Is it me, or does modern fantasy lack soul? Think back to classical fantasy like Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, The Wheel of Time, Le Morte D’Arthur, The Once and Future King, Narnia, or Earthsea.
These books were dripping with soul and passion. They evoked a sense of wanderlust, adventure -- they were a gateway to another world rich with lore, heroes, villains, and universal themes such as hope, comradery, goodwill, and love.
Now look at modern fantasy. Everything so fricking bleak and dreary. Everything has to be "gritty" and realistic. The colors are washed out (figuratively, but sometimes literally), the protagonist is an butthole, the side characters to the main protagonist are giant pricks, the morals are vapid, and the wanderlust is all gone.
Even the "lighter hearted" works like Sanderson are void of substance, since Sanderson seems more obsessed with anime and his magic systems, than telling a good story.
I know the pic related isn’t the best way to convey my concern, but something about it just turns my stomachs. What the hell even happened? Where has the imagination of a different and more beautiful world gone?
>Is it me, or does modern fantasy lack soul?
Literally everyone thinks and says this.
And that's because it's true, yes. Everything is digital now, which is why art looks like total shit, but everything has also become a blobby simplified mess - see CalArts. This isn't to say that there aren't artists out there making incredible art though, and it goes without mentioning the political scarification.
As for the fictional worlds themselves, it's partly because everything has become ironic and cynical. Look at the world we're living in. The face of 'wanderlust' and 'adventure' nowadays isn't a brave hero with an intrepid spirit, it's a middle class American girl with wealthy parents travelling to Italy and posting vapid pictures and videos of herself on social media. That is now what people to aspire to be.
Could also argue that fantasy has become such a dominant genre and so ingrained into our collective psyche that the same clichés Tolkien used 80 years ago simply don't invigorate us anymore. Fantasy at its core has barely evolved and there's a definite truth to the claim that everything has already been done before.
I don't know. I like fantasy but I mostly read shit from the 80s and earlier. I have read a handful of newer ones but they were kinda insipid. Same with scifi. Most of them look unappealing and I have zero desire to find out more. Maybe the fault is with me since to be honest I have not given any of it a chance. But I don't care, lol
All of the best fantasy was written between the end of the Middle Ages and the end of the World Wars. I think there are many reasons for this but the total victory of the technological society and consumerist zeitgeist are among the most obvious.
Tolkien was great precisely because his stories were first escapist fantasies, built with attention and love and care and sincerity, and not mass produced consumer garbage designed to sell copies and also because he specially dug up the pre-modern myths and fabled and used them as models, while everyone after him uses shallow conceptions of him as their model, and many times not even that.
You say "everything" modern is bleak and dreary but the only current example you give is Sanderson. How much modern fantasy have you read?
It sounds like you are more frustrated with the direction fantasy has gone in art, video games, tabletop rpgs, movies, etc than you are with books.
You sound like a moron.
Ok. How much modern fantasy have you read? Name names.
GRRM
Bakker
>Is anyone else bored of a toy that seemed fun in high school?
Come on, you‘re almost there…
The toy from the high school era is still fun, the new generation of that toy is garbage
No i still read prachett and it's still beautiful as i read it when i was a kid (im 43).
Fantasy is written by and for urbanites now. People who have never walked in a misty morning glenn or seen an old forest or made a camp fire and enjoyed being on a hike. A part of the heyday of fantasy was an awe of nature and a lust for adventure. Now they’re writing tales of medieval New York and the conspiracies to take over the business/kingdom. Frick me dead.
Don’t ask me what the woman writers are doing. Probably some billionaire werewolf love drama.
>I know the pic related isn’t the best way to convey my concern, but something about it just turns my stomachs.
Its a poetic image really.
Let's break it down, bit by bit.
>the elven sorceress
In the first picture, she wears white and gold. The white symbolizes purity in many cultures, and gold is obviously regality or royalty, suiting a wizard. She is not wearing armour, she is wearing a loose garment , exotic, yet its not just a bikini. You can tell shes some sort of high sorceress. The dragons bright red tail circles around her feet, like a portal. Her hairstyle- elegant. Her features- nordic or classical european.
