Maybe the difference between the evolved dogs in A Fire Upon the Deep and "orcs" in everything else is that the point have having sentient dogs is to explore the question of "what would it look like if dogs evolved to the point of being able to create a sophisticated civilization" (the impact of different evolutionary paths - both biological and social - is a fundamental theme of Vinge's novels in this setting), while the point of having orcs is that it's an orc. The reader already knows what an orc is, and a dwarf and a fireball. A fantasy author can focus on what it would mean to put these known entities in novel settings.
What would happen in a feudalistic, honor-based medieval tech level society if only one noble family had dragons? Martin can spend his time exploring how they would disrupt politics and war and social organization rather than spending chapters explaining what dragons are. If he instead had used Scott's sentient wasps the impact on the story world would be the same but he'd have to waste a lot of time bringing the reader up to speed on the powers and limitations of wasp-assassins. Maybe this is an important dividing line between hard sci-fi and fantasy.
I feel like GRRM is the hard sci-fi of fantasy. He doesn’t just use a setting to explore the feelings of an ordinary person - he explores what the economics and politics of a world with dragons and lost magic would be.
I disagree there. Martin may be regarded as the 'hard sci-fi' version due to his "it was grim up north back then" plotting, but he doesn't *really* go into "so how does the tax system work, what are the politics, what are the logistics of running this empire?" Mostly, I think, because he has so much going on that keeping all the characters straight and who is where right now doing what consumes the energy and attention. The TV series also cut a lot out because it was too much, you have to have a fairly simple plot that can be understood and followed over the course of the show to let viewers know what is going on and keep up with it, no matter how many complications you introduce.
I mean, can anyone quote me the facts and figures of the Iron Island fisheries, for instance?
I don't think most sci-fi known for being "hard sci-fi" is really meeting those standards either. VERY VERY few fiction books get at all into hard facts and figures about economics. Technology, sure, meaningless bureaucratic technobabble sure. Actual description of a working economy....no. Even something like say Silo, where Hugh Howey they clearly put a lot of thought into the economy, its mostly just a handwave.
Robert Silverberg has, in Majipoor, and others. But then, he also writes actual science fiction, too. In "Lord Valentine's Castle", the protagonist opines that the king ought to pay for his own festival, but someone else notes that that would be nothing more than the taxes everyone else has paid. He also goes into some money denominations and how they are used.
As it happens, he also has some new races there that never caught on much in a popular sense. Four-armed people (who can make great jugglers), and a Yoda-like race yet with different personality than Yoda.
I have to push back on that one, though it’s not on topic. For all his veneer of gritty realism, as Brett Devereaux has pointed out, his vision of the logistics of medieval warfare is much less accurate than Tolkien’s. Tolkien moves realistically sized armies over attainable distances in a logical way; Martin often teleports absurdly large armies over vast distances and furthermore suggests surprise battles that are impossible to have with an army of that size. There are similar careless misunderstandings of technology, strange anachronisms, etc. His grasp on medieval politics is equally shaky and error-ridden—particularly apparent because internal politics between lord and vassal are so prominent. And some things are just absurdly implausible. For example, the Starks have ruled the north for an absurdly long time and yet they have virtually no relatives. There should be a Stark under every rock and bush rather than one nuclear family and one estranged cadet branch. The weird paucity of relatives among the great houses is necessary for Martin’s constant backstabbing to work—realistically naked assassinations of entire houses at a time by their vassals are not possible and the attempt would not work well for obvious practical reasons.
Frankly I think it’s the opposite. Martin gives you the aesthetic impression of doing a really critical look at the implications of fantasy while in substance actually being quite tropey and doing almost everything by the Rule of Cool. He does deliberately subvert expectations but not often realistically—for example the deep cynicism about religion, chivalry, and warrior code/ethos is very much ahistorical, obvious if you have read any primary accounts of the time and note how many decisions make zero logical sense unless they actually are bound by an ethics and outlook that Martin writes as a sham.
On the other hand Tolkien was legitimately a medievalist, and is pretty concerned about accurately creating a world of verisimilitude and plausibility that continues past the surface, and I would argue that his characters are much more realistically depicted than Martin’s within their context. He doesn’t go so far into internal politics as Martin but what he does show is much more realistic (absent the occasional encroachment of fantasy or the consequences of fantasy, which is actually rare because Tolkien’s world has much less magic in it than Martin’s).
I largely agree with your critique of the "Martin is more realistic" narrative. To add to it, I'd say that what people are actually noticing is a difference in the genre of the *story*. ASoIaF and the Tolkien Legendarium are the same genre in terms of *setting*, but the stories are very different in genre. Martin is mostly writing a military/political thriller (basically, Tom Clancy with dragons instead of jet fighters), while Tolkien wrote various combinations of mythological tragedy, heroic saga, traditional English fairy-story, and the odd bit of gothic horror.
Similarly, a lot of post-Tolkien fantasy which is often described as being derivative of Tolkien doesn't feel very Tolkienesque to me, and I think the disconnect there is also story-genre vs setting-genre. They're seen as Tolkien-derived because their settings draw heavily on at least the aesthetic of Tolkien's universe, but the stories seem to draw more heavily on the sword-and-sorcery fantasy of Robert Howard, Jack Vance, etc. I think this pattern is heavily influenced by D&D, which was originally designed for small-unit wargaming through Conanesque storylines and had Tolkien-derived setting elements layered on top of it at the request of many of Gygax's wargaming buddies.
Tangentially. later in life, Tolkien did start writing a sequel to LotR ("A New Shadow", set a century or two after LotR and dealing with a Morgoth-worshipping cult arising and making a nuisance of itself in Gondor), which he abandoned about a dozen pages in because he realized it would be a thriller-style story which he wasn't particularly interested in writing.
re: "A New Shadow"--What! How did I never know about this!
Anyway--regarding GRRM, I think the criticisms of his world are perfectly accurate. But that's not what made ASOIAF good! GRRM's strength is rich, varied, psychologically realistic characters. Tolkien's characters (besides the hobbits) are in many ways quite alien to us, exactly because they're properly contextualized in their imagined time periods. They aren't "worse characters," they're just serving different purposes in different genres.
Agreed. Additionally, I have heard the argument that SoIaF is more early modern than medieval. For example, the betrayal of Ned Stark involves Littlefinger (a very minor noble) bribing the white cloaks (the non-noble city guards in Kings Landing) to take his side in a political conflict. Robert seems to have basically no loyal people around him, where in a vassalage system, he would put long-trusted vassals in the small council and in command of the city guard (which obviously should not be powerful enough to arrest nobles in the first place).
Also, while I am sure that some backstabbing occurs occasionally in vassalage systems, the amount of it in SoIaF feels ridiculous. After the red wedding, nobody will ever visit Lord Frey again. This would severely affect his ability to control his vassals and make his liege worry about his reliability and letting this precedent against hospitality stand. Not a good combination.
Uhm, this is more or less exactly what happens to Walder Frey after the RW; his only company are the Boltons, who exploit him. And while no well-groomed noble would have ever come up with such a stupid idea, Walder Frey is an upstart bridge-troll who thinks he can rise simply by spawning lots of children and marrying them off.
GRRM may have misgendered his fair share of horses, and the presence of dragons and Others isn't doing the applicability of his storylines a great service, but he has an uncanny intuition for realistic behavior of people in power.
No—it isn’t. You don’t seem to understand that in the medieval context it’s *Frey’s* vassals that he should be worried about—Frey is sitting at the top of a pyramid of complex and traditional fealty obligations. Or at least he should be, but this enormous and critical element of the feudal world is ignored because the consequences of his betrayal of the vassalage code would pretty much immediately render him irrelevant because he would only be in control of his personal holdings.
You seem to be taking for granted that GRRM is writing about the European Middle Ages. I see where this assumption is coming from, but I think a good deal of it comes from the angle from which you're looking. His setting resembles the Middle Ages in terms of (non-magical) warcraft, Antiquity in terms of the role and the diversity of religion (the Faith of the Seven has little of the power of the Vatican), and Early Modernity in terms of occasional technological advances (and anything Braavos). And even in the Middle Ages, I believe that China and the Arab World adhered much less to a chivalric code than Europe. I agree, though, that the individual outlooks of many characters are unmistakeably modern.
The whole idea of comparing Tolkien with GRRM is of limited use; the authors were writing in different genres while using some of the same topoi. I have seen people use bits and pieces of ASOIAF as metaphors for contemporary politics with great effect and good justification (among other things, ASOIAF portrays in detail various ways people can fail to adapt to changing circumstances); I cannot imagine any such applicability for anything in LotR or the Silmarillion. On the other hand, GRRM goes nowhere as deep in the worldbuilding as Tolkien does, and in many ways stands on the shoulders of giants (I wonder how much sense ASOIAF would make to a reader unfamiliar with Western culture, mythology and fantasy).
Whose world has more magic? Hard to say, because of how different they are. Tolkien has omnipotent gods that deliberately meddle with the world; Martin has chaotic fields of unknown forces that some believe to have mastered to their advantage, but ultimately just are what they are and don't desire anyone's good or evil (the irregular seasons, in my headcanon, are evidence of a three-body system; ASOIAF started out as a sci-fi writer). I personally found the latter easier to immerse myself in, and e.g. warging rings more natural to me than resurrection by the will of Eru Iluvatar. But it's a matter of intuition, and you will find yours just as natural as I find mine.
I feel that for House of the Dragon specifically, the world building does not feel consistent. The Targarrians conquered Westeros with their dragons, so they are obviously very important strategically.
Giving dragons to female Targarrians of child-bearing age does not optimize the availability of dragons for combat. Handing out a few dragon-bound brides for patrilinear marriage to the other houses for prestige might work if you kept 80% of the dragons plus the big ones for yourself (which they don't in the show).
A simple fix would be to declare that dragon riders have to have the same gender identity as their dragon (just make the eggs pink and blue). Even then, I would expect female dragon riders to be unmarried and either celibate or on contraceptives.
Instead, we have the rider of the biggest dragon in a non-Targarrian household (!) and then dying in child-birth (!), presumably depriving the military of a dragon rider with decades of training.
Also, one would expect dragons to be guarded better? Instead, the crazy uncle can steal a dragon egg and an owner-less dragon getting dragon-jacked by some minor Targarrian without any authorization.
In a vassalage system, one of the key tasks of the ruler is to keep their powerful vassals happy. Here, these are mostly the dragon riders. Having a monthly council of all the dragon riders,complete with military-relevant games and feasts would be a no-brainer. Instead, dragon riders fight in tourneys on horseback, which feels like holding an archery competition in the marine corps.
Also, the combat speed of dragons is low enough that they are vulnerable to ballista arrows (which travel perhaps at 324km/h) at long distances in a way I would not expect a Cessna (cruise speed 226km/h) to be. I would not expect a dragon cruise speed higher than 100km/h. Westeros is oversized at 1200x3000 miles^2. That would make Kings Landing - Oldtown a ten hour flight. Apparently Targarrians are also cold resistant.
Finally, while Robert might be in no position to conquer in Essos, the old king at the start of HotD is? I would assume that the logistics of besieging Pentos from Kings Landing are much favorably compared to besieging Winterfell. If I had united the six kingdoms in Crusader Kings, that would be an obvious next goal.
IIRC, the packs of sentient dogs form some sort of telepathic hive mind, where the pack is much smarter than its members. This is something way more alien than elves or dwarfs.
Also, that planet is conveniently located in the no-FTL zone of a otherwise populated galaxy (IIRC).
Yes! IMO, that was the most interesting part of the aliens; being dog-like was almost incidental. The hive-mind was based on sound, so different packs couldn't get close together (except for fighting and mating), and cities were spread out. Individual members could die, and the continuity of personality was a big deal, and there were various ways around that. All sorts of cool stuff.
(On the second, I think the planet was still in the FTL zone at the start of the book, but close to the slow zone, so FTL was slow and advanced technology was unreliable unless specifically designed for operation in that area.)
Tangentially, the complaint about populating your fantasy novel with "alfar" because it kind of sounds like "elves" rubs me the wrong way. Anyone who picked the name "alfar" wasn't going for "something that kind of sounds like 'elves'." It kind of sounds like "elves" because it is the Norse word "elves".
"The one thing I still don’t understand is why everyone has the same races. Why elves, dwarves, goblins, and sometimes drow?"
Is there some truth to the idea that lots of (most?) real-world folklore has something a bit like these tropes?
"Why not sentient dogs, or dolphins, or bee-people living in hive-cities [...]"
These all sound like ideas I would associated more with science-fiction (or perhaps science-fantasy). My gut instinct is that truly speculative writing is somewhat at odds with the premise of fantasy, which largely feels like it's about tapping into things we already feel intuitively familiar with. That's why fantasy feels like it's set in the past - even if it's never explicitly stated as such.
It reminds me of anime I watched when I was small. I'm thinking Dragonball. Maybe even anime-ish stuff like Samurai Jack. I think that showing things off visually helps to avoid tedious headachey descriptions.
And then there’s the stuff that seems like fantasy at first but is eventually revealed to be future/post-apocalyptic in some way (e.g. people going Back To Nature and it looks like it’s in some alternate past).
But also, with the elves/dwarves/etc: it reminds me of something Brandon Sanderson said once, that “elves are played out”. And, I mean, he’s the expert and I’m not, but to me it kind of sounded like saying that guitars are played out in rock music because it’s been so many decades since the Beatles or whatever. Tropes are tools (as a wise man once said), instrumentation is a tool, and what you do with those tools can continue to evolve. That’s what I think, at least.
Ach, I can't read Sanderson. He's a competent writer but his prose is cardboard and I don't care about the stat-nerdery of his magic system.
Also, I don't think American writers *get* elves, they seem to regard them as "like humans only live way longer and are sexier". The SERRAted Edge series which had the American Faerie Court into NASCAR racing? Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God.
And yes, they do tend to spell it "Faerie". Our Elves Are Different, I suppose.
The same way I would not *attempt* to write a Paul Bunyan or John Henry story, because those are real American folklore concepts and I'm not American (I still have no idea how John Connolly managed to pull it off with the Charlie Parker series of novels), Americans should be *firmly* limited in how they can depict the Daoine Sídhe.
Poul Anderson's 'The Broken Sword' got elves better than anyone since Tolkein. Larry Correia's 'Monster Hunter International' trailer park elves probably aren't your cup of tea.
No, probably not 😁 But if they're the American equivalent of local spirits, that would fit.
Tolkien did make his Elves different to how they are in folklore, he did take Celtic influences (I think probably Welsh as that was his second favourite language, rather than Irish), and keep them instead of the English by-then 'flower fairy' types of the fairies, as well as Nordic influences, and made them nobler and higher than their antecedents, but he did get the strangeness and beauty and timelessness right. And how Fairyland is perilous, when Sam compares Galadriel to a river that might drown a Hobbit, but it's not the river's fault.
Mercedes Lackey's stockcar-racing Elves who want to help abused children may have good intentions, but oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
"Also, I don't think American writers *get* elves, they seem to regard them as "like humans only live way longer and are sexier"."
That's a nice insight - you've crystalised a thought that has been bothering me for a while now.
I agree with all of what you have said in your comment; there are fundamental cultural differences in the interpretation of what it is to be an elf, and I assume this is for the reasons outlined above - different cultures need different things from their stories.
I liked Jo Walton's _Among Others_ because the elves were more alien than most elves. She's Welsh, so she was doing a good example of elves from the British Isles.
Americans do seem to think it's fun to have elves take up modern culture.
Have you read _The Tommyknockers_ by Stephen King? His aliens from a UFO struck me as being as chaotic as elves should be.
So far as I know, Paul Bunyan isn't exactly an authentic American folk legend, he was invented as part of an advertising campaign. So he's an American invention, but probably not the way you meant. it.
"The Tommyknockers" was very good, a novel take on aliens. The ST:TNG Pakled reminded me of them; just because a species has space travel does not mean it is smart.
> Also, I don't think American writers *get* elves, they seem to regard them as "like humans only live way longer and are sexier".
That is a pretty accurate representation of what we know about how early Germanic cultures thought of elves.
The word got repurposed later to refer to essentially any supernatural creature, and picked up an evil sense due to the influence of Christianity, but we can tell that elves were originally not viewed as evil because the element "elf" is used in "theophoric" names like Alvin and Alfred. The other element that survives of old elf-related mythology is a sexual theme.
Yeah, but elves/fairies are not really comprehensible from a human viewpoint. They seem cruel and arbitrary to us, and make decisions based on criteria we can't understand. Fairyland is a *dangerous* place for humans in the old tales. American fantasy Elves tend to be "well I get where you're coming from" level for humans, at least the 'good' ones. The ones interested in music/art/knowledge tend to be depicted as too aloof, stuck-up, and indeed either prigs or boring.
Though Laurell K. Hamilton *really* went to town on the sexual themes of old elf-related mythology, to the point that it made her Merry Gentry series unreadable for me; the 'problem' of the main character were "oh, which of these six guys of various degrees of human or fairy blood will I fuck? how about all of them? oh yeah and my wicked relatives are trying to kill me, but the most pressing issue is do I fuck the goblin or not?"
The Anita Blake series started off well with a really interesting world, but went downhill fast as Anita got overpowered and the tone shifted to softcore porn. I think Hamilton figured out 'sex in urban fantasy' was the big selling niche and she went for it. A lot of urban fantasy already overlapped with paranormal romance, she just turned up the dial from 'romance' to 'sex'.
Right. It's sorta like asking why Super Man is always fighting bad guys in capes, and not, like...aliens or a plague of giant lizards or terminator robots or something. Kinda not his niche.
Aliens? Brainiac, Darkseid, Zod, the Hybrid of Oric, Lobo, and plenty of others. It's a recurring plotline in the Silver Age comics that a good third of the aliens that pester Earth from time to time are there to cause exactly the minimum amount of trouble needed for an excuse to challenge Superman to a 1v1. Kryptonians going extinct, for quite a few of the more militaristic races in the galaxy, was like if the Patriots all died in a bus crash the week before the Superbowl, denying the other team any possible satisfaction of victory.
A plague of giant lizards? Terminator robots? The classic 1941 animated short films "The Arctic Giant" and "The Mechanical Monsters" (respectively) had him fighting a whole bunch of each, and the tradition's continued anytime Lex Luthor doesn't feel like getting his hands dirty personally and goes for cloning or machinery instead. I really recommend those shorts, by the way; shockingly high animation quality, which holds up really well even eighty years later.
There have been a couple cases (Red Son, Kingdom Come, Superman: Peace on Earth) where he tries to fight something way more abstract, like world hunger, to various degrees of success. There's a phenomenal short fanfiction "A Common Sense Guide to Doing The Most Good" (https://archiveofourown.org/works/30351690) in which Superman becomes an effective altruist and strict utilitarian, and tries to solve *everything*. Sure, bad guys in capes and run-of-the-mill supervillains are his bread and butter, and he's fighting those most of the time, but that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't write him with a little more creativity.
I see your point and Joe's, that fantasy is about tapping into legends we "already know" while sci-fi is about exploring new directions, but on the whole I agree more with Scott that current fantasy does not go as far as it reasonably could, and that while there's a need to build off legends and worlds we already know, there are still more cliches than needed.
He's also literally fought Ridley Scott's Aliens (Superman/Aliens 1995 plus a 2002 sequel) and James Cameron's Terminators (2000's Superman versus The Terminator: Death to the Future). He also fought H.G. Wells' Martians once. (Superman: War of the Worlds during the centenary of the Wells novel in 1998.)
Supervillains were also mostly a relatively late addition to the genre generally. (Which is one reason Superman's primary antagonist mostly wears a business suit or prison gray rather than a costume.) Superman's first decade or so was mostly spent dealing with gangsters, mad scientists, corrupt politicians, assorted profiteers, etc. And of course Nazi and Japanese infiltrators. (Clark got his draft notice, but failed the eye test due to accidentally reading the chart in the next room with his X-ray vision and so he was classified 4F.)
