/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19319678]

Why do you guys dislike it so much? How does it differ from older books of fantasy?

[Anonymous No.19319712]

>>19319678
I came to the conclusion a long time ago that modern fantasy sucks because it's void of genuine mysticism. Say Tolkien was not a Pagan or anything, but he was fervently Christian and he obviously imbued Middle Earth with his religious spirit. Only those who have a mystical inclination can write good imaginative stories. Most writers today are godless materialists who run everything on aesthetics and genre tropes.

[Anonymous No.19319719]

>>19319712
This is also the reason why another anon said he felt like he was tapping into "something primordial" when he read the Odyssey although he admitted that it was stylistically and narratively flawed compared to the Aeneid. Mysticism matters as much as story and form.

[Anonymous No.19319800]

>>19319678
>Why do you guys dislike it so much?
I don't dislike it, but it seems like it is in a rut. Multiple high profile fantasy authors seem to refuse to write the next book. Others churn out the same thing again and again. The genre feels tired and in need of something or someone new to reinvigorate it or expand it.

>How does it differ from older books of fantasy?
Early fantasy tends to be in dialogue with other stories like myths, legends, folktales, which give it more gravitas compared to modern fantasy - which tends to be in dialogue with the bog standard conventions of the fantasy genre. Early fantasy treats a secondary (fantasy) world not as an end in itself (worldbuilding, etc) but as a stage to play out stories that have figurative significance for humanity generally. However the obsession with worldbuilding in modern fantasy is off-putting and actually shows a lack of imagination. (It's almost like taking Frankenstein, and then building the Sci-Fi genre based solely on endlessly tweaking and refining the epistolary novel format, as if that were the point.) It would just be good to see more independently minded experimentation. New things that aren't blatantly in a "following Tolkien" or "stealing from LeGuin" or "trying to be the next Harry Potter" tradition.

[Anonymous No.19319886]

>>19319678
Because the vast majority of fantasy authors following Tolkien made it their goal to either copy Tolkien as much or distance themselves from him as much as possible. Ignoring the list of cheap imitators, which are too numerous to recount, you have people like Moorcock and Martin who explicitly position their works in opposition to Tolkien's (though Moorcock himself isn't that bad). Most modern fantasy is in essence derivative of Tolkien in some form or another. Even when they're copying Tolkien, most authors are only copying the most inane and meaningless parts of him. Elves and dragons and dwarves! You have the obsession with worldbuilding for instance, which doesn't serve much of a purpose other than worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding, which is explicitly not what Tolkien was doing. He didn't want to create the world of middle earth because it was cool, he did it for a specific purpose, which was creating an english mythological world. He was also an oxford professor of linguistics with a vast experience in european history and culture, so he could pull it off. Very few writers following him were ever as qualified.

Fantasy must be fantastical, not a quest where the hero experiences the world, travelling across the different nations with their intricate rules of governnance, meeting all the different fantasy races with unique features that inhabit it on the way to his eventual battle with the Great Evil. Not to say that before Tolkien such tropes did not exist, or that all fantasy written after him is universally terrible, but after him they became almost all that fantasy consisted of. The King of Elfland's daughter, Gormenghast, Lovecraft, Tales of Zothique, to name a few, are all brilliant pre-Tolkien works of fantasy that work well as their own thing. And this is without even going into the massive commercialisation of the genre following its rapid rise in popularity. There are some good modern fantasy books, but they are often the exceptions to the rule and notably do not follow the Tolkien formula of a Tolkien world with Tolkien fantasy races on a hero's journey quest. Discworld is alright (though does suffer a little from what I've just been talking about), Earthsea is pretty good, and Susanna Clarke's stuff is brilliant. But books or series like them are few and far inbetween.

tl;dr Modern fantasy is largely just a bad copy of Tolkien, and it cheapens the entire genre as a result.

[Anonymous No.19320573]

>>19319712
Interesting. I wonder how George MacDonald and Lord Dunsany tapped into that mysticism since they were more KJV-style Christians.

[Anonymous No.19321095]

>>19320573
I started thinking about this when I watched interviews to the painter Beksiński, whose work is amazing, and he was legitimately into occultism at least for a time. He appears to be a very rational man but his work is obviously filled with religious symbolism, the occult, and a general sense of the Other. There was obviously a desire in him to access this mystical side even if he never talks about it explicitly. Many of the people who made great things in the past had a spiritual passion that drove them, not just something like modern "success", something more intimate. You can definitely achieve technical excellence without mysticism but technical excellence alone is sterile. I am absolutely certain that what really sets works of art apart from those that are merely technically excellent is this mystical element. It doesn't necessarily have to be a strictly religious act, but it must be a desire to access the Other through the art. I am absolutely convinced that art is a mystical/religious act.
On a famous interview with Jean Renoir on cinema, he says something like
>When you look at Etruscan pottery, it's all beautiful. It cannot be that every Etruscan artisan was a genius!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7Mtd6GE_PI
And then he blames "technological advancement" for it. He complains that the film's grain in its becoming smoother and cleaner has changed for the worse, that all the "texture" of old, rougher things was being destroyed by modernity. But then he says "you could continue using the old ways, but it wouldn't be the same". I think this argument doesn't hold up. Technique is just technique. There are people today who paint like Caravaggio. But their work is sterile. Is it because they are not "moving on with the times"? I don't think so. It's because they are enamored with the aesthetics, but they lack the mystical drive. They lack that ineffable "soul" that moved people in the past, directly or indirectly in the production of art. People in the past lived more intensely, they experienced more pain, more fear, more of everything. They clinged to the Gods who were real in their mind. When they produced art the art was smeared with these sensations, even if it was technically lacking. I'm willing to die on this hill, it's the death of mysticism that killed the arts.

[Anonymous No.19321550]

>>19321095
Beautiful insight. Thank you so much for replying, anon.