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So far I’ve discovered in this thread:
-People don’t like traditional fantasy that takes itself seriously.
-People don’t like lighthearted fantasy that plays with the themes.
-People don’t like hard magical systems.
-People don’t like soft magical systems.
-People don’t like dragons being involved.
-People don’t like an absence of dragons.
-People don’t like character archetypes.
-People don’t like counterarchetypes.
-People don’t like when characters speak an understandable language.
-People don’t like characters meeting each other in common social meeting areas.All good here? Great.
Just write whatever the fuck you want. There’s always an audience.
“And you should win things by watching!”
That’s why you’re still kids, ‘cuz you’re stupid!
That’s just lemmy being too god damn stupid to differentiate between “this is my preference” and “this is bad”, as usual.
“I don’t like dragons”: preference.
“I don’t like Mary Sue characters”: bad writing.
Zero consistency to magic systems. I get it, having all sorts of spells in the story is fun and gives a lot of creative ways to make fights more interesting, but…
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If teleportation magic exists, why don’t people who own it teleport everywhere?
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If time travel magic exists, why isn’t everyone doing everything in their power to get it and use it? Looking at you, harry potter.
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The villains usually have spells that are supposed to be ultra powerful and can kill anyone quickly but somehow it doesn’t work against main characters and there’s no excuse for why fights drag on for so long. Imagine seeing the villain introduced by vaporizing someone but never seeing them do it again.
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Main character(s) breaking the rules of magic just because…
I’m a fan of stories like Avatar the last airbender or Witch Hat Atelier because their magic is very consistent. It makes things way more interesting when a character can’t just pull something out of their ass to save them in the middle of a fight.
Shoutout to every story that alludes to the fact that mages can run out of mana but is insanely inconsistent how and when it happens. Sometimes they spam spells for hours and sometimes it’s just “Oh no, I can’t use [spell] anymore because… Um… The plot says I can’t!”
One of the things I enjoy most about Sanderson’s work is his attention to detail in his numerous magic systems.
Shoutout to every story that alludes to the fact that mages can run out of mana but is insanely inconsistent how and when it happens. Sometimes they spam spells for hours and sometimes it’s just “Oh no, I can’t use [spell] anymore because… Um… The plot says I can’t!”
hhahahaa, just like reload when dramatically appropriate.
There’s a thing I heard somewhere about how your magical system needs to have a balance between how well it’s understood vs. how useful it is, or else it will break the plot.
If a magic system is extremely useful, then it must also be extremely mysterious, so that you can say “Well, it can’t immediately fix all problems because the gods work in mysterious ways.” Gandalf or Tom Bombadil seem incredibly powerful, but they don’t solve all of the problems in Middle Earth, and that’s okay because they’re terribly mysterious.
If a magic system is extremely well understood in-universe, then it has to have hard limits on how useful it is, so you can say something like “Well, the Law of Equivalent Exchange says that to solve all our problems would require a blood sacrifice of the entire population, so that’s not an option.”
If your magic is pretty well-understood AND very useful, then by all rights it OUGHT to solve all your problems, and when it doesn’t then readers rightly begin to question why any of the plot needs to happen at all (see, for example, the time turners in Harry Potter).
If teleportation magic exists, why don’t people who own it teleport everywhere?
Another wizard and I absolutely wrecked our DM’s in game economy just teleporting everywhere. Wizard Instant Shipping Inc.
Checks out lol, it’s a busted ability
If teleportation magic exists, why don’t people who own it teleport everywhere?
Because you die and a copy of you is created.
If time travel magic exists, why isn’t everyone doing everything in their power to get it and use it? Looking at you, harry potter.
It can only be used by women who have borne children, to travel to a point before they bore children. Obviously, this means their child disappears from existence.
The villains usually have spells that are supposed to be ultra powerful and can kill anyone quickly but somehow it doesn’t work against main characters and there’s no excuse for why fights drag on for so long. Imagine seeing the villain introduced by vaporizing someone but never seeing them do it again.