I think you're on to something, but there are a few twists that need explanation. Some decades ago, when I read quite a few fantasy novels, I eventually grew tired of the MWTRKHHAHHTBRBPFSTEHHDNKHITTP, and the peasant boy chosen by destiny to save the world, and all the other stuff. Then a friend recommended "A Game of Thrones", and he pointed out that it's different - more realistic in an important way, in that (almost) all main characters are nobility. No destiny is needed to give them a headstart in the race and to justify their special position in the Game. Arya Stark has Valyrian Steel (TM) because - wait for it - she got it from her family. Also, the dragons don't really play a role until pretty late. With such an obvious deviation from the formula, how did ASOIAF still become one of the defining fantasy series of the last decades?
Game of Thrones balances sUbv3rT1nG Exp3ctAt10Ns with standard fantasy tropes. You get both the magical dragon prince who is chosen to save the world with his super sword and cool wolf powers and also the magical dragon prince who gets his brains bashed by a giant cartoon hammer wielded by a drunk guy.
And it seems like the 'subverting expectations' part is achieved largely by mining real Middle Ages history, the best-recorded parts of which did consist of nobles and royals plotting to discredit/murder/incestuously mate with each other. Game of Thrones seems like it's a hybrid of fantasy and historical fiction where you keep the fantasy world but replace the quest tropes with somewhat more realistic geopolitics (I haven't read/watched it so this is just my badly informed impression).
Also, it just occurred to me that Joan of Arc is a real historical example of a teenage girl who doesn't know much about the world suddenly becoming the Chosen One and going on an epic quest to defeat the Dark Lord's armies (well the British).
>Game of Thrones seems like it's a hybrid of fantasy and historical fiction where you keep the fantasy world but replace the quest tropes with more somewhat more realistic geopolitics (I haven't read/watched it so this is just my badly informed impression).
No that is an exactly accurate description of what at least the first three books are about.
No, the geopolitics of A Song of Ice and Fire don't work at all. This is actually a case where the trite moral of a random Saturday Morning Cartoon is more accurate than the "gritty truth" - the Forces of Good can't be defeated by the Forces of Evil because the Forces of Evil aren't able to cooperate with each other.
George R. R. Martin's world is populated almost entirely by nobles whose most common go-to strategy is to double-cross whoever they happen to be working with at the time. In reality, nobles who act like that are very swiftly deposed.
That is, in fact, what we see happening. The bastardly stabparty mode of politics, in Westeros, is *less than a generation old*. The only betrayals in Robert's Rebellion were:
- The Mad King Aerys being Mad and a King
- The 'Late Lord Frey' showing up to the pivotal battle of the war only when it was already over and claiming to swear allegiance to the winning
- Tywin and Jaime Lannister turning on Aerys for the wrongs he'd done them personally and planned to do later
Plus Dishonorable Mentions for Castamere(, Rains of) and Cersei betraying her marriage vows and having incest babies instead. These are all (except Cersei) very mild examples and ones which are largely not held against the betrayers. (Cersei's is secret, which shields her from the consequences for a while, and also as the narrative makes *extremely* clear she's a complete idiot with delusions of grandeur, getting carried by her family despite her best efforts.)
It's only in the new era that people get this idea that perhaps they should be Machiavellian, and they are correspondingly quite bad at it with disastrous consequences for themselves and the country. With the exception of the (rot13)qbear naq ernpu plot where a couple of the shrewder nobles in the country agree to secretly plan a *slow* revenge and reveal it only to the extent necessary to keep their own families from fouling up the plan.
The MWTRKHHAHHTBRBPFSTEHHDNKHITTP works for most because it's the model of fairy stories. The miller's son? The youngest daughter of three? Cinderella? The poor but honest Jack and the Beanstalk? Where the moral, if any, is that "being kind and generous to the poor and outcast is what qualifies you to win" where the miller's son or the skivvy shares their last loaf of bread with the ugly beggarwoman, who turns out to be the powerful witch who sends them on the quest with the right instructions and weapons to win.
Yes, but the victim was a cloud giant nobleman who Jack's people were already presumptively at war with, which by the standards of the time made that a meritorious border skirmish.
I agree with you, but I’d argue that some of the pleasure of engaging with ASoIaF is that it *seems* like a more complex subversion at first, but is actually in a gradual process of turning into one of the more simplistic “underestimated messiah saves everybody from capital E Evil” stories, and it shows its hand pretty early.
There's a lot that's hard about it, but one thing GRRM has talked about is that he's committed to telling the story through the viewpoints of characters-- he doesn't believe in truth from an omniscient viewpoint-- and he's having trouble getting characters into place for the events he wants to have happen.
He also wrote himself into a corner from a pacing standpoint. The whole early three books are very “these are all preliminaries to the real war”, so if you are going to give that the proper respect it deserves you need to probably leave a trilogy just for that.
And if you are going to do that, then you need to start frog marching the characters into the right places and towards resolution and the reduction of viewpoints/characters in a middle “bridge” trilogy. Instead that middle bridge trilogy mostly opened up new storylines and new characters and broadened the world.
And what’s left is just too heavy a lift to get done the couple books he is shooting for. It’s too big a task.
Yeah, I read something by him where he was talking about having originally wanted a 5-year timeskip somewhere in the middle, but that there was so much that would happen during that timeskip that he'd have to spend so much time describing it that he might as well write it anyway, and that the collapsing of the timeline led to characters not being in the right place, or having experienced the right things. It sounded like he was trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle using rubber tongs and a time-delay.
Honestly the extent it slowly gets more typical is also the extent that it slowly gets worse. Everything that is good about the series really has nothing to do with the main plot, which is pretty shit.
I mean, we don't know how this ends - the show clearly isn't right. There is some capital E Evil, and there are some necessary messiahs to deal with it, but it doesn't look like ordinary politics is lining up to support them in their efforts. We already saw this with the pleas for aid to all five kings, where only Stannis answers - even with the destruction of the world at stake, since that will only arrive in a couple dozen months the normal intrigues don't even pause to consider whether they should help. (:galaxybrain: This is actually a parable about AI Safety.)
I think the actual ending (assuming we ever see it) is a story about how, even if there was a real, verifiable messiah and a threat that needed them to beat it, the world would not reward them and their story would be a tragedy. They would be used as a political prop at best and probably end up burned at the stake like Jeanne d'Arc for being inconvenient to those with temporal power.
I'm unclear whether the intended question here is "why is this structure so successful/popular/common" (which I think is what you answer?) Or "why is all fantasy like this?" which is how I read your framing, but which I think is manifestly untrue unless you define the genre tautologically.
Witty as usual; nicely written. Presumably just a rhetorical flourish, but I don't think it was remotely fair to say that Tolkien is the only creative person living in the 20th century...
There are quite a few authors who do write more diverse and interesting worlds; when not getting into public controversies over the women in his life, China Mieville used to write about sentient cacti, ant-headed artists and the like. Isekai stuff on the other hand is utterly miserable, in a “What If CS Lewis, but as a Sociopathic Nihilist?” way? And that’s without mentioning the LitRPG, surely the most wretched form of genre writing yet to exist.
I don't fully agree with you on Isekai. First because I don't honestly think it's like Lewis at all beyond being transported to another world. Of the Western options, I think it tracks more closely with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and that was a truly cynical piece of literature.
But second, there is just so, so much isekai out there that I don't think you can boil it all down to any one descriptor. The majority of it can probably be fairly described as soulless Dragon Quest fan fiction, but then you get stuff like No Game No Life which is an incredible burst of joy, or The Second Coming of Gluttony which actively uses the premise to give its protagonist tools to grow and to repair all of the bridges they burned on Earth.
I'm quite surprised at just how much romantic fantasy isekai there is out there, much of it also of the 'slow life' subcategory, where someone who had a bad end on Earth (often death by overwork) gets a second life in a fantasy world, and rather than saving the world, they end up settling down and finding, well, romance. I mean, they usually find some way to work 'magic' and 'adventurers' into the story, but it's not the focus of the story.
Yeah, a lot of the time the isekai aspect is basically just a hook to grab readers. The market dynamics of an industry driven by web novels means authors have to focus on getting you to pick up the first chapter of their story out of thousands of options, and apparently isekai is just the single most effective way to do that in Japan. So you end up getting a lot of stories that basically aren't even an isekai outside of mentioning it at the start, and maybe referencing it every now and then. Like, The Academy's Undercover Professor is really just a fantasy spy novel/comedy of errors, and pretty much the only consequence of the MC being reincarnated is that he uses names from Earth for his various pseudonyms like Morirarty or Machiavelli.
"The one thing I still don’t understand is why everyone has the same races. Why elves, dwarves, goblins, and sometimes drow?"
Some people like worldbuilding, and some people just want to tell a story.
N.K. Jemisin's worlds are super unique and popular. Brandon Sanderson's worlds are, too. There are fantasy writers who create something extremely new.
But both spend a lot of time worldbuilding to describe that world. What if you just want to tell a story using magic? You can import the generic fantasy world, tweak it to suit your purposes, and just go. Everyone understands the world so you can reference elements without explanation and people get it.
Generic magical fairy-adjacent people? Elves. Brutish, strong, tribal types? Orcs. One-and-done. Now tell your unique story.
That's what I did with my first novel because I didn't want to do huge amounts of worldbuilding. So I did Fantasy-Renaissance—tweaked the generic world to suit my unique story.
Between him, Joon Ha Lee, Ada Palmer, and Ann Leckie, to name only the few that came to mind immediately, we really are in the best age of speculative fiction there ever has been
I was looking for a new book to read and tried picking up a few inventive, highly recommended fantasy novels. It was exhausting. When I put down the Malazan Book of the Fallen after about 50 pages and picked up Fleischman is in Trouble instead, I couldn’t believe how much of a relief it was to read a book set in present day New York City where not every single aspect of society, history, politics, magic systems, etc had to be painstakingly explained over the course of hundreds of pages before the story would make any sense! (And the level of nuance you can convey with just tiny details like what street a character lives on or what style of eyewear they have when you’re writing about a society that is real and the reader knows about intimately is really remarkable...) I feel like this must be why even sort of creative fantasy stories are still usually set in some kind of vague medieval pastiche — it’s not easy to tell a story set in a truly exotic, novel, and detailed world and bring your readers with you if they’re actually going to enjoy themselves.
John Holbo wrote about exactly this issue just the other day on Crooked Timber - but his point is that it’s not just sci fi and fantasy that has the worldbuilding problem, since th same thing arises if you write about parts of the real world for readers that aren’t familiar with it. His blog post is about authors who seem to have learned the skill from good sci fi.
'"And the level of nuance you can convey with just tiny details like what street a character lives on or what style of eyewear they have when you’re writing about a society that is real and the reader knows about intimately is really remarkable"
That is indeed true, but the problem exists for me in literary fiction where I have no idea of the layout of New York City so no idea why *this* street rather than *that* street, or what this season's most hot fashion must-haves are so it goes right over my head why the character is noted as wearing glasses by Oompala La Loompala 😁
Meanwhile, drop me down in Morris's "The Well At The World's End" and I can make my way around.
Sanderson specifically overturns these tropes in Stormlight, where the story of a person gaining agency through effort, encounters with terror, and overcoming and integrating mental illness is the story of multiple characters. The progenitor civilization being advanced is not actually true, it's a story that people tell themselves from back when there were more frequent world resets and the people whose job it is to deal with that are surprised at how much better the civilization everyone lives in at finding out how things work is than any that has existed on the world thus far (there's a multiple progenitor world thing going on but that is mostly unhelpful to those concerned)
I love Sanderson and I think he bucks the fantasy trends so much I'm not even sure I would place late stormlight books in the genre. It's very clearly moving towards science fiction. Hell 1/3 of Rhythm of War is a ~mage~ scientist inventing the equivalent of anti matter.
All the cosmere stuff is going that way, as Arcanum Unbounded and this year's secret projects show. All of them so far are either fantasy sci fi hybrid extensions of fantasy books, or straight sci fi
Dune? Everyone in Dune is human. The Guild Navigators have turned themselves into something weird, but they're still considered human and don't match any of the standard fantasy races.
The Bene Gesserit are human only in the sense that they can interbreed with us, and that only because it's their whole project to breed humanity like dogs. And they're the *most* human of the strange factions. Tleilaxu? Pod people. Guild? Mermen who swim in spice gas. Ixians? Unclear but cyborgs. Mentats? Living computers with drug habits. Even the Swordmasters of Ginaz seem to be remarkably superhuman. As are the Fremen!
Everyone is *of human stock*, that's the signature feature of the universe. But by breeding and training humanity has been shaped into a dozen elite factions with superhuman powers no one else can replicate.
L Frank Baum, predating LOTR and pretty nakedly just writing books about silly fantasy creatures, did have one of his protagonists chosen King via sortition.
> As far as I know, this extremely basic idea (someone has to invent spells, but then anyone can use them) had never been tried before
This is canonically how the Harry Potter universe works, albeit without much explanation or exploration. Snape invents the Sectumsempra curse, writes it down in his potions book, and then Harry uses it two decades later just based on that description. There are similar hints, though not very fleshed out, about potions and other things working the same way. (There is a lot of fanfiction that explores this more.)
In D&D, a lot of spells have a set origin. For example, Aganazzar’s Scorcher is a spell invested by Aganazzar, whoever he was (there are lore books about this, I assume). You don't do this as a normal adventurer playing D&D, but that's because it's hard to balance and doesn't fit the pacing of a table top role playing game.
In Eragon, if my memory holds, spells are sentences and phrases in the Ancient language. While this does tie it back to an ancient civilization (they tied magic itself to their language), it also means that anyone who knows that language can casually invent new spells, which Eragon does throughout the series.
Yeah, this is a pretty wide swath, and I came to mention D&D as well: anything that is downstream of D&D tends to work like this. Sometimes there's a special bloodline or years of study to get to be the "anyone" who can cast spells, but that seems orthogonal to the basic idea?
I'm pretty sure in Harry Potter you still have to _be magical_ to use the spells, and _being magical_ is a heritable trait that only rarely shows up in people without the right bloodlines
I agree that Potter sort of uses this, but it doesn't explore it or follow it to any logical conclusion, and it's not really true that anyone can use spells (spells are quite hard, Dumbledore is a better wizard than the average first-year student because the average first-year student can't just Google "what are all the spells Dumbledore knows" and memorize them over a few days)
I haven't read the books, but at least pop-culture and movie perception is fairly clear that you have to be born with magical ability. Most people in the Harry Potter world are "muggles" and cannot use magic even if they learn the spells.
This is basic Vancian magic from the "Dying Earth" series. Many spells are prefixed by the name of the inventor. But "learning" the spell is tricky - you have to have the knowledge of the spell, and you have to have a certain amount of skill to even be able to learn it, and ultimately you go through a long process to cram a single instance of the thing into your brain, and then once you cast the spell it's gone from your brain, and you need to go through the long process again in order to cast it again.
They were really something. Sometimes I was rooting for the protagonist, and sometimes against, but I always wanted to turn the page and find out what happened next.
And I miss it in modern D&D! So much about being a wizard was hoarding power, using intimidation and bluff to prevent wasting your magic, having the foresight to prepare the right spells, and the creativity to make use of the spells you did have prepared.
Great post. Perhaps i'm unusual in this, but the very end of the LOTR movies brought on a depression in me when Frodo realized that he cannot go back to his quiet existence in the Shire after what he's seen and done.
If the main driver of one of fantasy's memes is akin to a lottery, then I wonder of there is also the lottery winners curse after the adventure is complete.
I wrote a short post about the onset of my depression courtesy of the LOTR.
I haven't read your post yet, but I've bookmarked it for later.
At a glance, though, I can certainly see the end of LOTR as depressing for that very reason. I don't read enough fantasy to know how often there's a "lottery winners curse."
The closest example I can think of (again, with my limited knowledge) is something I've noticed in a few other works, where the hero suffers some injury early in the story, and that injury is never fully healed. That of course happens to Frodo with the Nazgul blade. But I remember it happening to C. S. Lewis's character Ransom in his (Lewis's) "sci fi trilogy" (I believe it's called a "sci fi trilogy," but to me it rings more like fantasy). I suspect that the trope of a persistent injury probably has a long tradition in European/Western folklore. But again, I haven't read enough to know.
Brett Deveraux (acoup.blog) said in his series looking at LotR that Frodo's return is "one of the best descriptions of PTSD I have ever read".
Since Tolkien fought in WW1 and was open about how that had influenced his outlook - he was offended at the idea that his work was an allegory for WW2 e.g. Sauron as a metaphor for Hitler, but he affirmed that his experience in WW1 had influenced his work - Frodo's "the Shire has been saved, but not for me" is very likely a deliberate choice in that direction and not just a plot device to let him sail into the west.
It's interesting to me that Brett has also written that there's nothing in the ancient literature suggesting that anything like PTSD existed back then - so it could be a culture-bound snydrome in the general sense of the word, or "battle PTSD" could be a result of attributes of specifically modern warfare. The physical wound that never heals is very much an ancient thing (and a real thing, especially if you don't have modern medicine) but the concept of a mental wound that doesn't heal could be a modern take on it again coming from the fact that "battle PTSD" is a thing in the modern world.
My personal suspicion is that PTSD is largely the result of a betrayal of trust: "war is honorable and glorious", "we'll be home by Christmas", "we'll be greeted as liberators", "we're the good guys". ("Family members won't hurt you, so it's OK to take off your clothes.") And battle PTSD would occur less in societies that didn't rely on propaganda to motivate killing, didn't pretend that people don't have to make hard choices, and where people were closer to ground truth, as it were. Which isn't to say it couldn't happen, but that it's less likely.
Also that, in the absence of a modern theory of mind, PTSD might be characterized in other ways, such as possession by spirits.
And also, to put it in abstract terms, in societies with less surplus than we have, people who cease to be functional would be steered onto other, faster paths of resolution. So there'd be less of a data set to draw conclusions from, even adjusting for the size of the societies.
It's interesting because I've read what Devereaux and others have written about PTSD in pre-modern times and the consensus that "yeah, we really don't have any solid evidence for it" (a lot of pop history books will, indeed, cite the same handful of references to people being possessed or fighting ghosts or whatever) -- for literally millennia of human history, it seems like the standard refrain from our sources is something like "war kicks ass, we should do more of it." (See e.g. Bret Devereaux's commentary on Bertran de Born, who was very much in favor of war as a positive experience.)
But then, as Devereaux and others point out, the ancient or pre-modern writer whose works survive tends to be a military aristocrat, someone who was expected to do a lot of war in order to win glory, and who might even have a bunch of peasant levies around them to take the lion's share of the casualties. We don't see very much written from the perspective of the peasant whose house was burnt down, or the villagers put to death by a foraging party. (And indeed, Devereaux suggests in his commentary on ancient Sparta that the brutal treatment of children in the agoge resembled that of modern groups' treatment of child soldiers, resulting in deeply embedded psychological trauma that shows itself in Sparta's culture and foreign policy.)
It may be an oversimplification on my part but I do think a large share of military-related PTSD being recognized is that we just happen to have a lot of sources on ordinary folks, not just aristocrats -- we have Sassoon and Remarque and Tolkien -- and maybe future historians would be hard-pressed to say if anyone from these times experienced PTSD if they only had the memoirs of, say, Haig and Ludendorff.
I agree with the general point, about having limited and unbalanced sources. And I've read what Bret's written about it.
But I also think that if it were as prevalent then as now, even the sources we have would have mentioned it. And none of your examples really contradict what I was saying. Would peasant levies expect something different? Would the peasants on land an army passes through expect anything different? You read the series on foraging, right? "Harbinger" is a ominous word, and associates with "doom" for a reason.
We have I think a fair bit from Greece and Rome, and those societies didn't really do "peasant levies". A hoplite was a respectable middle-class citizen of the polis; if he's not the one who winds up writing down the story he's probably a neighbor and drinking buddy of the guy who is. Same for the Roman legions, I think.
And if you're going to invoke Remarque, you kind of have to throw in Junger. By WWI, things had changed to the point where PTSD was not rare, but neither was it close to universal. How much of that is down to changing human nature and how much to changing the nature of war, is going to be hard to tease out of the data.
One of the background themes in LOTR is that everything is going downhill. Each round has smaller bad guys and smaller good guys. Gondor, the greatest city of middle earth, was once just a military outpost.
