#Fantasy Tropes

[headspace-hotel]

There is a type of plot that is prevalent in YA books and starting to get into general lit that I do not like. It is a similar trope to the MacGuffin, but instead of the plot being driven by an object, it is driven by the characters being in some sort of situation with formally fixed stakes.

Just as a MacGuffin is an object with no specific properties that affect its importance to the story, the identifying characteristic of this plot is that exact nature of the situation is irrelevant or at least not very important.

A very common example is when characters are involved in some sort of game or competition—for example, the first Throne of Glass book involves the protagonist competing to become the king's assassin, but the plot of the book would need to change very little if the competition was a beauty pageant.

"Gamified" plot lines like this often also include MacGuffins (to drive the "game"), confirming the tropes' similarity in my head.

The other common example is the "magic/superhero/assassin school" plot. The "school" is often just a device that brings the characters together and keeps them on a predetermined track, but there's nothing about what the characters are learning or even the school's specific identity as an educational institution that affects the plot.

[insomniac-arrest]

Entire plot line to an adult fantasy novel in the search bar

[arsnof]

My absolute least favorite trope in sci-fi is the planetary monoculture.

Vulcans come from Vulcan, Thanagarians from Thanagar, Martians from Mars. Kryptonians speak Kryptonian and are science people while Klingons speak Klingon and love to fight. The entire population of Cybertron either picked sides or left.

Meanwhile, we are Humans from Earth with thousands of languages, religions, cultures, ethnicities...

I hate it in fantasy, too. You mean there are no dipshit elves that walk with a limp because they tripped on a rock? If all fairies are tricksters, who's doing the accounting? Jreph the daytime troll who wears sunscreen.

[electricalpylon]

[mask131]

I saw again another post implying that J.K. Rowling "invented" the idea of a "school for wizards/school for witches" in fiction... *sigh*. Again, while Hogwarts definitively marked the cultural landscape and changed our modern vision of what a "school of sorcery/magic school" is supposed to be... Rowling invented nothing, and there were many, MANY, magic schools in fiction long before the first Harry Potter book was released. As much in fiction for adults as fiction for children. Let me recap some big points:

The Invisible College, from Diana Wynne Jones' The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land, one year before Harry Potter - AND which forms a parody/reference to most of the schools listed below.

Wizard's Hall, from the titular Wizard's Hall book by Jane Yolen - six years before Harry Potter.

Groosham Grange, from the novel of the same name by Anthony Horowitz, nine years before Harry Potter.

The Unseen University, from Terry Pratchett's Discworld - 14 years before Harry Potter.

Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches, from Jill Murphy's The Worst Witch, 23 years before Harry Potter

The island of Roke, from the Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin - 29 years before Harry Potter.

We can even go back to Dom Daniel, from T.H. White's original version of The Once and Future King, 58 years before Harry Potter.

And I am not even counting the various "magic colleges" and "sorcery academies" that appeared in role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons long before Harry Potter came out...

Conclusion: Hogwarts is interesting and influential... But not inventive.

[plotandelegy]

Crafting Future From Ruins: A Writer's Guide to Designing Post-Apocalyptic Technology

Photo: Standard License- Adobe Stock

Crafting post-apocalyptic tech involves blending creativity and realism. This is a guide to help you invent tech for your post-apocalyptic world:

Tinker, Tailor, Writer, Spy: Start with modern tech. Take it apart (conceptually or literally if you're feeling adventurous). Using the basics, think of how your character might put it back together with limited tools and resources.

Master the Fundamentals: Understand the basic principles underlying the tech you're working with. Physics, chemistry, and biology can be your best friends. This understanding can guide your character's resourceful innovations.

Embrace the Scrapyard: The world around you has potential tech components. Appliances, vehicles, infrastructure - how could these be deconstructed and repurposed? Your characters will need to use what's at hand.

Cherishing Old Wisdom: Pre-apocalypse books and manuals are the new internet. A character with access to this knowledge could become a vital asset in tech-building.

