What's the worst and most annoying tropes in fantasy in your opinion?
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What's the worst and most annoying tropes in fantasy in your opinion?
What's the worst and most annoying tropes in fantasy in your opinion?
DMT Has Friends For Me Shirt $21.68 |
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DMT Has Friends For Me Shirt $21.68 |
>Power loss depression -> I was powerful once... 🙁
>Reincarnation romance -> a love so powerful it conquered time <3
>World tree -> what if the world was, like, a big tree, bro... woah...
>Did I just say that out loud?
>Reincarnation romance -> a love so powerful it conquered time <3
This can be great if done right, which it will never be.
I've enjoyed one. It wasn't a novel but the gameplay was shitty enough that it may as well have been.
In the story that I'll never write because I'm afraid of killing it with my writing incompetence, the universe itself recycles souls and concepts, and souls can get tangled together over time. Friends and lovers can end up meeting eachother by chance and once again being friends or lovers, without even being aware of it.
Over time, this phenomenon would even cause them to merge into one being/soul but that would be over long ass periods of time though.
‘Dune’ says hello.
Cloud Atlas.
I don't like how modern iterations of it almost entirely consist of cuckoldry as a form of "subversion" as if that hasn't also already been played out
loss depression -> I was powerful once... 🙁
Why is this shit? It's perfectly reasonable and can be great
tree -> what if the world was, like, a big tree, bro... woah...
Agreed. There should be bunch of trees connected together, forming a hive mind. I hate the singular thing somehow is all powerful, unless it's a deity. It should be decentralized, or at least, create some kind of amplifying conduct to one central source
Itself.
Ok. Thanks. Go read your self help book bro.
You asked for our opinions and that is the trope of fantasy which I find most annoying. Don't ask questions you don't want the answers too. Or use the general if you only want the responses of fantasy gays.
For someone on IQfy you sure have trouble reading. I asked for overrated fantasy tropes, not what people thought of the genre itself.
You asked for annoying, not overrated.
Annoying, overrated, bad, something you personally don't like or care to see. I want to hear them all.
Ok, I will reword it so you can understand the point better. All of them.
https://www.amazon.com/How-NOT-Be-Dumb-Ass-Perfect-ebook/dp/B01BU3VO9Q
Either way, you failed to answer OP's question.
If you can't even muster a literate answer to such a simple question, your opinions about anything that involves reading are obviously worthless.
yep,this moron is beyond salvation
If salvation is escaping into fantasy novels than I am ok with being beyond salvation.
Fantasy.
When there is a ridiculous caricature of a racist.
I would find this annoying but haven't read enough modern fantasy to think of any examples.
Doesn't bother me personally, but it's a reasonable complaint.
Low-skill complaint.
All history being the history of the wars between good vs evil
Brainlets think the same way about actual world history.
le chosen one (only YOU can save the world!)
le baddie wants to destroy the world
>le baddie wants to destroy the world
I wonder what's the Night King's tax policy
To be fair, high tax policies are pretty evil.
>Villain wants to save the world
>Hero doesn't approve of their methods but has no alternative except wishful thinking
That one gets quite old.
Why they invented fiction, so some people could wait that long
womyn
women are either pure innocent maidens or misunderstood feminists in a male world
Upper class women are destroyed by rape while lower class women just accept it and move on.
morally grey
Brandon Sanderson
>Builds a world
>Has interesting and unique magic system
>Good characters
>Compelling Story
This guy's clearly never read Alcatraz vs The Evil Librarians
When things don't happen because the author doesn't want to be too dark when they definitely would've happened. Like a hot girl getting captured and not explaining why she didn't get raped or considering such possibilities, or someone who easily could get killed in some situation but not, or something like that.
There's a prophecy but...we misunderstood it!
That it can't move away from medieval settings and that homosexuals don't see it as fantasy if it doesn't have dragons or a tolkien-esque world.
The filthy peasant who becomes a knight.
>'the chosen one'
>descendent of an ancient powerful bloodline
>only you can save the world
>your grandfather was actually the king of ____
Whatever you want to call this. It's the most common trope in fiction and it fricking sucks. I struggle to enjoy anything along these lines.
>"Dude, but that's like .... immoral, okay? We're all very pious here!"
>My dragons don't "breathe" fire they spit flammable venom
>Gods are powered by belief, if people stop believing in them they die
>Good vs Evil is too simplistic so everyone's the bad guy
>There's an evil human empire and the main characters are wholesome freakshits on the run from it
>The multiverse is a thing but I won't actually use it in a creative way like moorwiener did
I hate multiverse nonsense period. It's a scape goat for literally everything.