I believe Tolkien was setting up the resurrection as a eucatastrophe, but not that he was intending to write about it directly.
I'll disagree with your post a bit. This is all obviously my opinion; I don't currently have a direct line to the Source of Universal Truth.
I don't think Frodo's depression is a result of losing relevance on a large scale. It's that he failed. After all the suffering on the long journey, at the end, he succumbed to the call of the ring. And succeeded in his mission through no immediate virtue of his own. (Yeah, people tell him that it was because, once upon a time, he had mercy and spared Gollum's life, but that's not what it feels like to Frodo now. Those people are just trying to lift his depression. They don't know.)
And sure, Frodo didn't really *do* anything bad with the ring. But he would have. He just didn't have time.
Everyone praising him, everyone celebrating him, all of that makes it worse. Even back in the Shire, where most people don't know and don't care about the details of his "adventure", he still sees them going about their lives unaware of the depths in their own souls. The prayer is "lead us not into temptation", because he was tempted and he gave in. And so would everyone else, and the only reason everyone else can be happy is that they don't know it. Not the way Frodo knows it.
I've read material based on Tolkien's letters that backs up your interpretation. Maybe not all the details, but that to a large extent, Frodo's suffering was because he blamed himself for succumbing to the Ring.
He's supposed to get healing in the West-- I wonder whether part of the healing will be getting shown convincingly that his succumbing to the Ring is part of a larger plan more than being reassured that his achievement was extraordinary, which it was. He held out against the ring for a long time, something that Gandalf and Galadriel didn't trust themselves to do.
I'm afraid I've got a negative gut reaction to the term "plan" used in this sort of context, but if I re-phrase it as "perspective", it's more palatable to me (and probably just the same thing when seen clearly). So yes, I think part of the healing would be from being able to see what happened from a wider angle, as it were. All the ways he could have failed and didn't, all the horrible things that could have befallen the world had he chosen differently, and against them all the single moment of failure may not seem as bad.
And there might also be virtue in being around others who *know* what he went through. Sam knows, Gandalf knows, Galadriel knows. I think the Valar would know. (And although it's AFAIK prevented by the metaphysics of the world, Boromir's spirit would know. I like to imagine them hanging out somewhere in the gardens. Maybe out on a boat, together, fishing, silently, occasionally passing the beer.)
And I think there's some inherent virtue in it being *over*. Finally, literally. Frodo doesn't have to keep trying any more. There was this bit from Tolkien that Deiseach linked, below, which I think nicely summarizes a problem that Frodo will no longer have to deal with.
> For finite judges of imperfect knowledge it must lead to the use of two different scales of 'morality'. To ourselves we must present the absolute ideal without compromise, for we do not know our own limits of natural strength (+grace), and if we do not aim at the highest we shall certainly fall short of the utmost that we could achieve. To others, in any case of which we know enough to make a judgement, we must apply a scale tempered by 'mercy': that is, since we can with good will do this without the bias inevitable in judgements of ourselves, we must estimate the limits of another's strength and weigh this against the force of particular circumstances.
IIRC, Boromir and Frodo will meet up again, since Frodo's going to Elf Heaven, but he'll eventually die and go to Human Heaven, where Boromir presumably is. The Undying Lands are called that because the Elves and Valar live there; there's nothing really special about the lands themselves.
While I share your negativity when it comes to the real world, Providence / the will of Eru is a fairly explicit part of Tolkien's world-building. At several points in the series it's heavily implied that Frodo's quest is either the plan of the Valar or of Ilúvatar.
I think it's an attempt to import a 4D perspective into a 3D world, and while the language used may be helpful for some people, it's anti-helpful for me (and presumably anyone else like me).
I think it would be healing for Frodo to see his story as part of a larger plan or a larger context. But he would be giving up something there, too — something about the his own autonomy and choices mattering in a crucial way. In the big picture, Frodo’s story and Gollum’s came together to destroy the Ring, and of course woven into each of their stories are many other
beings’ stories. So Frodo has to step back from seeing himself as the crucial figure, and more as part
of a tapestry. Kind of painful, even if it can be seen as spiritual growth. It’s a transition Gandalf seems to have gone thru before the story begins. He’s commanding and knows he’s a great wizard, but lacks personal vanity. Says to the steward of Minas Tirith, whose name I can’t remember, “I too am only a steward.”
But it *was* Frodo's choice that did matter, Frodo's and Bilbo's choices to be merciful to Gollum when they were faced with it.
They could have chosen otherwise, and nobody would have blamed them, and it would have (seemed to be) the prudent, sensible decision. The mysterious workings of fate and/or Providence don't take away from agency, they incorporate all choices (good and bad) into the final weaving:
"If you re-read all the passages dealing with Frodo and the Ring, I think you will see that not only was it quite impossible for him to surrender the Ring, in act or will, especially at its point of maximum power, but that this failure was adumbrated from far back. He was honoured because he had accepted the burden voluntarily, and had then done all that was within his utmost physical and mental strength to do. He (and the Cause) were saved – by Mercy : by the supreme value and efficacy of Pity and forgiveness of injury.
...There exists the possibility of being placed in positions beyond one's power. In which case (as I believe) salvation from ruin will depend on something apparently unconnected: the general sanctity (and humility and mercy) of the sacrificial person. I did not 'arrange' the deliverance in this case: it again follows the logic of the story. (Gollum had had his chance of repentance, and of returning generosity with love; and had fallen off the knife-edge.)"
"By chance, I have just had another letter regarding the failure of Frodo. Very few seem even to have observed it. But following the logic of the plot, it was clearly inevitable, as an event. And surely it is a more significant and real event than a mere 'fairy-story' ending in which the hero is indomitable? It is possible for the good, even the saintly, to be subjected to a power of evil which is too great for them to overcome – in themselves. In this case the cause (not the 'hero') was triumphant, because by the exercise of pity, mercy, and forgiveness of injury, a situation was produced in which all was redressed and disaster averted. Gandalf certainly foresaw this. See Vol. I p. 68-9 [1. "Pity? It was Pity that stayed [Bilbo's] hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity."]. Of course, he did not mean to say that one must be merciful, for it may prove useful later – it would not then be mercy or pity, which are only truly present when contrary to prudence. Not ours to plan! But we are assured that we must be ourselves extravagantly generous, if we are to hope for the extravagant generosity which the slightest easing of, or escape from, the consequences of our own follies and errors represents. And that mercy does sometimes occur in this life.'j"
"I do not think that Frodo's was a moral failure. At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum – impossible, I should have said, for any one to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when starved and exhausted. Frodo had done what he could and spent himself completely (as an instrument of Providence) and had produced a situation in which the object of his quest could be achieved. His humility (with which he began) and his sufferings were justly rewarded by the highest honour; and his exercise of patience and mercy towards Gollum gained him Mercy: his failure was redressed."
"So Frodo has to step back from seeing himself as the crucial figure, and more as part of a tapestry."
We get that in the book, though, with Sam talking about being part of a story:
"“I don’t like anything here at all,” said Frodo, “Step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.”
“Yes, that’s so,” said Sam. “And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventure, as I used to call them.
I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.
Folk just seem to have landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten.
We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in. I wonder what sort of tale we fallen into?"
“What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven't we?' he said. 'I wish I could hear it told. Do you think they'll say: Now comes the story of Nine-fingered Frodo and the ring of Doom? And then everyone will hush, like we did, when in Rivendell they told us the tale of Beren One-hand and the Great Jewel. I wish I could hear it! And I wonder how it will go on after our part.”
Yes, I agree with what Tolkien is saying, and you too. It was clear long before Frodo got to Mt Doom that he would not be able to destroy the ring. He could barely stand to let Sam wear it for a little while a few days before he got to the Crack of Doom. And I get that being saved from himself by Gollum was the only way the ring could be destroyed, and that Gollum's being alive was the result of a good quality of Frodo's, mercy. So in a way Frodo's own goodness saved him. Still, looking at the story from Frodo's point of view, it seems like the only someone could take on delivering the ring to the fire would be to swear to themself that they will never, never give in to it no matter how badly they want to. You can't say to yourself, "well I will try, but if the temptation is too powerful then I will just have to give in" -- because taking that point of view would never sustain you. So at the end Frodo broke an oath he made to himself, and I don't think there's a way to back things up and say to yourself, "well, if I had understood the situation better, I would have realized I'd never be able to throw the ring into the Crack of Doom, so it's OK that I couldn't keep an oath I made at I time when I was very naive."
I don’t think Frodo’s condition at the end of LOTR is an inability to enjoy the sweet little Shire after all the adventures he’s had and the wonders he’s see he’s seen, and that he leaves with the elves so he can again live in a world of magic and wonder. Seems to me the book makes clear that Frodo was damaged by what he had been through. He lost more than a ring finger in the course of being the Ring -bearer. . He is, for instance, sick on the anniversary of various ring-related events. His eyes are sad, not bored. I think the elves are hospice.
Lots of fantasy series have gnolls, which are sentient hyenas. Tabaxi too, sentient cats. In D&D there are the aarakocra, bird people. The next version of D&D is introducing Aardlings, divine people that have the head of an animal and the body of a human, and have the ability to grow wings. There are dozens more beyond that - https://www.dndbeyond.com/races. And that's all just in D&D!
I can think of lots of fantasy series with lots of different unique species. In Mother of Learning, there's a race of sentient wasps that the main character has to negotiate with. In The Wandering Inn, there's a race of people who are only a few inches tall. It's all out there.
Once you have elves and dwarves and goblins, it's easy to keep throwing in even more races. I don't think D&D or the D&D-esque stories would have tabaxi and so forth if they didn't have elves and dwarves to begin with.
This makes me reflect a good deal on Stephen R. Donaldson's 'Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever', which basically is a ten book consideration of the nature of power itself.
It does avoid the tolkienism of dwarves/elves, having rather several cultures of humans plus giants each with different magical-ish skills. On the other hand, the plot of the whole series revolves around a ring, so your mileage my vary.
It's not for the faint of heart, though. Covenant is something of an antihero and about half the people I know who have tried to read the series gave up in the first book, disgusted with him.
The use of language is also very weird-- Donaldson uses obscure words with no clues about what they mean.
It was an effort at a fantasy world with a very different feel from Tolkien. The art in it is modern in the sense of free verse for the poetry and what I think is atonal music.
Wellll... the first trilogy is very much *influenced* by Tolkien. They don't have Dwarves and Elves - but they do have people who work with wood and people who work with stone, magically. They don't have the Rohirrim, but they do have people who live with and are devoted to magical horses. The Council of Lords is that world's version of wizards.
It is, however, *very* much different in its exploration of power. Donaldson comes to a somewhat similar proposition as Tolkien about power corrupting, but he works it out in a hugely different way: the innocent are weak, only the guilty can wield power. So to save the innocent, the guilty may have to do terrible things. This doesn't excuse them, it doesn't make the terrible things not-terrible, but it's the price of power.
I did like the entire series, even if it was very very much built on a different philosophy base. And as Nancy says, it expanded my vocabulary immensely.
I ran out of interest long about book seven or so. One thing I especially liked for unclear reasons was, in the second trilogy, the world is going through extreme phases-- drought, flood, rapid plant growth (which enables people to survive the other phases, but is still bad-- the plants are screaming, some more I don't remember)-- the sun is a different color for each phase. It was neat that it wasn't the sun changing, it was something happening in earth's atmosphere. Maybe I liked it because it showed a sense of proportion.
The last four books went in an odd direction, very feminist (of a sort). It was clear Donaldson had changed his mind about several elements since the last book twenty years before.
Some of that was good, some not so good. It does complete the story and wrap it all up, but he never really deals with the character of the Creator who he introduced in the first book but never really developed. I think he found a creator being too much and not enough for what he wanted to do, which was (in part) an examination of moral choices and belief. If there's a powerful god-being outside it all, then the stakes aren't that high as he can intervene and work it out (I disagree there, but whatever) and if the creator is powerless, then he's not really doing anything for the story. Lord Foul as the shadow-side of our humanity is something he can work with, but not a Creator.
I agree with both Nancy and Deiseach on this... and Deiseach makes a good point about human stand-ins for elves and dwarves (plus the forests being alive and having the forestals, which is clearly somewhat derivative of Ents).
I really like the whole ten book series, but it does, I think, come down to being pretty derivative with a twist of Tolkein, a la Scott's point.
I may have been a tiny bit in love with Lord Mhoram, who really is a very appealing character for his sense of justice, morality, and compassion 😁
The Giants are great creations, too; I dare anyone not to tear up about Saltheart Foamfollower (though Donaldson does overdo it on the elevated language front there, which doesn't always come off as well as one might wish).
Also, it was very effective while, after a period of sterility, Giant children are get boon, everyone is celebrating, and the children turn out to be monsters.
Yeah, before GRRM, Donaldson made a habit of "oh, you think things can't get worse? hold my beer! oh, you think there's going to be good times? you sweet summer child!"
I'd say that it's actually Donaldson's giants and not the Woodhelvenin tree-mages who actually resemble Tolkien's elves more than superficially. A long-lived and slow-reproducing non-human race, few in number but great in power, they are allied to the humans against the forces of evil. The first ones we meet are exiles from a magic land across the sea which is also home to the godlike beings who occasionally intervened in history to avert catastrophe or the triumph of evil. Their skills at sailing at arms, and certain types of crafting eclipses human achievement; despite being good guys they have a history of berserk/excessive violence, and they are the most celebrated singers in the Land.
Interestingly, I thought Donaldson meant the Elohim to be the Elves stand-ins (and really Stephen, you couldn't have hit us over the head *harder* with that anvil about god-analogues?)
The Giants' special relationship with stone was more a Dwarvish trait, though I think they were not meant to be copies of any other species. I think they would appreciate and agree with Gimli's speech to Legolas:
"You have not seen, so I forgive your jest," said Gimli. "but you speak like a fool. Do you think those halls are fair, where your King dwells under the hill in Mirkwood, and Dwarves helped making long ago? They are but hovels compared with caverns I have seen here: immeasurable halls, filled with an everlasting music of water that tinkles into pools, as fair as Kheled-zâram in the starlight."
"And, Legolas, When the torches are kindled and the men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! then, Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains as fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities, such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come. And plink! a silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in the grotto of the sea. Then evening comes: they fade and twinkle out; the torches pass on into another chamber and another dream. There is a chamber, Legolas; hall opening out of hall, dome after dome, stairs beyond stairs; and still the winding paths lead on into the mountains' heart. Caves! The Caverns of Helm's Deep! Happy was the chance that drove me there! It makes me weep to leave them!"
"No you don't understand," said Gimli, "No dwarf could be unmoved by such loveliness. None of Durin's race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We would tend these glades of flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap - a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day - so we could work, and as the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. And lights, Legolas! We should make lights, such lamps as once shone in Khazad-Dûm; and when we wished we would drive away the night that has lain there since the hills were made; and when we desired rest, we would let the night return."
"The one thing I still don’t understand is why everyone has the same races. Why elves, dwarves, goblins, and sometimes drow? Why not sentient dogs, or dolphins, or bee-people living in hive-cities..."
Elf, dwarf and goblin variants all seem 'organic' and natural, partly because they're familiar from previous fantasy and myth, and partly because they all relatively subtle variations on normal humans. A fantasy setting can bear small additions like bird-people, before seeming too unnatural, but too many more novel additions (e.g. singing purple ants) can seem artificial and arbitrary, and take you out of the fantasy. One can end up wondering 'why did the author decide that the world is inhabited by singing purple ants in particular?', rather than just automatically accepting the world as a given.
To riff on this, I think that part of what's happening is that we are collectively doing a categorization or lumping of things that are actually meant to be distinct.
One could look at the Eldar (Tolkien), Eldar (Warhammer), Drow, Alfar, Christmas elves, Aes Sidhe, Nymphs, Kitsune, and round them all off as "elves, basically." Skinny folk who do magic and seem uncanny, basically. A huge amount of resolution is lost when we casually grant this lumping-together. What do the WH40K Eldar and the Tolkien Eldar have in common beyond pointy ears, really? (Trick question, Tolkien never states in the books that his elves have pointy ears.)
Even mysterious never-actually-shown progenitor-races who have left behind artifacts and architecture give off an elf vibe ... but isn't this us projecting our trope awareness onto an intentional blank spot in the lore?
Sometimes authors will intentionally muss the tropes up, like with Robert Jordan's Ogier, who are large and monstrous in appearance, but are in fact long-lived and wise nature-mages, thus breaking your expectation enough that you don't automatically classify them as elves, despite the fact that they borrow heavily from fantasy elf tropes.
Something I always found interesting about this is that Tolkien, the father of the modern Fantasy genre, actually doesn't tell this story in LoTR.
Or rather, he does tell this story, but he deliberately makes it a secondary plot. The story of the lost prince who finds himself and rises to meet his grand destiny does happen in LoTR - to Aragorn. Aragorn has the destined bloodline. Aragorn finds himself through a difficult journey. Aragorn becomes the king of men. Aragorn marries the elven princess. None of this ever happens to Frodo, our main protagonist. And Frodo's story is not much like the fantasy stories described here at all.
Frodo isn't chosen by some grand destiny in his bloodline, he's present at the council by circumstance and volunteers. When Frodo enters the forbidden forest to discover its secrets, he doesn't go on a self-actualizing journey where he finds himself, he's wounded by the monsters and never recovers. Frodo does carry The Lost Magic of the Ancient Civilization, but the ring is not an equalizer that allows him to battle the dark lord. It's a terrible burden that destroys his life and offers nothing in return. There is no moment of self-discovery or godlike power. He is offered no happily ever after. Frodo is an ordinary person without a destiny who sacrifices everything for the sake of what's good.
The hobbits are a lot of things, but they are not classic fantasy heroes. The hobbits can never become rulers of men, they will never be great warriors or kings even hypothetically. They don't have magical blood and aren't fated to accomplish anything in particular. Frodo and Sam remain fairly ordinary people throughout the story, who's primary strength is merely that they stepped up to sacrifice themselves in order to do an extremely difficult thing. They make a sacrifice that few of us could ever imagine deliberately making. Aragorn is going through his reluctant hero arc and discovering the power and strength that were always inside him, while our main characters are pushing through a much more painful, grounded story that we know from the start cannot end well for them.
And then Aragorn's story is explicitly spelled out in the text as being less important than Frodo's. Aragorn's big conclusion isn't fighting the Dark Lord himself, it's choosing to divert the Dark Lord away from Frodo. "My friends, you bow to no one" says the destined king of men as he kneels before the little hobbits. The ordinary people who make the simple choice to resist evil are far more important than the epic heroes in their perfect fantasy plot.
Tolkien invented a lot of what we now consider modern fantasy - but he invented it as background. The Perfect Fantasy Story about the fated protagonist isn't the focus. We associate Tolkien's work so strongly with fantasy as a genre that it's easy to forget how LoTR itself is effectively a subversion of these classic tropes.
Peter Jackson's Aragorn is a reluctant hero (because Jackson doesn't get nobility as a character trait and has to replace it with something else in all the characters where that's a factor), but Tolkien's isn't. He does get the "raised in obscurity then learns he's the heir to a special bloodline" bit. But there's no immediate glory, and also no Refusal of the Call, just assumption of responsibility and a life of of hopeless work fighting and working against the enemies who dispossessed his people a thousand years earlier.
He's technically the heir to the throne, but for most of his life that's about as likely to get him a throne as someone having documentation that he's the heir of Charlemagne. His immediate job isn't to save the world or win the kingdom. The expectation is that, like the last many members of his hereditary line he'll spend a short life doing hard things with no recognition, while leading a small band of like-minded fighters.
It's only after decades of that that the prospect of anything changing appears. As you note, Aragorn fully understands that he's not the central hero of the drama, and spends a lot of that period harrying and presenting himself as a distraction to the enemy to enable the real mission (which he's not on) to go forward, or assisting with important but secondary goals like rescuing Hobbits or helping preserve Rohan.
Then he does become king and marry the fairy princess after all. But "plucked out of obscurity for a lifetime of thankless hidden heroism, culminating in leading a doomed diversionary force far from the site of the main confrontation" isn't exactly a cliched hero's journey.