Indigo Everly

[fuzzy-oooze]

steampunk, as a artsyle, is weird because it's very popular and well-known and common but it typically only really shows up in the form of homages and one-offs rather than actually dedicating to it. and whenever it DOES show up as a main aesthetic in something, it's always like the entire identity of the thing, their tends to be very little originality in steampunk media. when it comes to steampunk media that's actually worth talking about it's like... bioshock, dishonored, maybe fallen london? a very small number of things. it's like the DnD of aesthetics.

[thepedanticbohemian]

Break these terrible amateur tropes by thinking outside the box.

[halogenwarrior]

So you know how there is often a trope in fantasy where the wise wizard or princess or whoever has an affinity with animals and can get them to work for their cause of restoring the rightful king or whatever it is? And generally, this is supposed to show how positive a figure the person is and how righteous their cause is that even nature itself knows letting the good humans win will keep the balance. I think it would be interesting if it was turned on its head and played for horror - a human feared by animals, with horrific powers that can twist an animal into forgetting its basic view of the world, its survival, its home, those it cares about, in favor of zealously promoting inane human causes that would normally be incomprehensible. That magnificent deer is suddenly infused with alien horrifying concepts of human states, and human family lines, that lead to the conclusion that getting whoever that person thinks is the rightful king on the throne is more important than life itself, abandoning its herd and children for reasons it can't even comprehend. The mother wolf, loving and brave for her children, suddenly grows an unnatural obsession with a random human baby's supposed chosen destiny and abandons her children to feed the human alone, and their cries echo in the forest as they slowly starve, not understanding anything of what has happened. They claim this proves righteousness and wisdom but it's not, it's just power. And it's not even just humans who can do this, maybe it's a gift randomly born into individuals of all species. You, a human, could just be wandering around a road when suddenly you encounter a gifted prairie dog and suddenly all you can think about is the great importance of the politics and struggles of a particular colony of prairie dogs, your brain forced to comprehend a mind and world alien to yours and abandoning all of the goals and humanity you had previously to it. And any animal can have this power, at any moment any other animal's will could be bent to serve a cause it understands nothing of. That's just how it is.

[cripplecharacters]

hi, I saw one of ur posts talking Abt things that shouldn't be done for vitiligo rep, and one thing u mentioned was the like connect to animals that r black and white. I was wondering about kinda like, the reverse of that? The reason is I have a character I was designing who's kind of similarish to a mermaid, and I wanted to base some of his design off an orca. I was considering doing the black/white coloration, but I was wondering if that would be too similar to vitiligo. Personally his design is very early with regard to animal motif stuff, so I can put the orca elements into his design in other ways, but I also wanted to ask what you feel might be preferable handling with similar cases (like zebra centaurs, panda or cow humans and other animals who naturally have black/white coloring or similar contrasting colors)-

The main question is if u think the characters actually bringing up that they don't have vitiligo, but rather have common patterns, like saying "most of us have skin/hair/etc color variation bc it's just how our pigment works by default, but ppl with vitiligo have it bc of autoimmune reasons + (giving details on it and maybe mentioning a diff character in story w vitiligo)"

having the variation only affect specific things, for example black/white hair (like an orca mermaid having white eyebrows that mimic orca eyespots) without the skin pigmentation being affected (potentially also bringing up vitiligo to make it specific they aren't connected)

Or just trying to avoid having any animal based color choices that evoke the image of vitiligo, which is totally understandable if u feel the prev examples are still linking vitiligo to animals in a way that's ultimately harmful ppl w vitiligo.

Mostly I wonder if explicitly stating it's a different thing would actually help to combat the idea, or if it's just one of those things that is better to completely avoid doing

Hello!

I think it depends on how far it goes is the determining factor. A zebra centaur who has the zebra coloration on their horse part isn't a problem and doesn't evoke a vitiligo connection, the same way that a gray horse part wouldn't evoke argyria. I would say that the same goes for hair coloration, in media the hair color is kinda "anything goes" either way.

