/lit/ - Literature

>>21788917
Hegelian multi-novel fantasy epic when?

You'd definitively need some good poetry.

>>21788917
bump

>>21788917
>What would a modern day fantasy have to have to cause the big impact that Lord of the Rings had?
Impossible. In the middle of the Twentieth Century there was a pent up desire for 'fairy stories' and LotR was the first to really satisfy it. Nowadays there's a superabundance of fantasy.

>>21789225
Well, if anything ASOIAF scratched that new itch of not wanting too much fairy shit. I don't think it's as far fetched as you would think because something always takes ahold of the culture and fantasy is a staple of literature ever since the Greeks.

>>21788917
I've heard rumours that K.D. Walter is writing some kind of fantasy novel, don't know if that's true or not

>>21788917
I say do away with all tropes that derive from Dungeons and Dragons, almost every single fantasy that has come for so many years has little green goblins, green orcs, short and bearded dwarfs, elfs with long ears, mimics, etc.
I know some of these things come from Tolkien but even he did not write these things the way they are always portrayed, what created the lack of creativity with Fantasy is the fact that everyone's fantasy is essentially their D&D campaign, the same goblins, the same classes, the same fantasy elements.
>>21788993
I think verse is the way to go, if we bring back the poetic epics finally something could be different than every HR karen's personal fantasy novel.

>>21789274
>>21788993
Would an epistolary epic be enough of a stylistic change for it to make it very different? Maybe a fantasy epic in the style of the bible where essentially different eye witness accounts are taken into the story and maybe even letters recounting of that world. I genuinely don't know if there's a similar fantasy series like that

>>21789378
That already sounds better than a lot of stuff, if only because its structure is so incredibly different from what is common today. I once explored using the type of writing where every line or sentence was numbered the way biblical works are but even just something more similar to folklore from the 1800s would be enough. I grew up on Czech stories written in that time and much prefer them over the type of stuff that is written today.
I think that among the changes that need to happen is that everything needs to be said as though it happened a long time ago and not as if the reader is there with the people during the events. I feel like too much literature has this focus of detail that goes something like:
>"What do you mean?" He told her, clutching her head. "What do you mean we went the wrong way?" He repeated to what he found to be an empty room.
Too much literature focuses on telling you exactly what the characters are doing in what exact way and what they are thinking as they do it, I'm tired of this. I did not read all of LoTR but Tolkien had a very unique way to write that is very similar to the stuff he was inspired by, an older way to write.

>>21789405
I understand exactly what you're saying. This is an odd example since this series is usually not mentioned when talking about fantasy series but one thing that I noted immediately from His Dark Materials was that it had this "biblical" feel to it. The best way I can describe it is what you just said: not much detail from the plot but enough for you to understand the impact, if that makes sense. I really can't explain it but books 1 and 3 are the best examples of what I'm trying to get at.

>but even just something more similar to folklore from the 1800s would be enough.
This is what I was sort of getting at with the question in the OP. My estimation is that it's going to be either something extremely different or something that goes back to the roots of folklore and does something new with it.

Also, your thing sounds interesting with the numbering of verses. I haven't ever read that in a "modern" fantasy epic and if you have some excerpt or something I'd be willing to read it

>>21789405
Another thing I was thinking about and trying to encapsulate in an idea was something that Tolkien did. I read somewhere that the reason Tolkien did what he did was because he was trying to create a mythology for his homeland which seemed to be lacking at the time.

So it got me into that that line of thinking of "what if we applied something like that but for the whole world?"

Other stuff that I've thought about is something like making an epic of our modern day and making it work. Not just unicorns meet our reality but maybe something like meme magic becomes a thing and several chosen heroes throughout the West get chosen and the internet plays a huge part, etc. I'm kinda going off the rails here but I wanted to bounce off some ideas

>>21788917
Look at the amazon's best selling page and see how prevalent Litrpg/Progression Fantasy books are there. For this generation of young men those genres will be memorable classics, Mother of Learning, He Who Fights With Monsters, The Wandering Inn, Worm, Dungeon Crawler Carl...We will see in a few years which of those will remain known among readers and which forgotten. Well, The Wandering Inn has been going strong for 7 years already, with several more until it's finished.

>>21789816
I've seen Wandering Inn for a while and haven't checked it or anything. I'll probably get memed into it but is it good?

Be written decently enough but not too good, be marketed well, have high shilling in all manner of social media and regular media, perhaps have an audience for the author already such as a very large YouTube account and other such social media.


The key to success in lit today isn’t the content or even the quality of the work, it’s a questioning of marketing, it’s a question of why should I pick up your book and not the classics or the million other fantasy series. People don’t care about your style or your philosophy, they care about you, about how you are the product and how the community you’ll create is the product, they care about the world is a product also, how you make them appear and feel in contrast to others in the real world is a major consideration.


Consider the field of actually successful Lit, when it’s “literary” it’s all posturing materials meant to make you feel intelligent because you can say you’ve read this about such and such topic, consider the major players in fantasy today, so much nepotism so many connections, all working on elaborating on a hollowed out tropeified repetitive skeleton dug out of Tolkien’s corpse, people don’t read Sanderson for anything but making the fantasy mode continue, they love the incest of it.


