So far I’ve discovered in this thread:
-People don’t like traditional fantasy that takes itself seriously.
-People don’t like lighthearted fantasy that plays with the themes.
-People don’t like hard magical systems.
-People don’t like soft magical systems.
-People don’t like dragons being involved.
-People don’t like an absence of dragons.
-People don’t like character archetypes.
-People don’t like counterarchetypes.
-People don’t like when characters speak an understandable language.
-People don’t like characters meeting each other in common social meeting areas.All good here? Great.
Just write whatever the fuck you want. There’s always an audience.
You're looking for opinions? I got opinions.
-
The Chosen One who gets dragged around like a sack of potatoes until they Come Into Their Own and go on to Turn The Tide.
-
The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage.
-
The Sharp-Tongued Princess.
-
The Rogue With A Heart of Gold.
-
Plots based on misunderstanding ancient prophecies that are so vaguely written they could be cookie recipes.
-
Gods that slot into neat roles on a godly table of elements.
-
Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology.
-
Elves that are exactly like every other elf character you've ever read about except for one glaring but superficial difference which is there to make you think the author's not plagiarising their own favourite author.
-
I absolutely hate the trope where they start out with something interesting and have to do a flashback to the parts that led up to it. Like I just had that happen with a sequel to a book I was reading, and I'm really struggling to get started. I fucking hate the
*cold open to something dramatic happening*
Record scritch "I bet you're wondering how I got here. Well, it all started...."
bullshit trope and its really hard for me to look past some times.
Women and girls usually end up in a relationship by the end of the story and/or are the ones needing to be rescued. Its formulaic, boring and sexist due to the comparative lack of the opposite occurring. eg. men needing to be rescued.
Like... even if you did not give a single shit about sexism, its the same tired plot points over and over again. It has Hallmark channel writer energy. Create a second plot I beg you.
Elves always being like the bottom rung of society or them being the outcasts. It's insane to think that elves wouldn't be the rulers of dam near any government or at the very least not be the power and influence behind a puppet government. Who wouldn't want the help of a race of people who, depending on the lore, can live for thousands of years.
I mean, there could be an elf that has been a friend of your family for like 5 or more generations. That sounds dope as fuck for us but kinda shitty for them.
girls falling in love with the main character and wanting to stay with him for the rest of the story just because they have met random.
All things Deus Ex Machina. I get it, endings are hard. Climaxes are hard to write. But the payoff feels cheap as hell when your protagonist just "digs a little deeper" and suddenly finds just enough power to save the day. When it comes out of nowhere, it feels unearned by the hero and is not only unsatisfying, it's also a good way to give you hero power creep until there's nothing on earth that can believably challenge them. See: Superman.
I'm so sick of exceptionalism. Every damn thing seems to center around some shitty thinly veiled oligarch, their kids as some hero, or unhappenable origins and an impossible hero. Everything is geared towards cultural acceptance of some authoritarian neo feudal dystopian future.
Stories can be interesting in other spaces. We all exist within those real spaces. We can fantasize about better places and times within similar realities as our own. I view all this exceptionalism like collective narcissism. I can't tell if it is an universal writing bias or a publishing bias, but I don't like it.
Elves and Dwarves done like every other Elf and Dwarf. Especially when they go out of their way to give the Dwarf that overdone Irish/Scottish accent written out in damn near unreadable text.
Also when the worldbuilding and plot basically is "here's some not so thinly veiled racism between groups who will set that aside to fight a common enemy." Series ends on a high note, but you know this world will fall into disarray again cause people suck, so like, what was the point.
This is specific to the videogame-ish sub-genre, mostly Isakeis…
But you go out of the way to include RPG mechanics into your story… but the only real influence it has on the storytelling is spending an inordinate amount of time grinding… a mechanic explicitly added to RPGs to pad the game.
There are good video game based stories, Survival Story of a Sword King and Dungeon Reset both immediately come to mind… but I feel like this is a widespread problem.
For one thing, too many works of fiction involve a romance. I don't judge the romances itself, I would never get between even multiple people in love when on a screen, but these things don't always have to be in the boundaries of the story. Even works like DC Comics which promote themselves on a realism basis give romances out like a token. Which is why the ending to Battleship saved that movie in my eyes.
Just finished watching The 100 on Netflix. The writing was pretty terrible.
-
Literally every bad action performed by a character (up to and including genocide) was justified as "I had no choice". They should have called it, "The no choice show". I would have loved to have seen a counter in the corner of the screen that ticked up every time that was said, which was at least once per episode.
-
Seconds before any kind of solution that would have solved major problems was enacted, a character (different each time)- previously rational, but now for some reason completely chaotic- would jump in and destroy the McGuffin and fuck everyone over because it was in their personal interest. Every single fucking time, even in the final episode. It's no longer a plot twist, it's just lazy AF writing. It also meant that the characters had no consistency or predictability of motive, which meant their believability went down the toilet.
I'm going to stop there but believe me, that's the tip of the iceberg.
That show was proof that Netflix will greenlight just about anything.
-
The way GOT ended with making the storyteller (the writer) become an important part of the story. The writers self insert is a problem in a lot of media but particular in fantasy.
The main character is given so much buff.
I still looking fiction where main character is ordinary person.
- No godly fast learning/growthing speed.
- No extraordinary willpower that train day and night with bare minimum on food and housing
- No hack-like device/weapon/...
Yep!
The "Deckbuilder" litrpgs where the words card and deck dont mean anything and its just skills