The main character leaves his normal life when a villain’s casual disappearing spell actually “doubles” him, resulting in the origin of his heroic power.
Main character(s) breaking the rules of magic just because…
Because schizophrenia. Main character hears voices and they occasionally meld into a chorus in a way that produces unique magical outcomes.
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More than 17 apostrophes on the first page with every name of a person, place, or thing having one.
Ah yes, H’taln’k from J’briom-4, flying his Zal’t M’lort class Winger to the Mont Bronl’n port with the day’s haul of Sea Crom’t. Oh won’t his mabs’k be pleased with this delivery.
Chill, not all of us speak Klingon
Today is a good day to learn.
Also kennings. No, you do not sound mysterious using “younglings” instead of children.
Treating wands like guns in fights instead of using spells creatively
Bringing Harry Potter into this, the fact that they showed they do know how to do this, when Dumbledore and Voldemort fought in the 5th movie, makes it all the more annoying that almost every other fight in the series was just shooting blasts and energy beams at each other
Oh yes…this is SO lazy. There’s this immense potential for creative choreography that’s left untapped. Directors should really consult dungeon masters for this kind of stuff
There’s a meme floating around that suggests taking inspiration for wand using from conductors and I cannot stress how amazing every fight in Harry potter would have been if this was the standard.
They actually pull this off well in Frieren. There are tons of different and unique spells but the one the MC always uses is the basic magic attack spell because she is stupidly overpowered she doesn’t need to be creative.
To me that is lazy writing. Specfic spells should have a set damage unless they are upcast. Maybe this is just the dnd player in me that thinks that though.
I think the other person doesn’t word it well. First, the fighting isn’t the main plot of the story, its more about everything in between. The MCs are powerful, but still need to be careful in their fights. or they will die.
The story doesn’t want dragon ball fights that are 20 chapters long, or have an impassible monster that de-rail the goal for 20 more chapters. Their obsticals are more about the world and people they interact with.
The magic combat system is pretty well thought out, but not complex.
The MC basically has lots of mana. That’s their “op” trait. They developed a stragedy to spam cast the basic damage spell.
I’m making up some numbers here to kind of paint a picture of how this “basic spell” work.
Attack spell =
- 1 second cast time
- 1 damage to defence spell
- 10/10 damage to unprotected person. (Can do 9/10 depending on what the plot needs)
- Can be cast in a variety of directions. (I.e it’s not a gun, its a targeted missle)
- cost more mana than the defence spell.
Defence spell =
- .5 second cast
- Can absorb 100 hits
- low mana cost for small area over a short period of time, high cost to do “full coverege”. Its essentially a sheild they move around and resize to block attacks as they come. Fully protecting yourself burns too much mana and you’d lose.
For most hitting the defence spell a hundred times is a stupid stratagy, so everyone came up with different spells that break through it in a few hits.
Out MC instead trained the basic spell so much, they can cast it 20 times a second over a long period of time. This forces the opponent to burn mana trying to maintain defence. The opponent is overwhelmed and get hit. However the stratagy only works if they back the openent into a postion where they can’t counterattack or have a buddy attack MC from behind.
So its kinda like they have infinite level 1 spell slots and they are just spaming magic missile over and over?
Pretty much, yes, but infinate isn’t quite true.
(The magic system isn’t DnD, so I’m spending way too much time making up a lot of shit here to give a general idea that no one really asked for. (And because its fun to brutely mash one magic system into another)).
Let’s say your average mid to high level mage has 100x spell slots (and for now assume all other stats are also equal). In this system, there are no spell levels. Instead, more complex spells require more slots to be used at once.
The basic defence and attack spell are 1 to 10. 1 defence spell blocks 10 basic attacks. However, you can’t attack and defend at the same time, and 1 defence is only for a small area. Full 360° coverage would cost a lot of slots per second. You conserve slots by precicly blocking the opponents spells as they come.