And contra Hollywood expectations, he never visibly questions what he has to do whether it's working alone in the dark for suspicious villagers or leading armies, nor does he doubt his right and intention to rule if the occasion comes up. His doubts focus on his judgment and ability to make the correct choices, not his overall mission. His story isn't really one of self-discovery, but of accepting duty and responsibility when it comes to him. And of a hero with a full complement of royal blood and destiny deliberately choosing to play a supporting role.
Sincere sacrifice and a life of duty as themes tend to get missed by critics and, interestingly, adaptors. I suspect it’s a fear of being thought naive.
Another point here is that Frodo, at the end, fails in his resolve. He carries the burden to the end but he is not finally capable of completing the mission of his own volition. The Ring is ultimately destroyed through conflict between two victims of its own corruption, and Frodo has to live with the knowledge that it was within him to have ended up another Gollum.
Right - it's not by accident that the moment of Frodo's fall in Mount Doom occurs in the same moment as any other fantasy would have the triumphant self-actualization where the hero finally understands his own power. If Frodo were Brin Ohmsford or Harry Potter or a D&D character, Mount Doom would be the moment where everything comes together - he'd finally understand his purpose and his greatness and he'd use this new understanding to defeat the dark lord.
But LoTR isn't actually that kind of fantasy story. And so this moment that might be heroic is instead played as horror. Frodo choosing to wield The Lost Magic Of The Ancient Peoples and Realize His True Destiny is understood by the audience to be the moment when all our hopes fail. The worst thing Frodo can do for Middle Earth is to try to be like Aragorn, to be a creature of power instead of relying on the simple goodness he's known since the shire.
The Ring itself is all about doing this to different characters in different ways. No matter who holds it, the promise of the one ring is always that it will turn you into The Grand Hero with The Epic Destiny Who Will Grow Through Their Challenges To Reshape The World. The goodness of characters in LoTR is measured not in the strength to accept that destiny, but in the will to reject it as a lie. Hobbits resist the ring because they're simple, wholesome creatures who don't want to be epic fantasy heroes. and the message is that the real victory comes through the struggle and sacrifice of ordinary people who must always remain ordinary.
Isildur even *was* the epic hero who overcame an escalating series of challenges and loss to defeat the Dark Lord in direct confrontation and leave Mordor as the victorious High King. And taking the Ring ensured that his victory remained incomplete, and his life ended.
And that last was probably for the best, because one can only imagine what the Kingdoms in Exile would have become if Isildur had gotten all the way home with it. The Witch-King would have been a distant second to a descendant of Elros corrupted and made a wraith by the One itself. By the time Sauron recoalesced it would mostly have just been a change of administration.
Oh, indeed Tolkien wasn't writing a conventional hero in Frodo. From a 1944 letter to his son Christopher:
"Cert. Sam is the most closely drawn character, the successor to Bilbo of the first book, the genuine hobbit. Frodo is not so interesting, because he has to be highminded, and has (as it were) a vocation. The book will prob. end up with Sam. Frodo will naturally become too ennobled and rarefied by the achievement of the great Quest, and will pass West with all the great figures; but S. will settle down to the Shire and gardens and inns. C. Williams who is reading it all says the great thing is that its centre is not in strife and war and heroism (though they are understood and depicted) but in freedom, peace, ordinary life and good liking. Yet he agrees that these very things require the existence of a great world outside the Shire – lest they should grow stale by custom and turn into the humdrum."
1954 letter:
"Frodo is not intended to be another Bilbo. Though his opening style is not wholly un-kin. But he is rather a study of a hobbit broken by a burden of fear and horror — broken down, and in the end made into something quite different. None of the hobbits come out of it in pure Shire-fashion. They wouldn't. But you have got Samwise Gamwichy (or Gamgee)."
Letters of 1956:
"Frodo was in such a position: an apparently complete trap: a person of greater native power could probably never have resisted the Ring's lure to power so long; a person of less power could not hope to resist it in the final decision. (Already Frodo had been unwilling to harm the Ring before he set out, and was incapable of surrendering it to Sam.)
The Quest ⁂ was bound to fail as a piece of world-plan, and also was bound to end in disaster as the story of humble Frodo's development to the 'noble', his sanctification. Fail it would and did as far as Frodo considered alone was concerned. He 'apostatized' – and I have had one savage letter, crying out that he shd. have been executed as a traitor, not honoured. Believe me, it was not until I read this that I had myself any idea how 'topical' such a situation might appear. It arose naturally from my 'plot' conceived in main outline in 1936.1 I did not foresee that before the tale was published we should enter a dark age in which the technique of torture and disruption of personality would rival that of Mordor and the Ring and present us with the practical problem of honest men of good will broken down into apostates and traitors."
"If you re-read all the passages dealing with Frodo and the Ring, I think you will see that not only was it quite impossible for him to surrender the Ring, in act or will, especially at its point of maximum power, but that this failure was adumbrated from far back. He was honoured because he had accepted the burden voluntarily, and had then done all that was within his utmost physical and mental strength to do. He (and the Cause) were saved – by Mercy : by the supreme value and efficacy of Pity and forgiveness of injury.
...No, Frodo 'failed'. It is possible that once the ring was destroyed he had little recollection of the last scene. But one must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however 'good'; and the Writer of the Story is not one of us."
"By chance, I have just had another letter regarding the failure of Frodo. Very few seem even to have observed it. But following the logic of the plot, it was clearly inevitable, as an event. And surely it is a more significant and real event than a mere 'fairy-story' ending in which the hero is indomitable? It is possible for the good, even the saintly, to be subjected to a power of evil which is too great for them to overcome – in themselves. In this case the cause (not the 'hero') was triumphant, because by the exercise of pity, mercy, and forgiveness of injury, a situation was produced in which all was redressed and disaster averted. Gandalf certainly foresaw this. See Vol. I p. 68-9. Of course, he did not mean to say that one must be merciful, for it may prove useful later – it would not then be mercy or pity, which are only truly present when contrary to prudence. Not ours to plan ! But we are assured that we must be ourselves extravagantly generous, if we are to hope for the extravagant generosity which the slightest easing of, or escape from, the consequences of our own follies and errors represents. And that mercy does sometimes occur in this life.
Frodo deserved all honour because he spent every drop of his power of will and body, and that was just sufficient to bring him to the destined point, and no further. Few others, possibly no others of his time, would have got so far. The Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself), 'that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named' (as one critic has said). See Vol. I p. 65. A third (the only other) commentator on the point some months ago reviled Frodo as a scoundrel (who should have been hung and not honoured), and me too. It seems sad and strange that, in this evil time when daily people of good will are tortured, 'brainwashed', and broken, anyone could be so fiercely simpleminded and self righteous."
Letter of 1963:
"Very few (indeed so far as letters go only you and one other) have observed or commented on Frodo's 'failure'. It is a very important point.
From the point of view of the storyteller the events on Mt Doom proceed simply from the logic of the tale up to that time. They were not deliberately worked up to nor foreseen until they occurred. But, for one thing, it became at last quite clear that Frodo after all that had happened would be incapable of voluntarily destroying the Ring. Reflecting on the solution after it was arrived at (as a mere event) I feel that it is central to the whole 'theory' of true nobility and heroism that is presented.
Frodo indeed 'failed' as a hero, as conceived by simple minds: he did not endure to the end; he gave in, ratted. I do not say 'simple minds' with contempt: they often see with clarity the simple truth and the absolute ideal to which effort must be directed, even if it is unattainable. Their weakness, however, is twofold. They do not perceive the complexity of any given situation in Time, in which an absolute ideal is enmeshed. They tend to forget that strange element in the World that we call Pity or Mercy, which is also an absolute requirement in moral judgement (since it is present in the Divine nature). In its highest exercise it belongs to God. For finite judges of imperfect knowledge it must lead to the use of two different scales of 'morality'. To ourselves we must present the absolute ideal without compromise, for we do not know our own limits of natural strength (+grace), and if we do not aim at the highest we shall certainly fall short of the utmost that we could achieve. To others, in any case of which we know enough to make a judgement, we must apply a scale tempered by 'mercy': that is, since we can with good will do this without the bias inevitable in judgements of ourselves, we must estimate the limits of another's strength and weigh this against the force of particular circumstances.
I do not think that Frodo's was a moral failure. At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum – impossible, I should have said, for any one to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when starved and exhausted. Frodo had done what he could and spent himself completely (as an instrument of Providence) and had produced a situation in which the object of his quest could be achieved. His humility (with which he began) and his sufferings were justly rewarded by the highest honour; and his exercise of patience and mercy towards Gollum gained him Mercy: his failure was redressed."
One thing that I don't remember seeing Tolkien write about is why Sam, after Rosie died, chose to sail West instead of remaining with his children, and his grandchildren not yet past their tweens. He had the right as a ringbearer, but he wasn't wounded by it the way Frodo was, or stretched like Bilbo.
(He couldn't even be sure Frodo was still alive given their respective ages. Especially if the representations to the Numenoreans, that mortals in Aman would weary faster in its light, were true.)
It's the sort of choice that seems poetic in the immediate glow of Frodo's departure. But decades later, after making a life in the Shire-- one a lot less solitary and eccentric than Bilbo's: patriarch of a large clan plus Mayor for almost fifty years-- it seems as if it would feel like a rejection to those left behind that he would want to leave them forever, in the footsteps of someone none of them remembered.
Sam is also wounded, if less extremely than Frodo, we must remember: he too went to Mordor, he too suffered privations, and he too was a Ring-bearer and tempted (however fleetingly) by the Ring. So he too has his own painful memories and changed character.
After his long life, to find healing and then natural death (which would not be long in coming) in Valinor is the final ending of the entire journey. His wife had died, which I think is part of his reason for leaving; he didn't have long left either, and his family were all settled and living their own lives (and had moved away). It's not a rejection, it's the final stroke of the pen to the last word of "The End":
1482
Death of Mistress Rose, wife of Master Samwise, on Mid-year's Day. On September 22 Master Samwise rides out from Bag End. He comes to the Tower Hills, and is last seen by Elanor, to whom he gives the Red Book afterwards kept by the Fairbairns. Among them the tradition is handed down from Elanor that Samwise passed the Towers, and went to the Grey Havens. and passed over Sea, last of the Ring-bearers.
Merry and Pippin too leave the Shire when their own ends come:
1484
In the spring of the year a message came from Rohan to Buckland that King Éomer wished to see Master Holdwine once again. Meriadoc was then old (102) but still hale. He took counsel with his friend the Thain, and soon after they handed over their goods and offices to their sons and rode away over the Sarn Ford, and they were not seen again in the Shire. It was heard after that Master Meriadoc came to Edoras and was with King Éomer before he died in that autumn. Then he and Thain Peregrin went to Gondor and passed what short years were left to them in that realm, until they died and were laid in Rath Dínen among the great of Gondor.
1541
In this year on March 1st came at last the Passing of King Elessar. It is said that the beds of Meriadoc and Peregrin were set beside the bed of the great king. Then Legolas built a grey ship in Ithilien, and sailed down Anduin and so over Sea; and with him, it is said, went Gimli the Dwarf. And when that ship passed an end was come in the Middle-earth of the Fellowship of the Ring.
I'd look at it the other way. Sam's journey to the West is an indication that that's what he needed to do, and that the things he went through had a deeper effect on him than might be apparent from the surface.
He saw, up close, what the ring did to Frodo, one of the people he knows best, one of the best people he knows. He carried the ring himself, for a short time. He knows what it would have done to him, if he'd carried it longer. And apparently that knowledge was enough that he couldn't live completely happily, ever after. He needed to seek out gardens of healing beyond the world's end. Empirically, the love of those he left behind wasn't enough. What would have happened to him if he'd stayed, and endured longer to avoid hurting the people in his life? I don't know, but given the story Tolkien was telling, I think Sam made the right choice at the right time, and to delay longer would have caused more harm than it would have done good.
So you're saying you'll be writing more longer-form fiction? Excellent, it's always a pleasure.
I have this strong suspicion that, if fantasy indeed fulfills a certain psychological need (seems pretty plausible, Argument from Fictional Evidence and all that)...Cultures Very Different From Our Own should have radically different stories. Not talking so much about differences in history, religion, geography, whatever, although those of course play a part. I'm thinking more that, the shared psychological needs all humans have...if those get filled in other ways, stories won't have to scratch those itches, and thus won't find traction. What kinds of stories would a truly post-material scarcity society crave?
Conversely, exacerbating those needs will raise the salience of fictional cures. It feels like today's modern world specifically encourages agentic fantasies, with a listless populace continually coming unmoored from traditional paths towards meaning and milestones of life achivement. Dovetails with infantilization, the perpetuation of adolescence beyond all reasonable limits. Stories let one grow up vicariously...one could cynically claim that's the whole point, to keep people narrowly satiated with the shadow of competence. But it's probably just that successful art reads the room correctly, intuits the missing moods of modernity and seeks to fill such needs.
-also, I think Project Lawful is quite good, once one gets past all the academics...but maybe that's because it's not a typical cool-fantasy isekai? Being self-aware or genre-savvy is hardly novel at this point, yet it remains effective if done well.
Indeed, the Wuxia genre (martial arts fantasy within Chinese cultural sphere) has few overlapping tropes with LoTR. No races, no classes, few magical creatures. This setting also enables characters where luck + a good heart is predominant (Duan Yu), talent is predominant (Yang Guo), hard work is predominant (Guo Jing), and cunning is predominant (Wei Xiao Bao). The closest analog to magic is "inner force" (nei gong), but it's more like a prerequisite for higher level martial arts than something that a person would choose to specialize in.
(One exception: Duan Yu managed to specialize in "inner force" skills, because he was actually a pacifist who refused to learn any moves that would hurt people, but due to a series of fortuitous circumstances, he ended up with more "inner force" than anyone could realistically achieve, and ended up being the only person who could learn a skill that can cast serious DPS without knowing how to throw a punch, so perhaps he was the first and only "mage" in the Wuxia genre.)
Jin Yong doesn’t because he’s writing what we’d call low fantasy, but look at the pulp guys like Huanzhulouzhu or at contemporaries like Gu Long who wrote less down to earth and more fantastical stories
Point taken. Would you then consider "Xian Xia" to be high fantasy? Likewise, that genre has many shared elements (typically a buddhism-inspired celestrial hierarchy, afterlife, etc.) that works in a similar genre tend not to deviate from, yet is very different from LoTR.
Yes, I’d consider Xian Xia to be a good close analogue to high fantasy and agree that it is similarly formulaic. Ditto for the online spinoff of the ‘cultivation’ genre and LitRPGs, which seem to me to be an attempt to remove everything extraneous to the formulaic core (and which I find completely unreadable as a result)
> It feels like today's modern world specifically encourages agentic fantasies, with a listless populace continually coming unmoored from traditional paths towards meaning and milestones of life achivement. Dovetails with infantilization, the perpetuation of adolescence beyond all reasonable limits.
Yeah, this feels very true to me. It may connect to the prevalence of, if not literally apocalyptic, then at least high-stakes messaging. The world is dying, people are suffering, society is collapsing, evil is taking root, and YOU, yes you, can stop it, if you just retweet the right memes and chant the right slogans at the right protests. Clap loud enough, and the fairies will be saved!
It is convenient to use elves, dwarves and goblins (or orcs) because they are off-the-shelf. The reader knows what they are, and you don't have to explain them. And readers, especially young readers, do like to find some familiar bits in a novel.
Perhaps one reason why they are well-known is that they are similar enough to humans to be playable in role-playing systems. It's much harder to integrate a player who plays a fairy or a demon.
Apart from that, I don't think elves, dwarves and goblins are really so over-represented. I just mentally went through some of my favorite classic fantasy novels. The Belgariad Saga by Eddings features neither elves nor dwarves, but dryads and fenlings. The Wheel of Time features Ogiers, but no dwarves and elves. The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams features elves (Sithi and Norns), but no dwarves, and instead Qanuc. Sanderson features all kind of creatures (Warbreaker has literally a god as a main protagonist), but elves and dwarves don't stick out to me.
Perhaps this is because I have focused on pretty long books which can afford to introduce their characters. In novellas, it may be more convenient to let the party meet Archetype Dwarf #3 without much explanation.
"It's harder to integrate a player who plays a fairy or a demon."
Well, unless every player is a fairy or demon, as in some White Wolf settings, or the particular nonhuman isn't any more nonhuman than most Star Trek aliens. But "group of basically human-like creatures plus one creature very different from humans" can certainly get weird in a hurry.
I really wish there were more fantasy stories where the greater enemy was societal trends or whatever, and there aren't Secret Artifacts of Specialness (and their evil cousin, Ancient Prisons of Never-Mentioned-Until-Now Dark Lords) littered everywhere, but rather the special powers *and* the bad guys arise organically from that world.
Avatar and Korra are a good example of that. The powers are part of an established mythology; the Avatar is special, but not in a "it could be anybody, even you!" way. The villains are all politically motivated, not ancient monsters of evil (LoK season 2 aside).
I wonder if some of Piers Anthony's stories count? Most of the bad guys in the Apprentice Adept series are basically "members of the other political party" trying to preserve their wealth and power instead of Sauron-like figures.
(Disclaimer: This comment takes no position on the quality of Piers Anthony novels or to what extent they are Problematic.)
I don't think it's right to say everyone has the same races. Yeah, it's common to go "we have elves and dwarves but we call them alfs and eorfs", but I think it's also pretty common to throw in one unique race. "we have alfs, eorfs, urks, boblins and earimitans, 7 foot tall ears that eat sound" (I'm pretty sure I've even seen things with sentient dogs, bee people, and inch tall people, but I can't place it) Most just stop at adding one weird race, otherwise half the book is explaining how taverns work and not how special the hero is, and if you go too far in explaining how wasps visit dolphin cities the work stops being recognizably fantasy at all.
I think your Stories 1 and 2 explain a lot if not most things about (mainstream) post-Tolkien fantasy, including your final question about the same races.
Though Story 3 is more interesting to ponder, hence the thought-provoking post.
Although not strictly fantasy, David Brin's Uplift series deals with sentient chimpanzees and dolphins. Their sentience is developed by other sapient (in this case human) agents who become their 'patrons'. In the universe there are many patrons and many uplifted species, but sapient chimps and dolphins play important roles in many of his works.
This is one of the big reasons I like the Practical Guide to Evil - the free power you can pick up off the ground is intrinsically tied to having a lot of agency. Meanwhile a major theme throughout the book is that grand mages doing grand rituals is a lot less productive than rounding up everyone with a scrap of magical talent and training them to fireball in formation.
It's not clear to me that grand rituals are less effective than formation fireballing in PGtE - yes, Amadeus's reforms to the legions prioritize the second over the first, but I think that was a political decision. Amadeus didn't want close-knit clusters of noble or noble-trained mages to be a vital part of his army, because he didn't want his armies run by the nobles who were his political enemy, and those are pretty much the only way he could have gotten grand rituals.
What made his reforms so effective was a the other side of that political decision, that the factions he did support (orcs, primarily), meant he had much more effective infantry than previous legions, and most other countries.
Basically every time someone has the option to have grand mages doing grand rituals, they take it.
If you see a dollar lying on the ground, you pick it up. But purely political decisions don't explain Malicia being the first to ever actually conquer Callow despite every single Dread Emperor having tried at least once, most with much more power.
I haven't read that, but it sounds like the introduction of firearms - now you didn't need knights in armour, just conscript a bunch of working class guys and drill them in "the bullet goes in this end, aim at that spot and pull the trigger".
And that does indeed level the playing field - until someone invents planes and bombs that can be dropped on your guys with guns from a distance they can never shoot over, and then the race for Grand Rituals is back on 😁
Indeed, the big advantage of early firearms was not that they were more effective weapons than the alternatives, but that they were cheap to make and didn't require a lifetime of training to use effectively.
I think the main reason for common tropes like elves, goblins etc is the "common vernacular" dynamic, explaining new creatures takes a lot of space and pacing out of telling the story. However, I think the reasons these specific tropes have stuck is because they fit into the story structure.
