Fantasy Pet Peeves

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Beneath the Vaulted Hills and Compass of the Soul by Sean Russell. No war. Takes place in a world that is at about the early 19th century level of tech but also has magic.

[Diva]

Most people are probably aware of this, but Diana Wynne Jones has a couple nice books that send up the fantasy stereotypes, one of which is Dark Lord of Derkholm. The idea is that off-worlders come for "Fantasy" tourist vacations where they meet bewitching ladies, evil lords, bandits, demons, etc., and participate in semi-mock battles to complete their "quest". It's told from the side of the people having to put on the tours in their magical but non-stereotypical world. Good stuff.

I *love* this book! I keep recommending it to people but they won't read it. morons

and on the chainmail bikini artwork you were mentioning earlier:

some of my friends used to be in an all-female roleplaying team for conventions. Their team name was 'Fortunately I Was Wearing My Armour' or FIWWMA for short. They had a cartoon from a magazine (Dragon I think) which had a woman in a chainmail bikini, with arrows stuck in the bits of her that were armoured. And her conversation with the ogling man opposite was exactly that 'well, fortunately I was wearing my armour'.

always summed up the idiocy of that particular - uncomfortable - fantasy art fetish.

Pet question: Why must the plot of every fantasy novel include a war???

no war in Glenda Larke's Isles of Glory series - The Aware, Gilfeather and The Tainted

conflict, definitely. but not war. and lots of scheming and politicing *and* actual ruling of the islands are involved

[Wolf Girl]

some of my friends used to be in an all-female roleplaying team for conventions. Their team name was 'Fortunately I Was Wearing My Armour' or FIWWMA for short. They had a cartoon from a magazine (Dragon I think) which had a woman in a chainmail bikini, with arrows stuck in the bits of her that were armoured. And her conversation with the ogling man opposite was exactly that 'well, fortunately I was wearing my armour'.

Yeah.

[The Wolf Maid]

and on the chainmail bikini artwork you were mentioning earlier:

This must be all princess's Leia's fault. XD

One of my pet peeves in fantasy is when the author's prudish. Eddings the master in this one.

[williamjm]

My own pet peeve revolved around the Girls vs. Boys thing, a la Eddings and Jordan (also ties in with the Band of pubescent Heroes cliche). Yes, there has to be bickering of some sort in every group of people, but does it have to be so gender-stratified? And does it have to happen so bloody often? And why, for the love of Green Cherries, is it inevitable that the guy and girl that bicker the most always end up together? Out here in the real world, I'd imagine that if a man and woman are forever at odds with each other, and argue loudly over every little thing, then it's a sign that the two of them don't like each other. Then again, maybe I'm the insane one.

This does definitely happen in the Real World, but it is certainly overused in Fiction (I don't think it is just a Fantasy cliche).

[Werthead]

Not a cliche, really but common nonetheless: maps that all look the same and bear no resemblance to what a continent (or whatever) should really look like. Yes, this is fantasy. So what? My fantasy begins with a tectonically and topographically probable environment, but I'm probably just a big nerd.

I'm beginning to resent chapters beginning with little made-up quotations from some "historian" or something of the sort. I skip past them. I can enjoy the authors fine--it just bugs me when they feel the need to insert these paragraphs which only have meaning to the truly geeky.

Ahh, the Diana Wynne Jones Gnomic Utterance which must be intoned at the start of each chapter. "When the skies turn red as blood and a dog howls in the east, shall the hidden king arise." Or something. I'm not sure that the Feist/Bakker approach of placing a quote from Proper Literature at the start of the book is much better though. "Yep, this is a fantasy novel, but look! I've read MacBeth! Go me!"

Magician, a book that probably doesn't leap first to mind as such, makes a good fist of subverting its cliches. There is no villain. The nearest is the Warlord, but he's hardly in it and is very much behind the scenes and even dies off-screen. Guy Bas-Tyra is also off-screen for the whole book and, it turns out later, isn't such a bad 'un after all. More than anything else, the Kingom and the Empire and all their citizens seem to be caught in the sway of events, powerless to alter them. The nearest major cliche is that Pug does become a powerful magician but that is only after several years of study with the Great Ones. Tomas does become a great warrior, but only because he gets possessed by the batshit-insane shade of a warrior-demigod.

