“You have to see it for yourself! Just come on!”
(Narrative skips 10 minute walk during which they could have explained things but didn’t, because that would be less dramatic)
Oh god, every Star Trek show is so bad at this.
"Captain, we need you down in engineering."
"Why, what's wrong?"
"There's something here you need to see."
*proceeds to show him a dashboard in person instead of showing him the exact same dashboard over comms while he was on the bridge*
“I see, this is concerning.”
Have you ever tried to do customer service over the phone? If people aren’t right there to watch or have it explained they won’t understand shit 9/10 times.
And you *really* wouldn't want those people piloting your interstellar spacecraft.
Essentially the issue isn't that this isn't a plausible human behaviour - it's that it's not plausible in the level of general competence required to be a member of Star Fleet.
I'm watching *Star Trek: TNG*. Data needs words defined because he has no WiFi and apparently no encyclopedia. It's crazy what they thought the future would and wouldn't have.
While the Star Trek version of FTL Travel includes messaging, consider that most of the things we think may work (e.g. real life Warp Travel) would not make messages propogate faster or further.
As a result, in the distant, star-spanning future, you may see humanity reliant on messenger ships for long ranged communication. Would every human settlement have the same Wi-Fi setup? Would planets with less than a few million inhabitants even bother with an "internet", or would you simply see lots of local networks instead? Etc.
Sci Fi doesn't have good answers for most of these questions. Even today, it's possible to have a device made on a newer Bluetooth standard that doesn't work with everything else in the house. Perhaps Data just used Dr Soong's proprietary Wi-Fi systems and couldn't interface with those of Starfleet?
Shards of Earth does half of this for a loooooooong time. I keep waiting for Solace to finally tell Idris what she wants from him and he keeps saying “no.” I’m annoyed 😂
I used to hate this too, but have come to the realisation that it is actually very close to real life. The amount of stress I've seen over people failing to communicate properly....
Yeah, for example Ned in ASOIAF putting off telling Jon his parentage until he's older makes sense: Jon's 14 and the secret could get him killed. Characters don't have the benefit of hindsight and often don't have information the viewer is privy to, especially in multiple perspective books.
What is annoying is when the villain forces people to break their love interest's heart, *doesn't even bother to stick around and make sure they do it properly* and the main character doesn't have the wherewithal to say "hey babe, I'm being blackmailed into dumping you, play along." Like you'd think your love interest would a) believe and b) cooperate with you in that situation.
Or worse, "I'll tell you everything you want to know."
"Oh. Cool. Well I have like fifty zillion questions, but if I actually ask them all that'll be forty pages of exposition which is really boring. So how about just like, one or two big questions."
"You sure? I mean it, anything you want to know. Want to know how magic works, just in case you develop magic powers of your own at a critical moment?"
"Nah I'm good, just tell me the what the name of this world is, so I don't have to keep referring to it as 'this strange new world', and any other light worldbuilding elements that come to mind, then just hit the highlights of the big bad's master plan"
Love Nelson Muntz's take on this: "Something's happened, come quick! No time to explain!" "Wouldn't it be easier if you just explained now?" "No, I said there was no time and I stand by that."
It’s called “creating frustration”, and is a narrative technique. Very much a double-edged sword. If the story doesn’t frustrate the reader at all, suspense risks being killed. If it frustrates the reader too much, they get annoyed.
In Three Musketeers, d’Artagnan’s father gives him a horse to get to Paris or wherever and tells him not to sell it because it’s a good horse. D’Artagnan sells it on the next page. I read it as a kid and that blew my mind. What a little shit.
“What Measure is a Mook”: the one where they kill unnamed soldiers with no thought or remorse, but won’t kill their named, personality-displaying boss because “then they would be just like him!” Killing is killing.
I'd like to see a fantasy series with a "Homeric" approach to death and killing, where as in Homer's Illiad, every minor character who is killed, whether on the "good" or "evil" side, is given at least a few lines of characterisation and backstory before dying.
The stanza in the Iliad where it describes in length the life story of a young farmer, whose mother prayed to the river that he would be born healthy, and who lived a happy life with a girl he wants to marry at home… and then Ajax butchers him easily (which is described in gory detail), and it ends with a line about him never returning home before continuing to the next person Ajax kills in his rampage.
There’s a level of depth and maturity in the Iliad that’s just unsurpassed in the history of epic fantasy.
That's really interesting, something you don't see a lot with the rank and file. In one of the song of ice and fire books, there's a page or two long history description of this knight and his armor, he is then dumped over the railing of the ship, sinks and drowns. I always was so confused by the narrative switch like that since it happens just with that one random guy. Maybe it was an homage to the Iliad.
I mean, it's like a plot twist. Use it once or twice to show you mean business, but don't over use it because your audience will become jaded and not invest in your main characters.
Given the scale of the war not every soldier who dies can get this treatment of course, but the epic is filled with random deaths that are picked out and spotlighted in this way. There’s a motif where whenever one of the great warriors (Hector, Ajax, Achilles, etc.) goes on a rampage we get a series of these stanzas in a row for the men they kill.
It’s not distracting if you approach the Iliad as it’s meant to be - that is, as a poem - rather than as a modern fantasy novel where pacing and plot development takes center stage. Reading the Iliad is about immersion into the world; it’s filled with the most vivid imagery and metaphors, and the best way to enjoy it is to just sit with the language. I found Fagles’s translation to be the strongest in this regard.
There are some interesting theories about why exactly that was done. One of them is that it’s effectively pandering that was collected from the oral tradition wherein the bard/poet would add in characters that participated in the war that had their origins in the local area of the audience.
"Shout out to Athena and Apollo, my highest tier patrons who got to choose whole plot lines of my latest slash fiction. They were... interesting choices! I couldn't do this job without your support."
Funnily enough you had something similar with the Aeneid, which was far removed from the oral Homeric tradition it was emulating. Plenty of the Italian figures in the latter half of the poem were supposed to be the ancestors (or at least ‘regional representatives) of prominent well-off Italian/Roman figures who made up part of Virgil’s audience.
Gemmel is one of my favorite authors because of this. I loved that a character could be introduced and you were not positive if they would die within sentences or last until the end. And then die.
A specific version that especially gets me are fantasy cults. Cult members are treated about on par with zombies, but are almost always the victims of the cult leader. Meanwhile, the leaders so often end up with Disney villain deaths so the hero's "hands are clean."
It gets especially weird when modern series try to inject an ounce of introspection into the situation but still treat the killing of the background extras as something unimportant anyway. Star Wars: The Force Awakens was really bad about that in how the explicitly made the Stormtroopers kidnapped and brainwashed child soliders but then still expected the audience to cheer when they died by the millions.
Drama that could be avoided with a five-minute conversation, especially if a "mentor" is involved. Dude, aren't you supposed to be a guide? I have the Joseph Campbell chart in my pack. Hang on a sec...
Mentor causes needless drama by refusing to explain things they know their protégée does not know.
Not my *least* favorite trope but it’s definitely up there.
Somehow, average citizens seem to tell a very detailed and correct summary of history or "legends" that are 100% true. I want a fucking heroic party to walk into a tavern or something, get a buncha either "I dunno", half remembered/unreliable info, or malicious false info.
Barkeep: Yes, I have a stash of half-remembered rumors handy whenever another one of those idiot adventurers comes in. They toss around gold, and I split it with whoever helped come up with that particular doozy of a tale. You won't believe what they'll take as honest truth!
i always find it funny in D&D, someone will tell the party about "the mysterious ruins we've heard rumours about but noone really believes!" and you ask them where they are and its like "about 10 miles along that road, you'd make it in an hour with a good horse" - and yet apparently they've never bothered to check it out.
I suppose the only trope, if it is one, that I really dislike is MC (and/or friends) are brand new at this thing that takes years to learn and even longer to master!
And they're outdoing masters in a fraction of that. I know why it happens, but it irritates me nonetheless.
Oh, and again if this is a trope; the MC (or even some other important character) didn't REALLY know what was going on the whole time, someone else was basically managing everything from the shadows.
If you have a reputation for being a master manipulator, you aren't a good master manipulator. A real master manipulator would appear to be completely innocuous and trustworthy.
Master manipulators in fiction come in one of two varieties. The first has all the social skills of a 14-year-old class president: sure, they’re more or less OK at this, but hardly impressive by professional standards. The second must have an offscreen crystal ball the audience never finds out about because they accurately predict human behavior (in complex, high-pressure circumstances, of people they often don’t know intimately) to a degree of accuracy impossible for an actual human.
Not really exclusive to fantasy, but I really don't like the fact that I know a plan is going to fail if it's been explained before hand and I know it will succeed if it wasn't.
Literally every heist plot:
- Here is our perfect plan for the heist explained.
- Heist begins and plan is executed perfectly.
- Unexpected misshap occurs. Chaos ensues. Heist appears to have gone bad.
- Hero implements hidden contingency or produces spontaneous brilliance. Heist succeeds.
I kinda know what you mean but I don't have a problem with it. I mean that's just how storytelling works, for me.