Elves, for example, have a similar function as Ancient Progenitors: they provide strong artifacts and magic to the protagonists to receive, but are sufficiently alien / capricious / aloof that these things are still exclusive. Indeed, what might motivate elves to give the protag cool stuff is usually those traits that the everyman reader identifies with -- honesty, incorruptibility, loyalty, etc.
So, even if you want to make a race superficially different to elves, you still have strong reasons to make it fill the same story purpose (magic+aloof) to satisfy the fantasy, which in turn makes the race similar in a lot of ways anyway, and so you might as well give them pointy ears. Similarly, you're gonna want little rascal enemies that are easily defeated by the everyman folk hero protagonist but disgusting enough to justify violence towards them despite their weakness. Might as well make them green and call them goblins.
On another note: I think the romance of the Dalai Lama kind of related to all this. If you think about it, the idea of entirely deleting some kids' identity for religious purposes should be abhorrent to western sensibilities, and I wondered about this recently. A friend pointed out that this is probably superseded by the specific special ego self-discovery "what if I'm secretly the heir to the throne" fantasy which the Lama system kind of fits into.
Not only this, but also the character in the story most likely knows what Elves, Dwarves, Goblins etc. are. If I invent a race that is familiar to the characters in the story but not the reader, I have to find a way to perform an infodump about what the character knows to explain to the reader. If I use a race that the reader knows, I only need to explain anything that's not a part of the baseline concept.
I feel like the pattern of too much similarity is historical. The sorts of stuff I think of as recent fantasy, especially from the 2010s are things like litrpg, or cultivation that really are using different patterns in terms of races and how the things work - while at the same time keeping the random person being super powerful in a way that feels like they earn it.
I think this also could be why I find it hard to write fantasy well. I want a good explanation for why the random person is special that doesn't ultimately boil down to because it makes the plot work.
Those are basically just retellings of video games though; the ‘cultivation’ genre and litRPGs are both Let’s Plays for people who don’t have the literary competence to write Let’s Plays.
My firm belief, which I've held for quite a while, is that "Fantasy is optimized for storytelling"; removing parts of it makes it harder to tell stories. That one of the most common of those stories is "a person with no special ability or agency [...] save[ing] the world" follows naturally from that.
I would wager that the most well known Fantasy story today is actually Cinderella. There's no saving the world or even a real adventure. It just so happens that the rigid class structure resulting from traditional monarchy is very good at setting up dramatic romance between individuals of different social classes. It's a lot harder to set up a good romance with a Senator than it is with a Prince. The 'fence' (in Chesterton's metaphor) of monarchy is doing multiple jobs.
Fantasy works as a setting genre because the European Middle Ages-derived setting (culture and technology) contains a lot of obstacles that make for the meat of stories while containing the tools for the protagonist to overcome those obstacles. The most important of those are related to communication and transportation. For almost any story, the thought exercise of 'what would change if every character had a functional cell phone?' should give some interesting results (most Horror / Suspense type stories have tropes around removing the characters ability to communicate freely). If people in the setting can freely travel from point to point, it removes both a lot of the resource scarcity and a lot of the threat of monsters; the entire ideas of 'frontier' and 'wilderness' are tied to a lack of transportation.
One of the things I've observed about myself lately when I've watched/read 20th-century realistic fiction is just how much of every plot revolves around communication difficulties. It's particularly prominent in dramas and thriller/suspense-driven plots, but almost every story involves a problem that could be resolved instantly with a cellphone.
(I think I first noticed this when I watched season 1 of The Wire, where the focus on communication tech is explicit.)
I actually lived through the '80s and '90s. I remember the Before Times. But somehow my brain has rewired itself to not understand how two people in a modern urban setting could be unable to talk to each other.
I suspect older generations probably had similar experiences around other technologies. I think one of the purposes that 'standard' fantasy and preindustrial settings serve is as a sort of switching mechanism in the reader's mind, instantly shutting off all expectations of industrial technology. Fantasy offers the additional advantage of being able to selectively reintroduce some of our modern capabilities, but in an altered or limited way: only *some* people can fly, or communicate instantly across long distances, or make light without heat, or kill with the flick of a finger.
I haven't read any of the Wheel of Time this century, but as I recall, half the time I was yelling at the characters to just TALK WITH EACH OTHER DAMMIT.
That's a problem with a lot of detective stories, especially ones from the Golden Age; the character who Knows Something but doesn't tell anyone or go straight to the police, instead they drop hints, say they have to think about it, go home for the night and immediately get murdered.
Even when done well, it's annoying - just tell the cops! - and often it's not done well. Needless obfuscation.
Steven Brust's novels come up in this thread almost too often, but I once more feel the need to mention them. One of his latest, "Iorich", involves a version of this that actually mostly makes sense.
Our protagonist Vlad, on the run from the elf mafia, returns to the capital because he hears that the Empress has arrested one of his friends for practicing "Elder sorcery". Which is illegal and dangerous, but his friend is a high noble and everyone knew she did it and turned a blind eye, so something weird is going on, and it can't be so straightforward as merely distracting public attention from the military committing a few minor atrocities while putting down a small rebellion in a far corner of the empire. So Vlad shows up, and finds that no one is talking to one another. The imprisoned friend is pissed off and on a high horse of honor and refuses to lift a finger in her own defense, the Empress can't actually talk with her off the record, and all their mutual friends are getting quietly and intensely drunk because they can't find a way to resolve their duty as a friend with their duty to the Empire. Vlad is the only one who can fix this, because he's the only one with the combination of friendships with high nobility, disregard of what they all consider "honor", disregard for the Empire itself, and knowledge of the legal system (from the other side, from his time in the elf mafia).
Which is exactly what the conspiracy was counting on.
More like, get them to stop assuming they know what's going on in their friends' heads, and talk to each other. Forget anyone who isn't from Two Rivers.
Sometimes I've wondered what the story would be like if I only read one character's thread at a time. Would everyone else's actions seem inexplicable, simply because there's so much going on that I wouldn't know about?
That's the main reason I gave up on that series. Mid-way through (I think, don't quote me on this) volume seven (it might have been six or eight) the three main characters were all having prophetic dreams/visions/foreshadowing. Did any of them TALK to each other about that, and so avoid ten more books worth of difficulties? Of course not!
Even though they were meant to be best friends and kids from the same small village all thrust into this wide world of wars and magic and Big Bads, they didn't *talk* to each other about "guys, something weird has been happening to me recently" "wow, me too!"
At that point, it was obvious this was just to set up Plot Difficulties that would otherwise not happen, and there was no *reason* for them not to be confiding in each other at that point; indeed, that would have been the *natural* thing to do - who else can they trust or talk to about this? That's when I thumped the book down and went "No, forget it, this level of stupid is not sustainable".
They do a much better job at coming together in the end despite their conflicts than the people in the Game of Thrones TV show do in the face of the Night King's invasion. It actually turns out to be the "good guys" that start the Last Battle by raising a huge army to *invade the Blight*, not the massive invasion *from* the Blight that most people had expected - and once the fighting starts, pretty much every single human nation ends up helping out, with logistics greatly aided by the re-discovery of magic teleportation. (The one nation that actually fights on the side of the Dark One is the one nation that's sometimes mentioned but no viewpoint character has ever interacted with - every attempt by the Forsaken to acquire political power ended up being thwarted by the heroes except that one, because it was on the other side of the world and, unlike the Seanchan, never gave the heroes a reason to care about it.)
Even before the cell phone, thriller/suspense plots often used tropes about the phone connections being cut or otherwise subverted ("the call is coming from inside the house!").
Having used a setting where communication and transport is hard, the ability to communicate across long distances or travel more quickly becomes a significant power, and it's easy for authors to forget how powerful that is. It's why we joke about Gandalf just flying the ring to Mt. Doom on a giant eagle (yes, I know there are reasons this wouldn't work in universe).
Steven Brust's Dragaera series (begun in 1983, latest volume came out last week) is interesting in that most people the protagonist deals with can do that sort of thing by magic, not to mention teleportation and raising the dead-- but with enough complications that it's never a get out of plot free card.
The psychic communication in the book was in most ways better than 1983 phones. (And the fact that it could be used to instantly check the time kind of prefigures one of the unexpected side benefits of cell phones.) But while it still offers a few advantages, modern phones have mostly passed it.
Ooooh, thanks, I forgot that "Tsalmoth" was coming out! Stupid memory, I got it mixed up with a favorite restaurant that's re-opening on the 15th. Time to wander through some local bookstores to find it. :-)
Thanks! And, since you also seem to be a fan, can I ask - did you notice something unusual about the writing style of Iorich? I thought something was "off" the first time I read it, but on my recent re-read of everything, it jumped out, and I think it makes sense as an intentional device. But I haven't heard anyone talk about it online. I was going to post a comment over on dreamcafe to see if anyone else had noticed, but I got distracted and forgot (like I forgot about "Tsalmoth").
I don't remember noticing. But it's been a few years, so I may have forgotten. What was unusual about it?
When "Vallista" (I think) came out, I did a reverse publication order reread of the series. One thing that popped out is that each book (or at least most of them) includes subtle bits that turn out in retrospect to foreshadow the next one. (Unfortunately specifics have faded, but it was interesting to note.)
I also ran across a note that Brust has begun writing "The Final Contract". His plan is to write a draft, use that to inform "Chreotha", and then revise TFC after finishing "Chreotha".
Yeah, once you hit the late 1990s, you have a lot of stories with dead phone batteries and places with no cell signal. On the other hand, technology - real or imagined - also gives writers new ways to screw with people. The Ghostface killer in the original "Scream" cloned someone's cell phone as part of a plan to frame him for the murders, and "Alien" solved the "why don't the characters just leave the haunted house" problem by putting the heroes and monster on a spaceship. There's even a new version of "the bad guys cut the phone lines and now we can't call for help" - instead of cutting the lines, they have a cell phone jammer.
Fun fact: Tolkein was asked to help identify a cursed Roman ring that was found in England, which probably inspired the trope of magical artifacts from the ancient progenitor civilization.
I've read only a few fantasy books/stories and don't have strong opinions about Scott's piece. But I do like it. I see it basically as an attempt to define the genre by outlining the contours.
He does seem to offer criticisms. E.g., his "do better!" admonition and his reference to the "sadder corners of the internet" where being in a fantasy world is a goal/dream. But it seems to me that all genres have points to criticize.
I guess my question, either for Scott or for those who know fantasy more than I do, is this: Is fantasy uniquely bad (or challenged, or criticizable) or are the weaknesses of the genre of the same order as the weaknesses of other genres?
Nice, reminds me a lot of The Last Psychiatrist's old posts about the common tropes in books and films. I remember that Alone used a lot harsher words about the phenomenon of people wanting to be the Ordinary Teenager With a Heart of Gold. Or maybe it was the Neo fantasy, out of The Matrix? Neo-type story would be: you, a boring programmer doing nothing with your life discovers some forbidden knowledge and all of a sudden you realize that you have been The One (i.e. awesome, not boring) all along. This seems to match the ordinary person saving the world factor of common fantasy.
Look, fantasy should probably be compared to its most closely-similar genre: romance. That's another genre where the specific tropes have been refined over time precisely for that familiarity, because familiarity is vital to fantasy--be it sword-and-sorcery fantasy or romantic fantasy. So we shouldn't be surprised that there are elves and dwarves rather than completely wild races in most fantasies; people who really get into a genre, and who have shelves and shelves of it, are specifically looking to see the same beats and same ideas.
At the same time--and we see this in romance too--it can be fertile ground for play, because not every genre reader is looking for that repetition, and so you can have something like Game of Thrones or Discworld.
As such, I think it's correct to combine stories 2 and 3--to say, "Genre readers like the familiar, but why has _this_ become the familiar?"
So, some sort of female chest covering is going to get ripped, but we here in the English-speaking early 21st century have settled on bodices, so we see lots of bodices getting ripped, because that's what the genre calls for? I can buy that.
When I was a kid, there was a widely recognised cohort of supernatural races who were about as real as the christian god. They included (but were not confined to) fairies, pixies, brownies, dwarves and giants, and elves.
I've listed them in approximately descending order of benevolence. They were part of pre-existing and reasonably long-standing folk beliefs.
These days I'm still vaguely bemused that some of them have become famous - elves (fantasy) and fairies (disney) but others, like pixies and brownies, have disappeared entirely.
I think my childhood self wants to call it some kind of cultural appropriation!
Once upon a time in the forgotten past, there was a second kind of fantasy story-- the picaresque wanderer story-- Conan, and Fafryd and the Grey Mouser are notable examples, with Alyx showing up late.
It lost out to LOTR, possibly because people preferred saving the world to just wandering around having adventures.
Seannan McGuire's October Daye stories are a variant. October Daye is a lot tougher than most people, and probably smarter (the stories are mysteries as well as fantasy), but I suppose she has enough problems that it's possible to imagine being her.
Instead of a rather open world, the stories about about navigating complex family relationships and fae law. The races are pretty conventional, though worked out in more detail than in most fantasy.
The episodic TV era kept the picaresque adventurer wandering the Earth (or wherever) and getting involved in local troubles in various genres: Route 66, the Fugitive, Kung Fu, Logan's Run, The Incredible Hulk, etc. The Witcher and Poker Face revive the idea, albeit with an added throughline because the fashion has turned away from the purely episodic.
(Even Star Trek Strange New Worlds, which is consciously a throwback to episodic storytelling, has continuing character arcs in a way that TOS didn't.)
There are other models for fantasy from the 20th century (Conan and his subversion Elric, Zelazny’s Amber, Vance, etc.). But they’re not widely read even by genre fans anymore. I think it’s right that these aren’t psychologically compelling.
It occurs to me that, phrased this way, the average borderline aspie had their potential fantasy moment in real life on the early-2000s internet. It's not a perfect match, but the parallels are there even if you don't squint too hard:
- the world is open to change and being threatened by the old, evil forces of religion and overly restrictive copyright regimes (IIRC, then embodied by the still tyranically powerful music industry rather than the YouTUBE algorithm that sometimes plays the same role today)
- in order to stop them, you don't need to be particularly brilliant or agentic, you just need to be able to run a web server and/or install linux on things and/or do some light programming (I did mention borderline aspie)
- the technologies you're binding this way were mostly created by the ancients of 1960s MIT, who are still active in the world, but have moved on from the domain of making technological progress to various teaching/community leader roles or exited the field entirely
- confronting evil and triumphing meant knocking down the arguments of the enemy in a public and coordinated fashion, while maintaining your freedom to share music/pirated videogames with your friends, or possibly making a webcomic/blog so widely read that your place in the culture is cemented for all time
Squinting a bit harder, how close are John von Neumann/Jay McCarthy/Ken Thompson to Celebrimbor? How close were Richard Stallman/Cory Doctorow to Gandalf? How close were Holkins/Krahulik to Frodo/Bilbo? How many parallels are there between Bernie Cosell/jwz and Tom Bombadil?
Also, if we see the parallels, what can we learn about the aftermath of their adventures, given that we can see the way they played out in real life without something freezing the world in place with a well-placed "The End".
There’s definitely something about the mid 2000s internet that appealed to a lot of nerdy people but I think this is applying the US model and domain knowledge to a lot of people who didn’t live in the US and didn’t have these things in mind.
Fair. I was observing that the early 2000s Dawkins / Napster preoccupation with religion and copyright and breaking the chains of the past seems to me to have been a mostly US phenomenon.
Elves and Dwarves are “the diversity found within the everyman’s local, virtuous nation.”
Just as long-lost-kingship is a way to convey authority and status in a mythical rather than material way, Demi-humans are used as rapid shorthand for the full range of healthy diversity within a culture. Masculine/feminine, labor/capital, jocks/nerds, peasantry/aristocracy, urban/rural, etc. The key thing to notice is that fantasy stories will tend to involve one of each, as a kind of dyad. So having oaths of service (or just friendship) from both races symbolically creates the ‘grand alliance’ where society unifies behind a figure that transcends internal divisions. At the same time, the details of the way you characterize each race can be used to present the protagonist Everyman as ann intermediate figure along specific axes, demonstrating the golden virtues of moderation.
The reason why dwarves and eves in particular are so ‘sticky’ in fantasy isn’t because they stand in for any one particular role very well, but because they stand in serviceably well for so *many* binaries that crop up in society. They can collapse an entire complex society in to a mythic reference frame with remarkable economy, just two characters. People can and do increase the roster of demihumans beyond this, depending on the needs of the story or the medium, but those two are the Allen wrench and screwdriver of fantasy construction, you can almost always use them as-is.
+1 to the above. I think these categories stick around because they are shorthand for certain concepts and tropes that our minds find interesting and see in real life. TV tropes has a page on this dwarf/elf combo and others I am sure: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ElvesVersusDwarves
This reminds me that a great exception to many of the tropes is the Daughter of Empire series by Janny Wurts and Raymond Feist. There are insect warriors and whatnot in a Japanese feudal setting, but more importantly it is very much a competence fantasy where the main character outwits her enemies, strikes good alliances, and grows the economy of her region.
Anyone have recommendations for other good competency- or agency-based fantasy series?
Walter Jon Williams’ Quillifer and Patrick Rothfuss’ Kvothe are both omnicompetent characters with series built around them; of the two Quillifer is the more plausible.
Ascendence of a Bookworm is about an extreme bibliophile reincarnated as a peasant into a medieval world with few, very expensive books and so invents paper plus the movable printing press. It starts out fairly low competence and small, but I'd say around volume 4 part 2 is when this starts up.
The main character does bumble a fair bit, but the machinations of the more competent people around her are a joy to watch.
A second enthusiastic recommendation for this particular series.
One of the many things I enjoy about this particular series is the very gradual world-building. There's a lot to the world, but the scope of the story starts very small.
There's _The Thirteenth Child_ and it's sequels by Patricia Wrede. The viewpoint character is very competent though not omnicompetent. She's much observant and steady-minded than most people.
>The one thing I still don’t understand is why everyone has the same races. Why elves, dwarves, goblins, and sometimes drow? Why not sentient dogs, or dolphins, or bee-people living in hive-cities, or those weird people with ten arms and one eye who the medievals sometimes reported seeing in the Orient, or one-inch tall people whose cities are the size of football fields, or sentient wasps that you can hire to sting your enemies? If most of the fantasy universe is a machine for producing ordinary-person-saves-the-world stories, that explains the Chesterton Fence well enough to justify knocking down the parts that don’t contribute. Do better!
So, there's a writer I follow, who does work in different media under different pen names, but one of her larger scale works is an epic fantasy series called The Brightest Shadow which she does under the name of Sarah Lin. On the scale of more vs. less different from the archetypical standard fantasy, it's definitely towards the more-different end. And it's quite interesting and worth checking out in my opinion. But it also has a distinct weakness relative to Sarah Lin's other work. The setting is unfamiliar enough that the reader has to spend a lot of time learning stuff about it- stuff which is actually relevant to their ability to follow the plot, rather than the author just chucking it all at the reader so they can appreciate what a cool new setting the author has come up with. This comes with a number of downsides (the most obvious is that it makes it more difficult for the author to handle the pacing,) but one of the biggest I've come to realize is that *it's a lot harder for the story to be funny*.
Sarah Lin can be a very funny writer. She's proven herself capable of weaving humor even into works whose overarching tone is pretty grim. But The Brightest Shadow as a book series is rarely funny, because there aren't many opportunities where the audience is sufficiently familiar with what they're dealing with for the author to amuse them by subverting their expectations. It's easy to be funny in Discworld, *because* it takes the audience's familiarity with standard fantasy tropes for granted, and so it has countless ways to riff on those expectations. "Since you're expecting A, wouldn't it be funny if A turned out to B?" The first book of the TBS series has one particularly funny bit which stands out in my memory, around midway through the book, which plays with a trope that's familiar across fantasy and a few other genres of fiction. And it gives a feeling sort of like you've been floating around adrift, and the series has to get solid ground under it to pull off something as complicated as a joke.
Even straightforward character-based humor can be difficult to pull off in a setting that's too unfamiliar. It's hard to tell jokes which make sense to someone with a completely different cultural context, different assumptions and stereotypes and stuff. This article about an anthropologist trying to convey the story of Hamlet to people in an African tribal village gives a sense for how hard it is to follow along with the beats of a story when you don't have one-to-one analogues for all the cultural assumptions built into it.