Another nice bit of subversion there is that Pug is an orphan raised in the castle, which should set warning signals blaring, but actually there's nothing special about his parentage at all. His parents just died when he was young. No prophecies, no hidden lineage, nothing special at all.

The Lies of Locke Lamora also does a great job of making the genre cliches (the Thieves Guild, honourable gentlemen rogues etc) work for it well.

My biggest peeve is authors who write reasonable or very good first novels but, once they know they can sell 500,000 copies by name alone, just phone it in. See: Feist, Eddings, Jordan etc.

[williamjm]

Another nice bit of subversion there is that Pug is an orphan raised in the castle, which should set warning signals blaring, but actually there's nothing special about his parentage at all. His parents just died when he was young. No prophecies, no hidden lineage, nothing special at all.

Another particularly impressive anti-cliche in "Magician" is the way the orphan boy and the princess fall in love despite the huge social divide and then never get the opportunity to do anything about it and end up marrying other people and dismissing their previous brief relationship as being childish infatuation.

It is noticeable that most of Feist's best books Magician and the Empire Trilogy (as well as "Rise of a Merchant Prince" and "Honoured Enemy", to some extent) are those with the least typical fantasy plotlines. It is a bit of a shame that most of the other Riftwar books are more generic, even if at their best they do do the cliched Epic Fantasy thing quite well (such as "A Darkness at Sethanon" and "The King's Buccanneer").

[Multaniette]

Vagrancy,

Brilliant post.

[Mind Elemental]

Interesting take on Feist. His stereotypical elves/dwarves and Pug's revolutionising magic by being the first 3e character had put him off in my memory, but you raise some good points.

I actually liked King's Buccaneer and Shadow of a Dark Queen the best, because of the whole band-of-mercenaries-in-an-exotic-land vibe.

[Kat]

Ahh, the Diana Wynne Jones Gnomic Utterance which must be intoned at the start of each chapter. "When the skies turn red as blood and a dog howls in the east, shall the hidden king arise." Or something. I'm not sure that the Feist/Bakker approach of placing a quote from Proper Literature at the start of the book is much better though. "Yep, this is a fantasy novel, but look! I've read MacBeth! Go me!"

I think the only book for which I've been able to forgive the Begin-Chapter Quotations has been Powers' Last Call but only because I could actually see the relevance in the quotes, and there were a ton of allusions in the rest of the text as well. OTOH, normally when I see the quotations I think to myself, "Uh oh, another excuse for the author to pimp his favorites..." or possible "Uh oh, quotations does not world-building make" or something to that effect, only with proper grammar.

[Vagrancy]

This does definitely happen in the Real World, but it is certainly overused in Fiction (I don't think it is just a Fantasy cliche).

Mmm, I have seen real couples who seem to love each other regularly snipe, but I think what they do is more bantering than bickering. Banter is jokey and smart-assey, whilst bickering is bitter and obnoxious. Also bantering is distinctive in that both people participate; it isn't just the female screeching at the top of her lungs while the guy goes red and shuffles his feet, or when he does speak it's to say something transparently stupid. I classify what the people do in the novels to be bickering, usually; the author doesn't seem to get that after a certain point the arguing isn't cute anymore; it's annoying and pointless and if the kids can't play nice together, why can't they go find someone else to save the world with?

Either that or I really am insane.

Vagrancy,

Brilliant post.

Awww...thank you so much!

[Galactus]

Ahh, the Diana Wynne Jones Gnomic Utterance which must be intoned at the start of each chapter. "When the skies turn red as blood and a dog howls in the east, shall the hidden king arise." Or something. I'm not sure that the Feist/Bakker approach of placing a quote from Proper Literature at the start of the book is much better though. "Yep, this is a fantasy novel, but look! I've read MacBeth! Go me!"