The second picture has her wearing blue and black. Not a horrible colour combination, but on first glance you cant tell its the same character anymore. Its because shes wearing armour. Not an elegant sorceror's dress, but armour. Like a marvel hero. Its like the tacticool trend for superhero costumes, but for fantasy. Her hairstyle is a basic "let your hair down" situation, and her features are more akin to the botox lips and cheeks of modern instagram models, or more accurately, warcraft women. The weapons "look cool", but they do not make her look as elegant or regal as the previous depiction. Perhaps the pose is a bit better than a woman coyly looking at the view, but its the only positive.
>The dragon
The dragon in the first picture is a direct interpretation of the words "winged lizard". It is long and slender, with a narrow mouth, and has bright red scales which could be mistaken for rubies at first glance. The glowing blue eyes contrast against these.
The second picture's dragon, is a brute. The dragon's maw is now thick and ogrish, the noble visage marred by exaggerated features which attempt to make the dragon look more organic and less like the magical beast it was, with a muted colour scheme and unglowing eyes. Its tail does not even circle the sorceress's feet, which makes me believe that each of these characters were drawn as separate png images added to a pre-rendered background.
Cont.
Cont.
>the trolls and the knight.
Something interesting i noticed in the first picture: the paladin looks just like a crusader. Red cross and everything. Of course, the name "paladin" comes from an order of crusading knights, but after so much of tumblr tier paladin OCs I've seen, its strange to see one that derives from the original source material. His armour also, while being a derivative design, shines like purest light on the battlefield, which really sells the idea that its some sort of holy warrior on a mission.
The second piece of art doesn't even have him, or anything that striking, really.
Then comes the trolls. In the first picture you have two demonic looking creatures, massive torsos and gaunt arms, snarling at the heroes and glaring with glowing red and yellow eyes. Their armour is chainmail and cloth, form fitting. They look hulking and menacing, just as scary as the troll myth was to the ancient Norse.
The modern one? They aren't even trolls in the strictest sense. One looks furry, the other looks more like a bearded orc. Huge bulky blue armour , conveniently hiding the actual frame of the creatures. Its one of the reasons i believe that the lack of soul is also a skill issue on part of the artist- all the characters have very basic posing in the new picture. Cartoon-like proportions. Cloth material doesn't really hug the bodies of the characters like in the first picture. Even the stones in the background don't have the weathering the original picture had. The unimaginative designs are not only the fault of a piss-poor imagination, but the artists own lack of skill to draw complicated designs and have better posing. Thus the original trolls lurk and seem like abominable threats, while the new trolls fumble in heavy plates of metal.
Contd.
Cont.
>the dark elf
The original dark elf has very dark skin. An exotic black dress with even more exotic israeliteellery hanging from it. Almost African. The red eyes and white hair contrast well with the dark colours, and with the faint electricity emanating from her hands, makes her look like a crazy witch ready to strike.
The new dark elf is not a dark elf. Its a dark elf cosplay. The skin tone is ridiculously lighter, and doesnt contrast as well anymore with the red eyes and white hair. She wields a comically large knife instead of electricity. A detailed red and black cape is replaced by basic edgy skull armour. Her israeliteellery is replaced by a cheap bikini. She looks like a cosplay babe, not a mystical creature.
>final point : colour
I think this is the biggest problem. Whether it is the muted reds of the dragon, or the unrealistically vibrant green of the grass compared to its original green like colour, and even the skin colours of the individual characters- its all awful. There is plenty of vibrancy, but no contrast. Its like a pride flag- all the colours in the rainbow, but nothing blends together.
Ironically there is more diversity and less "revealing" designs in the first picture. You'd think that the opposite of that would excite anons. But alas, bad colouring, bad posing, poor character (re)design, and the obvious nature of the png characters placed onto a prerendered programme is what renders this SOUL-less.
Thank you for coming on my TED talk.
Good analysis. The top looks like it was made as art by an individual, but the bottom looks like it was made as an ad and the notes were probably stricter on the artist, so I'm not sure it's 100% to blame on the artist, I don't know the backstory.
