Ask Lemmy

You're looking for opinions? I got opinions.

• The Chosen One who gets dragged around like a sack of potatoes until they Come Into Their Own and go on to Turn The Tide.

• The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage.

• The Sharp-Tongued Princess.

• The Rogue With A Heart of Gold.

• Plots based on misunderstanding ancient prophecies that are so vaguely written they could be cookie recipes.

• Gods that slot into neat roles on a godly table of elements.

• Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology.

• Elves that are exactly like every other elf character you've ever read about except for one glaring but superficial difference which is there to make you think the author's not plagiarising their own favourite author.

So far I’ve discovered in this thread:

-People don’t like traditional fantasy that takes itself seriously.
-People don’t like lighthearted fantasy that plays with the themes.
-People don’t like hard magical systems.
-People don’t like soft magical systems.
-People don’t like dragons being involved.
-People don’t like an absence of dragons.
-People don’t like character archetypes.
-People don’t like counterarchetypes.
-People don’t like when characters speak an understandable language.
-People don’t like characters meeting each other in common social meeting areas.

All good here? Great.

Just write whatever the fuck you want. There’s always an audience.

Zero consistency to magic systems. I get it, having all sorts of spells in the story is fun and gives a lot of creative ways to make fights more interesting, but...

• If teleportation magic exists, why don't people who own it teleport everywhere?

• If time travel magic exists, why isn't everyone doing everything in their power to get it and use it? Looking at you, harry potter.

• The villains usually have spells that are supposed to be ultra powerful and can kill anyone quickly but somehow it doesn't work against main characters and there's no excuse for why fights drag on for so long. Imagine seeing the villain introduced by vaporizing someone but never seeing them do it again.

• Main character(s) breaking the rules of magic just because...

I'm a fan of stories like Avatar the last airbender or Witch Hat Atelier because their magic is very consistent. It makes things way more interesting when a character can't just pull something out of their ass to save them in the middle of a fight.

Shoutout to every story that alludes to the fact that mages can run out of mana but is insanely inconsistent how and when it happens. Sometimes they spam spells for hours and sometimes it's just "Oh no, I can't use [spell] anymore because... Um... The plot says I can't!"

More than 17 apostrophes on the first page with every name of a person, place, or thing having one.

Treating wands like guns in fights instead of using spells creatively

I absolutely hate the trope where they start out with something interesting and have to do a flashback to the parts that led up to it. Like I just had that happen with a sequel to a book I was reading, and I'm really struggling to get started. I fucking hate the

*cold open to something dramatic happening*

Record scritch "I bet you're wondering how I got here. Well, it all started...."

bullshit trope and its really hard for me to look past some times.

I dunno if it's considered "bad", but I personally hate when one of the characters gets amnesia, or the group meets a character that has amnesia. It just feels like a laziness by the author who can't think of any other way to make a storyline interesting.

Women and girls usually end up in a relationship by the end of the story and/or are the ones needing to be rescued. Its formulaic, boring and sexist due to the comparative lack of the opposite occurring. eg. men needing to be rescued.

Like... even if you did not give a single shit about sexism, its the same tired plot points over and over again. It has Hallmark channel writer energy. Create a second plot I beg you.

Elves always being like the bottom rung of society or them being the outcasts. It's insane to think that elves wouldn't be the rulers of dam near any government or at the very least not be the power and influence behind a puppet government. Who wouldn't want the help of a race of people who, depending on the lore, can live for thousands of years.

I mean, there could be an elf that has been a friend of your family for like 5 or more generations. That sounds dope as fuck for us but kinda shitty for them.

All things Deus Ex Machina. I get it, endings are hard. Climaxes are hard to write. But the payoff feels cheap as hell when your protagonist just "digs a little deeper" and suddenly finds just enough power to save the day. When it comes out of nowhere, it feels unearned by the hero and is not only unsatisfying, it's also a good way to give you hero power creep until there's nothing on earth that can believably challenge them. See: Superman.

girls falling in love with the main character and wanting to stay with him for the rest of the story just because they have met random.

Its for the reader/watcher to decide what is canon it maybe good if done subtly but if its some important or core lore, well then i should've just imagined the whole thing why are you needed ?

Elves and Dwarves done like every other Elf and Dwarf. Especially when they go out of their way to give the Dwarf that overdone Irish/Scottish accent written out in damn near unreadable text.

Also when the worldbuilding and plot basically is "here's some not so thinly veiled racism between groups who will set that aside to fight a common enemy." Series ends on a high note, but you know this world will fall into disarray again cause people suck, so like, what was the point.

You meet your party at the tavern...

This is specific to the videogame-ish sub-genre, mostly Isakeis…

But you go out of the way to include RPG mechanics into your story… but the only real influence it has on the storytelling is spending an inordinate amount of time grinding… a mechanic explicitly added to RPGs to pad the game.

There are good video game based stories, Survival Story of a Sword King and Dungeon Reset both immediately come to mind… but I feel like this is a widespread problem.

Dragons are cool, but god am I sick of them. The worst part is they are either evil and directly attack people or good and completely missing for 90% of the story.

I'm so sick of exceptionalism. Every damn thing seems to center around some shitty thinly veiled oligarch, their kids as some hero, or unhappenable origins and an impossible hero. Everything is geared towards cultural acceptance of some authoritarian neo feudal dystopian future.

Stories can be interesting in other spaces. We all exist within those real spaces. We can fantasize about better places and times within similar realities as our own. I view all this exceptionalism like collective narcissism. I can't tell if it is an universal writing bias or a publishing bias, but I don't like it.

The Chosen One somehow discovering some new thing at the climax of any big conflict.

I'm looking at you, Sword of Truth.