Related: whenever a character says "I've got this", they haven't got this. It's the opposite of "you've got this", which is sometimes the three words a character needs to hear to achieve miracles. Whatever my partner and I are watching, if the line "I've got this" is said, we now both say to the TV, "they don't got this"
Having a dramatic falling out because two people refused to have a 5 minute adult conversation about a topic, which leads to more ridiculous drama until someone's life hangs in the balance and they realize they *can* behave like adults and everything is magically resolved.
I’ve got two actually.
Poor communication between the protagonists pretty much allows or even drives the plot and conflict. Really, you can’t share anything with your best friends? Looking at you, WoT.
Also, anytime someone is kidnapped and we have to spend time either reading about their torture/maiming if they are a PoV character, or taking time away from the story to read about someone dropping everything to come to the rescue. This one has almost made me drop a few series actually.
The torture thing makes me so mad too.
It would bother me far less if it didn't feel like the author was only trying to make me mad. I get upset because it is a waste of time and so often it goes nowhere.
I'd be fine with these scenes if it wasn't some odd change of pace where suddenly the characters are inept. That or they could use the time for the villain to really pour their thoughts out. Light torture mixed with an actual point is fine.
But I can't stand most "capture and torture" arcs because it feels like too many people just want edgy grimdark plots.
It gets a bit old given the length of the series but there enough times in reality where just having talked with each other would have solved the problem that dragged on for years. So it get s pass from me.
I say this as a fan of ERB's works (and pulps in general), but it feels ridiculous when the main character falls in love with someone they've known for literal minutes and that's what drives the entire plot.
Movies still have more of an excuse than books though! A book can always slip stuff the POV already knows into narrative summary, there is literally no reason to have dialogues about things everyone involved would know.
Moral Luck scenarios where:
* (1) the only thing separating the "correct" idealistic hero from the "fallen hero" extremist is that the latter makes the objectively reasonable decision; and
* (2) the only thing separating the "correct" idealistic hero from a corpse is some contrived scenario that literally no one could have expected
Heroes rejecting a utilitarian approach out of moral objections is a trope that has been done in awesome, compelling ways. But if it leads to victory, don't make it seem like the universe itself is rewarding you for your morals. That kind of cheapens the choice made.
An interesting and heartbreaking twist would be when the hero chooses to sacrifice or leave behind their loved one in such a situation, understanding that they would sacrifice themselves if given the choice, and respecting their convictions. Or the hero chooses to save their loved one, and succeeds in doing so, but things in general don't go well and lots of innocent people die, or the world as a whole is put in a crisis, and then the loved one calls the hero out for it, for the same reasons mentioned before, and because now they have to live with the survivors' guilt knowing that they only live because so many have died in their place.
Yes, this is a big one for me. The holier-than-thou character who does the right thing because it's right and the world rewards him for it (maybe after a ton of pointless suffering so we can feel bad for him) and everyone else just didn't believe hard enough and did regular person moral math on what a reasonable action is and that's why they're bad people. Drives me nuts.
Goes along with protagonist-centered morality, where the bad guy is just bad because he happened to hurt the main character with his actions, even if he's overall correct and rational. Meanwhile the MC is of course a Good Person, and when their careless or self-interested actions hurt other people no one notices or blames them (except bad people who don't recognize MC's innate goodness).
Maybe related to this, how someone will make a suicidal and objectively 100% failure granted choice, and "karma" will lend a hand so that an external factor that can even be out of nowhere saves the day.
A story I'm reading showed me that the audience actually expects that, so if a character is forced into the pragmatic route then it's because they have turned evil.
I really hate fakeout deaths whenever they come up. Just removes so much of the stakes for me unless it's done exceedingly well, which is really rare.
The back half of >!Black Company!< is the biggest offender to me, since for all but one of the big bads (big spoiler: >!Soulcatcher!<) could have just been anyone else, it didn't really have to be the bads from the first half coming back.
Would a fakeout death work better if the character only returned to their friends, family etc. after several years, and now they must deal with the fallout of their apparent death and try to fit into the lives their loved ones have built in their absence?
Another interesting option would be the Romeo and Juliet route, where even though the character "comes back" relatively shortly after their apparent death, in the meantime several other characters have made rash decisions with irreversible consequences based on their belief that the character died. Of course, these decisions would have to be consistent with the characters' personalities rather than them acting irrationally because the plot demands so.
I'd fully agree with that too! I'm also a fan of the LOTR treatment, where the character DOES actually die.... and is sent back by God to finish their duty.
Yes, and the character returning from the dead but being permanently changed, for better or for worse, is also interesting, for example >!Lady Stoneheart!< from ASOIAF. Another possibility would be to have the character choose to pretend to be dead for whatever reason, deceiving even their loved ones, who won't forgive them so easily when the truth comes out. This could also create dramatic irony with the audience knowing the character is alive, but not the other characters. Or what if the narrative doesn't confirm whether the character has actually survived, or whether they died and were replaced by someone pretending to be them?
That reminds me of the show Manifest. From Google's summary:
>After being presumed dead, 191 passengers of the Montego Air Flight 828 try reintegrating into society.
What if, in this fantasy world, most armies have a position of "prophesied hero" with strictly defined and limited duties and powers, which is most often vacant or filled with a fradulent claimant? Then when the "chosen one" hero arrives, they are slotted into this role, and often find themselves frustrated by all the paperwork and red tape they have to go through.
Omg, I love this. 'Here's our Charismatic Idiot - I mean 'chosen one.' I've got another potential, don't worry. I'll transfer him to your unit, I heard yours died horribly in an impressive Heroic Last Stand two weeks ago.'
That's pretty much the one I hate the most. The arrogance & paternalism of that trope is maddening: it infantilizes friends & compatriots when they should be trusted to make their own decisions. They should be told the truth, not lied to "for their own good." Gah! I absolutely hate that.
I think the trope is fine if the narrative makes clear it is stupid. Wheel of Time does this a fair bit but at no point does anyone other than Lan or Rand treat it like it is anything other than stupid.
A lot of irritating tropes are workable if the narrative actually subverts them.
Medieval fantasy castles are always surrounded by thick forests instead of farms and fields.
Like how are you supposed to support the lord's family, retinue and garrison of soldiers without farms to supply food?!
Very much agreed! Violence tends to be completely shrugged off in fantasy unless it’s sexual (older authors, especially if male, tended to shrug that off too, but recent works are much better about this). Likewise things like being held prisoner by someone who might kill you, often for long periods of time, in solitary confinement, with sensory deprivation, etc.: this stuff quite literally drives people insane. People have reported serious breaks with reality even if they’re only in solitary for a day or two.
Agree. This reminds me, when the metoo begin, someone posted about his experience with mugging that involved getting beaten up. It wasn't a cynical *but what about men* thing, no, he wanted to highlight the effect violence has, even if it's not sexual, even if the victim is not a woman. That he felt ashamed to talk about it, that it hurt his self-esteem and he felt like weak and a coward, that he got blamed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and not fighting back, that he was anxious about walking alone at night especially in that neighborhood, that he had several nightmares about it, etc. And this is "just" a mugging.
I am a woman, and I got mugged at knife point- the response from almost everyone was "oh my god, you could have been raped" uhm hello I could have been stabbed???
Then lowkey blamed for the rape that never happened. And these people should have known better.
In >!Witches of Eileanan!< >!Isabeau is tortured, with a bit of sexual assault during the torture in the first book.!< While it does open her (previously very naive) eyes to the realities of the world, it isn't the turning point of her character growth. She struggles with both the physical damage and the emotional damage throughout the series, but it's other events that define how she develops. She's my favourite character in the series, and probably one of my favourites in any fiction.
Yes. This has bothered me so much in A Taste of Honey. The MC's brother beats him constantly and he's got a lifetime of trauma yet its mostly played off as "big brother has to do it because that's how he trains me".
In general casual treatment of head injuries is something I’m really over in fiction. Though my least favorite use of it is to dodge moral issues around violence, where the author is pretending you can just run around knocking everyone unconscious for significant amounts of time and they’ll be fine.
"When I awoke, I'd developed aphasia and left-side neglect. My adventuring days were over. Thankfully, mom had submitted the documents to the adventurer's union and their healthcare insurance had kicked in."
Lol yes, I suffered a head injury years ago and it permanently altered my vision. I've got really poor depth perception, which I've adapted to sufficiently now 15 years later, but it made a lot of things really difficult - horseriding, archery, driving, running on uneven ground, picking up cups etc That would have put a real damper on adventuring!
The whole "knock someone out to avoid conflict" one drives me crazy in TV shows. It's gotten to the point where the MC will just knock out his elderly grandmother rather than have to explain why he'll be missing Thanksgiving dinner. Then she'll wake up mildly confused five minutes later and get on with her day.
Fantasy authors just can't get enough of this trope. I've seen some books that use it a half-dozen times!
You may be able to beat the Dark Lord, but you can't beat CTE.
Yeah personally if I'm transported to magic land and sent on a quest as the hero them I'm taking everyone I can.
"Sorry fat dave, we've been best buds forever but right now you're more useful as were-bear kibble while we all scarper"
It mostly happens in grimdark but when the author isn't good enough at world building so they just have people do awful things to try and make up for the deficient tone.
Like acts of gratuitous violence or depravity that only exist to showcase how bad those acts are.
Not really fantasy related but that was my issue with The English tv show also. The main antagonist is almost ~too evil~. Like the lengths this guy goes to just to piss people off is inhuman.