I think that fantasy which is *too* unfamiliar kind of veers towards the character of sci fi, in the sense that so much of the narrative process is built around acclimating the audience to the unfamiliar that there's not much room left to use it as a framework for familiar human drives and dynamics. Human culture can be *really* flexible, and even the real world has seen societies with very different assumptions about things like how people associate with each other, why people engage in relationships, what a person ought to aspire to to live a good life, what kind of endeavor might contribute to that, etc. Take away too much of the audience's familiar grounding, and suddenly it's difficult to write something as straightforward as two characters establishing a rapport and becoming friends, because their interactions become a load-bearing mechanism for rebuilding the audience's assumptions about society.
I agree, this can be contrasted with her other work written under a different pen name, an epic porn JRPG that is a subversion of porn JRPG tropes, which are a superset of fantasy JRPG tropes. The Last Sovereign can be ridiculously funny when it wants to, exactly because the setting is so familiar that you can pull off the "audience expects A, then B happens, because of course it would" trick.
Homer should be showing up here. It seems classical stories were basically Homer fanfic for hundreds of years. Aren't special blood heroes just demigods? Aren't powerful ancient weapons just Achilles' armor? Aren't superhero action sequences just an aristeia?
The big innovation in this account is that instead of quirky gods being in frame, the fates are often more mechanistic or ancient and so out of frame. ("Bitten by a radioactive spider" instead of "born of an Olympian rape")
But if you view this as an interesting twist but the roots are thousands of years old, it is maybe more liberating. It may make sense that storytellers have tapped most of the fruitful veins over tens of thousands of years. But also: just go pick a different thing from Ovid to transpose and it may feel more original than much of this genre.
The dividing line to me between Fantasy and other fiction has been that the cosmology is anthropic and there is some clear source of supreme Authority, ie you know a thing is good because the Authority said it was good. Should also add this isn’t a simple “The Authority always says what is good and true” but in the Fantasy setting “what is good and true is good and true because it was said by the Authority.”
I think the becoming all powerful/wish fulfillment piece comes below that. It’s resonating because you can side step the whole problem of staying awake all night thinking “is that the right thing? Am I a good person?”
Like in Unsong there was a God somewhere deciding which universe got to have their seed implemented, right? That was the Authority. It existed above everyone and everything else, the flame imperishable or whatever you want to call it. Everyone else didn’t know what exactly it wanted or why but therein was the drama.
On the fictional race thing, dwarves I don’t get at all how they have survived the current age. Politician correctness or wokeness or what have you. We have actual humans who are dwarves and are not magical blacksmiths.
"On the fictional race thing, dwarves I don’t get at all how they have survived the current age. Politician correctness or wokeness or what have you. We have actual humans who are dwarves and are not magical blacksmiths."
Possibly because there is an existing tradition of dwarfs in folktales and fairy stories? People know when you talk about dwarves in a fantasy story, you mean the Snow White sort of dwarves, not the short people sort:
"I am under the difficulty of finding English names for mythological creatures with other names, since people would not 'take' a string of Elvish names, and I would rather they took my legendary creatures even with the false associations of the 'translation' than not at all.
Even the dwarfs are not really Germanic 'dwarfs' (Zwerge, dweorgas, dvergar), and I call them 'dwarves' to mark that. They are not naturally evil, not necessarily hostile, and not a kind of maggot-folk bred in stone; but a variety of incarnate rational creature."
Without grappling with too many specifics, I automatically just pattern match this all to the idea that You Get About Five Words (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-get-about-five-words). Tolkien chose some obscure references like the Kalevala as part of the basis for Middle Earth and built his own languages, but most readers of Fantasy never get through most of the more esoteric Tolkien canon, and in any case already know what fae and kings and wizards and dragons and monsters and gods and spirits "are." And we already understood the idea of a mythic past and fall from grace (the Greeks had the Age of Heroes and then early Renaissance Europe had the Greeks and Romans and Christianity has Eden, etc,).
As for Frodo vs Aragorn fantasies, we conveniently gloss over the fact that in addition to being born to be king, Aragorn is over 80 years old and was raised by millennia-old Elrond to be incredibly knowledgeable and skilled and talented, so he can do things far beyond a normal human. We *also* gloss over the fact that Gandolf mostly acts like a human-scale wise-but-flawed old man and not at all like a realistic representation of a five thousand year old demigod who entered the world from outside time itself and saw the rise and fall of countless civilizations in preparation for his quest to help a fallen world defeat the greatest remaining embodiment of evil. We even ignore that Eru told all the demigods, including Sauron and Gandolf and Saruman, that anything they did to thwart or deviate from his will would just end up working out anyway, or that he directly intervened in Numenor and in sending in the Wizards to get things back on course, or that all the Ainur know full well that In the Beginning Was the Music, and the Music Was With Eru. These other characters, if we pay attention at all, are deliberately making themselves look more relatable than they are, in order to not be the central figures of the story. Gandalf and Aragorn can't complete the quest in part because Sauron knows to pay attention to the Important People with Divine Spirits or Elven/Numenorean Blood but conveniently forgets that Pride Cometh Before the Fall. It's tropes all the way up and all the way down because otherwise the reader would need to slog through *another* few hundred multi-chapter elven poems and Tom Bombadil-lic side stories to have any understanding of what's going on, and then no one would read it, and most likely no one could write it either.
"We *also* gloss over the fact that Gandolf mostly acts like a human-scale wise-but-flawed old man and not at all like a realistic representation of a five thousand year old demigod who entered the world from outside time itself and saw the rise and fall of countless civilizations in preparation for his quest to help a fallen world defeat the greatest remaining embodiment of evil."
You're correct that we have to go into the lore to find out why this is, but there is a reason for it. Again, quoting the Letters:
"But G. is not, of course, a human being (Man or Hobbit). There are naturally no precise modern terms to say what he was. I wd. venture to say that he was an incarnate 'angel'– strictly an ἄγγελος: that is, with the other Istari, wizards, 'those who know', an emissary from the Lords of the West, sent to Middle-earth, as the great crisis of Sauron loomed on the horizon. By 'incarnate' I mean they were embodied in physical bodies capable of pain, and weariness, and of afflicting the spirit with physical fear, and of being 'killed', though supported by the angelic spirit they might endure long, and only show slowly the wearing of care and labour.
Why they should take such a form is bound up with the 'mythology' of the 'angelic' Powers of the world of this fable. At this point in the fabulous history the purpose was precisely to limit and hinder their exhibition of 'power' on the physical plane, and so that they should do what they were primarily sent for: train, advise, instruct, arouse the hearts and minds of those threatened by Sauron to a resistance with their own strengths; and not just to do the job for them. They thus appeared as 'old' sage figures. But in this 'mythology' all the 'angelic' powers concerned with this world were capable of many degrees of error and failing between the absolute Satanic rebellion and evil of Morgoth and his satellite Sauron, and the fainéance of some of the other higher powers or 'gods'. The 'wizards' were not exempt, indeed being incarnate were more likely to stray, or err. Gandalf alone fully passes the tests, on a moral plane anyway (he makes mistakes of judgement). For in his condition it was for him a sacrifice to perish on the Bridge in defence of his companions, less perhaps than for a mortal Man or Hobbit, since he had a far greater inner power than they; but also more, since it was a humbling and abnegation of himself in conformity to 'the Rules': for all he could know at that moment he was the only person who could direct the resistance to Sauron successfully, and all his mission was vain."
"Gandalf is a 'created' person; though possibly a spirit that existed before in the physical world. His function as a 'wizard' is an angelos or messenger from the Valar or Rulers: to assist the rational creatures of Middle-earth to resist Sauron, a power too great for them unaided. But since in the view of this tale & mythology Power – when it dominates or seeks to dominate other wills and minds (except by the assent of their reason) – is evil, these 'wizards' were incarnated in the life-forms of Middle-earth, and so suffered the pains both of mind and body. They were also, for the same reason, thus involved in the peril of the incarnate: the possibility of 'fall', of sin, if you will. The chief form this would take with them would be impatience, leading to the desire to force others to their own good ends, and so inevitably at last to mere desire to make their own wills effective by any means. To this evil Saruman succumbed. Gandalf did not. But the situation became so much the worse by the fall of Saruman, that the 'good' were obliged to greater effort and sacrifice. Thus Gandalf faced and suffered death; and came back or was sent back, as he says, with enhanced power."
On the one hand, I absolutely see and agree with what you're getting at in this post; on the other hand, I feel like you're completely and totally off-base. Yes; power fantasies are a huge subsegment of the fantasy genre. Yes; power fantasies require those three components of competence, agency, and accessibility in order to be able to be successful.
But in my opinion that has in many ways very little to do with the ur-fantasy world and the ubiquity of certain fantastical concepts. The backbone of fantasy is mythology. Elves and Dwarves existed long before Tolkien grabbed them for the Lord of the Rings. (For that matter, so did hidden princes who knew not what of their parentage, but I think it's fair to say the ur-myth that inspired more modern stories probably succeeded because of the same psychological underpinnings that you call out for more modern stories.) Bee-people and sentient dolphins don't have the same sort of mythological background, so stories written about them come off less as 'fantastical' and more as 'weird' - which some authors, like China Mieville, cheerfully use to great effect. Same goes for magic rings, swords, etc. being so common; how many fairy tales feature magic swords?
Ancient Ruins are sort of the odd one out because they're not quite as much of mythological origin - but at the same time, they're not just there because they're a convenient source of plot elements (although that is a very common role for them to take), they're an element of the literature because for a long while, Western civilizations were very concerned by and inspired by the crumbling ruins of Roman structures that they couldn't maintain.
But that just explains why Elves and Dwarves and Treasure and Ruins are there in the first place, not why they're ubiquitous, particularly in the generic-fantasy isekai worlds. *That* you can blame on Gary Gygax. He chose Tolkien as a base for his fantasy-inspired wargame he called Dungeons and Dragons, and made telling fantasy stories something that had a set of easily accessible rules that could be used to do it. And then video games were built off of that chassis.
I submit that the modern trashy fantasy / isekai story is, at heart, a *video game* fantasy. The fact that stories which are the most power-fantasy oriented, also tend to hew most closely to the Gygaxian example of Elves/Dwarves/Treasure/Ruins, isn't because Elves have some sort of innate psychological underpinning that makes them better at manipulating power-fantasy readers' psyche; it's because there's a shared cultural language around other very power-fantasy novels, games, etc. that fans of the genre are already very familiar with and enjoy experiencing, and the particular variety of escapism they're after is one where they can escape to something similar to the *other* power-fantasies they've already enjoyed.
There are no Elves or Dwarves, and only a few magic items or ruins in that *other* most power-fantasy of genres, Superheroes, but most superhero universes also all tend to look the same because the people attracted to those universes want to fantasize about universes similar or identical to the ones that gave them happiness in the past.
There's a bunch more I could say about the thousands of fantasy novels that don't fall into either the power-fantasy tropes or the Gygaxian ur-fantasy world, and how tarring an entire genre with the same brush is unnecessarily pithy and reductive, but that's a bit beside the main point.
I think people overemphasize the mythological background of elves and dwarves. In Tolkien, and even more so in post-Tolkien fantasy, they're really just weird humans, even though they're not called that. in mythology, they're more like nature spirits or minor gods.
In Tolkien, elves and humans are both Children of Iluvatar (Creator God), so it makes sense that they are similar in many ways. Variations on the same theme.
"I am under the difficulty of finding English names for mythological creatures with other names, since people would not 'take' a string of Elvish names, and I would rather they took my legendary creatures even with the false associations of the 'translation' than not at all."
"As far as I know, this extremely basic idea (someone has to invent spells, but then anyone can use them) had never been tried before;""
Isn't that kind of the mechanic in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?
I'm not familiar enough with Rowling's work to know if the mechanic was derived from Rowling's work. I took to the fanfiction more strongly than the original text.
Of course, the Harry Potter universe is essentially post-industrial in parts of it, with some bleedover into the more fantastical side of the world (train engines and such.) I wonder if the trope of inventing or discovering magic is one which tends to apply to post-industrial magic universes?
Some of the spells in D&D are named after people, e.g. Bigby's Grasping Hand and Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion. These came about because the authors were also playing the game, and their characters invented some spells.
It's the traditional idea of witchcraft. You don't need any kind of special powers or heritage to become a witch (apart from the whole "selling your soul to the Devil" bit) and you learn spells and charms and potions and the rest of it from other witches or whoever is willing to teach you.
Less malign but still on the borderline are the fairy doctors/quack doctors/cunning men/wise women who know cures and can do charms and spells. Maybe they learned these from the fairies, but they are ordinary humans. See Biddy Early and her magic bottle:
"Of all the tales of Biddy’s magical powers none were so fascinating as her “Blue Bottle” with which it was said she could see the future. Her son Tom died as a young man, but being worried about how his poor widowed mother would survive now that he was dead, Tom returned from the dead, to give her this magical “Blue Bottle”. He told her: “Take this mother and it will make a living for you”, and this bottle did indeed make her a living. People from all over the country were to seek Biddy’s predictions for the future which were said to be amazingly accurate down to the last detail. It was also said that if a weary traveller was coming many miles to meet Biddy, she would see him coming in the bottle and meet him half way.
Biddy was visited also, for her great healing potions which it was said healed most ailments. Biddy had a well at the side of her house, the water from which possessed the most magical powers, and if given with her consent could cure a person of any affliction. Animals were of enormous importance, the death of a cow or pig could mean failure to pay rent and the death of a working horse could mean destitution. In this time of no vets, Biddy was relied upon to cure the most serious of animal ailments of which it was said she could cure very effectively with a drop of water from her well, or one of her potions. Biddy, not being a selfish woman, did not make a great fortune from her powers, she only accepted a jug of poiteen or whiskey, or perhaps some food for her services but never money. It was said that never was a tired traveller turned from her door and many a passer-by was given a jug and a seat in front of her warm fire.
Another great power which Biddy is accredited with her ability to talk to and cure the wrath of the Fairies. People used to come to her who had been bewitched by the “little people”. One man had his entire herd of cattle cursed by the fairies and they all became violently ill. On the advice of one of his friends he went to see Biddy. After looking in to her bottle, she saw the problem. He had planted a whitethorn bush along a fairy path in his field. She instructed him to go home and remove the bush. As soon as he had done this, his entire herd immediately returned to full health."
What does go along with the special bloodline thing is such things as "seventh son of a seventh son" or cures being hereditary in certain families who knew the particular charm to cure such-and-such an illness, often involving smearing their blood on the affected part (e.g. children of first cousins were supposed to have such curative blood).
This is just from Irish superstition and folklore, I'm sure other cultures have the same kind of thing.
HPMOR uses pretty much exactly the generic fantasy rules outlined above: magic mostly comes from the Ancients, and dwindles over time (because magic books become unintelligible after the author dies and magical secrets are constantly lost); so people who stumble upon a secret cache of ancient magic (like the Chamber of Secrets) or ancient artefact (like the Elder Wand) can become very powerful. Occasionally, special people like our hero will recieve a new spell or new version of a spell through some mystical flash of insight, which seems to have something to do with their mental state.
The original Harry Potter stories were much closer to UNSONG's Names of God, with progress over time as new spells were discovered and spread. IIRC the old blog post where Scott first outlined the idea explicitly credited Harry Potter as one of the inspirations. There are some differences though; spells in Harry Potter require much more practice and skill, which mostly determine "power levels", whereas in UNSONG you mostly need secret Names to have any edge. Also, of course, magic in Harry Potter is limited to people with secret special bloodlines whereas in UNSONG literally *anyone* can use it and it transforms the whole world.
Interestingly, I just read a book called "7 Figure Fiction" by a romance novel author. Her underlying advice for writing is: Everything should be a self insert fantasy. Everything. Every single scene should have one or more places where the reader inserts themselves and enjoys it. How do you do this? She gives some common universal fantasies:
* Having a rich guy hyperfixate on you
* Being pulled from your boring life to one of adventure
* Falling in love at first sight
* Starting out kind of drab and then looking super hot
* Fixing a man via sex
* A guy who is mean to everyone but you
She emphasizes that while many of these things are red flags in real life, they have some aspect that makes the reader feel special / cool when they imagine them.
The book struck me as incredibly myopic in the scope of what she felt were "universal" fantasies, and also completely changed how I looked at fiction. I think what you've done is start to pick at the universal fantasies in fantasy novels here.
What's more interesting to me is analyzing the ones that appeal to me. "Hot guy picks me out of a crowd to stalk" does nothing for me. But things like HPMOR and Unsong have tons. Unsong in particular hits these notes: You have your out of nowhere mundane protagonist who is super gifted but down on his luck pulled out of his humdrum life. Then you have the Comet King, who I think is probably my personal self insert focus in an aspirational sense. For HPMOR, at least once a week I spend a few minutes in the car imagining I'm Harry doing clever things.
For a brief moment I had a crises about whether all writing just served the self insert point, but I don't think that's true. Some of the books I really like focus on puzzle solving within the lore, or communicate messages or ideas I found useful in real life. Unsong was an enjoyable read and also reading about the Comet King actually changed my behavior in a very real way. But "7 Figure Fiction" really brought this fantasy insert thing to the fore.
You realize that this post suggests you haven't read a lot of fantasy. There are so many counter-examples to your Ur-Fantasy-World that it's hard to even know where to start.
Martha Wells, Raksura novels, and Wheel of the Infinite, and the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy
Andrea K Host, Pyramids of London
Susannah Clarke, Pirenasi
CJ Cherryh, Rider at the Gate
China Mieville, Railsea
NK Jemisin, The Shadowed Sun / The Killing Moon
I could list a hundred more without effort, but how long can a list be before everyone gets bored reading it? But it's not like unusual fantasy worlds that are nothing like Tolkien's LotR world are remotely rare. Hell, I've written a totally different fantasy world myself. Honestly, there are hundreds of excellent books that do this. Thousands.
Yeah. I initially assumed it was Scott mildly trolling us but it’s possible he really hasn’t read all that widely in the genre. There may be a divide between fantasy-liking codexers and fantasy-disliking codexers despite the fact we’re largely ad idem on other things.
Yes, I thought it had to be tongue-in-cheek, but if so the assumed view of fantasy was so consistent through the post that I finally bought it. So if Scott was trolling, I fell for it!
My ordinary world is so strongly fantasy-liking that I guess I also have a hard time believing there's a significant fantasy-disliking population. But if they've never read anything but Sword of Shannara knock-offs, that sure explains the dislike!
FWIW, though I read LOTR half a century ago, I'm much more drawn to the science fiction end of the spectrum, particularly to the world building/thought experiment end, than to the fantasy end.
I'm sorry to burst your fiction bubble, but it's probable that the majority of people are fantasy-disliking.
I mean, a lot of people do not read much to begin with, and therefore are almost completely unfamiliar with it - although GoT changed this a fair bit. (The fantasy-dislikers dislike it across all mediums and don't watch it much either, but GoT was a widespread success and coaxed some of them to make an exception.)
Then of those who do read, many - maybe the majority - find fantasy unappealing.
While it's vastly more popular than it was thirty years ago, it is still nothing even close to being universally admired.
I think Scott is picking up on an extremely popular set of defaults rather than the whole genre. What you've listed are mostly stories that are liked but not extremely popular.
I tried Pirenasi but couldn't get into it, even though I liked (but not loved) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I'm familiar with Mieville's SF, and he has a style of writing where I appreciate his prose and creativity, but dislike his political philosophy and the worlds he creates. You could not pay me to read N.K. Jemisin. I am aware of Cherryh and Wells, and though others have raved about them, there is nothing to attract my wandering will o' the wisp interest there.
And these seem to be more in the SF than the Fantasy range, which is what we are discussing right now.
I may not get what you mean by "these," but if you mean that I mentioned books in the realm of SF, no. Every book I mentioned is definitely and clearly fantasy. Nor does anything depend on personal taste. The comment regarded worlds that have nothing in common with Tolkien. There you go, half a dozen out of literally thousands of examples.