But if you want to make a mermaid who has an orca bottom half, and vitiligo on the upper half, that is an issue. The problem is that readers, and people in general, just don't see the nuance and end up linking animal coloration with vitiligo anyway - I mean, it's not like cows in real life have it, but people still get compared to them. The visual is enough, even if there are in-universe explanations, in my opinion. Vitiligo is still dramatically misunderstood, and it's very much a case of "if it looks like vitiligo, it is vitiligo" when it comes to design choices like this.

In short; animal part with black/white coloration: cool, hair/eyebrows/etc: cool, skin: not cool. It just hits too close to the real life condition.

With that said, I don't think there's an issue having a character with vitiligo who's part animal if you're not trying to link the two. A catfish mermaid with vitiligo on her human part would be cool :-)

And for other ideas when it comes to mermaids and disability - a lot of people with limb differences that I know would enjoy a clownfish mermaid with an upper limb difference, the term "lucky fin" exists for a reason:-)!

I hope this helps!

mod Sasza

[its-boglin-time]

Not “becoming the very thing you sought to destroy” not “destroying the very thing you sought to become” but a secret third thing: “having always been the thing you sought to destroy.”

[nightswatchdisbandmentera]

This isn’t really a fully formed thought or anything. But it’s interesting how Sansa, Jon, and Lyanna specifically factor into one of GRRM’s greater explorations on the merits of fantasy. More specifically, there is a common trope that connects these three characters: a princess locked in a tower transforming into a valiant knight/hero. Lyanna and Jon, for starters, are pretty obvious explorations of this. Lyanna is the reconstructed version of this classic trope especially as presented through Arthurian tradition; but the twist here is that the dragon/knight who “locks” her in the tower isn’t actually evil and she isn’t so much kidnapped but rather willingly chooses to go there with him. This princess in a tower directly results in the birth of the hidden prince trope, which is even older than Arthur. So one fantasy classic, Rhaegar and Lyanna, leads to another with Jon being Arthur (a hidden prince and destined king), Percival (a hero who grows up in obscurity but has a great destiny to save the land), and Galahad (a noble hero destined to be even greater than his father, Rhaegar/Lancelot, ever was) all at once.

This princess dies in the tower…but her spirit/ghost lives on through her son, who grows up to look and act just like her, eventually becoming the valiant hero you read in the stories (but again, a de/reconstructed version). Part of how Jon does this is by repeating Lyanna’s actions as the valiant “knight” protecting an innocent from bullies. So by making it out of that tower even though his mother didn’t, Jon becomes the survival and rebirth of the fantasy ideal. You could even make the argument that just because Lyanna died doesn’t mean fantasy died as well because it lives on through Jon, her son. And this is actually is aided by Lyanna’s pleading for her son’s life, so she has some agency in how fantasy is preserved in the same way she had agency in how it’s perpetuated when she protected Howland Reed and when she ran off with Rhaegar. The princess living on and becoming the hero/knight in the stories is thus taken on by two characters here: Lyanna and Jon, mother and son. Jon goes even further into the Arthurian-knight playbook by encountering and eventually killing another vicious bully, Janos Slynt, who was coincidentally had a hand in his father’s demise. Then enter princess in the tower 2.0, Sansa Stark.

Sansa is an interesting case because she’s not martial in the way Lyanna and Jon are. But she too encounters her fair share of knights and villains. Janos Slynt is one of them, and Littlefinger will be another. I’ve talked about this before but Jon becoming the valiant hero Sansa wished for is important because it directly plays into GRRM’s reconstruction and (imo) defense of the ideals of fantasy. It’s not so much that heroes don’t exist - they actually do. They just might be far away, or might be the ones you’d never expect. This is the opposite of the “fantasy is dead, stop believing because everything sucks” reading you might see in some sections of the fandom. This moment may not end up meaning much for Jon and Sansa and their relationship, but it means a lot to us readers who are audiences of GRRM’s conversations with the genre and his arguments for its appeal. But that’s not the only interesting thing because Sansa, unlike Lyanna, does eventually make it out of the tower. But she’s currently in the hands of Littlefinger who, like Janos Slynt, was a villain responsible for her father’s demise. In this scenario, will she have to wait for a valiant hero to come take care of him again? Or will she instead don the knight’s armor (figuratively) by enacting justice in her own right? Based on the GoHH’s prophecy, it looks like it will be the latter; and it’s important to note how often “armor” as a motif is repeated in Sansa’s chapters. Thus, the princess evolving into the hero is told through the arc of a singular character here. Sansa is the princess who makes it out of the tower to become a hero of her own making; important disclaimer though, Littlefinger doesn’t really play into the elements of knighthood but he does count as an evil lord holding a princess hostage so Sansa can still be a subversion of the knight rescuing the maiden - the lesson being that she is her own knight, her own salvation!