>This character who died is actually alive in another universe
It was my biggest turn off for the Witcher series.
>>Gods are powered by belief, if people stop believing in them they die
I unironically believe this IRL
Probably because I played a lot of Black and White as a kid
>I unironically believe this IRL
that's what makes them true IRL
who came first
>the gods
>what they represented
>the humans who believed in them and wrote literature about them
>moorwiener
Never heard of this guy. Guess I'll have to look him up. Thanks for the rec, anon.
I'm too busy being celibate to read fantasy
It's less any particular trope most of the time than the core fantasy or fantasies of the story. I've read or seen so many stories where the same core dual-fantasy is presented in one of two ways. Apologetically, where the audience is beaten over the head with how good and decent the protagonist is, so it's perfectly okay that he ends up acquiring all of this power and status because he's a really good person you see, which is why all of these women are also swooning over him and possibly willing to engage in polyamory relationship with him because he's just such a good guy and we remind you every three pages of that. Then there's unapologetic, where it's the same power fantasy and sexual/romantic fantasy being presented, but the author just presents it nakedly instead of trying to justify it as being particularly deserved based on the protagonist's inherent virtues and good qualities.
The thing is that those two fantasies, the power fantasy and the romantic fantasy, are what power a lot of stories. They draw the readers in. So a lot of that is really at the core of a lot of stories, and when you see it enough that you start creating subcategories for it in your head based on how it's presented, it really starts to make a lot of things feel stale.
Faceless, nameless, anonymous mooks -- often non-human -- who are at first described as credible threats, only to gradually devolve into ineffective antagonists, vanquished or slain left and right by the protagonists as matters of course, barely acknowledged as threats, and quickly forgotten once reduced to hors de combat.
Let's get better, realer melee.
Well what's the alternative? Give every nameless grunt a name, a backstory and an hour of the protagonist grieving about how he killed some random opponent?
I think consistency is what anon is looking for, not backstories. The problem is unexplained mook inflation.
Let's say the first scenarios involving some lizardmen enemies are treated almost like a horror/suspense story. Then the first combat is described in great detail, lizardmen are portrayed as extremely difficult to kill. Thick, scaly hides, quick reflexes and so on. Then later in the story, they're treated like yard trash and the party just mows them down by the dozen, with no explanation or even acknowledgement that the mooks have been so dramatically devalued.
Thinking of Dragonlance?
That's one example. I'm not the anon who raised the complaint, though.
But you are taking part in the discussion, for which I thank you. Yes: you understand what I wrote; mook inflation, as you so eloquently put it.... We also don't see dozens of late-story, outclassed but genre-savvy mooks, who withdraw from before the valiant protagonists, drawing their pursuers into a prepared position where they are entrapped by an entrenched ambush, the mooks protected from the heroes whom they encircle. Oh, but then, I suppose, the mooks *CAPTURE* the heroes! Oh, frick, again? UH-GAIN! Drink every time that trope gets used, but be careful, because there's that one story where they get captured about an hundred times, sometimes they're surprised and overpowered by their captors, who capture them, or they escape and capture their captors, or there will be a flashback to when somebody got captured some time off-screen from the backstory which wasn't shown on-screen).
But, yeah, melee combat against "mooks" should *always* be dicey, especially against large numbers of them, unless you've attained some sort of major magnitude martial mastery and also possess whatever macguffin grants automatic victory over the mooks.
Look at the Wheel of Time. Trollocs! Jordan describes the enemy's mooks as ten foot tall furry rape beasts with claws, fangs and even horns, wearing bits of armor and wielding vicious weapons like heavy axes and wicked swords, strong muscles coiling under thick hide, the kind of monster -- *one* of which -- would be a credible & terrifying antagonist in a monster movie with one of these ten foot tall rape monsters is stalking and killing a bunch of high school kids or something. Just imagine a single Trolloc living in a city somewhere and randomly murdering people to eat their flesh every few days. Police 9mm would do nothing, at least short term, and might even get stopped by the fur. Ten feet tall. Just imagine trying to stop one from raping your girlfriend. Or you. Imagine. Do you have what it takes to fight off a Trolloc? No? What about with mace? A kitchen knife? How about a gun? A revolver, magnum rounds... if it can penetrate a bear's skull, it should penetrate a Trolloc's... right? Right? But that's still no guarantee. That Trolloc is pretty much guaranteed to be raping your bucci if that's what that rape machine wants to rape, and there's nothing you can do about it unless you or your buddy has a credible infantry weapon and the will to really use it, but that's still not quite perfectly guaranteed. So you agree: the Trolloc, even alone, is a fierce & fearsome foe... *ahem* ...and you believe that what's-his-name and his buddies have no problem slicing through scores of these rapebeasts? Like, seventeen Trollocs run up on the gang -- no problem? Really? Okay... I guess that, over the course of the books, the protagonists run into statistically fewer and fewer competent Trollocs -- they being already a rarity among their savage Trolloc kind. Maybe the best are reassigned?