To break the defence you need to to be able to hit it really hard and follow up before they can cast more defence or counter attack. To do more damage in a spell, it costs more slots. This is where things like the other stats, skills, refelx time, unique spells, and combat stratagy become deciding factors in fights. Slot count also varies, a young mage might start of with one slot, but can become a very high level mage with 300 slots.
MC has 200 slots to start with and trained to get a very fast cast per second rate for both basic attack and defence. They are so proficient in the spell, it’s the equivelent effort of you or me walking.
While MC’s magic mistle does little damage, they can cast the spell 20 times in a second from multiple directions. This forces opponents to use up all their slots to defend until they run out or get overwhelmed by the numbers. The only defence is to do 360 defence, which can’t be maintained for long. (For simplicity sake, assume all the magic is a one shot kill. If you don’t defend or dodge, you die).
To make things more fun, MC has no idea they are insanly strong because their only reference growing up was their mentor who has the 5000 slot cheat code.
Yes, I am over thinking this. And yes, I should be sleeping right now.
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This is my favorite pet peeve. I got through 6 pages of a fantasy novel where the writer spent multiple paragraphs describing alcohol made from potatoes and then called it “voka.”
Those 6 pages hit on every trope possible. Not even in an entertaining way. It took itself way too seriously.
Oh god not the capital letters! I always associate those with bad fantasy.
While I agree with you on the whole, there are some real world places with names that go hard.
Like Dead Man’s Pass, Oregon. Or Devil’s Gate, Utah.
…Maybe it’s just a Western US thing.
This is so bad it’s good.
I dunno if it’s considered “bad”, but I personally hate when one of the characters gets amnesia, or the group meets a character that has amnesia. It just feels like a laziness by the author who can’t think of any other way to make a storyline interesting.
One book that did it well was Nine Princes in Amber. It worked because the readers got to discover the “real world” along with the main character. Without it there would’ve been a shit ton of exposition of a detailed setting that didn’t rely on Tolkien at all, one that the MC was already familiar with. Although it might have been fresh in 1970 and overdone since then.
By modern standards this is pretty bad, and it boils down to an exposition problem.
The author needs to explain certain basic information up front (or at least pretty early on). A good way to do this is to have one character be a novice who needs to be told basic details, thereby informing the audience. In fact the “new guy” angle to exposition delivery is so good that it itself is becoming cliche.
In the example you brought up the author wanted to take advantage of the “new guy” trope but for whatever could not do that. Maybe the character needed social status or standing that a rookie would not have in order to make the plot work. Rather than find a creative workaround that made sense in their story they pulled out the old amnesia trick to eat their cake and have it, too.
Elves always being like the bottom rung of society or them being the outcasts. It’s insane to think that elves wouldn’t be the rulers of dam near any government or at the very least not be the power and influence behind a puppet government. Who wouldn’t want the help of a race of people who, depending on the lore, can live for thousands of years.
I mean, there could be an elf that has been a friend of your family for like 5 or more generations. That sounds dope as fuck for us but kinda shitty for them.
I like what Tolkien did with the elves. They went from a warmongering bloodthirsty species to ancient and wise and they decided to gtfo and live on a secluded island out of reach from pretty much everyone.
Vulcans really are space elves
Women and girls usually end up in a relationship by the end of the story and/or are the ones needing to be rescued. Its formulaic, boring and sexist due to the comparative lack of the opposite occurring. eg. men needing to be rescued.
Like… even if you did not give a single shit about sexism, its the same tired plot points over and over again. It has Hallmark channel writer energy. Create a second plot I beg you.
I agree with you on principle, but i feel it has reached a point where the circumvention of the classic tropes has created a new and also very formulaic stereotype: the “empowering“ woman. Must be strong, butch, evidently better than men in something typically associated with men, and if by any chance she is permitted to be classically feminine she must either be a lesbian or emotionally fucked up somehow. Bonus points for leather jacket and shades.
It is probably the better trope but i find it similarly boring at this point. Very performative and often with little relevance to the story being told.