It’s a very powerful meta-textual thread that exists between these three characters. They all fit into a wider narrative about fantasy and how it can live on, whether played straight or twisted a little crooked. So Sansa doesn’t have to be an overt in-universe parallel to Lyanna because that’s just not her role in the story. And I personally don’t think any “similarities” they have are actually important to Sansa as a person or to Jon because let’s face it, Lyanna’s primary (and most important) role is to be Jon’s mother and everything else informs on that. But both these women (and Jon) can be meta twinsies based on how they fit into GRRM’s wider narrative goals.

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Actually, the best part of being a "chosen one" is you don't have to send in a resume and write a coverletter. A magical scroll or mysterious stranger or flock of ravens just show up and give it to you.

[unidentifiedseacreature]

Human with diabetes X Vampire partner who can smell their blood glucose levels

[druidx]

Saying fantasy grace as a spell to purify food & drink, and stop people becoming unwell or assassinated.

The royal family sits down to dinner. The archbishop says grace to ensure any poisons have been nullified.

The healer of a party of adventurers saying grace as the pottage is being stirred or the roast spitted so no one succumbs to dysentery.

A mother making sure all her children know how and when to say grace as she sends them off to their new homes, in the hope their family line continues.

People of different religions arguing over the wording, not realising that it doesn't matter - it's the faith and intent which makes the magic work.

[mask131]

The thing that I always found abominably fascinating and insanely mind-blowing with the Earthsea series is that it breaks all the worn-out, over-used, “seen everywhere” cliches of fantasy people complain about today and try to avoid. 

Tired of your typical Europe-setting? Here is a world of islands influenced by a lot of various non-European civilizations!

Tired of having a white-predominant cast? Here is a series where people of color are the dominant ethnicities and the white are the minority and bizarre barbarian foreigners from far away!

Tired of having the heroes go on grand and perilous monster-slaying quest to fight some dark overlord or fetch a magical item? Here are books where the villains are elusive, abstract and philosophical threats, where the quests to defeat them are very down-to-earth, solitary and rely more on self-search and the understanding of human nature rather than great exploits. 

Tired of seeing the same old-worn out fantasy races tropes? None of this here! 

This book series was created with the intention of subverting, avoiding or breaking the new tropes and stereotypes that were rising up with the success of Tolkien’s work. It was made to be different and ground-breaking and stereotype-crushing, and it worked extremely well, becoming a classic of fantasy literature and influencing the genre massively... And yet, people only rediscover it today, and know about it today somehow. (Well a “large” today including the dozen of last years of so).

This series is the perfect example of the “new” fantasy that rises up in the modern era, as an attempt to “break off” from the “traditional” or “cliche” fantasy... And the first book has been sitting there since the END OF THE 60s!!! 

There are more examples I could point out of books that present to us a completely out-there, trope reinventing, stereotype breaking form of fantasy - and that yet have been there since the 70s or the 80s, or even before! As I went back in time to see several of the “classics” of fantasy literature, I came to understand something - a lot of the “cliches” and “stereotypes” and “over-used tropes” of fantasy people complain about today were not at all dominant for a very long time. If you believe the words of many people out there, you imagine fantasy never had black characters or queer characters or non-European settings or non-Tolkienesque plotlines until the 2010s or something... Which is not true. Fantasy was such a varied, bizarre, diverse genre in its literary form all throughout the 20th century, and many “old” works of the first generations of the post-Tolkien fantasy are basically what people want to see today as “pattern-breaking and fresh new fantasy”. 