I think this is insightful. I don't know about 'colour' as the essential distinction, but I like what you were saying more generally about the symbolic, severe, otherworldly quality of older art compared with the chunky, Funko Pop physicality of the modern.
>There is plenty of vibrancy, but no contrast.
I think part of the problem is that it's harder to create convincing textures in digital art, probably because the tools are too "perfect" and not as organic as an actual brush in a human hand.
That's why in the early 00s onward, digital fantasy art took this turn for cartoonish styles where every object looks to be made of some plastic.
Like look at that tigerman's armor in , his armor doesn't look like metal. And it's so fricking thick, like its made of stone, but not quite. It doesn't look like anything really.
It might as well be made of the same stuff as the dark elf's thigh lower in the same image.
One thing I've noticed is also that lots of clothing/armor design of modern fantasy art involves never leaving a plain or nondescript surface, instead it has to be filled with some useless trinket or detail, and I think this goes back to the texture thing... if there was nothing there, it'd be even more glaring how plastic the whole thing look, while with actual textures and painting, a skilled artist can create a convincing fabric texture without having to add some shitty detail.
It has nothing to do with it being digital. The artist draws to the client's instructions. The client wanted stupid-looking WoW slab-armor and superfluous detail. From what I hear from artists who draw this stuff, the clients tend to complain if the clothing is too "simple".
I still think it would be harder, or at least more time consuming, to create pic related in a software than with a brush.
To draw that sleeve, wouldn't you need to constantly change color or brush or something?
It's like digital painting has no grain to it, unless you use stuff like noise functions, but I don't know to what extent you can fine tune those.
You need to constantly change the color or brush with physical paint too. The physical painting probably took much longer to make than the digital painting. At least weeks, maybe months of work. Digital artists are too lazy to do that, or they'd be trad artists. Whatever "grain" you're seeing is not from the paint. The artist appears to have painted on a very large board in order to get the painting so smooth and detailed.
All this discussion of technical detail is interesting but the real difference is the meaning and content. The top is a composition of characters, each representing a different idea or purpose. The bottom is just an imitation of the top. Even if the art/armor styles were the same, it would seem shallower.
Top was painted by one of the GOAT fantasy artists and bottom wasn't. Top also did his own character design while bottom had to obey the client.
who painted the top? it's def better. the bottom looks like utterly generic artstation shit.
>Keith Parkinson
nevermind found it
>Top also did his own character design while bottom had to obey the client.
You're divining a lot and it's not as relevant as you seem to think. The top also was obviously working under constraints, both are marketing material for a videogame.
The other point is to help people understand WHY Parkinson is considered great, on more than just technical details.
>You're divining a lot
Your ignorance does not mean I am "divining". Parkinson said that he almost always designed the characters he painted, and the EQ series were not exceptions.
>Your ignorance does not mean I am "divining".
Well then correct my ignorance. Explain how Parkinson was doing "character design" when drawing pictures of the standard fantasy races in blatantly obvious Everquest classes, but the guy underneath him doing the same thing for Everquest Next was somehow not doing "character design" and was under some imaged additional constraints from the publisher.
Because if you simply assume that everyone should know this, yet cannot explain it, I will conclude that you're the one who doesn't understand.
Also remember, my entire thesis here is that the most overwhelming difference between the two pictures is the relative function of each character, based on what they are depicted doing. The fact that the Parkinson's Paladin wears Saint George's cross is secondary to the interaction between him and the Troll performing necromancy. It is unlikely that publisher constraints explicitly required an artist to eliminate the action-- indeed it appears the new artist attempted to copy some of the action elements, just lazily.
Bottom pic is copied exactly from the in-game character models.
My point is that although he was not as talented as Parkinson, to be fair, the bottom artist was also handicapped to use those terrible WoW-derivative designs. You can complain about the posing, ok, but I consider that part already covered by not being as talented. (I think the poses on the bottom are fine)
I think what really separates top and bottom in terms of skill is Parkinson's mastery of temperature. Look how Parkinson kept the sky clear blue to offset the dragon's bright red, for example. You can see the same thing at a smaller scale in each of the characters. Bottom's shading looks a bit muddy because he doesn't quite have the temperature figured out.