They also can’t have any scars on their face that could make them less attractive. Hester shaw from the predator city books had her fucking nose cut off and the scar also took off some her her top lip yet in the fucking dog shit movie they made she looks like this
Must be strong, butch, evidently better than men
And this writing style often results in complete lack of character development. Because how would you develop a character that is ideal from the start?
That one is worse in my mind as baring steroids men will be physically larger and stronger than women. women should have motivetions other than marry a strong man (nothing wrong with wanting a good husband, I know many young girls looking for one - but please don’t be the cardboard that is all I want)
I recently read a collection of novels by a prominent 1960s science fiction writer. In three novels and 400 pages, I don’t think there was a single female character who advanced the plot other than by sexually entertaining a male character (Despite one of the books having a female title character, and another had a lot of minor female characters.) I know it’s a product of its era, but even then, there were more woman PhDs than men who’d been to space, so I think a good science fiction author ought to be able to at least imagine the possibility. I have nothing against female sexuality, but the most interesting women supplement it with some other talent.
All things Deus Ex Machina. I get it, endings are hard. Climaxes are hard to write. But the payoff feels cheap as hell when your protagonist just “digs a little deeper” and suddenly finds just enough power to save the day. When it comes out of nowhere, it feels unearned by the hero and is not only unsatisfying, it’s also a good way to give you hero power creep until there’s nothing on earth that can believably challenge them. See: Superman.
Which is why I love enders game. Motherfucker was so brutal, the only thing slowing him down was exhaustion from killing EVERYTHING. The climax was about him realizing what he’d done
Yup. And that’s a great example of not relying on Deus Ex Machina - we watch Ender go through all his brutal training, learning to be the best and becomes a truly terrifying weapon of war. By the time Ender is, well, ending things, we’ve seen his growth and understand why he can do the things he does.
I get what you’re saying, and I agree, but I think Superman is a bad example. Superman is meant to be infinitely powerful (with only a few examples like kryptonite to aid in storytelling). It’s a bit like the premise of One Punch Man. His story is meant to be about what one SHOULD do with infinite power, and the nature of morality, rather than overcoming adversity as with most superheroes.
In the early days of Superman comics, dude couldn’t, e.g. fly. He could just jump really high. He didn’t have laser vision. Over time, the writers kept adding new powers until the only story they could tell was about Supes vs his own conscience. Nothing else (okay, besides Mr Mxyzptlk) can actually stand in his way.
Ya, but my counterpoint is that, for a character named ‘Superman’, that’s kinda the point. Everybody gets power creep eventually. Remember the Thanos-copter, and Lex Luthor stealing 40 cakes?
Being forbidden doesn’t make a relationship interesting. The Romeo and Juliet thing has been spun a million times, and every one of them is shit including the original.
I think I’ve just reached peak edge Lemmy, where Romeo and Juliet is referred to as “shit.”
Not to mention Romeo was a pedophile.
I’m so sick of exceptionalism. Every damn thing seems to center around some shitty thinly veiled oligarch, their kids as some hero, or unhappenable origins and an impossible hero. Everything is geared towards cultural acceptance of some authoritarian neo feudal dystopian future.
Stories can be interesting in other spaces. We all exist within those real spaces. We can fantasize about better places and times within similar realities as our own. I view all this exceptionalism like collective narcissism. I can’t tell if it is an universal writing bias or a publishing bias, but I don’t like it.
The dresden files are pretty good and everyone in those books are flawed as fuck. Same goes with expeditionary force by Craig Alanson. Joe Bishop and skippy are both royal fuck ups and assholes.
There was some brouhaha a while ago in some DND spaces where some people were like “can we stop doing stories about kings and ‘rightful heirs’? It’s all very regressive and not fun anymore” and some people just lost their mind.
“Don’t make this all PoLitIcAL , this conversation about political systems”.
Anyway. I’m super done with basic fantasy monarchy. My pandemic DND game had
- a Republic city-state. The players lead a recall effort against the shitty mayor
- an anarchist collective. The players helped stop counter-revolutionaries from restoring the (now undead) king to the throne
- an oligarchy of awful wizards in conflict with the surrounding town, with agents from neighboring states trying to shift the balance of power. At this point the players got tired of political intrigue, sadly.