The Tolkienesque-fantasy and all of its cliches and stereotypes were not so much dominant as just present in a handful of massively popular and widespread works - the case of the Shannara series can be pointed out, as its first book was PRAISED at the time for being able to recreate a Tolkien story in the 70s, and it was because it was mostly a copy of the Lord of the Rings that it got so popular (and why it is not well-liked today). And then the 80s rolled and early D&D reignited the flame of the Tolkien-inspired fantasy. By the 90s, it seemed Tolkien had been used and over-used to death, and people didn’t trust it all anymore... Which is why David Eddings’ Belgariad series was created. Its key point was to take back all the elements of the traditional epic fantasy story, but reassemble them, freshen them up, twist them slightly, all of that to re-create a by-the-book BUT fresh, new and interesting series. It was an attempt at prooving that, with innovation and some twists and modernization, the Tolkienesque fantasy would not die - and it worked massively well. And then in the 2000s, the Lord of the Rings movie sealed the deal. 

All these works make it look like fantasy had always been copying or taking inspiration from Tolkien. But it is false. It is true that most of the classics are tied to Tolkien, but not always in imitation or re-creation - in the case of “Earthsea”, there was a willing attempt at getting away and inverting the Tolkienesque fantasy to create a fantasy that went the very opposite direction. Same thing with the Elric Saga, also designed to be the reverse or opposite of The Lord of the Rings, and which in turn became the classic of another new genre of fantasy: dark fantasy. And Conan in all that? People forget that the Conan the Barbarian series were just as influential for fantasy works as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was. The Elric Saga, again, was created to completely reverse and avoid the Conan-like fantasy. A similar thing was done with Leiber for his “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” series, which was designed to break away from the Conan “heroic fantasy” style and reinvent the genre in a new direction. 

There are so many “old” and “classic” works of literary fantasy that actually do not feel like a “classic” at all because they have all the vibes, elements and expectations one has from a non-classic, non-traditional fantasy... BUT THEY ARE THE FOUNDATIONS, they are the basis and classics and inspirations of fantasy. And it all shows this huge gap between what people think fantasy is, and what fantasy really was - it is a fascinating case study of how one specific trend somehow got over the entire genre. Imagine a world where people think Gothic novels can only have a vampire or the ghost of a judge, and must be Bram Stokers-inspired, and that everybody points out they are tired to see Dracula-expies everywhere... Only to discover the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and be baffled by them and their “inventivity” and “breaking of patterns”. I’m sorry, that’s the fastest comparison I can make, but this feels just like that. There is this strangely specific idea of what fantasy is today forged on a few items... I think, beyond the massive success of Tolkien and imitators, D&D probably is also to “blame” for how people see fantasy today.

But even then, D&D took inspiration from so many non-conventional works of fantasy... Yes many became “classics” now, though often ignored by the masses - The Elric Saga, and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser were big influences. But take the Jack Vance series “The Dying Earth”, another big inspiration on early D&D. Take that. This series is from the 50s - FROM THE 50S - and yet it is a unique genre of sci-fi fantasy that I haven’t seen much being done around, and it creates such a weird, whimsical, bizarre, surrealistic fantasy world, it feels completely unique. And again, it is a classic of the 50s and 60s. 

I don’t really know where I try to go with this but the important thing is: when someone wants to read “non-traditional” or “non-Tolkienesque” fantasy, or “non-stereotyped” fantasy, it is possible, instead of searching for every new author nowadays (not a bad thing to do that though), it is possible to just go back in time, look back at the books of the 70s, 60s and 50s, and find there a novelty, a freshness and an inventivity that is lacking in a mass production of modern day fantasy. And that such a thing is possible is truly crazy for me. I don’t know if such a thing happened with other literary genres, but it is insane that sometimes in fantasy, to see “new” things you just have to look back into the past.