"Railsea is set on a dystopian world whose lands are covered by endless interconnecting tracks of rails, known as the "railsea". The earth is colonised by ravenous giant naked mole-rats and other carnivorous giant forms of familiar animals, such as earwigs and antlions as well as stranger non-identifiable creatures that reside in the polluted sky. These threats mean that humanity are confined to 'islands' of harder rock through which the animals cannot burrow and the spaces between can only be safely traversed by use of trains."
Yeah- that sounds more along the "science fantasy" lines to me than "fantasy" proper.
It's possibly more surrealist than either fantasy or science fiction, though I don't have a definition for the difference. I thought it was ridiculous fun, but mileage obviously varies.
What's your opposition to NK Jemisin? I thought The Broken Earth trilogy was some of the best SF I've ever read and certainly the most creative world building I've ever encountered.
Are you just on some culture war shit? I gather there was some culture war shit around NK Jemisin a while back but you couldn't pay me to pay attention to that stuff.
Tell me what this "culture war shit" was about, then? If you know of it enough to mention it, then develop what you think I think.
No, it's the taste of the prose she wrote. It just doesn't appeal to me. And I'm a bit tired of the "I am Woman, Hear Me Roar" stuff - Women! So oppressed! (Oppressed!) So vital and life-bearing! (Bearing!) - that I don't want one novel, much less a series' worth, of it.
I'm female myself, but I know women are only human. Yeah, yeah, the Patriarchy and the rest of it, and there was genuine wrong done, but that's not the novel angle for a story today that it might have been in the 70s.
And the "culture war shit" seems to be the selling angle the publicity blurb for her books goes by, and really I'm just tired of it all. I want a story, not a sermon. So imagine why this description does *not* grab me to go get this book:
"A new candidate for mayor wielding the populist rhetoric of gentrification, xenophobia, and “law and order” may have what it takes to change the very nature of New York itself and take it down from the inside. In order to defeat him, and the Enemy who holds his purse strings, the avatars will have to join together with the other Great Cities of the world in order to bring her down for good and protect their world from complete destruction."
Whoop-de-doo. Or I could get my partisan politics from the news, and get something decent to read in a story. I'm not picking on Jemisin here alone, let me make it clear; Ace Atkins was continuing the late Robert Parker's "Spenser" series of detective novels, and the most recent one was almost a roman à clef. The lead character was a stand-in for AOC and the plot went along predictable lines (I was hoping he'd do a twist where the enemy was on the inside and it was one of her campaign, but no, it was the very clearly delineated from the start baddies all along):
"In the latest thriller featuring the legendary Boston PI, Spenser and his young protégé Mattie Sullivan take on billionaire money manager running a network of underaged girls for his rich and powerful clients.
Carolina Garcia-Ramirez is a rising star in national politics, taking on the establishment with her progressive agenda. Tough, outspoken, and driven, the young congresswoman has ignited a new conversation in Boston about race, poverty, health care, and the environment. Now facing her second campaign, she finds herself not only fighting a tight primary with an old guard challenger but also contending with numerous death threats coming from hundreds of suspects.
When her chief of staff reaches out to Spenser for security and help finding the culprits of what he believes to be the most credible threats, Garcia-Ramirez is less than thrilled. Since her first grassroots run, she’s used to the antipathy and intimidation women of color often face when seeking power. To her, it’s all noise. But it turns out an FBI agent disagrees, warning Spenser that Garcia-Ramirez might be in real danger this time.
It doesn’t take long for Spenser to cross paths with an extremist group called The Minutemen, led by a wealthy Harvard grad named Bishop Graves. Although Graves is a social media sensation, pushing an agenda of white supremacy and toxic masculinity, he denies he’s behind the attacks. As the primary nears and threats become a deadly plot, it’s up to Spenser, Hawk, and a surprise trusted ally to ensure the congresswoman is safe. This is Spenser doing what he does best, living by a personal code and moral compass that can’t ever be broken."
To make it clear, neither would I bother my time with a series where the sides were swapped and all the good guys were the white Christians and the bad guys were the women of colour etc. As I said, when I want a sermon, I'll go to church.
Both of those blurbs sound awful. If that's the kind of stuff Jemisin is doing now, that's incredibly disappointing and feels like a sellout.
I read Broken Earth without knowing anything about her, and I found out after I read it that there had been a backlash to her clean sweep of Hugos for the trilogy, which I thought was absurd because to me they were clearly excellent, creative books. She was obviously a lefty but I didn't think the books were any preachier than your average SF, although I read them right after my Meiville kick so perhaps my tolerance for preachiness was elevated at the time. I do love Meiville though, Perdido Street Station and it's sequels are some of my favorites.
I suppose the books had a fairly emotional and urgent prose style which I could see not being everyone's cup of tea, but I found it a really interesting departure from the dry and dispassionate default for the genre. Everything isn't for everyone, of course.
As for Cherryh, I think you will enjoy the *Penric and Desdemona* series. It consists of short novellas (novellae ?) that are punchy, to the point, and oddly touching.
Not quite my feelings, I admit he writes well, but the old-school Marxist-Leninist stuff is not my cup of tea. And he takes a perverse delight in the muddy and the filthy, sometimes, beyond "look at what the honest working-class have been reduced to by the elite rich bastards" socialism.
A kind of "look, look! *this* is what reality is! stop all your stupid dreams of shining whatever, sickness, misery, and corruption are the *truth*!" extreme of the Realist novelist. A sort of Hardy's Nihilism, as described by Chesterton, talking about the immediate post-Victorian era:
"Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot. ...Nature is always coming in to save Meredith's women; Nature is always coming in to betray and ruin Hardy's. It has been said that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent Him. But it is not often, as in Mr. Hardy's case, that it is necessary to invent Him in order to prove how unnecessary (and undesirable) He is. But Mr. Hardy is anthropomorphic out of sheer atheism. He personifies the universe in order to give it a piece of his mind. But the fight is unequal for the old philosophical reason: that the universe had already given Mr. Hardy a piece of its mind to fight with. One curious result of this divergence in the two types of sceptic is this: that when these two brilliant novelists break down or blow up or otherwise lose for a moment their artistic self-command, they are both equally wild, but wild in opposite directions. Meredith shows an extravagance in comedy which, if it were not so complicated, every one would call broad farce. But Mr. Hardy has the honour of inventing a new sort of game, which may be called the extravagance of depression. The placing of the weak lover and his new love in such a place that they actually see the black flag announcing that Tess has been hanged is utterly inexcusable in art and probability; it is a cruel practical joke. But it is a practical joke at which even its author cannot brighten up enough to laugh."
Though I haven't read Mieville recently, he may have brightened up since.
The problem with Mieville is not his message, but rather his writing style. He never uses one word where ten words would do; and those ten words better be "moldywarpe" and "disestablishmentarianism" instead of, like, "brick".
I think that it is entirely appropriate to limit the analysis to the popular mass-market fantasy novels (anecdotally, I had read all of what Scott mentioned and hadn't even heard of those you listed), and perhaps it actually might not be a coincidence that the mainstream ones do hit the factors discussed in the article and the non-mainstream ones don't; that having these factors *facilitates* a fantasy novel becoming popular, and diverging from them hurts mass appeal - in which case your examples aren't counterexamples but rather even more reinforce the point of the reason behind the worldbuilding choices.
Yeah also like so many others, I also feel like I should point out that most of these specific tropes seem to have peaked in early 2000s in novels and now most of what we have are deconstructions, weird original stuff, or sexy fairies.
I think Elves and Dwarves and Orcs might just be the only species that human brains can possibly invent.
Or more precisely, the vector space of "species with notable characteristics which are interesting and affect the kind of story you can tell" is not that big, and basically anything you create is pretty close to an existing fantasy trope. Authors really do experiment in the small ways you can, but it's easier to just call your elves "elves" and give them pointy ears and call it a "nod."
Vulcans are elves. Klingons are orcs. Jawas are gnomes. Eewoks are kinda novel, but ultimately somewhere between Ents and maybe fairies? Chewbacca is a half-orc. Gungans (the Jar Jar Binks species) are just water Dwarves.
I think you underestimate the extent to which fantasy is often about saying how someone with intellectual/unappreciated talent can be a great hero. It's not that the hero can't be talented but it has to be a talent which isn't appreciated by everyone. I mean even talented teens feel unappreciated and misunderstood.
Sure, you have Tolkien whose hero is an untalented hobit (never liked that part) but there are also quite a number of books, maybe even more (Feist's magician series stands out) where the hero is especially magically gifted.
So it's about simultaneously satisfying something like the following desiderada:
1) The hero has to have some kind of talent that isn't recognized by others (so most social talent and often physical talent is out).
2) It has to appeal to relatively young audiences since that's when we fall in love with fantasy worlds. Also young romance is more appealing.
3) It's harder to introduce a whole new world from the perspective of a character who already knows all about it.
So I don't think there is any bias against it being a skill, hell I think that plenty of fantasy novels are implicitly the story of how being smart can make you the hero. It's just that you need to combine awesome powers with a story that allows the hero to be naive enough about the world to explain it to the reader.
You get more flexibility in a standard fantasy realm but if you want something new you can't introduce it with a hero who doesn't have any of the awe or feeling of strangeness the reader will have.
You could equally well ask why do so many books occur in something very similar to the real world or one of a small number of familiar sci-fi scenarios (navy in space, cyberpunk, space tanks/mechs). There is a large cost involved in familiarizing readers with a totally new environment and if the story you want to tell can be done without that you probably avoid it.
And if you do choose that path there are multiple pressures to use a young hero (relatable to audience, everyone appreciates young love, and most importantly you can explain world from their eyes) so that limits the ability of long training to play a role in their great power.
This is the kind of content I subscribe for! Thought-provoking, perceptive, and witty.
I think there's one big aspect that Scott is missing, though. The point of fantasy, IMHO, is *not* to stoke a person's ego by making them believe, "I may be the Chosen One tasked with saving the entire world!" That veers into arrogance and hubris, which are hallmarks of the evil side, not the good. (Which, if you want to identify with the evil side when reading a fantasy story, that's your right I guess, but that's not why these stories were written.)
Instead, I think of fantasy epics like LOTR or Star Wars as a sort of magnified reflection of what goes on in a person's mind/soul. All of us have in us the capacity for good and evil, and we must choose between them. As Solzhenitsyn famously said, "The line between good and evil runs through every human heart." Fantasy epics dramatize this internal struggle. They inspire and give hope: "Even if the right thing to do feels really, really hard, you can still choose to do it, just like Frodo chose to take the Ring to Mount Doom, even though he knew it was extremely dangerous and he would most likely die in the attempt."
This kind of struggle is recognizable to every human being. In real life, it most often is not epic, but rather takes the form of tiny, mundane decisions. The point is, in real life, you can choose to do the right thing even if you are not especially gifted or brilliant - you can choose to be kind, generous, responsible, hardworking, etc.
And yes, the "humble hero discovers super-duper magic that makes them special" trope is common in fantasy, but it's not the magic that makes the hero special, it's the choices he/she makes. In terms of raw magical power, the evil is stronger than the good in these stories. Emperor Palpatine, Sauron, and Voldemort have more powerful magic than Luke Skywalker, Gandalf, and Harry Potter, respectively. It's the hero's choice to fight for what is right in the face of overwhelming odds that makes them admirable.
On the Ancient Progenitors, forget invidious, pejorative theories like "The Ancient Progenitors are just another way of giving a force multiplier." One gets much closer to what, for many of us, is a very deep and lifelong love with the issue of mystery. I've been infatuated with old, far-off, forgotten things (happy or unhappy) since as long as I can remember. The feeling is impervious to reason or questions of instrumentality. If you don't share the love, at best you'll have trouble getting it. De gustibus . . .
To be fair, "invidious" and "pejorative" are probably too strong. After all, "another way of giving a force multiplier" is pretty kindly next to the sort of Freudian, Marxist, or whatever spins that can be put on things one disapproves of aesthetically ("the pathetic, oral-infantile fixation is obvious!" etc.). But still . . . reach for a little empathy, please!
The past is numinous in a lot of ways for a lot of people and in a lot of fiction. There are the ancient powers, and also the more recent past represented by ghosts.
And European civilization had a bunch of that baked in, with the whole "fall of Rome" thing. I don't think it's surprising that a lot of stories from European-descended cultures involve ruins of fallen civilizations, lost knowledge, and stuff like that.
Yes, though they're not the only ones. Consider "The City of Brass" from 1001 Nights. And Tolkien, for one, probably cultivated his native sense for old, past things more from the Old English tradition than the Roman (especially, the lovely Old English poem "The Wanderer," and the scene in Grendel's mother's cave in "Beowulf"). Tolkien was very self-conscious about how he treated his Ancient Progenitors; the goal was to reveal just enough to create what he called "the impression of depth"--of a deep, mostly lost, epic past--without revealing too much to take away the frisson of mystery. His explicit model was the same sense of depth in time that he had gotten out of the very old northern literature.
That touches on another thing that stands out to me in Tolkien's works. There's a lack of population, given the size of the land. Yes, there are ruined cities from ancient civilizations, but there's not as much as one would think (unless coming from a more American tradition which uses English settlement of a de-populated North America as the baseline). Middle-Earth is young, and wild, and there's an active force of Evil out there that will eventually destroy any settlement that becomes overextended. In Europe, there were people pretty much everywhere, and had been for thousands of years. But much of Middle-Earth has the feeling of a place where people tried settling, long ago, and then failed, and no one's been back since.
"Therefore, MWTRKHHAHHTBRBPFSTEHHDNKHITTP is the fantasy world’s preferred method of government (though absolute sortition would also work, if any author was brave enough to try it)."
You knew this was coming 😁 One author of a fantasy novel did indeed try this - "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" by G.K. Chesterton:
"The old gentleman opened his eyes with some surprise.
"Are you, then," he said, "no longer a democracy in England?"
Barker laughed.
"The situation invites paradox," he said. "We are, in a sense, the purest democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble to number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same intellect or lack of intellect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why should we not choose out of them one as much as another. All that we want for Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly look over some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what time was wasted in arguing about the House of Lords, Tories saying it ought to be preserved because it was clever, and Radicals saying it ought to be destroyed because it was stupid, and all the time no one saw that it was right because it was stupid, because that chance mob of ordinary men thrown there by accident of blood, were a great democratic protest against the Lower House, against the eternal insolence of the aristocracy of talents. We have established now in England, the thing towards which all systems have dimly groped, the dull popular despotism without illusions. We want one man at the head of our State, not because he is brilliant or virtuous, but because he is one man and not a chattering crowd. To avoid the possible chance of hereditary diseases or such things, we have abandoned hereditary monarchy. The King of England is chosen like a juryman upon an official rotation list. Beyond that the whole system is quietly despotic, and we have not found it raise a murmur."
"Do you really mean," asked the President, incredulously, "that you choose any ordinary man that comes to hand and make him despot — that you trust to the chance of some alphabetical list...."
"And why not?" cried Barker. "Did not half the historical nations trust to the chance of the eldest sons of eldest sons, and did not half of them get on tolerably well? To have a perfect system is impossible; to have a system is indispensable. All hereditary monarchies were a matter of luck: so are alphabetical monarchies. Can you find a deep philosophical meaning in the difference between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians? Believe me, I will undertake to find a deep philosophical meaning in the contrast between the dark tragedy of the A's, and the solid success of the B's."
"And you risk it?" asked the other. "Though the man may be a tyrant or a cynic or a criminal."
"We risk it," answered Barker, with a perfect placidity. "Suppose he is a tyrant — he is still a check on a hundred tyrants. Suppose he is a cynic, it is to his interest to govern well. Suppose he is a criminal — by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality. In short, by substituting despotism we have put a total check on one criminal and a partial check on all the rest."
...Two grave-looking men in quiet uniforms came up the hill towards them. One held a paper in his hand.
"There he is, officer," said Lambert, cheerfully; "we ain't responsible for him."
The officer looked at the capering Mr. Quin with a quiet eye.
"We have not come, gentlemen," he said, "about what I think you are alluding to. We have come from head-quarters to announce the selection of His Majesty the King. It is the rule, inherited from the old régime, that the news should be brought to the new Sovereign immediately, wherever he is; so we have followed you across Kensington Gardens."
Barker's eyes were blazing in his pale face. He was consumed with ambition throughout his life. With a certain dull magnanimity of the intellect he had really believed in the chance method of selecting despots. But this sudden suggestion, that the selection might have fallen upon him, unnerved him with pleasure.
"Which of us," he began, and the respectful official interrupted him.
"Not you, sir, I am sorry to say. If I may be permitted to say so, we know your services to the Government, and should be very thankful if it were. The choice has fallen...."
"God bless my soul!" said Lambert, jumping back two paces. "Not me. Don't say I'm autocrat of all the Russias."
"No, sir," said the officer, with a slight cough and a glance towards Auberon, who was at that moment putting his head between his legs and making a noise like a cow; "the gentleman whom we have to congratulate seems at the moment — er — er — occupied."
"Not Quin!" shrieked Barker, rushing up to him; "it can't be. Auberon, for God's sake pull yourself together. You've been made King!"
With his head still upside down between his legs, Mr. Quin answered modestly —
"I am not worthy. I cannot reasonably claim to equal the great men who have previously swayed the sceptre of Britain. Perhaps the only peculiarity that I can claim is that I am probably the first monarch that ever spoke out his soul to the people of England with his head and body in this position. This may in some sense give me, to quote a poem that I wrote in my youth —
A nobler office on the earth
Than valour, power of brain, or birth
Could give the warrior kings of old.
The intellect clarified by this posture —"
Lambert and Barker made a kind of rush at him.
"Don't you understand?" cried Lambert. "It's not a joke. They've really made you King. By gosh! they must have rum taste."
"The great Bishops of the Middle Ages," said Quin, kicking his legs in the air, as he was dragged up more or less upside down, "were in the habit of refusing the honour of election three times and then accepting it. A mere matter of detail separates me from those great men. I will accept the post three times and refuse it afterwards. Oh! I will toil for you, my faithful people! You shall have a banquet of humour."
By this time he had been landed the right way up, and the two men were still trying in vain to impress him with the gravity of the situation.
"Did you not tell me, Wilfrid Lambert," he said, "that I should be of more public value if I adopted a more popular form of humour? And when should a popular form of humour be more firmly riveted upon me than now, when I have become the darling of a whole people? Officer," he continued, addressing the startled messenger, "are there no ceremonies to celebrate my entry into the city?"
"Ceremonies," began the official, with embarrassment, "have been more or less neglected for some little time, and —"
Auberon Quin began gradually to take off his coat.
"All ceremony," he said, "consists in the reversal of the obvious. Thus men, when they wish to be priests or judges, dress up like women. Kindly help me on with this coat." And he held it out.
"But, your Majesty," said the officer, after a moment's bewilderment and manipulation, "you're putting it on with the tails in front."
"The reversal of the obvious," said the King, calmly, "is as near as we can come to ritual with our imperfect apparatus. Lead on."
The rest of that afternoon and evening was to Barker and Lambert a nightmare, which they could not properly realise or recall. The King, with his coat on the wrong way, went towards the streets that were awaiting him, and the old Kensington Palace which was the Royal residence. As he passed small groups of men, the groups turned into crowds, and gave forth sounds which seemed strange in welcoming an autocrat. Barker walked behind, his brain reeling, and, as the crowds grew thicker and thicker, the sounds became more and more unusual. And when he had reached the great market-place opposite the church, Barker knew that he had reached it, though he was roods behind, because a cry went up such as had never before greeted any of the kings of the earth."
Scott (and my fellow commenters), if you're looking for a fantasy epic that doesn't follow some of the tropes above, I highly recommend The Dandelion Dynasty series by Ken Liu. It's like "A Game of Thrones," but set in an archipelago modeled after ancient China. There are four books; the first one is "The Grace of Kings."
The story has really fantastic worldbuilding, well-done characters, and an exciting plot. The one big weakness is that sometimes there's too much worldbuilding; the author will go on for pages describing how some aspect of the world works, instead of getting back to advancing the plot, already. And the story sags in book three, but then the author pulls it together and really sticks the landing in book four. Be warned: Ken Liu gives George R.R. Martin a run for his money in the "beloved characters die in horrible ways" department. Very highly recommended overall.
