/lit/ - Literature

>>830353
what consensus?
I was never part of any consensus that would say that.
Fantasy is alright.

Quality prose, non-cliche plot elements, and three-dimensional characters.

There should be no elves, orcs, dwarves, magic rings, magic swords, or names with apostrophes.

The main character should not be an orphan and should not be apprenticed to a powerful wizard, mage, or magical martial artist.

>>830362
You just pissed all over the novel I'm writing.

>>830362
Correct. Neil Gaiman is one of the few living people who understands this.

i hate it when people tend to bitch too much about fantasy, but occasionally you'll hear someone who actually has a good point. the one i agree with is this: fantasy as a genre looses its goal and purpose when it gets away from its mythological roots. the basic hero's journey is illustrated in pretty much all ancient mythic traditions, and in particular it was many different european mythologies that modern fantasy was built off of. the problem arises when authors don't recognize the importance of the transitive symbols, and just sees the visual structure, which i will admit is something that is easy to do because fantasy is such a visually-based medium for stories. unfortunately modern fantasy has jumped on the bandwagon created by tolkien and fallen into the rut of elves, dwarves, orcs, dragon riders, dragon slayers, and sword in the stone reclaimers. not understanding the true meaning of these symbols, and not employing them correctly makes for terribly generic stories of the huge epic endbattle to determine the fate of the world. it makes these things cliche, and because of the broad range of way overused ideas, most people have come to disregaurd fantasy as a valid genre of literature.

atleast that's one point of view that i agree with, however much it sucks for people like me who love fantasy. oh well

>>830440
I don't know, that just sounds like another way to constrain the genre to a set of cliches. It's one thing to analyze myth & folklore for the components of the Hero's Journey, and quite another to say that new creations need to conform to it in some "correct" way. And I'm quite sure that fantasy won't gain more acceptance from the mainstream crowd just because it shares the same structure as the Epic of Gilgamesh. If anything, I would find that to be a deficit, and think that it suggests a lack of imagination.

>>830440
The hero's journey and associated symbols aren't a script to be followed. They are underlying motifs that tend to spontaneously arise in myths and stories all over the world. Campbell read a bunch of myths and said, "Gee, you can reduce most of these to these basic ideas." He didn't say, "All myths were purposefully written based on this model."

Fantasy tends to be bad and cliche because they try to follow myths and hero's-journey models too closely. "The farm boy is exposed to the world through a magical journey" is way too common. For fantasy to be rejuvenated and taken seriously, authors need to be creative and do something new.

Take Joyce's Ulysses, for example. It's not meant to be fantasy, but it takes the hero's journey idea and applies it to a man going for a walk around Dublin as his wife cavorts with a lover in their home. It does more to explore humanity, emotion, and feeling than any "lonely blacksmith's apprentice meets a wizard and eventually becomes a king" tale ever could.

>>830446
Oh, I should add, though, that I like your point about writers only getting the "visual" component of the fantasy work that they've read. Essentially, that's shallow reading, and while I reject the idea that the symbols need to be based on proto-mythical elements, it's nice when they stand for *something* interesting, more than just "orphan down on his luck becomes magical hero".

One example, for me, is the Thomas Covenant series. Despite its flaws, I think it was a series with a lot of original thought (at least in the genre) about human psychology.

>>830440
same guy from here
>>830446
the lack of imagination comes from reusing all of these ideas in modern fantasy. these are CONCEPTS not plot developments. the plot is handled by Campbell's idea of the monomyth, and its the lack of imagination that gets away from that; it just uses the surface idea of what these concepts vissually represent, not how they develop characters.

in a weird way that's difficult to explain, conforming to the monomyth, if done the right way can liberate a fantasy story from alot of the modern fantasy cliches.

I prefer alt history like Michael Tsarion

>>830469

i would like to see a bearshark in my fantasy novel

>>830455
>"The farm boy is exposed to the world through a magical journey" is way too common. For fantasy to be rejuvenated and taken seriously, authors need to be creative and do something new.

pic related, its a book that has nothing to do with farmboys, and its from the forgotten realms.

oh shit.

>>830455
Since no one read Ulysses, I really doubt anyone would read a fantasy-genre remix of it.

>>830492
>Forsaken House is the first title in a new trilogy chronicling the tempestuous return of an isolated society of elves to the mainland of the Forgotten Realms world.
Disqualified.

pic related

>>830495
what about that disqualifies the book?

>>830510
not the book referee here, but two things that turned me off were:

elves
trilogy

>>830504
>Funderlings, a little people, similar to dwarves, who are skilled in stonecraft; also known as 'Delvers'
>the burden of rule falls to the inexperienced princess, Briony, and her moody brother, Barrick
Disqualified.

We should acknowledge that sometimes the "farmboy becomes wizard" thing works really, really well. Pic related.