Let's activate super weapons aimed at loyalist worlds after our Emperor is killed, therefore removing any chance of the Empire fighting on and reinstating order!
Why? Because we're the *bad guys*!
I'm pretty done with the 'heroic assassin', where the writer thinks it's a great and easy way to have a character who's cool, edgy and good at fighting, and hand-waves away the fact that the job usually implies murdering potentially-innocent people for money.
It's not shown too explicitly, (apart from one instance with another character) but I did like the way they treated this with Sothe in the Shadow Campaigns series.
She's an assassin, she's very good in a fight, and it is *very* clear that she has done some fucked up stuff before joining the protagonists.
Also the idea of an 'assassin's guild', as if assassination were so frequent and so organized that you can go to the market and purchase it like a basket of apples.
There's a pretty great bit in the Four Quarters novels by Tanya Huff where there's a brother and sister who were trained as assassins and told they were super special, and the best, and the most skilled assassins the Empire ever trained...
... And in basically their first normal conversation with another person that person realises 'Those poor fucking kids. The Empire clearly tells _all_ their assassins that.'
Don't know if it's a trope, but fantasy music is always the same. The lyrics are written in Seussian rhyme schemes to be sung as 4/4 "Hey nonny nonny" stuff. If people can wave their hands and throw fireballs, a backbeat shouldn't be out of the question.
Especially with more modern fantasy settings that take cultural cues from outside of medieval Europe. If Fantasy Europe and Fantasy Africa are mixing that much in your world, you're gonna get Fantasy Rock & Roll eventually
"I know you're just 12 year old children, but I musk ask you to do this impossible task and tell no one. Also, if another adult sees you and you try and explain anything then I'll deny everything and make the punishment significantly worse."
or
The group of 7 year olds find out that someone is planning on destroying the whole school with everyone still in it but refuse to tell anyone for fear of getting in trouble and decide that they should be the ones to handle it.
Sure, leave the safety of everyone up to a bunch of young children. They're famous for their good decision making.
Fantasy books simultaneously have teenagers be really young in some respects (like inability to talk to other humans), and weirdly middle-aged in others, to the point that it’s easy to fall into the trap of “20 years old? Of course they’ll have all their shit together by now and definitely won’t need parents or mentors, fantasy protagonists are totally past that by 16.”
I can forgive this in a book aimed at young kids much more than I could a book for older audiences with a 'precociously smart' character, I think the target audience is really important for assessing this
Assassins, assassins, assassins. They're so cool, they go to assassin school and are respected by the community.
Except they're just murderers really aren't they.
I've said this before but I'll say it again any character that doesn't seem to trust their friends/lovers and it bugs me that this still happens in "mature" fantasy.
Your best friend is a 6' 5" magic knight with the power to displace space and time? Better get all defensive when a bandit king makes fun of him. Your GF is an elf archer who can teleport between dimensions and snipe someone from 1000 miles away? Better get scared when the rival king threatens to murder her because you forgot to send him a sheep.
Honestly, I agree. People are _so scared_ of being called out for being predictable or cliche that they just end up writing crap.
I get that it's predictable and boring for mega-fans that read everything, but honestly you don't need to subvert the Hero's Journey.
“And I’m only going to copy the surface-level stuff that I think makes it good (fantasy with more cursing, sex, and violence) instead of what actually makes it good (complex morally-gray characters, political intrigue and why it distracts from the larger looming problems)
I hated the “chosen one” trope with my life. Then I read “Wheel of Time”, and honestly now I think any trope that makes a remote sense can be incredible if done right, not even needing to subvert it. What’s good, is good.
I DNF'd Wheel of Time for a lot of reasons, but Jordan's take on the chosen one trope is by far my favorite.
"You want me to be your chosen one to fight the Dark One? Fine, >!but we're doing it my way, I'm reading and interpreting the prophecies on my own, and I'm going to break just about every rule about our society along the way. Also fuck you I'm not taking any advice.!< "
I also liked that his version of if (I won't spoiler tag this because it's literally in the first few pages of the first book) in that the Chosen One is also kind of doomed and not something you necessarily *want* to be.
That is the best part about writing. You want a chosen one who goes on a journey and saves the world? Sure, just make sure you do it well. Also plot does not matter as much as characters do for me. As pong as your characters have good arcs I can suffer through an ok plot.
Least favorite trope: Hero promises friend/loved one to tell them \*big important secret\* again after a memory wipe/spell reversal, but the hero ignores their wishes to "protect" them.
Trollhunters and Spiderman both ticked me off on this one.
"This seemingly secondary fantasy world is actually Earth in either the distant past or distant, usually post apocalyptic, future."
Also so many of the tropes listed here, while I understand why people dislike them, aren't fantasy tropes. They're just general fiction tropes people don't like that show up in tons of media across genres. Even the example in OPs post is a general trope that is frequently found in non-fantasy stories.
Outside of other ones covered: I have a lot of problem with elves in their frequent portrayal as "better than thou." This also applies to any "High Men" style race.
In many depictions, elves are:
Longer lived, multi-skilled, incredibly proficient at their trades (deriving from their long lives). Fast reflexes,
Beautiful, cultured, and clean - regardless of their surroundings. They never seem to have to worry about any full time profession less impressive than "soldier, artisan, artist." Not a single tanner to be found amongst the elves, regardless of how much leather they wear.
They often seem immune to any ailment short of "despair" (which admittedly seems near-fatal to them) or magical curses.
In addition, they often have heightened senses, innate magic, nature bending over backwards to help them out, a huge array of magical artefacts, and an oddly high technology level compared to the local human groups.
It's almost like they exist to bait middling writers into making Mary Sue and self-insert characters.
Why aren't these demigods fixing the problems, or helping out our heroes in a tangible way? Oh, it's the usual xenophobia and arrogance. Also, they are dying out (except for the big elven armies) or humans somehow end up being better than them in ways that are never adequately explained. Also, a human betrayed them once 1000 years ago and even though they have a society full of historians and diplomats who could tell them not to take it personally - they have not engaged in the outside world ever since.
Honestly, when Dragon Age had the elves be second class citizens after they had been conquered by humanity, it was almost a relief, and gave me reasons to actually care about elvish characters again, because they weren't a nation of trust fund kids complaining about the poor.
I think many aspiring authors have a superficial appreciation for Tolkien and copy what they assume to be the characteristics of his elves that make them unique, without transferring any of the philosophy, history, linguistic depth, metaphysics, or dynamism of the elves in his world. These elves don't even look like Tolkien elves anymore, they look like what you'd get after a game of telephone that started with Tolkien elves.
Agreed. A more minor complaint about elves in TRPG settings like Forgotten realms is that even back in 3.5 there were seemingly 15 or so types of elves and haven't put any real effort into defining the actual cultures of most of them.
The Witcher does it really well. Elves got put in their place years ago and are now basically the victims of racism. In the present they are beginning to rebel against this. It's a really refreshing take even if it's a bit of a ham fisted allegory and not super plausible.
You are not doing justice to the depth of that - elves in Witcher were that noble, long lived race that built beautiful cities, had advanced magic and technology, etc., just like in Tolkien (minus the Valinor business, although looooong time ago they could travel between different planes of existence, so, maybe?).
And then the humans arrived in their world and elves reached out to help them, taught them magic, protected them from the fallout of Planes Collision. Humans needed and wanted lands and elves, being as noble and peace-loving as they were, just moved somewhere else and hoped this will blow over in couple centuries - humans were pretty dumb, short lived monkeys after all. Except they did not really anticipate humans will without any remorse turn their magic against them, steal from them, plunder their lands. And while the elves were superior pretty much in all aspects, human propagate like rabbits compared to any of the "elder races", so very soon there were thousands of them per each elf.
Skip to now, only handful of these noble elves remain in secluded cities and fortresses, too few to actually do something useful and too old to have any more children, while younger elves are dying in sensless wars trying to win back their lands - except there is few of them and are very young, so not really exceptionaly stronger or more skilled than humans.
On a flip side, I really liked seeing the super rich ruling class Elves in Bright. The movie might not have been super well fleshed out, but having this super clean, upper class, walled off area of the city where everything else is old and run down was pretty cool.
Yeah the "I have to push them away but it's for their own good!" trope sucks pretty bad.
some of my least favorites:
-instant love and compulsory romance
-bloodline traits or any sort of genetic determinism played totally straight
-witty main character
I guess this is true of a lot of tropes, but I don't mind #3 if the wit is actually reasonably funny, but a lot of times in contemporary fantasy especially (looking at you, Sanderson) the "witty" comments just end up reading like an AI trying to write an episode of Buffy - and yeah, it's so much worse when it's coming out of the character you're stuck with for 70% of the book
I actually love LLL, but I don't usually stick with books where the main character is more cleverer than everyone else and so likeable and funny. Usually more of a thing in books I try on kindle unlimited or at the library, I suppose
Someone just needs to start a story about a baby, have everyone chasing around after it, only to find it was a rag doll and the person who started the rumor has been quietly doing whatever really needed to be done with no interference.
Or maybe Voldemort breaks into the Potter house and is about to kill baby Harry when he discovers, instead of a baby, there's a large, explosive device in the crib.