Magician, a book that probably doesn't leap first to mind as such, makes a good fist of subverting its cliches. There is no villain. The nearest is the Warlord, but he's hardly in it and is very much behind the scenes and even dies off-screen. Guy Bas-Tyra is also off-screen for the whole book and, it turns out later, isn't such a bad 'un after all. More than anything else, the Kingom and the Empire and all their citizens seem to be caught in the sway of events, powerless to alter them. The nearest major cliche is that Pug does become a powerful magician but that is only after several years of study with the Great Ones. Tomas does become a great warrior, but only because he gets possessed by the batshit-insane shade of a warrior-demigod.

Another nice bit of subversion there is that Pug is an orphan raised in the castle, which should set warning signals blaring, but actually there's nothing special about his parentage at all. His parents just died when he was young. No prophecies, no hidden lineage, nothing special at all.

The Lies of Locke Lamora also does a great job of making the genre cliches (the Thieves Guild, honourable gentlemen rogues etc) work for it well.

My biggest peeve is authors who write reasonable or very good first novels but, once they know they can sell 500,000 copies by name alone, just phone it in. See: Feist, Eddings, Jordan etc.

I actually really like Feist's books (or rather, I have a fondness for them) Magician was great and very anti-cliché as pointed out. (And it's never really OBVIOUSLY anti-cliché either, it just naturally subverts the cliché) Silverthorn and Darkness at Sethanon do the cliché fantasy stuff pretty well. I rather liked Prince Of the Blood in a light-hearted non-serious way, same thing with King's Buccaneer, and both Shadow of A Dark Queen and Rise of a Merchant Prince had promise.

But damn, he ruined it in Rage of a Demon King. The Valheru-as-to-alien-to-coexist-with-man villains was pretty cool, the Mad God? Not so much.

After that it has been pretty much crap. Midkemia started out as a roleplaying world though, but I'm still damn surprised he never licenced it. (apart from the computer games) it seems like a fun place to RP in.

[Sandello]

Gallant knights. I can't stand them.

[KazigluBey]

I can't stand when authors put in capitalized nouns that are supposed to mean something mysterious and powerful. Examples would be having the Seeing, or the Wheel, or the Rebirth, or the Knowing, and all these stupid powers that piss the hell out of me when they're capitalized to make it seem like they mean something important. For god's sake, if a character can see into the future, describe their experiences viewing the future, don't say they had a "Seeing and the future was Foretold. Becuse it is all part of the Wheel and the Rebirth." *shudders*

[Maia]

I have my share of virulent hatred for prophecies which get fulfilled exactly as foretold. But my greatest peeve is with the iron-clad rules of the genre.

I.e. that the heroes are fighting for the right cause, that they win in the end and at the worst get to ride into the sunset, but usually get the girl/guy and live happily ever after. The _only_ fantasy books that are allowed to deviate from these rules are prequels to the pre-existing novels (which is why reading a prequel without knowing that it is one can be a very enjoyable and surprising experience) and countless retellings of the popular Western legends - which BTW, almost all are stories of tragedy and hubris!

IMHO, those conventions hurt fantasy more than anything else, because they make any book predictable, no matter its other virtues. Our beloved GRRM is going to skirt the rules by having a multi-POV cast, but still enough of the POVs will survive to get us an above ending. I mean, does anybody think that the Starks won't regain their overlordship of the North (at least) in the end? That the Others won't be defeated? Etc. Still, even this is a huge step in the right direction.

OK, a couple of other peeves - "everymen" heroes, who nevertheless quickly gain various superpowers, usually magical ones. People like to blame Tolkien, for many fantasy cliches, and yet he was the only fantasy author to have a true "everyman" hero, who never evolved into a slayer of legions, the most powerful mage for ages, etc., and also never could have duked it out with the main villain mano-y-mano.

Books written in the same setting, where the author is unwilling to let it evolve, so that between the hopeful, triumphant ending of the previous book and the beginning of the next one things get magically "reset" to the previous depressing level, all achievements proving to be ephemereal and quickly forgotten, so that a new generation of heroes has the same difficulties to contend with. Often happens with prequels, because the final point is set, so no real "progress" can be made, but Marion Zimmer Bradley and others are also guilty of employing it in later books in internal timeline.

What gets me in particular is that all the endings are so damned happy and then in the beginning of the next book we learn all the horrible things that happened to the characters once they were off-screen. If that's how you want to play it, at least have the courage to _show_ it , not tell.

