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You’re looking for opinions? I got opinions.
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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.
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The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage.
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The Sharp-Tongued Princess.
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The Rogue With A Heart of Gold.
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Plots based on misunderstanding ancient prophecies that are so vaguely written they could be cookie recipes.
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Gods that slot into neat roles on a godly table of elements.
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Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology.
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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.
Me reading the wheel of time:
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The Chosen One ✓ the main male characters, but definitely Rand
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The Wise Yet Enigmatic Sage ✓Moiraine
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The Sharp-Tongued Princess. ✓Nynaeve
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The Rogue With A Heart of Gold. ✓Mat
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Plots based on misunderstanding ancient prophecies that are so vaguely written they could be cookie recipes. ✓All the prophecies
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Gods that slot into neat roles on a godly table of elements. ✓The forsaken all having distinct methods to get to the top
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Magic systems so detailed and prosaic you may as well call them technology. ✓The one power
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Elves ✓Warders
All that said, I’m still enjoying the series thus far.
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.
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.
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.
Sorta star wars too.
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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”
https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Urban_Elf_(5e_Subrace)
Well they tried…
I’m at least glad to find out it wasn’t a horrible attempt at a politically correct rebrand of the Drow.
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.
You may as well be describing The Matrix.
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.
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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…
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If teleportation magic exists, why don’t people who own it teleport everywhere?
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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.
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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.
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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!”
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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.
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
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.
Why couldnt she just fuck off to a tropical island and stay off twitter? Same thing with notch (guy that created minecraft)
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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?
She started the series on benefits, and ended them a billionaire.
“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.
She likes the slytherins and Snape. The warning signs were there from the beginning.
The series goes from “magic wands require extreme responsibility and must be used carefully,” to machine gun wands.
One of the things I enjoy most about Sanderson’s work is his attention to detail in his numerous magic systems.
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.
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.
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.
I think the web novel Worm does this really well. I recently got it recommended to me and am enjoying it immensely! :)
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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).
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.
Checks out lol, it’s a busted ability
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.
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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.
It was so hard to not reference that scene, because I really agree with Morty but didn’t want to seem like I was just memeing.such a garbage trope…
You could always refer to the other time Dan Harmon referred to the same trope, with the Community episode where Abed is trying to tell the story through flashbacks, annoying everyone around him.
Treating wands like guns in fights instead of using spells creatively
Oh yes…this is SO lazy. There’s this immense potential for creative choreography that’s left untapped. Directors should really consult dungeon masters for this kind of stuff
There’s a meme floating around that suggests taking inspiration for wand using from conductors and I cannot stress how amazing every fight in Harry potter would have been if this was the standard.
Bringing Harry Potter into this, the fact that they showed they do know how to do this, when Dumbledore and Voldemort fought in the 5th movie, makes it all the more annoying that almost every other fight in the series was just shooting blasts and energy beams at each other
Except, of all people, those idiots Crabbe and Goyle busting out a living dragon made of fire. I mean, they shouldn’t have, but they managed it.
Nothing but direct strikes from aurors and death eaters.
They actually pull this off well in Frieren. There are tons of different and unique spells but the one the MC always uses is the basic magic attack spell because she is stupidly overpowered she doesn’t need to be creative.
To me that is lazy writing. Specfic spells should have a set damage unless they are upcast. Maybe this is just the dnd player in me that thinks that though.
To be clear, the magic system in this world is essentially technology. There is a set input and a destined output. The MC simply doesn’t care about fighting to learn any advanced fighting spells and just gatling-gun-spams the weakest attack spell until the opponent gets exhausted.
This ends up being brought up later, since a mage who’s sufficiently trained in fighting supposedly has a fair chance of defeating the MC. It’s a bit of a theme throughout the show about juggling the practical fighting applications of magic vs. the mundane but fun uses of magic
I think the other person doesn’t word it well. First, the fighting isn’t the main plot of the story, its more about everything in between. The MCs are powerful, but still need to be careful in their fights. or they will die.
The story doesn’t want dragon ball fights that are 20 chapters long, or have an impassible monster that de-rail the goal for 20 more chapters. Their obsticals are more about the world and people they interact with.
The magic combat system is pretty well thought out, but not complex.
The MC basically has lots of mana. That’s their “op” trait. They developed a stragedy to spam cast the basic damage spell.
I’m making up some numbers here to kind of paint a picture of how this “basic spell” work.