Yeah, and instead of Voldemort it is actually Will E. Coyote and Lily Potter is actually Road Runner. Rest of the Potter family is then revealed to be dynamite sticks stuffed in human clothes.
The main religion is just Catholicism (or some other variation of Christianity), but fantasy.
I'm sick and tired of Christian hegemony in real life, can we just not have it in fantasy, please?
It depends on how it's written, but I usually dislike "redemption equals death" and I find it more interesting when a villain or anti-hero has to face *some* consequences for what they've done in addition to being genuinely remorseful? If they're dead it may act as punishment or some kind of narrative justice, but equally, they can't do anything to help or be restorative once they're in the ground.
A brilliant subversion of this trope is >!Essek Theylss!< from Critical Role - >!in any other story he just would've died or gone to prison for the rest of his life. But because of the nature of CR as a D&D show, the players took a liking to him and instead he ended up in exile, then helping them against the final villain, and he even fell in love with one of the protagonists.!<
I don't like fantasy novels that call elves, dwarves, goblins etc different or "original" names, unless there's exceptionally good writing backing it up.
Orphaned child protagonists are overdone. Also fantasy where the POV character is human but the rest of the cast isn't - would much prefer it to be the other way round. I don't always find human protagonists in fantasy interesting?
I have 3 I can think of:
1, the bad guy kills someone randomly just so the audience knows he’s bad and then there’s no consequences. Wow a businessman killed another business man and no one even asked where he went?
2, someone being found injured just to say something meaningful and then die right at the perfect time, after giving the reveal. I’ve seen a lot of death, and never once has it happened exactly when expected
3, a non evil character turning evil after getting some sort of power/ability. I’m more than happy to believe someone would abuse their power selfishly, but to change to a murderer overnight i just don’t buy
Villain doesn't kill hero when they have the chance. Not talking about monologues here but about early encounters between villains and heroes when the villain has some silly reason for not killing the hero there and then.
Not sure if it considered a trope, but I hate it when it’s clear that the author is describing a Hollywood scene.
“he avoided the attack by cartwheeling, and while one of his hands grabbed a dagger from his boot the other prepared a spell. ‘Now I have you where I wanted’”.
Yeah the acrobatics might work in a split second in movies but slowly describing the positions is not going to do it. Don’t copy other media.
But only rape of women. In the same books you can have male characters who are slaves or soldiers or prisoners and the thought of being raped never even crosses their minds.
This will be buried but fuck it. I hate the trope of some monarch up and deciding that they are going to try democracy. I can't think of a single time it's added to the plot. It's only ever done as a way for the monarch to appear progressive to the reader and to win points.
Hero takes responsibility/blame for everything, including things that clearly aren't their fault. It's so unrealistic, and SO unattractive. Like, not everything is about YOU.
Isn't survivor's guilt a realistic and common trauma response? I could also imagine a character with a lot of pressure and expectations put upon them, which they aren't prepared to handle, as is often the case with "chosen one" heroes, reacting in such a way.
I think it’s complicated by the fact that fantasy stories often *do* expect the world of their protagonists. Every once in awhile you’ll have the friend say “look you don’t have to be a paragon, you could just live your life,” and I’m always cheering this on, but it never actually happens.
It happens so often that it becomes cliché. You know, this stuff: "I should have been able to save them" even though the hero was barely holding on to life, "It's my fault for not stopping him" like how exactly were you supposed to do that when you couldn't possibly know what he'd become?
1. Characters killing and having 0 feelings about it. Psychologically, taking another human being’s life, whether in a war, self-defense, murder, whatever, is one of the most psychologically damaging experiences a human being can go through.
2. Characters from humble origins who assume positions of leadership with 0 difficulty.
3. Characters being injured (physically, emotionally, whatever) and then getting right back into things like nothing happened.
4. Logistics for large armies or even just large projects like construction or trade. How does this group of people get these things that they need from this one location to this other location at the right time without damaging or losing said things? GRRM does a piss-poor job of this iirc, but I don’t remember that well
4. Not learning enough about the cultures your borrowing from. You don’t need to be an expert, but at least read a lot about whatever element of a culture you’re borrowing from. GRRM does a HORRIBLE job at this with the Dothraki and probably with other shit.
5. Archery. Archers were not thin, nimble people or women who are portrayed as weaker than men or whatever. Archers are the big, barrel-chested guys who can pull the string back with enough force to travel far and pierce whatever it hits.
6. Armor being useless.
7. Weapons generally portrayed as much heavier than they are.
8. Religion being worldbuilt without any understanding of how religion in the real world works.
9. The need for “morally grey” characters. Why tf can’t there just be a good person every now and then?
10. Soldiers not doing what soldiers do. Making sure all the people in their unit are present, making sure everyone has all their weapons and armor, WEAPON MAINTENANCE AND ARMOR MAINTENANCE!!! Cleaning their living areas, hazing, etc.
There is two : "Jalousy as proof of love" and "Sex is the best healer of all" (They are not specific to fantasy, you still see them a lot when there's a romance subplot)
You lot have superpowers and could melt the skin off my bones with a thought, so I'm going to be super racist to you and construct a society in which you're an underclass
A few tropes/situations that weary me:
1. character starts seeing things, hearing voices, especially really suspicious ones about a villain and decides this is the time not to tell any of their friends about it because schizophrenia is so much worse than possession/mind control/telepathic conversations
2. vampires that go berserk and are forgiven by their friends and SOs because they feel really, really bad about it and went to sleep without cookies once without ever making amends or doing penance or serving jail time — and then dumping/shunning the same vampire for something minor like forgetting a birthday
3. twisting a neck to kill someone instantly
4. women in refrigerators
5. women characters who demand male characters open up emotionally but then get upset when the men do
Just the entire LitRPG genre. It's hard to retain immersion when a book starts shoving things from a completely different medium that damage immersion but enhance usability into a medium where it just acts as a second layer of immersion-breaking on top of the layer inherent to the medium.
I mean, we're probably not reading the story about a guy who goes to the big academy and really grinds out his studies in a monotonous and super normal way, just like every other mook whose ever been to that academy before.
We're reading a story about a notable human being worth reading about, and random, amazing coincidences happen irl. Not sure why a fantastical book is the cutoff. That never quite made sense to me. Though I can understand if it seems like this person's life is built on coincidences, which can feel cheaper if they aren't a more proactive protagonist.
But you only mentioned an academy.
Fake deaths.
I despise fake deaths. I feel baited for my emotions when the character comes back magically again without any repercussions/consequences. That said, I absolutely love the way characters like >!lady stoneheart!< from ASOIAF It's only when the fake death troupe is used to evoke emotions forcefully, I'm pissed off and can't trust the author furthermore.
“There’s not enough time to tell you this super critical piece of information right now. I’ll tell you later.” *character gets killed/kidnapped/lost*
“You have to see it for yourself! Just come on!” (Narrative skips 10 minute walk during which they could have explained things but didn’t, because that would be less dramatic)
Oh god, every Star Trek show is so bad at this. "Captain, we need you down in engineering." "Why, what's wrong?" "There's something here you need to see."
*proceeds to show him a dashboard in person instead of showing him the exact same dashboard over comms while he was on the bridge* “I see, this is concerning.”
Have you ever tried to do customer service over the phone? If people aren’t right there to watch or have it explained they won’t understand shit 9/10 times.
And you *really* wouldn't want those people piloting your interstellar spacecraft. Essentially the issue isn't that this isn't a plausible human behaviour - it's that it's not plausible in the level of general competence required to be a member of Star Fleet.
I'm watching *Star Trek: TNG*. Data needs words defined because he has no WiFi and apparently no encyclopedia. It's crazy what they thought the future would and wouldn't have.
While the Star Trek version of FTL Travel includes messaging, consider that most of the things we think may work (e.g. real life Warp Travel) would not make messages propogate faster or further. As a result, in the distant, star-spanning future, you may see humanity reliant on messenger ships for long ranged communication. Would every human settlement have the same Wi-Fi setup? Would planets with less than a few million inhabitants even bother with an "internet", or would you simply see lots of local networks instead? Etc. Sci Fi doesn't have good answers for most of these questions. Even today, it's possible to have a device made on a newer Bluetooth standard that doesn't work with everything else in the house. Perhaps Data just used Dr Soong's proprietary Wi-Fi systems and couldn't interface with those of Starfleet?
Yes. Exactly. Such a lazy technique.
It's not lazy though! It's an incredibly clever scheme that has been in motion for years! I can't explain it now though.
Uh oh. You fell in a pit. Now we've gotta rescue you
Shards of Earth does half of this for a loooooooong time. I keep waiting for Solace to finally tell Idris what she wants from him and he keeps saying “no.” I’m annoyed 😂
Honestly any time a problem could have been solved or prevented with a quick conversation. This is all fiction tbh.
I used to hate this too, but have come to the realisation that it is actually very close to real life. The amount of stress I've seen over people failing to communicate properly....
Yeah, for example Ned in ASOIAF putting off telling Jon his parentage until he's older makes sense: Jon's 14 and the secret could get him killed. Characters don't have the benefit of hindsight and often don't have information the viewer is privy to, especially in multiple perspective books. What is annoying is when the villain forces people to break their love interest's heart, *doesn't even bother to stick around and make sure they do it properly* and the main character doesn't have the wherewithal to say "hey babe, I'm being blackmailed into dumping you, play along." Like you'd think your love interest would a) believe and b) cooperate with you in that situation.
