/lit/ - Literature

Fantasy has never been respected by the wider literary consensus. In responses Fantasy creators and consumers have increasingly sequestered themselves into their own little cultural bubble, created their own rubrics and standards of quality.
The explosion of popularity in fantasy fiction is accompanied with an increase in critical insularity.
"If we have our own rules then we can decide what is good and what is bad".

And these rules inevitably take the form of pseudo-objective flowcharts that can be picked up largely intuitively from conversations within fandom, or from a short 5 minute YouTube video, and most importantly leave very little room for interpretation.
If anything I think an "anti-interpretation" sentiment is what runs through a lot of this, and is rooted in the mix of sense of inferiority and animosity toward "traditional" literary standards and criticism

Such attitudes are more or less explicit depending who you are speaking to, but I think the uptake of Hard Magic Systems, rather than the concept itself, is the perfect, unambiguous, example.
This is because the theory as laid out by Sanderson originally is a readymade checklist, a flow chart. Grab a book and run it through the machine and get your results instantly. No boring thinking required! DING DING DING, great news this book has HARD MAGIC.

Again, I don't think Hard Magic is good or bad, but it is a very short jump from here to assigning value and turning a potential approach to writing into a mere aptitude test. Which is something I have seen happen. It is very appealing, and ripe for abuse, by those can't into the figurative. Hyper-literalists who can't see the bunny or the duck, only a splotch of ink on paper.


Such people are only the extreme end of this overall trend. The flip side is the broader phenomenon of people with minor cred in a field carrying water for something retarded, like "Trained Chef On Why Spaghetti-O's Are Secretly Genius".

In the case of Fantasy the two tend to intermingle, but the result is the same; creating a safe distance between the Fantasy genre and anyone that might speak ill of your favourite book.