[Mauvka]

Books written in the same setting, where the author is unwilling to let it evolve, so that between the hopeful, triumphant ending of the previous book and the beginning of the next one things get magically "reset" to the previous depressing level, all achievements proving to be ephemereal and quickly forgotten, so that a new generation of heroes has the same difficulties to contend with. Often happens with prequels, because the final point is set, so no real "progress" can be made, but Marion Zimmer Bradley and others are also guilty of employing it in later books in internal timeline.

hear, hear

I think, more than just the genre, it's is also people in general fearing change. It is only an extention of the general aversion, when an author writes an ending that is actually a return to the beginning. Even on this board, how many people are hoping for a return of the Starks, Tullys, Targaryens to power? Maybe not as much for the Targs, but anyway.

As for Lannisters: cast them down to a minor great house

Ironborn: can't let them gain power, confine them to their rocks

The Boltons: Replace the Starks?? No way. Rickon will murder them in their sleep!!

The conclusion that changes nothing is annoying, but hard to avoid.

[Errant Bard]

The conclusion that changes nothing is annoying, but hard to avoid.

It's doable with ASOIAF, though. The setting of the novels allow for realistic developments of the story without shocking the readers, and I think that having an ending that is totally out of sync with the rest of the tale is not likely to happen with GRRM.

But I'm one of those who think that LF will end on the throne and all PoV but Sansa will die or stay away from westeros, and Winterfell will not be rebuilt.

Anyway, back on topic, what really gets me now in Fantasy, is the manicheism of most books. When you have the Dark Lord and his minions on on side, and the Good Guys on the others. The bad guys are evil and that's it, and the good guys are good, no matter what wretched action they do.

Then the Dark Lord is still a cool guy because he give every new fledging adventurer a sporting chance by not sending elite assassins for him right away, no, he sends weak troops first and then progressively stronger ones for the hero to level up smoothly. All attempts on the heroes lifes will be straightforward ones, too, never poison in their drink, scorpions in their bed, arrow to the back, saddle sabotage or the like.

[The Marquis de Leech]

Anyway, back on topic, what really gets me now in Fantasy, is the manicheism of most books. When you have the Dark Lord and his minions on on side, and the Good Guys on the others. The bad guys are evil and that's it, and the good guys are good, no matter what wretched action they do.

Totally agree. Authors like Eddings seem to think that their heroes can cheerfully commit any number of crimes against their enemies, yet still be regarded as the clear "good guys". For them morality isn't something dependent on what a character does, but rather on whether the character belongs to a sort of pre-decided "team".

The tragedy is that an author like Tolkien, who had very strong views on the nature of good and evil, often gets lumped in with prats like Eddings. Tolkien's good guys were, however, good because of their actions, not because they were arbitraily declared "good" by the author. Good guys could fall, while bad guys could be redeemed.

Then the Dark Lord is still a cool guy because he give every new fledging adventurer a sporting chance by not sending elite assassins for him right away, no, he sends weak troops first and then progressively stronger ones for the hero to level up smoothly. All attempts on the heroes lifes will be straightforward ones, too, never poison in their drink, scorpions in their bed, arrow to the back, saddle sabotage or the like.

Agreed, this is annoying. I think it's a result of the author getting confronted with three possibilities during the writing process:

1. The Dark Lord is intelligent

2. The Dark Lord is a powerful threat to the world

3. There will be a happy ending

The author can have two out of three. However, rather than picking the first two, and having a story with an unhappy ending (or at best a bittersweet one), the tendency among much of modern fantasy is to mollycoddle the reader, and go for the purely happy ending. Since it is so much more dramatic to have a powerful bad guy, this leaves a situation of fantasy being full of "dummy Dark Lords".

[Galerian]

I am going with this one: the evil that is being driven towards the peaceful lands by an even greater evil.

[Galactus]

Authors like Eddings seem to think that their heroes can cheerfully commit any number of crimes against their enemies, yet still be regarded as the clear "good guys".

I believe he actually rejected that at some point. i believe in the Malloreon Belgarath said something like "Good versus evil? That's tricky. I'm sticking with Us versus Them."