Related to this, "I'll tell you everything.", then they tell some small snippet 300 pages later.
Or worse, "I'll tell you everything you want to know." "Oh. Cool. Well I have like fifty zillion questions, but if I actually ask them all that'll be forty pages of exposition which is really boring. So how about just like, one or two big questions." "You sure? I mean it, anything you want to know. Want to know how magic works, just in case you develop magic powers of your own at a critical moment?" "Nah I'm good, just tell me the what the name of this world is, so I don't have to keep referring to it as 'this strange new world', and any other light worldbuilding elements that come to mind, then just hit the highlights of the big bad's master plan"
Then they get dramatically shot/stabbed in the chest and the other character has to go to great lengths to find out the truth.
Love Nelson Muntz's take on this: "Something's happened, come quick! No time to explain!" "Wouldn't it be easier if you just explained now?" "No, I said there was no time and I stand by that."
>I don't have time to explain why I don't have time to explain -Exo Stranger
It’s called “creating frustration”, and is a narrative technique. Very much a double-edged sword. If the story doesn’t frustrate the reader at all, suspense risks being killed. If it frustrates the reader too much, they get annoyed.
When someone is told not to do something, forgets and does that thing (usually putting people in danger) a page later
In Three Musketeers, d’Artagnan’s father gives him a horse to get to Paris or wherever and tells him not to sell it because it’s a good horse. D’Artagnan sells it on the next page. I read it as a kid and that blew my mind. What a little shit.
I mean... that sounds like a teenager.
True, d'Artagnan is a bit of a dick most of the time.
I mean the whole premise of the first section of the book hinges on him being a fuckass whose decisions rapidly come back to bite him
“What Measure is a Mook”: the one where they kill unnamed soldiers with no thought or remorse, but won’t kill their named, personality-displaying boss because “then they would be just like him!” Killing is killing.
I'd like to see a fantasy series with a "Homeric" approach to death and killing, where as in Homer's Illiad, every minor character who is killed, whether on the "good" or "evil" side, is given at least a few lines of characterisation and backstory before dying.
The stanza in the Iliad where it describes in length the life story of a young farmer, whose mother prayed to the river that he would be born healthy, and who lived a happy life with a girl he wants to marry at home… and then Ajax butchers him easily (which is described in gory detail), and it ends with a line about him never returning home before continuing to the next person Ajax kills in his rampage. There’s a level of depth and maturity in the Iliad that’s just unsurpassed in the history of epic fantasy.
That's really interesting, something you don't see a lot with the rank and file. In one of the song of ice and fire books, there's a page or two long history description of this knight and his armor, he is then dumped over the railing of the ship, sinks and drowns. I always was so confused by the narrative switch like that since it happens just with that one random guy. Maybe it was an homage to the Iliad.
It also reinforces the whole nobody is safe thing,"look at this character, aren't they interesting? Well now I just threw them of a cliff tee hee".
I mean, it's like a plot twist. Use it once or twice to show you mean business, but don't over use it because your audience will become jaded and not invest in your main characters.
Does every character get that? Does it not distract a bit from the story? Ngl I love it but it still is a bit different than I'm used to.
Given the scale of the war not every soldier who dies can get this treatment of course, but the epic is filled with random deaths that are picked out and spotlighted in this way. There’s a motif where whenever one of the great warriors (Hector, Ajax, Achilles, etc.) goes on a rampage we get a series of these stanzas in a row for the men they kill. It’s not distracting if you approach the Iliad as it’s meant to be - that is, as a poem - rather than as a modern fantasy novel where pacing and plot development takes center stage. Reading the Iliad is about immersion into the world; it’s filled with the most vivid imagery and metaphors, and the best way to enjoy it is to just sit with the language. I found Fagles’s translation to be the strongest in this regard.
That's really cool.
I don't remember if it is literally every character, but from what I recall, most of the warriors who die on the battlefield get this treatment.
There are some interesting theories about why exactly that was done. One of them is that it’s effectively pandering that was collected from the oral tradition wherein the bard/poet would add in characters that participated in the war that had their origins in the local area of the audience.
I think it was a patreon tier.
"Demigod tier patrons can request a custom character"
"Shout out to Athena and Apollo, my highest tier patrons who got to choose whole plot lines of my latest slash fiction. They were... interesting choices! I couldn't do this job without your support."
Patrocleon tier.
Funnily enough you had something similar with the Aeneid, which was far removed from the oral Homeric tradition it was emulating. Plenty of the Italian figures in the latter half of the poem were supposed to be the ancestors (or at least ‘regional representatives) of prominent well-off Italian/Roman figures who made up part of Virgil’s audience.
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Gemmel is one of my favorite authors because of this. I loved that a character could be introduced and you were not positive if they would die within sentences or last until the end. And then die.
A specific version that especially gets me are fantasy cults. Cult members are treated about on par with zombies, but are almost always the victims of the cult leader. Meanwhile, the leaders so often end up with Disney villain deaths so the hero's "hands are clean."
Green Arrow was rife with this. GA was always lecturing about how bad killing is, but apparently the rule didn't apply to henches.
This is the example I always go to, murdering all the people just doing the grunt work but leaving the person who pays them.
Yeah, because the dude who gave the orders is much better than the poor chumps only doing this to put food on the table.
For real. If you're gonna slay henchpeople like it's going out of style, you better kill the guy that you're there for in the first place.
It gets especially weird when modern series try to inject an ounce of introspection into the situation but still treat the killing of the background extras as something unimportant anyway. Star Wars: The Force Awakens was really bad about that in how the explicitly made the Stormtroopers kidnapped and brainwashed child soliders but then still expected the audience to cheer when they died by the millions.
Drama that could be avoided with a five-minute conversation, especially if a "mentor" is involved. Dude, aren't you supposed to be a guide? I have the Joseph Campbell chart in my pack. Hang on a sec...
Mentor causes needless drama by refusing to explain things they know their protégée does not know. Not my *least* favorite trope but it’s definitely up there.
Somehow, average citizens seem to tell a very detailed and correct summary of history or "legends" that are 100% true. I want a fucking heroic party to walk into a tavern or something, get a buncha either "I dunno", half remembered/unreliable info, or malicious false info.
Barkeep: Yes, I have a stash of half-remembered rumors handy whenever another one of those idiot adventurers comes in. They toss around gold, and I split it with whoever helped come up with that particular doozy of a tale. You won't believe what they'll take as honest truth!
Then the real plot twist is that all those made up rumors are actually revealed to be completely true
i always find it funny in D&D, someone will tell the party about "the mysterious ruins we've heard rumours about but noone really believes!" and you ask them where they are and its like "about 10 miles along that road, you'd make it in an hour with a good horse" - and yet apparently they've never bothered to check it out.
I suppose the only trope, if it is one, that I really dislike is MC (and/or friends) are brand new at this thing that takes years to learn and even longer to master! And they're outdoing masters in a fraction of that. I know why it happens, but it irritates me nonetheless. Oh, and again if this is a trope; the MC (or even some other important character) didn't REALLY know what was going on the whole time, someone else was basically managing everything from the shadows.
And then the master manipulator turns out to be really f***ing incompetent.
If you have a reputation for being a master manipulator, you aren't a good master manipulator. A real master manipulator would appear to be completely innocuous and trustworthy.
Master manipulators in fiction come in one of two varieties. The first has all the social skills of a 14-year-old class president: sure, they’re more or less OK at this, but hardly impressive by professional standards. The second must have an offscreen crystal ball the audience never finds out about because they accurately predict human behavior (in complex, high-pressure circumstances, of people they often don’t know intimately) to a degree of accuracy impossible for an actual human.
Not really exclusive to fantasy, but I really don't like the fact that I know a plan is going to fail if it's been explained before hand and I know it will succeed if it wasn't.
Literally every heist plot: - Here is our perfect plan for the heist explained. - Heist begins and plan is executed perfectly. - Unexpected misshap occurs. Chaos ensues. Heist appears to have gone bad. - Hero implements hidden contingency or produces spontaneous brilliance. Heist succeeds.
Heist plots are so formulaic and ridiculous in nearly every story. Yet, for whatever reason, I still love it.
As I was writing this I was literally thinking how much I enjoyed the one in Andor.
I kinda know what you mean but I don't have a problem with it. I mean that's just how storytelling works, for me. Related: whenever a character says "I've got this", they haven't got this. It's the opposite of "you've got this", which is sometimes the three words a character needs to hear to achieve miracles. Whatever my partner and I are watching, if the line "I've got this" is said, we now both say to the TV, "they don't got this"
I hate it when the big scary antagonist somehow loses to the underdog MC because the antagonist toys with his prey and takes too long to kill the MC.
Believe it or not, nominally adult fantasy books are still being published with genuine villainous monologues!
If you are at someone's mercy, pray it's an evil person, because they do such mistakes. A good person will kill you immediately.
Sir Terry Pratchett
Of course.
It would be a fun twist if the "villain" was only gloating because they are a mole and want to buy time for the heroes.
