/lit/ - Literature

Fantasy as a genre is plagued with very generic stories with little variation between them. Not only this, but the nature of fantasy dictates that large amounts of the story are purely from the author's own imagination, which means that an understanding of the world we live in is not necessary to make a fantasy novel.

As a fantasy author, you don't have to have any grasp of history or global politics, since your world is fictional. Conflicts can be easily manufactured without regard for modern reality. You'd be hard-pressed to write any story set in the current era where large-scale race wars consume most of the plot (and one race is depicted as unilaterally evil), but this is a common device in fantasy fiction. Likewise you need no understanding of biology -- you can invent entire species (or recycle existing ones, like fairies) and give them specific attributes that dovetail nicely with your plot. Also any story involving magic can easily "bend" the rules of magic (since no such rules exist) to manufacture convenient plot twists or allow the hero a miraculous saving throw at the very end.

In the most overused of fantasy plotlines, you don't even need to establish any real motivation for your characters, and neither do you need to explain how all these disparate souls happened to convene -- there's a quest for a magical thing! or a quest to vanquish an evil sorcerer! and they all meet and interact because they're all part of the same adventuring party! Problem solved.

Is all fantasy necessarily like this? No. But the majority of it is. Even if you avoid the overused "quest" plots and eschew use of orcs/elves/dragons altogether, set it in something OTHER than Ye Olde Medieval Setting and eliminate all the magick, you still run the risk of letting some kind of deus-ex-machina sew up all your plot holes because your story has so little grounding in objective reality.