>(I think the poses on the bottom are fine)
It's not a question of "fine" vs "not fine" it's a question of meaning. The Parksinon art is a composition of unique, distinct moments. Each character is not only defined by what they look like, but what they are doing in the picture. Look at the Dwarf and Halfling.
TOP: Dwarf is leaning back, clearly intimidated though not necessarily afraid of the enormous ogre in front of him. You're really encouraged to think about what the Dwarf feels about the huge and threatening monster in front of him. The Halfling is poised to for the opportunity to strike as the Ogre goes after the Dwarf.
BOTTOM: The Dwarf and Furry are engaged with generic attack/defense combat poses. There's no 3-way dynamic with the halfling as with the original. The tiny Lizard-thing and the green warcraft Orc vaguely reflect the original Dwarf/Ogre relationship, but is far less impressive. The Orc is not imposingly large like the original Ogre, and the Lizard barely looks human.
You're right about the characters in the bottom image being added to a pre-rendered background. Look at the character's feet in the top image - it looks like they're actually standing on the ground, and in some cases, their feet/footwear is obscured by grass. There's at least some sense of gravity and interaction with the environment (I mean, it's not great, but the sense is there). In the bottom picture, there's no sense of weight or gravity, no interaction with the environment. They look like they're floating in the scene.
>all that shit
You're right on all counts, of course, including the fact that Keith Parkinson is simply a more talented artist (who works in physical material not digital). But I'd sum it up with one word: purpose.
The characters in Parkinson's original are all unique characters, each with their own history and role in the action. Even where the actual postures may look a slightly awkward, they all convey some different aspect of combat. The confident point of the Paladin at the evil Troll who is raising undead, the wariness of the very small Dwarf and Halfling facing the enormous, menacing Ogre, the nervous archer preparing his shot, the Dark Elf channeling rock star energy, and of course the galaxy brain black wizard taking a moment from contemplating the universe to peek at elf ass. Firiona Vie herself is looking directly at the audience while the bard observes the battle. The entire picture is full of contrasting perspectives and emotions.
Meanwhile the bottom pic is like if you told a bunch of models to do a combat pose for the camera. All characters convey the same generic combat mindset, except for the Paladin who, taking the place of the wizard in the original picture, is just posing and staring off into space for no reason now. (This happens when you copy without comprehension, which is the main way to remove "soul" from art.)
>taking a moment from contemplating the universe to peek at elf ass
wow, he's just like me
Good posts
All of what you said here is exactly what they did to the old RuneScape graphics. They updated it from looking like the top picture (soulful, thoughtful design) to the bottom one (generic fantasy mobile game). Most people actually prefer the latter design, because they're fricking cattle. Anything new = good
Does anybody even play RuneScape anymore?
Half a million players online right now.
That's nice that it's still popular. RuneScape was a great game back in the day.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that IQ and birth rate are inversely correlated in the West, and most likely has been for decades.
>has been
have been
frick. see the problem?
>see the problem?
well, you're here so you're not gonna reproduce, which is a counterpoint to your argument.
Americans happened. Everything they touch turns to shit.
You have to look hard to find good fantasy nowadays. I sound like I'm joking, but I lurk in /wg/ and /sffg/, and the best recent fantasy I've read has come from those threads. Just web-published stuff by "amateur" writers.
post em
Sure. check out the pastebin of course, but a lot of it is trash imo.
Here are my personal favorites that I've found on IQfy:
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/65271/the-screaming-plague-of-ash-a-medical-horror-fantasy -> found on /wg/
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/54622/the-kill-list -> found on /sffg/
Can the modern urbanite bug even appreciate epic adventure anymore?
Classic fantasy was a swan song for the enchanted forests and heathen traditions of old Europe. At some point in the last century the break with the past became definitive and the past can't be engaged with unless it's under 5 layers of irony and condescension. This creates apathy towards the entire project of Fantasy. If people can't take it seriously how can creators. Modern fantasy is just bumpkins, retrogrades, and well-meaning but primitive types getting rolled over by modern audience self-inserts. Fantasy has been sequestered into a corner like a kid's toy. It's over.
This is literally happening everywhere you homosexual. Wake up c**t it's not the 90's anymore hyperreality has eaten everything.