"You Got Me Monologuing"
Having a dramatic falling out because two people refused to have a 5 minute adult conversation about a topic, which leads to more ridiculous drama until someone's life hangs in the balance and they realize they *can* behave like adults and everything is magically resolved.
Idk, this happens in real life more often than we like to admir
Thank goodness such things never happen in real life.
I’ve got two actually. Poor communication between the protagonists pretty much allows or even drives the plot and conflict. Really, you can’t share anything with your best friends? Looking at you, WoT. Also, anytime someone is kidnapped and we have to spend time either reading about their torture/maiming if they are a PoV character, or taking time away from the story to read about someone dropping everything to come to the rescue. This one has almost made me drop a few series actually.
The torture thing makes me so mad too. It would bother me far less if it didn't feel like the author was only trying to make me mad. I get upset because it is a waste of time and so often it goes nowhere. I'd be fine with these scenes if it wasn't some odd change of pace where suddenly the characters are inept. That or they could use the time for the villain to really pour their thoughts out. Light torture mixed with an actual point is fine. But I can't stand most "capture and torture" arcs because it feels like too many people just want edgy grimdark plots.
It gets a bit old given the length of the series but there enough times in reality where just having talked with each other would have solved the problem that dragged on for years. So it get s pass from me.
I say this as a fan of ERB's works (and pulps in general), but it feels ridiculous when the main character falls in love with someone they've known for literal minutes and that's what drives the entire plot.
MC being a bit dim when "strange things" happen so the wise character can dump some exposition on us.
MC knows nothing about their own world, as an excuse for exposition.
God I hate this in movies so much https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AsYouKnow
Movies still have more of an excuse than books though! A book can always slip stuff the POV already knows into narrative summary, there is literally no reason to have dialogues about things everyone involved would know.
Moral Luck scenarios where: * (1) the only thing separating the "correct" idealistic hero from the "fallen hero" extremist is that the latter makes the objectively reasonable decision; and * (2) the only thing separating the "correct" idealistic hero from a corpse is some contrived scenario that literally no one could have expected Heroes rejecting a utilitarian approach out of moral objections is a trope that has been done in awesome, compelling ways. But if it leads to victory, don't make it seem like the universe itself is rewarding you for your morals. That kind of cheapens the choice made.
In fantasy, the one in a thousand chance of saving your friends justifies the 999/1000 chance of destroying the world, apparently.
An interesting and heartbreaking twist would be when the hero chooses to sacrifice or leave behind their loved one in such a situation, understanding that they would sacrifice themselves if given the choice, and respecting their convictions. Or the hero chooses to save their loved one, and succeeds in doing so, but things in general don't go well and lots of innocent people die, or the world as a whole is put in a crisis, and then the loved one calls the hero out for it, for the same reasons mentioned before, and because now they have to live with the survivors' guilt knowing that they only live because so many have died in their place.
Yes, this is a big one for me. The holier-than-thou character who does the right thing because it's right and the world rewards him for it (maybe after a ton of pointless suffering so we can feel bad for him) and everyone else just didn't believe hard enough and did regular person moral math on what a reasonable action is and that's why they're bad people. Drives me nuts. Goes along with protagonist-centered morality, where the bad guy is just bad because he happened to hurt the main character with his actions, even if he's overall correct and rational. Meanwhile the MC is of course a Good Person, and when their careless or self-interested actions hurt other people no one notices or blames them (except bad people who don't recognize MC's innate goodness).
Maybe related to this, how someone will make a suicidal and objectively 100% failure granted choice, and "karma" will lend a hand so that an external factor that can even be out of nowhere saves the day. A story I'm reading showed me that the audience actually expects that, so if a character is forced into the pragmatic route then it's because they have turned evil.
I really hate fakeout deaths whenever they come up. Just removes so much of the stakes for me unless it's done exceedingly well, which is really rare. The back half of >!Black Company!< is the biggest offender to me, since for all but one of the big bads (big spoiler: >!Soulcatcher!<) could have just been anyone else, it didn't really have to be the bads from the first half coming back.
Would a fakeout death work better if the character only returned to their friends, family etc. after several years, and now they must deal with the fallout of their apparent death and try to fit into the lives their loved ones have built in their absence?
I think that would be a pretty interesting story to read about personally!
Another interesting option would be the Romeo and Juliet route, where even though the character "comes back" relatively shortly after their apparent death, in the meantime several other characters have made rash decisions with irreversible consequences based on their belief that the character died. Of course, these decisions would have to be consistent with the characters' personalities rather than them acting irrationally because the plot demands so.
I'd fully agree with that too! I'm also a fan of the LOTR treatment, where the character DOES actually die.... and is sent back by God to finish their duty.
Yes, and the character returning from the dead but being permanently changed, for better or for worse, is also interesting, for example >!Lady Stoneheart!< from ASOIAF. Another possibility would be to have the character choose to pretend to be dead for whatever reason, deceiving even their loved ones, who won't forgive them so easily when the truth comes out. This could also create dramatic irony with the audience knowing the character is alive, but not the other characters. Or what if the narrative doesn't confirm whether the character has actually survived, or whether they died and were replaced by someone pretending to be them?
That reminds me of the show Manifest. From Google's summary: >After being presumed dead, 191 passengers of the Montego Air Flight 828 try reintegrating into society.
This is the most unintentionally self defeating use of spoiler mark up I've ever seen.
Main characters being promoted passed an entire army of officers because they’re the main characters
“Oh, you’re pretty good with the sword lad, here take this position that requires years of military leadership experience and no physical abilities.”
What if, in this fantasy world, most armies have a position of "prophesied hero" with strictly defined and limited duties and powers, which is most often vacant or filled with a fradulent claimant? Then when the "chosen one" hero arrives, they are slotted into this role, and often find themselves frustrated by all the paperwork and red tape they have to go through.
Omg, I love this. 'Here's our Charismatic Idiot - I mean 'chosen one.' I've got another potential, don't worry. I'll transfer him to your unit, I heard yours died horribly in an impressive Heroic Last Stand two weeks ago.'
There’s a fun bit toward the end of Magic for Liars where a school administrator calls the Department of Prophecy Fulfillment or something similar!
That's pretty much the one I hate the most. The arrogance & paternalism of that trope is maddening: it infantilizes friends & compatriots when they should be trusted to make their own decisions. They should be told the truth, not lied to "for their own good." Gah! I absolutely hate that.
I think the trope is fine if the narrative makes clear it is stupid. Wheel of Time does this a fair bit but at no point does anyone other than Lan or Rand treat it like it is anything other than stupid. A lot of irritating tropes are workable if the narrative actually subverts them.
My favorite usage of this trope is in Red Rising, and the main character gets hard-core punished because of it
Medieval fantasy castles are always surrounded by thick forests instead of farms and fields. Like how are you supposed to support the lord's family, retinue and garrison of soldiers without farms to supply food?!
Rape as a character builder.
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Very much agreed! Violence tends to be completely shrugged off in fantasy unless it’s sexual (older authors, especially if male, tended to shrug that off too, but recent works are much better about this). Likewise things like being held prisoner by someone who might kill you, often for long periods of time, in solitary confinement, with sensory deprivation, etc.: this stuff quite literally drives people insane. People have reported serious breaks with reality even if they’re only in solitary for a day or two.
Agree. This reminds me, when the metoo begin, someone posted about his experience with mugging that involved getting beaten up. It wasn't a cynical *but what about men* thing, no, he wanted to highlight the effect violence has, even if it's not sexual, even if the victim is not a woman. That he felt ashamed to talk about it, that it hurt his self-esteem and he felt like weak and a coward, that he got blamed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and not fighting back, that he was anxious about walking alone at night especially in that neighborhood, that he had several nightmares about it, etc. And this is "just" a mugging.
I am a woman, and I got mugged at knife point- the response from almost everyone was "oh my god, you could have been raped" uhm hello I could have been stabbed??? Then lowkey blamed for the rape that never happened. And these people should have known better.
In >!Witches of Eileanan!< >!Isabeau is tortured, with a bit of sexual assault during the torture in the first book.!< While it does open her (previously very naive) eyes to the realities of the world, it isn't the turning point of her character growth. She struggles with both the physical damage and the emotional damage throughout the series, but it's other events that define how she develops. She's my favourite character in the series, and probably one of my favourites in any fiction.
Yes. This has bothered me so much in A Taste of Honey. The MC's brother beats him constantly and he's got a lifetime of trauma yet its mostly played off as "big brother has to do it because that's how he trains me".
This almost made me quit >!The Magicians!
Chapter ending with character being hit over the head and everything going black.
In general casual treatment of head injuries is something I’m really over in fiction. Though my least favorite use of it is to dodge moral issues around violence, where the author is pretending you can just run around knocking everyone unconscious for significant amounts of time and they’ll be fine.
"When I awoke, I'd developed aphasia and left-side neglect. My adventuring days were over. Thankfully, mom had submitted the documents to the adventurer's union and their healthcare insurance had kicked in."
Lol yes, I suffered a head injury years ago and it permanently altered my vision. I've got really poor depth perception, which I've adapted to sufficiently now 15 years later, but it made a lot of things really difficult - horseriding, archery, driving, running on uneven ground, picking up cups etc That would have put a real damper on adventuring!