Attack spell =
- 1 second cast time
- 1 damage to defence spell
- 10/10 damage to unprotected person. (Can do 9/10 depending on what the plot needs)
- Can be cast in a variety of directions. (I.e it’s not a gun, its a targeted missle)
- cost more mana than the defence spell.
Defence spell =
- .5 second cast
- Can absorb 100 hits
- low mana cost for small area over a short period of time, high cost to do “full coverege”. Its essentially a sheild they move around and resize to block attacks as they come. Fully protecting yourself burns too much mana and you’d lose.
For most hitting the defence spell a hundred times is a stupid stratagy, so everyone came up with different spells that break through it in a few hits.
Out MC instead trained the basic spell so much, they can cast it 20 times a second over a long period of time. This forces the opponent to burn mana trying to maintain defence. The opponent is overwhelmed and get hit. However the stratagy only works if they back the openent into a postion where they can’t counterattack or have a buddy attack MC from behind.
So its kinda like they have infinite level 1 spell slots and they are just spaming magic missile over and over?
Pretty much, yes, but infinate isn’t quite true.
(The magic system isn’t DnD, so I’m spending way too much time making up a lot of shit here to give a general idea that no one really asked for. (And because its fun to brutely mash one magic system into another)).
Let’s say your average mid to high level mage has 100x spell slots (and for now assume all other stats are also equal). In this system, there are no spell levels. Instead, more complex spells require more slots to be used at once.
The basic defence and attack spell are 1 to 10. 1 defence spell blocks 10 basic attacks. However, you can’t attack and defend at the same time, and 1 defence is only for a small area. Full 360° coverage would cost a lot of slots per second. You conserve slots by precicly blocking the opponents spells as they come.
To break the defence you need to to be able to hit it really hard and follow up before they can cast more defence or counter attack. To do more damage in a spell, it costs more slots. This is where things like the other stats, skills, refelx time, unique spells, and combat stratagy become deciding factors in fights. Slot count also varies, a young mage might start of with one slot, but can become a very high level mage with 300 slots.
MC has 200 slots to start with and trained to get a very fast cast per second rate for both basic attack and defence. They are so proficient in the spell, it’s the equivelent effort of you or me walking.
While MC’s magic mistle does little damage, they can cast the spell 20 times in a second from multiple directions. This forces opponents to use up all their slots to defend until they run out or get overwhelmed by the numbers. The only defence is to do 360 defence, which can’t be maintained for long. (For simplicity sake, assume all the magic is a one shot kill. If you don’t defend or dodge, you die).
To make things more fun, MC has no idea they are insanly strong because their only reference growing up was their mentor who has the 5000 slot cheat code.
Yes, I am over thinking this. And yes, I should be sleeping right now.
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Oh god not the capital letters! I always associate those with bad fantasy.
This is so bad it’s good.
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.
I agree with you on principle, but i feel it has reached a point where the circumvention of the classic tropes has created a new and also very formulaic stereotype: the “empowering“ woman. Must be strong, butch, evidently better than men in something typically associated with men, and if by any chance she is permitted to be classically feminine she must either be a lesbian or emotionally fucked up somehow. Bonus points for leather jacket and shades.
It is probably the better trope but i find it similarly boring at this point. Very performative and often with little relevance to the story being told.
They also can’t have any scars on their face that could make them less attractive. Hester shaw from the predator city books had her fucking nose cut off and the scar also took off some her her top lip yet in the fucking dog shit movie they made she looks like this
But that’s not specific to women, a similar example is Tyrion Lannister in A Song of Ice and Fire https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/mg_got_tyrion.png
That has to do with Hollywood wanting actors to look pretty and with costs of keeping effects realistic and cost efficient even on close ups.
I think it might be partially prettiness but I think it is mostly practicality. If the makeup is that difficult, it will take hours every day to put on. It can be hell on the actors. I remember reading about Peter Ustinov who played Hercule Poirot in “Murder on the Orient Express” but refused to do it for “Death on the Nile” because he did not want to have to wear that makeup in Egypt.
You have to make sure complicated makeup always looks consistent. It would have been really hard to do that in a series over multiple years.
One other example I can think of is Katniss in The Hunger Games. If you read the novel, her body was REALLY broken. I think her entire body was covered in burn scars. It would have been very hard to do that in the film consistently (though I will note that in the novels, the scars are not on her face. I saw it as symbolic of the inner scars of the Games).
