• spittingimage@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • Granite@kbin.social
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      8 months ago

      Now I want to read a fantasy comedy where someone trying to make cookies from an ancient recipe is whisked off on an adventure to fulfill the prophecy, but they just want snickerdoodles dammit.

    • Frozengyro@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Me reading the wheel of time:

      • The Chosen One ✓ the main male characters, but definitely Rand

      • The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage ✓Moiraine

      • The Sharp-Tongued Princess. ✓Nynaeve

      • The Rogue With A Heart of Gold. ✓Mat

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

      • Gods that slot into neat roles on a godly table of elements. ✓The forsaken all having distinct methods to get to the top

      • Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology. ✓The one power

      • Elves ✓Warders

      All that said, I’m still enjoying the series thus far.

      • StereoTrespasser@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I honestly don’t understand the appeal of Robert Jordan. I made it through 50 pages of The Eye of the World before throwing it into the nearest little library. By then I had uncovered every fantasy cliche known to man, made even worse by the writing style of a 12 year-old.

        • TheRealKuni@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          The Eye of the World suffers from being a fantasy work published in its era, when publishers wanted Lord of the Rings. So it’s basically Lord of the Rings. Chock-full of cliches because that’s what got published. The series gets significantly better from there on.

          Jordan wasn’t without his shortcomings as a writer, but he was very good at two things I find most appealing in a fantasy author: worldbuilding and hard magic systems. This is the same reason I love Brandon Sanderson, despite his (comparatively) weak prose against someone like, say, Rothfuss.

          He also, when he knew he was dying, managed to outline enough of his planned ending that another author was able to take it up and write the final three books of his series after he died, which is a really cool gesture for his fans.

        • theherk@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I started that book over and over and just could not do it. But then my dad convinced me to read it further. I did. Got hooked by book three, and then got stuck in a loop of reading the series on repeat. Love it.

    • simple@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      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.

      For real. There has to be a better use of elves other than “they live in the woods and appreciate nature and hate dark elves or night elves or whatever your story calls them”

    • snooggums@midwest.social
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      8 months ago

      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.

      I was expecting a joke about Star Wars: A New Hope later in the post!

      Yeah, those have all been done to death in novels and I’m sick of the reluctant chosen one the most.

    • GrayBackgroundMusic@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

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

      I’m just the opposite. I like magic systems that are basically alternative physics. Gimme some of that inherent plausibility Brandon Sanderson.

  • Remmock@kbin.social
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    8 months ago

    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.

  • simple@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    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!”

    • NJSpradlin@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Harry Potter was the worst culprit for a lot of these. The author was just writing a fun story that she threw together wildly. She didn’t care about consistency in magic… which is the UNDERLYING PREMISE OF THE ENTIRE STORY. But, cool it’s a Coming Of Age story with a mix of the Hero’s Journey in there, and a few odds and ends from other stories and mediums. There’s enough fun to suspend disbelief… but, upon further inspection you wish you just hadn’t inspected further.

      • simple@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        I can give the first half of Harry Potter a slack because it’s pretty laid back and whimsical. As soon as it tries to take itself seriously it kind of falls apart for me. God, deathly hallows sucked.

        • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
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          8 months ago

          I stopped reading after the 4th book at release. Never really had interest in picking up the next couple of books.

          When my interest in “well, might as well give it a go again” started back up, JKR started to go insane and now I don’t want to have anything to do with the series anymore

          • MrsDoyle@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            I remember when all the controversy started I thought wow, this must be exaggerated somehow, and sought out what she had actually said. Oh. My. Fucking. God. When she was challenged she didn’t just double down, she quadrupled down, and then some. Loathsome woman, just awful.

            • xkforce@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Why couldnt she just fuck off to a tropical island and stay off twitter? Same thing with notch (guy that created minecraft)

          • NJSpradlin@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            I was reading the books religiously through middle and high school, as the movies were coming out… but, the movies finally caught up with the books for me, for some reason I didn’t get around to reading the last one before the movie. Anyway, I’ve NEVER gotten back to it. I’ve tried, but the magic is gone. The author is outspokenly uninclusive while her books, the original world she built, is all about inclusivity. I can’t fathom how separate and different her works are from her blatant bigotry. Fucking. What.