It’s written by modern day urbanite bugmen grew up and lived in the city all of their life and who have zero understanding of the old fables that old fantasy harkens to.
It's a problem with genre fiction in general. It's now written by nerds who do nothing but consume nerd media and don't have actual lives with things happening. Similar to what Miyazaki was talking about, how anime is just made by people who do nothing but watch anime.
just like modern programming is an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction; modern fantasy is a retell from a retell from a retell. It loses it's essence and connection to it's roots on each iteration, also, people are way too exposed to media now, novelty is lost. Who knows, Sanderson might have been praised if his wroge his books 50 years ago.
People blame GURM for making fantasy bleak and gritty and realistic and for hating whimsical fantasy, but I think that's a surface level reading of his work.
George *loves* fantasy and elves and giants and heroes and wanderlust and adventure, he just had to adjust his approach to his time and contemporaries in order to deliver it, all the others works you listed were products of their time, and the only reason they are taken seriously today is because readers understand they come from a time with more naiveté and less general knowledge of the world and cynicism, if those books didn't exist and someone tried to release them today, they wouldn't have nearly the same reception and acclaim because technology has changed how people perceive the world and fiction.
People today are cynical and think there is nothing left to know, so in order to deliver the fantasy pill to them, George has to wrap it up in a cover of gritty realistic sexy historic drama, and it worked like a charm, people in the mainstream were genuinely excited for *dragons* when they were attached to a character like Dany in the show. Today that feels like nothing but at the time it was an achievement since being a nerd was looked down upon throughout all of the 00s.
ASOIAF is full of mysterious far off towers, secret meetings, shadows lurking and watching things, ancient forces at work, intrigue and mystique, unknowable historic events, legendary heroes and swords, impossible feats, fantastical creatures and gods etc, but in the internet era when everything is a Google search away, the only way to make these come off as believable in a story is to treat them as sprinkles to stoke the imagination in an otherwise seemingly mundane world and story, as opposed to having elves singing hymns out in the open. Likewise the characters and the morals have to seemingly falter in other to be relatable unlike old stories that could talk about them openly, because the zeitgeist and people's lives are bleaker.
Excellent points about what seems to be going on.
>People blame GURM for making fantasy bleak and gritty and realistic and for hating whimsical fantasy, but I think that's a surface level reading of his work.
I don't blame him for this. GRRM got successful on the strength of his character writing, the satisfyingly complex political intrigue, the thorough and creative world-building and good plot structure and adventure elements. The "gritty realism" approach aligns well with both political intrigue and character development.
In my experience, the popularity of edgy/grimdark/bleak ebbs and flows. The late 90s was notoriously edgy, while the early 90s was not. ASOIAF has endured through multiple light/dark cycles so I think there's more to it than just "bleakness as a package for traditional epic fantasy."
I think most obvious difficulty with this approach is the danger that it can turn into such a convoluted knot of conflicts that no satisfying resolution is possible. Additionally you can run into problems where too many twists, disappointing developments and especially character deaths can leave readers not caring what happens. History doesn't end, events just keep leading into more events on and on. There's an implicit agreement between storyteller and audience that a tale is more than just a random slice of history. A story is told because there's something interesting about it.
>fantasy bleak and gritty and realistic
It wasn't even the first one to do it. There were always low and high fantasy. Nobody of course did a work of that magnitude but i can't really see what is to "blame". If you are mad that got a show and that popularized like nothing else, blame is on the show, not on his writing.
It’s really just the postmodern society that exists, and the one that exists is full of cynicism, nihilism, and post-irony.
It’s going to take a long while before change happens.
Modern fantasy authors have to write stories for a woman's audience in mind since they're the primary consumers of fantasy / science fiction literature. What you're experiencing isn't really so much as a lack of soul as it's more tailored for a female audience, since men don't really read books for entertainment anymore.
Modern fantasies are extremely shit no matter what medium they take form in. I think I have only come across a handful of good low fantasy settings and even fewer historical ones in the past 20 years.