I haven't read much fantasy, but what kind of story is this? This is literally straight from a video game. The fantasy books I read, the main character just gets stronger at using tricks and traps to get out of these situations, like Masters of Five Magics or Discworld. Even in Masters of Five Magic, when Alcuard got himself on socery to kill a bunch of bandits, he was wounded, had training and he was on performance enhancing magic. Even then, it was a fluke that wasn't replicated in the rest of the book.
>Random unnamed mook shows up halfway through the book
>Kills the protagonist by hitting him on the head while he's trying to pull his sword out of another mook's body
>The rest of the book is just everyone else reacting to the main character's death
>Protagonist-killer is never identified or expanded upon
Would you prefer this sort of realism?
The protagonist should continue to appear as a ghost reacting to his own death along with everyone else.
That sounds like a premise that would make me give your book a try. Reminds me of that comic from Ultimate Marvel that's just about Ultimate Spider-Man's funeral, and it's sorta what happened.
>trope
Why pseuds like this word so much?
it's useful? what alternatives do you suggest? motif, pattern, cliché
Generic fantasy races/monsters. Elves, Dwarves, Dragons, Orcs etc.
I always liked orcs but hated elves and dwarves. Diluted distanced but functional and oh so cathartic racism
huh? meds?
Nords
Also drug yourself, troony israelite
No I will drug you and you can't stop it.
You are my slave.
Any modern day values in a medieval fantasy setting is always the most awkward and always the worst, especially if the author has a weird obsession with democracy in a medieval world. You know by then the author doesn't give a single shit about anything but the fact that he plays D&D a lot and that he is with the current times or whatever.
Also, any ridiculously absurd military strategy, especially if it's a cheap deus ex machina. That's a fricking stupid thing I see a lot in fantasy too.
I'd also go with anything with Brandon Sanderson in it. His shit sucks most of the time, and has a weird obsession with magic and how much people have of it. I just think it's goofy as hell. He's also one of those fantasy writers who writes modern day values that characters hold, which just makes me dislike him even more.
I don't know I think it would actually get a little withering if every single time somone picks up a book cause they like midevil weapons and people using them to fight cool fantasy creatures they're presented with something as oppressively bleak as actual omnipresent real world midevil attitudes.
It would be cool though to more often present some materialist reasoning for why things aren't that bad. Like magic being common throughout the population might explain people being better able to defend themselves and advocate against basically being enslaved on either class or gender lines, explaining more horizontalist social relations and ideology. Like people being born with a revolver attached to them.
>The Middle Ages are... LE BAD!
>Globohomosexual is... LE GOOD!
Fantasy by definition should have something new in it, but it's hard as hell to find that. I've started reading hunting novels because hunting a buffalo or tiger is more fantastic than hunting dragons and orcs at this point.
Something I have gradually grown to hate is female warriors and females in positions of martial authority. And I'm not talking about women "acting like men". Even when the woman is effectively written "as a woman", with irrational moods and all, I don't like it.
The book ending with a rather boring fight. I guess in the 60's this was fine, but we've been desensitized to fight scenes by video games and action movies. A fight scene needs to have something unique about it to hold my interest, and I don't mean a bunch of fencing terms thrown in.
>I've started reading hunting novels because hunting a buffalo or tiger is more fantastic than hunting dragons and orcs at this point.
I think one reason Fantasy (and certain types of Sci Fi) got so popular in the first place is that modern hunting has become such a LARP. It still takes skill and there's legitimate risk, but there are no real frontiers. You hunt following strict rules in artificially protected game preserves. You can pull satellite imagery of anywhere on the planet to your hand-held GPS-enabled device. Hell, most really big game went extinct in North America shortly after humans brought the atlatl over the land bridge.
A major appeal of Fantasy is to escape to a world where adventure is meaningful. You can go out and hunt a buffalo but you're never going to discover a foreign civilization across the sea.