So I think it is partially aesthetic but mostly practical.
Now, to be fair, in the Punisher TV show they also refused to make pretty boy Jigsaw actor look as fucked up as his face really SHOULD have looked according to the comics.
Also why some characters that NEED to be wearing masks or helmets conveniently are not. Like in race cars or in space. Or the face protection is unrealistic so we can still mostly see them.
There’s also some funny times where comic characters who can’t breathe in space are merely wearing a small covering of the mouth, and maybe nose, but not eyes/ears.
Literally has to force in their own “I am no man” line.
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.
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.
One book that did it well was Nine Princes in Amber. It worked because the readers got to discover the “real world” along with the main character. Without it there would’ve been a shit ton of exposition of a detailed setting that didn’t rely on Tolkien at all, one that the MC was already familiar with. Although it might have been fresh in 1970 and overdone since then.
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.
Problem is, that they easily turn into the nuke equivalent in fantasy. It’s challenging to incorporate them into a world where they are not completely OP
They could still be selfish or not engaged with less powerful creatures instead of evil or benevolent.
GRRM stories have made dragons really boring
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.
I think that’s the plot of Thumbalina. And yes, it’s stupid.
You meet your party at the tavern…
A tavern is a perfect place to meet strangers. It is a social hangout where new things are bound to be found!
The problem is always starting an adventure by interacting with a mysterious stranger they have no reason to trust. Why isn’t Aunt Elovynn sending them on their way from a family get together? Or the religious leader that the characters know and trust giving them a start?
Tavern is a perfect place to meet, though it’s neutral ground and it’s public. Most people won’t start shit in public.
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.
Irish dwarves? Scottish dwarves seems to be the trope Do you have any example of irish dwarves. Except from leprechauns, whuch I don’t consider dwarves.
The Scottish accent is baffling. “Dwarves originate from Scandinavian mythology, so let’s give them a Scottish accent!” Elves (the human-sized kind) originate from Scandinavian mythology as well, why not give them Scottish accents?
Elves and dwarves being monolithic cultures. I’d be fine the the standard stereotype if that was only one kind. There are so many kinds of humans, it’s hard to believe that there is only one kind of dwarf. Make Irish vs Scottish dwarves or something, cmon. Make dwarves Mongolian, idk.
The Chosen One somehow discovering some new thing at the climax of any big conflict.
I’m looking at you, Sword of Truth.
The series is so long, which part are you referring to? Lmao it is one of my favorites still though.
(I’m pretty sure in a bunch of cases he uses magic to resolve stuff but never understands what he’s doing and most of the time can’t replicate it)
Also have you read sword of justice series?
Most of the series past the first book is what I was referring to. It seemed like, for at least several books, there’s some big climax and he suddenly rediscovers some lost aspect of War Magic that saves the day, mostly unrelated to the rest of the book. It’s been over a decade since I read them though, so I might not be remembering it right.
Still enjoyed the series as a whole, despite a few things. Haven’t read sword of justice, but I might give it a try.
Its been quite some time since I read them as well, but you aren’t wrong. Well I’ve a host of recommendations if you ever need any!
I started off really enjoying the series, but eventually had to abandon it as he kept adding increasingly over the strawmen who’s sole purpose was to be blown away by the might of Randian Objectivism.
Yeah, I always felt like the series would have been better as a single book (maybe the first and part of the second?). Playing with ideas of truth and perceived truth was cool, but it wasn’t enough to sustain such a long series.
Throwing out peripeteia / anagnorisis would kind of ruin a massive portion of fictional literature.
I’m not against it as a general rule, it’s just frustrating when it’s overused–ends up feeling like a deus ex machina thing.
I think I generally agree. But it is like most the other things in the thread. The plot mechanic is fine when done well and bad when done poorly or as a cop out.
So I think most of us just hate shitty storytelling.
Being forbidden doesn’t make a relationship interesting. The Romeo and Juliet thing has been spun a million times, and every one of them is shit including the original.
I think I’ve just reached peak edge Lemmy, where Romeo and Juliet is referred to as “shit.”
It gets edgier
Fucking teenagers
Not to mention Romeo was a pedophile.
Romeo was 16 and Juliet 13. Kind of a big gap for that age but nowhere near being a pedo wtf
The plot is discovery and progressive revealment of big weird thing. The climax is flashback-heavy explanation of big weird thing.