Lots of options.
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Honestly, DND was the wrong tool for the game. DND is best for resource management dungeon crawls, like “we have 20 hit points between us and enough juice to cast Sleep once, do we keep going or turn back?” kind of stuff.
It doesn’t really have many tools for social conflict, for example. Tooling for hooking into characters is sparse. I really like Fate more, and feel it’s more in line with how people intuit RPGs.
Do you have a good example of a story which doesn’t fall into this trope at all? One which perfectly encapsulates not doing this?
The Expanse in the first couple of seasons did a decent job of showing that the characters were flawed and not at the center of the world while struggling against a system that is a more realistic portrayal of what monsters exceptionalism really creates.
This aspect of Star Trek the next generation did a pretty good job of contextualizing the fact that the events on the Enterprise were the stories of one of many such vessels.
EDIT:
That is why I like Dune and Asimov’s universe as well.
In Dune there is a ton of exceptionalism, and it is outright shown to be awful for the average person. I would argue that every form of exceptionalism throughout the books is always met with an equally negative outcome and flaw.
In Asimov’s stuff there is exceptional altruism in Daneel. The most exceptional characters like The Mule is shown as a tyrant. Hari Seldon is unexceptional in his exceptional idea, but is dead for the exceptional events that followed and his exceptionalism is constantly in question.
The Expanse is the first thing that came to mind for me as a counter-example when I read your first comment so I’m glad to see you mention it! It even plays on the exceptionalism idea in book/season 3 and 4 where Holden seems special because >!Miller is appearing to him!< and because >!he isn’t affected by the eye parasites!< only to explain those things away with reasoning stemming from events that already happened in previous books. And any exceptionalism that comes after that is largely due to the reputation or skills characters have built for themselves rather than because they’re “chosen ones”.
If you haven’t read the books, I really recommend them!
Just very quickly: the books are so much better than the show! I had to stop watching the show somewhere I think in season 2 - everything started digressing/simplifying too much from the books (the characters became flat and uninteresting etc.) So yeah, I found the books much more enjoyable.
Lost in Translation comes to mind. A peek into the intersection of two people’s lives for a few days
This is specific to the videogame-ish sub-genre, mostly Isakeis…
But you go out of the way to include RPG mechanics into your story… but the only real influence it has on the storytelling is spending an inordinate amount of time grinding… a mechanic explicitly added to RPGs to pad the game.
There are good video game based stories, Survival Story of a Sword King and Dungeon Reset both immediately come to mind… but I feel like this is a widespread problem.
The Wandering Inn handles this well, where to hit large milestones you need not just xp but self development.
Is The Wandering Inn this one https://wanderinginn.com/ ? Can’t find anything else .
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Dragons are cool, but god am I sick of them. The worst part is they are either evil and directly attack people or good and completely missing for 90% of the story.
Problem is, that they easily turn into the nuke equivalent in fantasy. It’s challenging to incorporate them into a world where they are not completely OP
They could still be selfish or not engaged with less powerful creatures instead of evil or benevolent.
Not necessarily a writing trope, but a casting trope in fantasy TV/film that always annoyed me: British accent = fantasy accent. It’s not so bad these days, but a lot of 2000s-era fantasy would just have all the actors speak in awfully fake British accents.
Also, not to mention the more poor and stupid people get, the less posh the accent gets. That’s a very classest thing that I’m sick of.
That is kind of accurate though if you’re basing the story on history. Like if it’s Robin Hood or King Arthur then the nobles will sound posh and the peasants won’t.
Less of an excuse for it in high fantasy; I guess it’s a quick way to telegraph to the audience who’s who, but you’re definitely right that it reinforces traditional class stereotypes.
The plot is discovery and progressive revealment of big weird thing. The climax is flashback-heavy explanation of big weird thing.