            • BottleOfAlkahest@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              For a woman who wrote “it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.” She seems awful fucking concerned with what categroies people were born into.

              If only there was an epic saga about the conquering power of love over bigotry that she could read. Maybe one involving a boy who lives or some fantastic magical beasts?

              • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                “It matters not what someone is born” is a very unfair sentence, what you are born can set the difficulty level of your life to extra easy or infinite pain regardless of your will and efforts. The anti-suicide nets off the windows of the iphone factories are not there for people born in a rich family.

            • xkforce@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              She likes the slytherins and Snape. The warning signs were there from the beginning.

      • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        The series goes from “magic wands require extreme responsibility and must be used carefully,” to machine gun wands.

      • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        Eliezer Yudkowsky can be a bit preachy at times, but he did a good job of pulling on threads in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to try to get to a fairly consistent model of magic

    • K3zi4@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      One of the things I enjoy most about Sanderson’s work is his attention to detail in his numerous magic systems.

      • owenfromcanada@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        And the imaginative variety. The magic system in the Mistborn series was fantastic and unlike anything I had ever read or even imagined. And then he adapted it consistently to an industrial age, and somehow made it work. Respect to Sanderson.

    • callouscomic@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      Same reasons I find extended comic universes to be appalling. Why don’t superheroes just use all of their powers all the time? Why isn’t the more powerful superhero conveniently here right now? Why do we have to pretend there is a struggle?

      The minute 2 or more superheroes are put together, it’s basically ruined cause all their powers are only used as convenient for the story.

      • Miphera@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I think the web novel Worm does this really well. I recently got it recommended to me and am enjoying it immensely! :)

    • GraniteM@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      There’s a thing I heard somewhere about how your magical system needs to have a balance between how well it’s understood vs. how useful it is, or else it will break the plot.

      If a magic system is extremely useful, then it must also be extremely mysterious, so that you can say “Well, it can’t immediately fix all problems because the gods work in mysterious ways.” Gandalf or Tom Bombadil seem incredibly powerful, but they don’t solve all of the problems in Middle Earth, and that’s okay because they’re terribly mysterious.

      If a magic system is extremely well understood in-universe, then it has to have hard limits on how useful it is, so you can say something like “Well, the Law of Equivalent Exchange says that to solve all our problems would require a blood sacrifice of the entire population, so that’s not an option.”

      If your magic is pretty well-understood AND very useful, then by all rights it OUGHT to solve all your problems, and when it doesn’t then readers rightly begin to question why any of the plot needs to happen at all (see, for example, the time turners in Harry Potter).

    • GrayBackgroundMusic@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      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!”

      hhahahaa, just like reload when dramatically appropriate.

    • GrayBackgroundMusic@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

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

      Another wizard and I absolutely wrecked our DM’s in game economy just teleporting everywhere. Wizard Instant Shipping Inc.

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

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

      Because you die and a copy of you is created.

      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.

      It can only be used by women who have borne children, to travel to a point before they bore children. Obviously, this means their child disappears from existence.

      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.

      The main character leaves his normal life when a villain’s casual disappearing spell actually “doubles” him, resulting in the origin of his heroic power.

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

      Because schizophrenia. Main character hears voices and they occasionally meld into a chorus in a way that produces unique magical outcomes.

    • flubba86@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Ah yes, H’taln’k from J’briom-4, flying his Zal’t M’lort class Winger to the Mont Bronl’n port with the day’s haul of Sea Crom’t. Oh won’t his mabs’k be pleased with this delivery.

    • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I remember seeing some sort of graph, where the number of made up words on the first page of a fantasy novel can be charted to a skewed bell curve of that novel’s average rating. One or two made up words tends to boost ratings slightly, but more than that and the ratings quickly decline. Because if an author is immediately dependent on introducing new words as a crutch for worldbuilding, it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the book.