>>830513
Ursula le Guin does have a special talent for making her novels seem like genuine folk tales/myths

see also: The Left Hand of Darkness

>>830514
Yeah, it's got some hokey stuff, but the 'elves' are actually lovecraftian things from another dimension, so I likes it.'

>>830362

What if there are reasons for the elves and dwarves and they do not follow the common cliches?

>>830527
Elves and dwarves are the most abused common cliches in fantasy, aside from the "poor commoner becomes a noble/magician" trope.

There had better be really good reasons to include them, and you'd better not have any of the other problems in the list.

>>830440
>>830458
and can i take another moment to talk about another cliche that i absolutely hate in modern fantasy?

i hate what has happened to the general idea of magic in modern fantasy. magic in a lot of european mythologies was more of a generic, mystical miracle-working property. it was generally associated with nature and the earth, was dark, and even sometimes evil. (especially from the christian point of view of witches and pagan-cultures which eventually took over most of these mythologies in europe) nowa days magic is is muddled down to generic spoken spells that cast lightning from your hands, summon spirits to fight for you, or throw fire balls or anything else used for combat. wizards and other mythical creatures traditionally were never warriors, and magic was used more to manipulate the environment and nature around them, never to attack. in modern fantasy magic has been reduced to a strict set of spells that anyone can learn like getting a driver's licence and it's just generic bullshit. you can see the exact same thing happen in the star wars franchise. the Force started out as that same mystical energy field that lacked definition because it was used in a very miracle kind of way. but the videogames totally ruined the idea of the force. now every jedi ever can cast lightning with no darkside effects at all, and the force is just used to push shit around. whats even worse is that this was further developed by the newer films. it pisses me off to see something awesome and original be ruined basically by people capitalizing on one broad idea and narrowing it down to something too specific for its own good.

>>830540
same guy again, i forgot to mention that i love leguin's novels for having that same mystic idea of magic. her novels are amazing, and not to sound sexist, but she's honestly the only female author i've ever read that i enjoy.

I'm new to the genre (never got around to finishing LOTR but plan too soon, also reading A game of thrones). But I was thinking a good plot idea (I'm no writer, so I wouldn't attempt myself) would basically be a standard fantasy "kid gets orphaned by war" premise, the main differences being.

- The war is genuinly brutal (there's rape, genocide, and the events are highly psychologically traumatizing to the hero)
- The hero has little idea what he's doing, a good amount of the early portion is just him trying to survive the wilderness, and his inexperience in survival/combat is a major theme.
- The evil witch is batshit schizophrenic-style crazy, and has very good reasons for retaliating against the main characters kingdom.

basically the idea is to make the world as gritty and uncaring as possible.

Like I said, new to the genre, so there's probably stuff that has similar themes and style. I'd love for it to be pointed out if there is.

I would like to see fantasy that is not based on European folklore and culture. There seems to be this attitude that fantasy by default has to be set in a world based on medieval Europe. There was an entire world outside of that continent at the time. All of it had rich history and culture from which to base epic stories from.

>>830543
>>830540
>>830513
You've convinced me to give Le Guin a try. I like your ideas about how magic should be treated.

>>830546
You've just described nearly every fantasy series ever written that wasn't explicitly aimed at young adults.

>>830457
FUCK YEAH THOMAS COVENANT
But even that has elements of the hero's journey, just turned on its head.

>>830546
>basically the idea is to make the world as gritty and uncaring as possible.

You're already reading that series.

>>830551
another great thing about leguin's work that makes her popular is that almost all of the cultures in her book are dark skinned, or completely black, which her actually acknowleges she did because she wanted to get away from european-based modern fantasy. we have to admit that white people are genetically in the minority on a global scale, so there's a lot of mostly untapped potentials in fantasy

>>830551
You might like urban fantasy, which is set in more contemporary times.

I'm not sure about fantasy in other countries and cultures, though.

>>830551
The problem with that is that anything based on Medieval Asia tends to only include Japan and then falls into the weaboo category

>>830563
>You're already reading that series.
It's called life, man...

>>830540
You make an interesting point about magic. On a related note, I've gone to a number of SF conventions, and have seen a fair number of author panels discuss world-building, both in SF and fantasy. I'm pretty sure every single time, the main theme for fantasy world-building was "consistency, consistency, consistency", particularly for treatments of magic. The authors basically argued that your "magic system" needed to have fundamental principles worked out, which needed to be adhered to in all uses of magic in the story. It's sort of like a magic system from an RPG, where once the rules are set (mages forget spells after using them, for instance), you can't just break them for convenience in storytelling.

While I can see that this is pretty decent advice, I get the feeling it might lead to the very sort of "mundane magic" that you were complaining about. Having a balance of "magic that makes sense" and "magic that is still *magic*" could be pretty tricky for a writer, I think.