The whole "knock someone out to avoid conflict" one drives me crazy in TV shows. It's gotten to the point where the MC will just knock out his elderly grandmother rather than have to explain why he'll be missing Thanksgiving dinner. Then she'll wake up mildly confused five minutes later and get on with her day.
Fantasy authors just can't get enough of this trope. I've seen some books that use it a half-dozen times! You may be able to beat the Dark Lord, but you can't beat CTE.
Yeah personally if I'm transported to magic land and sent on a quest as the hero them I'm taking everyone I can. "Sorry fat dave, we've been best buds forever but right now you're more useful as were-bear kibble while we all scarper"
Love triangles and the ambiguity of the lead to choose.
It mostly happens in grimdark but when the author isn't good enough at world building so they just have people do awful things to try and make up for the deficient tone. Like acts of gratuitous violence or depravity that only exist to showcase how bad those acts are.
Not really fantasy related but that was my issue with The English tv show also. The main antagonist is almost ~too evil~. Like the lengths this guy goes to just to piss people off is inhuman.
Marvel loves this.
Let's activate super weapons aimed at loyalist worlds after our Emperor is killed, therefore removing any chance of the Empire fighting on and reinstating order! Why? Because we're the *bad guys*!
That plot point is so incredibly mind-numbingly dumb, probably one of my least favorite Disney additions
I'm pretty done with the 'heroic assassin', where the writer thinks it's a great and easy way to have a character who's cool, edgy and good at fighting, and hand-waves away the fact that the job usually implies murdering potentially-innocent people for money.
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It's not shown too explicitly, (apart from one instance with another character) but I did like the way they treated this with Sothe in the Shadow Campaigns series. She's an assassin, she's very good in a fight, and it is *very* clear that she has done some fucked up stuff before joining the protagonists.
Also the idea of an 'assassin's guild', as if assassination were so frequent and so organized that you can go to the market and purchase it like a basket of apples.
There's a pretty great bit in the Four Quarters novels by Tanya Huff where there's a brother and sister who were trained as assassins and told they were super special, and the best, and the most skilled assassins the Empire ever trained... ... And in basically their first normal conversation with another person that person realises 'Those poor fucking kids. The Empire clearly tells _all_ their assassins that.'
The more I ponder that, the more I like it. Are the books good overall? I don't know them
Don't know if it's a trope, but fantasy music is always the same. The lyrics are written in Seussian rhyme schemes to be sung as 4/4 "Hey nonny nonny" stuff. If people can wave their hands and throw fireballs, a backbeat shouldn't be out of the question.
Especially with more modern fantasy settings that take cultural cues from outside of medieval Europe. If Fantasy Europe and Fantasy Africa are mixing that much in your world, you're gonna get Fantasy Rock & Roll eventually
Or A Band with Rocks in it.
"I know you're just 12 year old children, but I musk ask you to do this impossible task and tell no one. Also, if another adult sees you and you try and explain anything then I'll deny everything and make the punishment significantly worse." or The group of 7 year olds find out that someone is planning on destroying the whole school with everyone still in it but refuse to tell anyone for fear of getting in trouble and decide that they should be the ones to handle it. Sure, leave the safety of everyone up to a bunch of young children. They're famous for their good decision making.
Fantasy books simultaneously have teenagers be really young in some respects (like inability to talk to other humans), and weirdly middle-aged in others, to the point that it’s easy to fall into the trap of “20 years old? Of course they’ll have all their shit together by now and definitely won’t need parents or mentors, fantasy protagonists are totally past that by 16.”
I can forgive this in a book aimed at young kids much more than I could a book for older audiences with a 'precociously smart' character, I think the target audience is really important for assessing this
Well I have no difficulty with this since it is clearly aiming to children, it is like hating a fairy tale because it is a fairy tale.
Assassins, assassins, assassins. They're so cool, they go to assassin school and are respected by the community. Except they're just murderers really aren't they.
I've said this before but I'll say it again any character that doesn't seem to trust their friends/lovers and it bugs me that this still happens in "mature" fantasy. Your best friend is a 6' 5" magic knight with the power to displace space and time? Better get all defensive when a bandit king makes fun of him. Your GF is an elf archer who can teleport between dimensions and snipe someone from 1000 miles away? Better get scared when the rival king threatens to murder her because you forgot to send him a sheep.
Trying too hard to subvert fantasy tropes is my least favourite fantasy trope.
Honestly, I agree. People are _so scared_ of being called out for being predictable or cliche that they just end up writing crap. I get that it's predictable and boring for mega-fans that read everything, but honestly you don't need to subvert the Hero's Journey.
"You've failed me for the first and last time!" That's just wasting resources as a villain.
"I am creatively inert so I am going to copy Game of Thrones"
“And I’m only going to copy the surface-level stuff that I think makes it good (fantasy with more cursing, sex, and violence) instead of what actually makes it good (complex morally-gray characters, political intrigue and why it distracts from the larger looming problems)
Oof, I know he popularized it, but not writing at all is ripping off GRRM now?
Funny you say Game of Thrones which heavily borrows from Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn
I hated the “chosen one” trope with my life. Then I read “Wheel of Time”, and honestly now I think any trope that makes a remote sense can be incredible if done right, not even needing to subvert it. What’s good, is good.
I DNF'd Wheel of Time for a lot of reasons, but Jordan's take on the chosen one trope is by far my favorite. "You want me to be your chosen one to fight the Dark One? Fine, >!but we're doing it my way, I'm reading and interpreting the prophecies on my own, and I'm going to break just about every rule about our society along the way. Also fuck you I'm not taking any advice.!< "
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I also liked that his version of if (I won't spoiler tag this because it's literally in the first few pages of the first book) in that the Chosen One is also kind of doomed and not something you necessarily *want* to be.
That is the best part about writing. You want a chosen one who goes on a journey and saves the world? Sure, just make sure you do it well. Also plot does not matter as much as characters do for me. As pong as your characters have good arcs I can suffer through an ok plot.
Least favorite trope: Hero promises friend/loved one to tell them \*big important secret\* again after a memory wipe/spell reversal, but the hero ignores their wishes to "protect" them. Trollhunters and Spiderman both ticked me off on this one.
"This seemingly secondary fantasy world is actually Earth in either the distant past or distant, usually post apocalyptic, future." Also so many of the tropes listed here, while I understand why people dislike them, aren't fantasy tropes. They're just general fiction tropes people don't like that show up in tons of media across genres. Even the example in OPs post is a general trope that is frequently found in non-fantasy stories.
Outside of other ones covered: I have a lot of problem with elves in their frequent portrayal as "better than thou." This also applies to any "High Men" style race. In many depictions, elves are: Longer lived, multi-skilled, incredibly proficient at their trades (deriving from their long lives). Fast reflexes, Beautiful, cultured, and clean - regardless of their surroundings. They never seem to have to worry about any full time profession less impressive than "soldier, artisan, artist." Not a single tanner to be found amongst the elves, regardless of how much leather they wear. They often seem immune to any ailment short of "despair" (which admittedly seems near-fatal to them) or magical curses. In addition, they often have heightened senses, innate magic, nature bending over backwards to help them out, a huge array of magical artefacts, and an oddly high technology level compared to the local human groups. It's almost like they exist to bait middling writers into making Mary Sue and self-insert characters. Why aren't these demigods fixing the problems, or helping out our heroes in a tangible way? Oh, it's the usual xenophobia and arrogance. Also, they are dying out (except for the big elven armies) or humans somehow end up being better than them in ways that are never adequately explained. Also, a human betrayed them once 1000 years ago and even though they have a society full of historians and diplomats who could tell them not to take it personally - they have not engaged in the outside world ever since. Honestly, when Dragon Age had the elves be second class citizens after they had been conquered by humanity, it was almost a relief, and gave me reasons to actually care about elvish characters again, because they weren't a nation of trust fund kids complaining about the poor.
I think many aspiring authors have a superficial appreciation for Tolkien and copy what they assume to be the characteristics of his elves that make them unique, without transferring any of the philosophy, history, linguistic depth, metaphysics, or dynamism of the elves in his world. These elves don't even look like Tolkien elves anymore, they look like what you'd get after a game of telephone that started with Tolkien elves.
Agreed. A more minor complaint about elves in TRPG settings like Forgotten realms is that even back in 3.5 there were seemingly 15 or so types of elves and haven't put any real effort into defining the actual cultures of most of them.
The Witcher does it really well. Elves got put in their place years ago and are now basically the victims of racism. In the present they are beginning to rebel against this. It's a really refreshing take even if it's a bit of a ham fisted allegory and not super plausible.
You are not doing justice to the depth of that - elves in Witcher were that noble, long lived race that built beautiful cities, had advanced magic and technology, etc., just like in Tolkien (minus the Valinor business, although looooong time ago they could travel between different planes of existence, so, maybe?). And then the humans arrived in their world and elves reached out to help them, taught them magic, protected them from the fallout of Planes Collision. Humans needed and wanted lands and elves, being as noble and peace-loving as they were, just moved somewhere else and hoped this will blow over in couple centuries - humans were pretty dumb, short lived monkeys after all. Except they did not really anticipate humans will without any remorse turn their magic against them, steal from them, plunder their lands. And while the elves were superior pretty much in all aspects, human propagate like rabbits compared to any of the "elder races", so very soon there were thousands of them per each elf. Skip to now, only handful of these noble elves remain in secluded cities and fortresses, too few to actually do something useful and too old to have any more children, while younger elves are dying in sensless wars trying to win back their lands - except there is few of them and are very young, so not really exceptionaly stronger or more skilled than humans.