I'm an exception, but I don't think there's much crossover between otherwise-hunters and today's sff fans. There's not even much crossover between sff fans and readers of historical adventures. And it shows in the quality of the work. Without even a classical education anymore to be exposed to stuff like Xenophon and Herodotus, and the age of exploration being politically out of fashion, the current generation of sff writes absolutely childish, naive stuff. I think you could still have adventures in exotic locations up until probably the early 1970's, and a lot of the older sff writers did. Jack Vance obviously was heavily inspired by his time as a sailor for example and you feel it whenever his characters pull into a strange new port. The next generation of sff will be dominated by litrpg because they won't have any life experience outside video games.
>the current generation of sff writes absolutely childish, naive stuff.
So don't read current generation stuff.
Have you really read every single 20th century SFF novel?
>So don't read current generation stuff.
Well, I don't. But it would be nice to be able to read something with fresh ideas that hasn't been cannibalized by tv and video games already. Last thing I found like that was Altered Carbon, which is over 20 years old now.
>Have you really read every single 20th century SFF novel?
No.
Misogynistic incel.
Tax:
When magic is forced into following some TTG like "system".
Fantasy is annoying, in and of itself. The genre represents automatically a collection of tropes I fricking despise. I don't understand how anyone could read much of it. If you've read one fantasy book, you've pretty much read them all, with only a couple notable exceptions: Tolkien and Vance.
And? Did anyone ask if you liked the genre?
>What's the worst and most annoying tropes in fantasy in your opinion?
>in your opinion
>In fantasy
>Not about the genre itself
It's like someone conducting a survey on what color they should paint a car, and you shout that you don't like cars. Wow, you have added absolutely nothing.
>If you've read one fantasy book, you've pretty much read them all
by this logic if you listen to one music, you listened to all in a genre.
fallacy is not an opinion
Everyone is straight.
Male/female friends that act like siblings are gay.
Deranged.
gods powered by belief is probably the most moronic one.
>the main limitation of powerful magic is that the bad guys can sense you using it
That one's pretty good
Over-explained magic systems which are just rpg mechanics from a video game or some form of science/chemistry, completely ruining the best aspect of magic.
What's the best aspect of magic?
That it should be mysterious and magical.
Shit reason.
Magic doesn't have to be mysterious.
That doesn't mean you have to ruin a story describing autistic parameters like a videogame but the important part of magic in Fantasy is the power itself and how the characters use it. Not the feels you get reading about the phenomenon.
hi
RPG mechanics in fantasy writing is the truest mark of a Redditor. If you write magic into a fantasy story, you'd best read about the real world concept of magic and portray it in the same manner. I'm tired of WoW fireball spells.
>real world concept of magic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(supernatural)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremonial_magic
I want an /x/ schizo side to my fantasy stories, thank you very much. The same way I want historical inspirations for the setting.
One set of autists vs another.
Your side is no better.
The point is to have a good story and either approach can work.
That's true, that's just how I personally approach writing fantasy. Obviously, I take liberties depending on how serious the story's tone is.
Only real world magick is human sacrifice and coomer spells. Blood and cum make the world go round.
>thinly veiled modern day race polemic
>the bad guys are just proxy nazis
>some bullshit magic system no one asked for
>gary stu/mary sueing
>
Magic systems having to be this crazy unique thing. Please focus on writing a good book, and if some quirky magic thing comes out of that, cool. If it doesn’t? Still cool. Just write a good book dammit and stop focusing on what a fantasy book ‘should be’. Maybe it’s just a curse of trying to write within the confines of a genre
Magic is hard to write. For it to not dominate the story very few people have to be able to use it, or it has to come at a high cost to make it rarely used. Otherwise magic is going to be front and center in the story, and it'll need specific rules and long, constant explanations.
>it'll need specific rules and long, constant explanations.
This is the mistake.
You aren't compelled to explain anything. If magic explanations are getting in the way of the storytelling, stop explaining the magic. You can still have the rules defined in your own notes. You can still follow your rules rigorously.
>it has to come at a high cost to make it rarely used
For what it's worth, the cost (or risk) only needs to be balanced with utility. A spell that grants a stealth bonus only needs to cost enough that your thief isn't going to bother over-using it. Maybe it requires just enough attention to maintain that most of the time a thief would prefer keep his mind free of distractions when creeping around, relying only on skill-based techniques.
Summer never ends...
Why spell names matter, if the spell has a cool sounding name people will just presume spell means the origin of the magic ergo leaving the explanation to another character or storyline
>the prophecy
Major characters getting into a notable fight/battle with shit armor and/or no helmets.