The only thing that will and to some regard is booming already, is the western adaption of Asian light novel tropes and gimmicks, because our lit began to feel ashamed to shamelessly appeal to the young male fantasy, whereas the Asian has no shame in indulging young male power and sexual fantasies, animeification is the only big trend you’ll see in fantasy going forwards imo.

I’m not trying to paint an ugly picture OP, I just think that the field isn’t motivated the way you think it is.

>>21789916
Like I want you guys to go on Royal road right now and look at the top read stuff, look at the quality of the writing and the style and consider the raw reader amount; that shit is our contemporary pulp lit.

>>21789930

>>21789889
>I'll probably get memed into it but is it good?
The first volume has been rewritten recently to bring the story up to quality. It's certainly a unique story, a solid epic fantasy full of slice of life and warcrimes, with lots of of humor, inspired by Warhammer universe and set in a fantasy world resembling D&D. The story gets bigger and more intense with each volume.

Some people hate it, some people love it. I myself have started loving it around Volume 4 and consider it one of the best stories I've read in my life. You simply need to experience it for yourself to make judgment. Not every day you read epic fantasy where the protagonist is an Inkeeper

"what can I bring to the table that has not been done before" is a question I always ask myself and being different is at the core of what I try to write, what I want to write is the antithesis to what has come before because it turns tropes around and makes a mockery of them, because when I write I put effort to specifically make it happen the way that it shouldn't, and to make the themes purely opposite to what traditional epics had been about.
A trick I like is to use the tropes themselves and 'recreating' them but to change their meaning.
The next BIG thing has to be relevant to today and but still resound with people in years to come, no 2010s femanazi stuff, no right wing vs left wing stuff, no ben shapiro no peterson, but purely written around the things in life that have never changed.
Everything written by HR karens about their dystopian schoolbus adventure will be forgotten in 50 years and the next big thing should try to be about something a little more profound than CURRENT THING.
I personally don't even use medieval settings in mine and use a universal aesthetic, one "modern" but it could be of any time. To talk about rifles as if they were forged by Wayland, to talk about cities as though they were little settlements, to depict men pulling plate carriers off the fallen the same way Grecians pulled bronze armours off the Trojan dead.

>>21789943
That's pretty interesting. I'll take a look

>>21789916
OP here and I gotta agree. I know for a fact marketing is the big piece in any sort of product, especially in the age of the internet.

But my point is that, for example, that Royal Road excerpt is not gonna be considered a turning point in fantasy. Regardless of whether or not you have to market the shit out of your brand and world, I still fully believe that in order to be that next defining fantasy book you still have to bring something new and universal to the table and like you said, be written decently enough. My question was more what do you think the next big thing will have to do in terms of its story and canon to get to that level?

But I guess you gave your answer and it seems to be marketing. Which, sadly, I gotta agree. Though, some people say the best marketing is testimonials so if you make something good enough people will spread the word themselves so who knows

>>21790000
>I personally don't even use medieval settings in mine and use a universal aesthetic
>To talk about rifles as if they were forged by Wayland, to talk about cities as though they were little settlements, to depict men pulling plate carriers off the fallen the same way Grecians pulled bronze armours off the Trojan dead
could you expand on that? That sounds interesting.

>>21790076
I haven't been on /lit/ in years but last time I was here me and some people were brainstorming for a poetic epic set during the Afghan war from the perspective of a superstitious Taliban warrior, back then I was trying to convince people to use the kinds of tropes that are found in old stories but to "modernize" them, I wrote some short stories where the quality of the wood and the metals on a warriors rifle are described like a relic, like a weapon one would want to loot from the battlefield, one that kings would want to be buried with. I like to keep things abstract and to make them more symbolic than they are tangible. Another opinion I try to tell people is to refuse to say specifics like the model of the gun or the caliber of the ammunition, of the weight of the tanks, of the tactics used.
What I'm working on right now uses the four temperaments as a basis for emotions, people are described according to what they are and not what they wear, not the cool outfits or how fancy their sci-fi armour is. I don't know to describe it but if you want here are a few stanzas from what I'm working on so that you can see for yourself:
Men lyke you had cut us down
With ryfles, with rockets, with panzers,
Whose power - so awe inspyring
That all our shyres and all our towns
Had quicklie burned in roaring fyres
Till naught was left save songs to sing.

I advyse that we lure them heere,
That we cut them down and dryve them back
In one great fyght among the paths
For Rollant too was felled by speers,
For everie sheeld myght have one crack
And one is ample for our wrath.

To depleete man’s ammunition,
To consume their bombs and shells
With our lyves - be theese your demands?
Must we suffer such attrition?
Must with corpses ours this fyre we quell
Till none of us are left to stand?

The language used is specifically meant to be of a foreign dialect and these stanzas are not related.

>>21788917
OP is lazy and wants 4chan to come up with fantasy book ideas for him to incorporate to make it "big"

Nice try, come up with your own ideas chud

>>21790135
Was waiting for this one. It took a retard four hours to come up with it, too kek

>>21788917
Sorry but JM Arlen already wrote the next LotR