Most of it seems to be written for children/women or young men without much care put into the world building, characters or other such things. For the most part is is trope upon trope upon trope and copied ideas that somehow get worse with each iteration. People also can't seem to take their settings seriously so Redditor tier "humor" has to be injected into the setting even if it doesn't fit the characters or circumstances at all.
How do you write fantasy without tropes?
>children/women or young men
You realize they are the only one who read now? If i have to start writing something of course i would do for a teen or young adult something. Writing something that would be obscured by everything on that age gap would be a suicide. I read moorwiener when i was 12 cause i had into my library thanks to my mom, nowdays if you are not categorized you are completely overshadowed.
>trope upon trope upon trope and copied ideas
You realize every original idea can be related to something easily right? This happens in every field of realitty from car design to housebuilding. I honestly write a completely (for me) original setting then i spent one hour on the internet and titterally everyone could say "yeah you copied from that".
>take their settings seriously so Redditor tier "humor" has to be injected
This fricking this. Everything must be quirky, full of marvel situations and jokes. I am someone who avoid even using irl terms if it doesnt apply to the contest (no "go to hell" if you don't have christian hell in the setting) but the marvelization of everything is terribile.
>top
generic mmo art
>bottom
generic mmo art (new)
>Is it me, or does modern fantasy lack soul?
old fantasy was inspired by folklore and legends, new fantasy is inspired by video games and cinema
I agree with the op that new fantasy should be more upbeat, heroic, and adventurous. What else might it also need to include to pique your collective IQfy interests?
World building is a big one for me to get into something new. I love just reading about the world and finding maps and histories and all that bullshit.
Everquest is still going strong, they release new expansions yearly, 29 released in total with another in the works. They release new rule set servers yearly, most recent one came out in May.
https://www.everquest.com/news/eq-oakwynd-now-live
This is just retail Everquest, Project99 has been popping off forever too though I don't know all the details with it.
As to what happened, people thought people wanted more advanced, harder, and challenging things and at the same time people tried to bring esports into it. All of this has failed through out the years and here we are in 2023 and Everquest is as popular as retail WoW and WoW classic is the most popular MMO on the market.
It gets even worse. Read The Boken Sword (1954)
It will make you so depressed how bad fantasy is now
everquest 1, the image that the top comes from, was the first game, and the artist died of leukemia in 2005
everquest was 'realistic' for its time, same with everquest 2, however wow came out around eq2 and its arts tyle more or less never really looks dated, while any realistic style looks like spoiled milk a few years after inception.
so with next, they went heavily stylized, and from what I remember, it would still look good today if they project didn't go breasts up.
That pic kills me
Personally in everything i write i find difficult to stick over the "altready heard" on the genre. The story of the young boy who grabs some random guys around to find a magic sword to kill the evil skileton king is... overused. Do people want to hear again about elves with pointy ears living in the woods eating vegetables, op with magic and believeing they are the master race? Or about short kings who lived buried in the mountains digging gems? But on the other side of the coin if you create something incredibly complex or creative you waste half of your book just explaining what the hell you want the reader to understand.
Once you were satisfied enough with dragons and beholders, now everythng is already seen and done.
Then there is the perversion of the modern era, every fricking idiot which cames to you "but the humans using the fungi people as slaves is an allegory of black slavery in the usa?" "no they are just fricking fungi people". No, i don't want to put a gay in every party if i don't want it and yes the search of the artifact should be more important than the girl wanting to win over the males at every turn. And this castrates me, really, i feel the kick in the balls. Unfortunately now you have to adhere to the "standards" and of course everything goes topsy turvy if you need to force every single agenda, while struggling already to give people new and interesting stuff.
Are there any quality takes on the fantasy genre that are inspired more by ancient times rather than medieval times? It seems that everything is trying to be like medieval England, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, or like somewhere else in Europe, as well as the East Asian versions of the genre, but I don't notice anything inspired by pre-medieval aesthetics. I know about historical fiction for ancient Roman and Greek stories, as well as original texts, but where are the Greco-Roman-inspired Tolkiens and Martins?
Circe is good. Gene Wolfe's Soldier in the Mist is supposed to be good but I haven't read it.
>reading fantasy as an adult
grow up
shut up and frick off to your philosophy threads already
read Too Like the Lightning