>badass woman archer
>elves are attuned to nature
>non-human races/setient species are just humans with another coat of paint (behaviour-wise, I don't mind the humanoid looks)
>church bad
>le lots of sex
>an ancient evil awakens out of nowhere
>elves live to be thousands of years old
>"This spell/artifact shortens the user's lifespan" but then it doesn't
>a necromancer is the bad guy
How many sex scenes is too many?
When it becomes recreational rather than a bonding experience between 2 characters (or a traumatic scene, it depends). For example, I also don't need to know the emperor who practises slavery is fricking his slaves or that bf and gf shag in the bush every night in the same vein I don't need to know the characters piss and shit offscreen
>tl;dr I don't want to read about too much sex unless I'm reading erotica, in which sex is the central theme
Weapons cutting through plate armor, gays, and enemies attacking one at a time
Really just dragons.
Protagonist wins because they have a "special" weapon/item that no one else has.
As long as that's not the ONLY reason they win. I'm fine with a magical sword. If it's an actual struggle even with the mcguffin item.
the whole dd setup
why?
the current cultivationshit/litrpg slop is the absolute worst thing to ever become popular. I can't imagine the kind of "person" who is interested in that
Are you referring to those chink stories where the hero becomes god through meditation and kills billions of people he doesnt like?
Yes.
Cultivation as a literary genre is older than America
What is it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xianxia#Cultivation
Basically meditating for 10 000 years after eating a dollop of water dragon shit to boost your power level over 9000 million
Dragon Ball Z
i read cradle, it was decent, but then i read "he who fights with monster" and jesus christ it was awful. if you want really shit though, try the gamelit stuff. you don't know pain until it's time for the three pages of stats and skills meant to show how powerful and cool the main character is
Equipment and culture not being period appropriate. Why are there full plate ritters in 1078 england? Why is every culture essentially just england (isekai gays are worse off for this)? Another thing that I personally haven't seen, magicmen not ruling the world. You'd expect the ability to cast fire from your fingers give you an edge up in kingdom conquest.
>What's the worst and most annoying tropes in fantasy in your opinion?
Slavery does not work.
Hard magic systems > soft magic systems. simple as.
Unironically dragons. So fricking stupid and ruined by trannies.
male mentor/female mentee
i don't hate the idea, but it's like every writer who does it is thinking to themselves "i should give him a female protégé, because it's never been done before"
Seems more likely they are thinking that male mentor / female mentee is the most natural relationship to have. That's certainly what it's like in real life. Men are the pioneers, the risk-takers, the genius inventors and bleeding edge virtuousos. They become masters train apprentices to aid them, and will accept anyone talented unless there are cultural biases.
Female mentor is unnatural. It can be done, but it's harder to pull off. You have to really be able to write a convincing female master.
the most annoying one is the self insert one. these Black folk never take themselves seriously, never account for bad decisions and always end up winning. whenever I stumble upon one I just root for the bad guy because he's more likable than that the author self insert. the main character walking around recreating ketchup or cooming in slave girls while everyone is fighting a millennial battle against an ancient evil also leaves a bad taste in my mouth. most of the time the story has no purpose and is forgotten the second it's finished. what the actual frick is wrong with the people writing these novels and why do they write at all
Why do you read them?
I wish I didn't. I'm a stupid frick so most of the time when I realize these are self inserts I'm already in the middle of it. At this point I immediately drop them and leave a bad rating. There aren't that many good fantasy books out there but I still like the genre and sometimes finding very good ones can be ewarding.
You guys know your shit. So what're some better-written and interesting fantasy books?
The Etched City. Shame that the Sheila never publihed anything after that.
The one I'm writing that'll be done in thirty years. It won't have all those bad tropes. I'm not like the other novelists. Elves? Pfft. My pointy eared race of Aryans will be called the smegmaris. That's totally different. I'll call my trolls trollocs too.
Mother of Learning
Eight
Warlock of The Magus World
I Shall Seal The Heavens
Re:Zero
A nerubians journey (book 2 ongoing)
Super Supportive (book 2 ongoing)
The Game At Carousel (ongoing)
In no specific order even if the english ones are better.
The Bible
It's the world building that has to make sense and the fact that you have to use unusual names.
"In the 33rd year of King Voyaistan's reign, there were twelve tribes of the Elves to the west...but the evil sorcerer Enword was plotting his demise...Enword was sealed away for 2000 years...but the seal is weakening for some reason..."
Good guy wins and linear story.
dead parents, hands down the laziest shit ever
Characters having modern day political sensibilities despite the setting being completely removed from ours.
When the world has a finite physical size but doesn't whenever the author decides to shit out a new city or location (looking at YOU Discworld). Also characters being horny to other characters purely because they were nice to them, or something to that effect.