/lit/ - Literature

>>12179951

You know what's great about The Dying Earth? There is no answer, only the "oh shit" moment in the story he appears in to make you wonder. There is no "lore" to drown in in that collection, only mystery.

Giving an answer would dilute that massively and make it a vastly inferior work. When I look at contemporary writing riffing on classic fantasy it's disappointing.

Take Brandon Sanderson, if he wrote Liane the Wayfarer most likely he would tell a fan asking your question "RAFO" and explain in detail what happened in his next book. Or the story would be part of an 800 word long text with at least three to seven short chapters of essentially exposition about the magics of the land and how this was possible.

This is also a problem in videogame writing: take Pillars of Eternity, where lots of conversations are about how souls circulate, the ins and outs of animancy, what the gods are like - and this on top of endless books you can read which are mostly dry and academic. "Lore" mostly translates to boring infodump.

Compared to that, "I am Chun the Unavoidable" is genius. Revealing how these things work never improves them.