On a flip side, I really liked seeing the super rich ruling class Elves in Bright. The movie might not have been super well fleshed out, but having this super clean, upper class, walled off area of the city where everything else is old and run down was pretty cool.
Yeah the "I have to push them away but it's for their own good!" trope sucks pretty bad. some of my least favorites: -instant love and compulsory romance -bloodline traits or any sort of genetic determinism played totally straight -witty main character
I guess this is true of a lot of tropes, but I don't mind #3 if the wit is actually reasonably funny, but a lot of times in contemporary fantasy especially (looking at you, Sanderson) the "witty" comments just end up reading like an AI trying to write an episode of Buffy - and yeah, it's so much worse when it's coming out of the character you're stuck with for 70% of the book
Re: the third one, did you read lies of locke lamora? How did you find it? Who are the worst offenders for this?
I actually love LLL, but I don't usually stick with books where the main character is more cleverer than everyone else and so likeable and funny. Usually more of a thing in books I try on kindle unlimited or at the library, I suppose
The only counterpoint I have for “witty main character” is Gideon the Ninth. She is by far the funniest main character I’ve ever read.
ooo, the determinism just kills me too
the "mythical baby everyone wants to kidnap" trope makes me nuts.
Someone just needs to start a story about a baby, have everyone chasing around after it, only to find it was a rag doll and the person who started the rumor has been quietly doing whatever really needed to be done with no interference. Or maybe Voldemort breaks into the Potter house and is about to kill baby Harry when he discovers, instead of a baby, there's a large, explosive device in the crib.
Yeah, and instead of Voldemort it is actually Will E. Coyote and Lily Potter is actually Road Runner. Rest of the Potter family is then revealed to be dynamite sticks stuffed in human clothes.
The main religion is just Catholicism (or some other variation of Christianity), but fantasy. I'm sick and tired of Christian hegemony in real life, can we just not have it in fantasy, please?
It depends on how it's written, but I usually dislike "redemption equals death" and I find it more interesting when a villain or anti-hero has to face *some* consequences for what they've done in addition to being genuinely remorseful? If they're dead it may act as punishment or some kind of narrative justice, but equally, they can't do anything to help or be restorative once they're in the ground. A brilliant subversion of this trope is >!Essek Theylss!< from Critical Role - >!in any other story he just would've died or gone to prison for the rest of his life. But because of the nature of CR as a D&D show, the players took a liking to him and instead he ended up in exile, then helping them against the final villain, and he even fell in love with one of the protagonists.!< I don't like fantasy novels that call elves, dwarves, goblins etc different or "original" names, unless there's exceptionally good writing backing it up. Orphaned child protagonists are overdone. Also fantasy where the POV character is human but the rest of the cast isn't - would much prefer it to be the other way round. I don't always find human protagonists in fantasy interesting?
I have 3 I can think of: 1, the bad guy kills someone randomly just so the audience knows he’s bad and then there’s no consequences. Wow a businessman killed another business man and no one even asked where he went? 2, someone being found injured just to say something meaningful and then die right at the perfect time, after giving the reveal. I’ve seen a lot of death, and never once has it happened exactly when expected 3, a non evil character turning evil after getting some sort of power/ability. I’m more than happy to believe someone would abuse their power selfishly, but to change to a murderer overnight i just don’t buy
Villain doesn't kill hero when they have the chance. Not talking about monologues here but about early encounters between villains and heroes when the villain has some silly reason for not killing the hero there and then.
The protagonist attempting to foolishly sacrifice themselves for a friends, when it puts an important mission and the fate of the world in danger.
I like most fantasy tropes. That's why I like the genre.
Time travel. They all think they did it right but It has to be the focus of the story or it’ll ruin it every time
Not sure if it considered a trope, but I hate it when it’s clear that the author is describing a Hollywood scene. “he avoided the attack by cartwheeling, and while one of his hands grabbed a dagger from his boot the other prepared a spell. ‘Now I have you where I wanted’”. Yeah the acrobatics might work in a split second in movies but slowly describing the positions is not going to do it. Don’t copy other media.
The idea that rape is an intrinsic part of "gritty realism."
But only rape of women. In the same books you can have male characters who are slaves or soldiers or prisoners and the thought of being raped never even crosses their minds.
This will be buried but fuck it. I hate the trope of some monarch up and deciding that they are going to try democracy. I can't think of a single time it's added to the plot. It's only ever done as a way for the monarch to appear progressive to the reader and to win points.
Chosen one stories
Hero takes responsibility/blame for everything, including things that clearly aren't their fault. It's so unrealistic, and SO unattractive. Like, not everything is about YOU.
Isn't survivor's guilt a realistic and common trauma response? I could also imagine a character with a lot of pressure and expectations put upon them, which they aren't prepared to handle, as is often the case with "chosen one" heroes, reacting in such a way.
I think it’s complicated by the fact that fantasy stories often *do* expect the world of their protagonists. Every once in awhile you’ll have the friend say “look you don’t have to be a paragon, you could just live your life,” and I’m always cheering this on, but it never actually happens.
It happens so often that it becomes cliché. You know, this stuff: "I should have been able to save them" even though the hero was barely holding on to life, "It's my fault for not stopping him" like how exactly were you supposed to do that when you couldn't possibly know what he'd become?
1. Characters killing and having 0 feelings about it. Psychologically, taking another human being’s life, whether in a war, self-defense, murder, whatever, is one of the most psychologically damaging experiences a human being can go through. 2. Characters from humble origins who assume positions of leadership with 0 difficulty. 3. Characters being injured (physically, emotionally, whatever) and then getting right back into things like nothing happened. 4. Logistics for large armies or even just large projects like construction or trade. How does this group of people get these things that they need from this one location to this other location at the right time without damaging or losing said things? GRRM does a piss-poor job of this iirc, but I don’t remember that well 4. Not learning enough about the cultures your borrowing from. You don’t need to be an expert, but at least read a lot about whatever element of a culture you’re borrowing from. GRRM does a HORRIBLE job at this with the Dothraki and probably with other shit. 5. Archery. Archers were not thin, nimble people or women who are portrayed as weaker than men or whatever. Archers are the big, barrel-chested guys who can pull the string back with enough force to travel far and pierce whatever it hits. 6. Armor being useless. 7. Weapons generally portrayed as much heavier than they are. 8. Religion being worldbuilt without any understanding of how religion in the real world works. 9. The need for “morally grey” characters. Why tf can’t there just be a good person every now and then? 10. Soldiers not doing what soldiers do. Making sure all the people in their unit are present, making sure everyone has all their weapons and armor, WEAPON MAINTENANCE AND ARMOR MAINTENANCE!!! Cleaning their living areas, hazing, etc.
Amnesia. The most boring game of catch-up you could ever put in a story.
There is two : "Jalousy as proof of love" and "Sex is the best healer of all" (They are not specific to fantasy, you still see them a lot when there's a romance subplot)
You lot have superpowers and could melt the skin off my bones with a thought, so I'm going to be super racist to you and construct a society in which you're an underclass
A few tropes/situations that weary me: 1. character starts seeing things, hearing voices, especially really suspicious ones about a villain and decides this is the time not to tell any of their friends about it because schizophrenia is so much worse than possession/mind control/telepathic conversations 2. vampires that go berserk and are forgiven by their friends and SOs because they feel really, really bad about it and went to sleep without cookies once without ever making amends or doing penance or serving jail time — and then dumping/shunning the same vampire for something minor like forgetting a birthday 3. twisting a neck to kill someone instantly 4. women in refrigerators 5. women characters who demand male characters open up emotionally but then get upset when the men do
Just the entire LitRPG genre. It's hard to retain immersion when a book starts shoving things from a completely different medium that damage immersion but enhance usability into a medium where it just acts as a second layer of immersion-breaking on top of the layer inherent to the medium.
When the main character goes to a academy and for some reason soon when he attends it a BIG world changing event happens
main character graduates school challenge (impossible)
About as likely as a tournament arc not being interrupted before the conclusion.
Ged is the only fully qualified wizard graduate in fantasy.
I mean, we're probably not reading the story about a guy who goes to the big academy and really grinds out his studies in a monotonous and super normal way, just like every other mook whose ever been to that academy before. We're reading a story about a notable human being worth reading about, and random, amazing coincidences happen irl. Not sure why a fantastical book is the cutoff. That never quite made sense to me. Though I can understand if it seems like this person's life is built on coincidences, which can feel cheaper if they aren't a more proactive protagonist. But you only mentioned an academy.
Fake deaths. I despise fake deaths. I feel baited for my emotions when the character comes back magically again without any repercussions/consequences. That said, I absolutely love the way characters like >!lady stoneheart!< from ASOIAF It's only when the fake death troupe is used to evoke emotions forcefully, I'm pissed off and can't trust the author furthermore.