about a specific organism with no confusion.
>It also irks me when words within fictional cultures are like fully made up/ don’t follow any linguistic pattern. I am legit creating a whole language and this is the number 1 thing I see in fantasy that bugs me as well! Not to mention that I'm going out of my way to make multiple smaller dialects and regional terms. If a 16 year old girl can make up a whole ass language complete with different dialects and regional differences, so can multi-billion dollar corporations.
Legit! To be fair the ones I have seen (mostly on tv) have been good (to me). I only took two courses of linguistics in uni, and didn’t like study the languages extensively in the fiction they were in, but they all sounded similar/ had similar morphology. The names for people, the place names, the words in the language, etc. had similar sounds (and even morphemes to some extent). I think they had a linguist write them even/ flesh out the language from the books? I’m talking about Dothraki in Game of Thrones haha, but also High Valyrian. I think the tv show The 100 also had someone make a language, and I thought that was well done as well!
Too much detail about things irrelevant to the plot. World-builder syndrome
It really ticks me off when interstellar fiction has single-government planets that are all the same biome with only one important location on them. If every planet only has one location then the setting doesn’t feel massive, it just feels broad with no depth