Re: Scott's comment on why all fantasy has to have elves, dwarves, and goblins/orcs? This one doesn't. Almost all protagonists are human, and Ken Liu goes out of his way to describe protagonists of many races, which is a nice touch (there are very dark- literally black - people, pale white people with red hair, and everything in between). There are gods, and they sometimes interfere in the affairs of mortals, but they are mostly minor characters. And there are fantastic animals, like sentient whales and flying, fire-breathing not-dragons.
I think a lot of this template can be placed at the feet of Gary Gygax and DnD. He (as the exemplar of the modern role-playing game creator) took a bucketful of influences from SF and Fantasy, but mostly Tolkien who had become the 800lb gorilla. The magic system, I am told, came from Jack Vance. Hence why the fantasy races (sorry, "species", this term has now been Politically Corrected) were all some variant of Human, Elf, Dwarf and Hobbit (with different names, perhaps). There was a bit more room in the evil/opponent races for development, but again dragons were the favourites.
Fantasy novels, therefore, when they were being written built up on these templates because they were being aimed at, and sold to, the market of DnD players and SF/F nerds. This was the tie-in/crossover market the big publishing houses were interested in, because they weren't going to waste time and money on original fantasy novels that might sell about a dozen copies. Everyone wanted the next Tolkien, so we got a lot of copies of Tolkien-clones.
I myself read the Shannara books for lack of other new fantasy (remember, we're talking the days of the 70s/80s and for all the Del Rey/Ballantine fantasy libraries, there were about ten publishing houses who didn't care about that nerdy crap) and I have to say I didn't much like it (too American, if you will forgive the Eurocentrism). But Brooks did indeed develop a formula and a template that worked, his sales were impressive enough, and that set the pattern from then on: fantasy novels had to be at least triple-deckers with the standard Dark Lord and Hero plot.
The elves and dwarves in D&D came from people other than Gygax; he wanted it to be more the pre-Tolkien Sword and Sorcery genre (e.g., Conan the Barbarian). The Hobbits in LotR leave home without weapons, because it doesn't occur to them that they'll need them; neither Conan nor a D&D character would ever make that mistake!
Not so much that they don't think they'll need them, as that they don't really have access to them. The Shire is insular and peaceful, the last time anybody fought was back in the days of the Dire Winter when wolves and goblins invaded, and any weaponry has been quietly rusting away since in the mathom house. They have sticks and staves, and probably daggers, but nothing serious as they set out because they're not expecting anything on the way.
What they are *expecting" is "get to Bree, meet up with Gandalf, let him take care of all this and either we go back home or we stay in Bree". But of course, what happens is very different.
I really enjoyed this, so I will show my appreciation by nitpicking a bit.
There's an argument that the real hero of LotR is Sam - he may not even be the chosen ringbearer, but when the lava hits the fan and he can't carry the ring, he can at least carry Mr. Frodo. Score one for the ordinary working-class person!
Tolkien almost certainly considered the Silmarillion his magnum opus, but it's LotR and the Hobbit that got him fame, maybe because they so closely fit the common fantasy tropes. Maybe there's authors out there who are trying to invent new archetypes and races of fantasy, but they only get a very small readership but the ones who mostly stick to the standard narrative get all the publicity? It might be because there's genuinely a bigger market for that (Scott's points #2 or #3), or it might be that marketing executives or whoever selects which authors get book deals go for what shareholders will see as the safe option, just like Disney is going with the n-th Star Wars franchise film yet again. If it's the executives, then we'd expect to see more "diversity" in self-published internet fan fiction as that cuts out these particular meddling middlemen.
That said, all this is Western fantasy. I'm by no means an expert on South Chinese fantasy but what I do know of it is that the hero is generally a Kung Fu master (not exclusively male), monks and nuns fulfil vital NPC roles, the counterpart to the Lost Ancient Civilisation is the burning of the Shaolin Temple causing the masters to disperse and share their knowledge with whichever locals take them in, dragons are generally good, and people living by rivers and lakes may or may not be bad but are definitely chaotic.
Also, whoever wrote Journey to the West was at least as inventive as Tolkien, as they basically came up with the genre of D&D fan fiction back in around 1600.
I like this, but I would add that I think the progenitor civilization which has collapsed serves to underscore the stakes that the main characters are playing for. One of the Wise Characters explains: "Look, there was this awesome ancient civilization with technology we still don't understand X thousand years later, but it collapsed because they failed to deal with the Dark Lord effectively. Imagine what the Dark Lord and his pals can do to *you*, you later, lesser son of great sires! And who knows, maybe if you carry out your quest and defeat the baddies, the great ancient civilization can then be rebuilt, ushering in a new golden age, and we'll all have you to thank for it! Get to it, bucko."
Competence porn is an essential thing for me. Harry Potter series without Hermione/Dumbledore would be lame. LOTR without Aragorn/Gandalf/Elves would be lame. The archetypal elf is hyper-competent and they exist to provide the competence porn and rare knowledge. Dwarves are more down-to-earth, figuratively and literally. In the star wars universe, the Jedi are the elves and the gungen/wookies/smugglers are the dwarves. Dwarves are there to provide comic relief or be more relatable for people with small egos. Orcs and Goblins exist only to be the Dark Lord's foul minions. In Star Wars, Stormtroopers are the orcs. And I guess the sith are drow. I guess you could draw a 2x2 matrix where the good is above evil and competent is to the right of incompetent.
Top left (good, incompetent): hobbits,dwarves,gungen,wookies,ewoks,ron,neville
Top right (good, competent): elves, jedi, mandalorian, gandalf, dumbledore, hermione, aurors
Bottom right (bad, competent): Dark Lord, sith, drow, dark wizards, bond villains
Bottom left (bad, incompetent): orcs, goblins, stormtroopers, crabbe, goyle, bond mooks
I think a fantasy universe needs to have all four quadrants covered. I don't think a neutral row is necessary because the neutrals almost always end up picking a side.
Good analysis overall, but how do you get Dwarves in the good/incompetent quadrant? Tolkien's Dwarves are highly competent. They are amazing blacksmiths and engineers (they built the Mines of Moria)! And they can be fearsome warriors. In The Silmarillion, the Dwarves pretty much single-handedly stop Smaug the Dragon from killing all the good guys in one of the major battles. The LOTR movies made Gimli into a comic relief character, but that's not what he's like in the books.
I second this, with Dáin Ironfoot. You cannot call him incompetent. The Dwarven kings of yore make stupid mistakes at times, but that is out of the normal pride/arrogance of kings. Being renowned for vast hoards of treasure means that dragons will be interested in you, as in "flying down to burn you out of house and home and take that hoard for themselves".
'I grieved at the fall of Thorin,' said Gandalf; 'and now we hear that Dáin has fallen, fighting in Dale again, even while we fought here. I should call that a heavy loss, if it was not a wonder rather that in his great age he could still wield his axe as mightily as they say that he did, standing over the body of King Brand before the Gate of Erebor until the darkness fell.
'Yet things might have gone far otherwise and far worse. When you think of the great Battle of the Pelennor, do not forget the battles in Dale and the valour of Durin's Folk. Think of what might have been. Dragon-fire and savage swords in Eriador, night in Rivendell. There might be no Queen in Gondor. We might now hope to return from the victory here only to ruin and ash. But that has been averted - because I met Thorin Oakenshield one evening on the edge of spring in Bree. A chance-meeting, as we say in Middle-earth.'
"In The Silmarillion, the Dwarves pretty much single-handedly stop Smaug the Dragon from killing all the good guys in one of the major battles."
I love that bit! And I wish that Rings of Power was halfway good (and also that someone had the rights to The Silmarillion) because I want to see this done onscreen: Sauron is sweeping all before him, he has corralled Elrond and it is looking very very girm indeed, when the Dwarves march out of Khazad-dum, give his forces a good kicking, chase them around Middle-earth continuing with the ass-kicking, then retreat back to Khazad-dum and slam the doors in his raging but helpless to do anything about it face 😁
Sure, apologies to any dwarves I offended. I play a dwarf holy paladin in WoW. Dwarves can be good blacksmiths and warriors, but they work hard for it, and they're materialistic. Versus elves who tend to seem more like they were just born with divine grace and be effortlessly competent and noble. It's sort of like bourgeois vs idealized aristocrats.
(I would like to genetically engineer my kids to have the grace and beauty of the elves)
Tolkien's Elves do have their own flaws (do *not* engineer your kids to turn out to be like Feanor) and the kind of people who like to see racism under every stone tend to hyperventiliate about his Dwarves as an Anti-Semitic Stereotype:
"There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don't expect too much."
To which I can only say "Have you ever read the descriptions of dwarves in Nordic mythology and folklore? Try reading about them even in the tidied-up versions online":
I never really "got" the dwarf-Jewish connection until I saw the first of Jackson's Hobbit movies. When they were in Bilbo's house and started singing, it might as well have been "By the Waters of Babylon"...
Jackson's movies are not without their flaws (there's a reason why "Flaming Denethor!" became a pet epithet on one fansite I frequented, and personally I think that it was a bad decision to make the character like that, same with making Wormtongue such a visible Villain - I'd like to have seen what Brad Dourif could have done with the "looks like a venerable, respectable councillor which makes people trust him" original - but I'm not a movie director and I know nothing about what makes a movie work) but when he gets it right, he gets it *right*.
The Dwarves singing in "The Hobbit" is not the same as the book version, but by thunder it *works*:
"The dark filled all the room, and the fire died down, and the shadows were lost, and still they played on. And suddenly first one and then another began to sing as they played, deep-throated singing of the dwarves in the deep places of their ancient homes; and this is like a fragment of their song, if it can be like their song without their music.
As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns. Suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up —probably somebody lighting a woodfire — and he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He shuddered; and very quickly he was plain Mr. Baggins of Bag-End, Under-Hill, again."
I think, as Tolkien developed his work, he realized that the irredemability of the orcs was a key failing, given his faith. D&D has eliminated the notion of evil races. And I see the notion of 'redeemability' or 'value of supposedly dark races' trending upwards.
Star Wars has already introduced a redeemed stormtrooper.
At the same time, there's a definite storytelling need for a category of enemy that has at least a little more than animal intelligence, is roughly comparable to a human combatant in power, and is obviously hostile. There's no need to explain why you can't negotiate with them or even why they're attacking you; it's what they do.
Some Japanese fantasy works set in European-fantasy settings do this by making orcs and goblins outright monsters; creatures that, while they're capable of making crude weapons and armor and using tactics, are instinctually aggressively hostile. This is far from universal; just as many works subvert the idea by making traditionally 'always Chaotic Evil' races as human in temperament as, well, humans.
I think it's good that the concepts of "orc" and "goblin" are broad enough to be used both ways. In fact, being able to subvert the preconceived notions is a great storytelling tool. It only works, though, as long as "in some worlds, goblins / orcs are always evil" is an option.
Did you ever read "The Last Ringbearer" by Kirill Eskov? It's a bit uneven but has some brilliant parts, although I don't know how much of the good and bad lies in the amateur translation.
If you haven't, it purports to be written from an oral history of the War of the Ring, from the perspective of the orcs. That is, "orocuen" was just the name of one of the ethnicities of humans who lived in Mordor, same as "trolls". Sauron the VIII was a constitutional monarch, Mordor was on the verge of an industrial revolution, elves were vicious xenophobes, Aragorn was an opportunist who "just so happened" to show up in Gondor right after Denethor "burned himself to death", and history was written by the victor.
> This, then, was the yeast on which Barad-dur rose six centuries ago, that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle Earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic. The shining tower of the Barad-dur citadel rose over the plains of Mordor almost as high as Orodruin like a monument to Man - free Man who had politely but firmly declined the guardianship of the Dwellers on High and started living by his own reason. It was a challenge to the bone-headed aggressive West, which was still picking lice in its log ‘castles’ to the monotonous chanting of scalds extolling the wonders of never-existing Numenor.
I have not read it. But I have been told of it a number of times. It does seem interesting, especially because, as much as I like Tolkien, I never bought into his technophobia. And I probably fancy royalty less than he did.
Well, I suppose if it's a sort of even more extreme version of "Paradise Lost" where the Bad Guy is indeed the Hero, then it works as a deliberate contradiction of Tolkien's work.
Just as someone could write an alt-history novel about how Stalin was really a benevolent ruler and Soviet Russia was on the brink of becoming the earthly paradise, only the covetous and envious West and the bumptious, brute force Americans destroyed it all by their underhanded tactics and deliberate campaigns to ruin it.
Pretty sure most people would not accept that in our reality, Stalin *was* the Good Guy (do some people think this? yeah, there's always someone) and the same for Sauron - he wasn't a benevolent ruler, however he may have started out with his intentions. But sure, if someone wants to read the anti-Tolkien, let them do so. I'm not interested, because I don't have the taste for those "what if Jack the Ripper really, y'know, was *not* a crazy murderer but was killing for a *good* reason?" takes, but Sauron Good is just as valid a novel as Stalin Good for the creative imagination to work on.
In fairness, with the 'canonical' LOTR we only really get one, single perspective which creates a huge potential for uncertainty. Imagine if the *only* source we had for Stalinist Russia was a single pro-Stalinist source. That would hopefully result in people questioning the narrative as presented. Tolkien's narrative framing ("LOTR is a translation of other texts") does kind of invite an 'unreliable narrator' style critique. The book is not the writing of an omniscient narrator and nothing in LOTR is certain based on that text alone. The notion of orcs as an irredeemable evil race does pose some problems that even Tolkien wrestled with in his later years. Calling people orcs does sound like propaganda. With Stalin there's far less room for a total rewrite. He's too recent. We have numerous voices including Soviet sources which support a sort of commonly agreed upon history. We know that the purges were real. With Tolkien's universe, there's a lot more room for error, and thus for rewriting of the narrative.
I wouldn't trust to just the gospel descriptions of the Pharisees, either. Vlad the Impaler was a hero to his people. Only the pens of his enemies described him as having sold his soul to the devil to become a sort of original vampire.
""what if Jack the Ripper really, y'know, was *not* a crazy murderer but was killing for a *good* reason?""
The problem with this scenario is that the murders are indisputable historical facts and their attribution is tautological. Whoever did the murders is, by definition, Jack the Ripper. But what if the facts, themselves, were in question. What if a person blamed for the murders was actually innocent and a patsy. What if the murders were *not* carried out by a single serial killer, but the impression was created by an ambitious journalist willing to string together crimes to create a narrative of a killer on the loose in order to sell newspapers. What if the number of prostitutes killed during "Jack the Ripper's" supposed killing spree was not actually higher than the average rate and there are enough murdered women, especially prostitutes, on a regular basis to provide ample fabric to selectively stitch together a compelling narrative.
Yes, but in this situation, we *do* know what Stalin was like and what living in Stalinist Russia was like, and instead it's a rabid defender of True Communism who is doing the rewriting like the Party in 1984.
It's not the recency which is in question here; indeed, with his proposed but abandoned sequel "The New Shadow", Tolkien found:
"I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall [of Mordor], but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless – while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors – like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow – but it would be just that. Not worth doing."
"As for the Entwives: I do not know. I have written nothing beyond the first few years of the Fourth Age. (Except the beginning of a tale supposed to refer to the end of the reign of Eldaron about 100 years after the death of Aragorn. Then I of course discovered that the King's Peace would contain no tales worth recounting; and his wars would have little interest after the overthrow of Sauron; but that almost certainly a restlessness would appear about then, owing to the (it seems) inevitable boredom of Men with the good: there would be secret societies practising dark cults, and 'orc-cults' among adolescents.)"
"The Last Ringbearer" is one of those orc-cults. Great fun if that's your thing, but some of us are old enough to remember the true days 😁
"He straightened his back and lifted his head, and walked away up the path, slowly but steadily. The thought crossed his mind even as he stepped over the threshold: 'Perhaps I have been preserved so long for this purpose: that one should still live, hale in mind, who remembers what went before the Great Peace. Scent has a long memory. I think I could still smell the old Evil, and know it for what it is.'
The door under the porch was open; but the house behind was darkling. There seemed none of the accustomed sounds of evening, only a soft silence, a dead silence. He entered, wondering a little. He called, but there was no answer. He halted in the narrow passage that ran through the house, and it seemed that he was wrapped in a blackness: not a glimmer of twilight of the world outside remained there. Suddenly he smelt it, or so it seemed, though it came as it were from within outwards to the sense: he smelt the old Evil and knew it for what it was."
For that take on "Paradise Lost", try "To Reign in Hell" by Steven Brust. It's short and punchy and all Abdiel's fault.
For that take on "The Lord of the Rings", try "Banewreaker" by Jacqueline Carey. Just 2 books, not very long. The Melkor analogue and his lieutenants and their people aren't *nice*, and sometimes are even a bit evil. But the Manwe analogue is a Total Dick, and there's millennia of misinformation out there.
"The Last Ringbearer" is more like a product of an alternate universe where, when Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians were portrayed as demon-worshiping sub-human monsters who enslaved the entire Aegean Sea, and therefore the Spartans were the noble leaders of a coalition who, while not perfect, did what was necessary to keep the world safe. (Alcibiades would be portrayed pretty much the same.) And then 2000 years later, someone finds Thucydides' notes.
From the descriptions, I have a vague feeling I read some of the Brust novel before? It sounds somewhat familiar. It is based on Gnosticism, so that is where the viewpoint is.
As for Carey, I knew I had heard of her. Since BDSM fantasy is not my thing, I've never read any of her famous Kushiel's Dart (and forgive me for laughing here, but I couldn't take a fantasy race in a fantasy world with a fantasy land named "Terre d'Ange"; I mean, come on girl, make more of an effort! Do you really think your American readers will never have come across the exotic tongue of French before?)
I see why her Sundering series didn't do much; she isn't really doing much with the story. It's the familiar "hey,. what if the Bad Guys were really the Good Guys and we turned everything around?" which works only when its novel, but once there's a body of works where "Look with thine ears: see how yond Judge rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?" has been established, then the work has to be very good indeed. I think the problem, again going by the description, is that this bold brave reversal only works if you're familiar enough with the Silmarillion to get the correspondences, so that it has the same problem as the Rings of Power: people who know (and like) the canon aren't going to want this, and people who are looking for a generic fantasy novel need something with a bit more "so what is going on?"
Re: Athens and Sparta, we're accustomed to thinking of Sparta as not a great society, but more recently Athens has been getting the same treatment - its attitudes towards women, slaves, and non-citizens, for instance.
Has our benevolent self-appointed King, Sauron, made sure to have DEIB in his selection of officials? How many women are in positions of authority? Why does he not recognise his Maia privilege? 😁
I'm not insulted by any of these, but I'm not interested, either.
"It was a challenge to the bone-headed aggressive West, which was still picking lice in its log ‘castles’ to the monotonous chanting of scalds extolling the wonders of never-existing Numenor"
"What is the house of Eorl but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among the dogs? Too long have they escaped the gibbet themselves."
Yes, I can see the family resemblance in the attitudes! 😁
> Because The Lord of the Rings is not a good, or even the best, fantasy text. It is *sui generis*, the only one of its kind; therefore, we will not settle for anything less than a full exoneration.
The entire third chapter is a description of how the natural cycles of climate change resulted in reduced rainfall in Mordor, inspiring the government to attempt irrigation on a massive scale. But unfortunately they and their "infant science" didn't understand what they were doing well enough, and they caused an ecological catastrophe of desertification. Resulting in the need to import almost all their food up the Anduin and through Ithilien. Meaning that if hostilities broke out between Mordor and Gondor, Gondor would be able to strike first and cut off Mordor's food supply. Meaning that if hostilies become *likely* to break out, Mordor would need to strike first. Not to mention the geopolitical effect of having Gondor sandwiched between the allies of Mordor and Isengard, meaning that if Gondor struck first it could take out one and then reduce the other at its leisure.
Content warning: our friends are doing more of their music theme weeks, you may want to turn the sound off when visiting this link (I like it, but some might find it annoying):
"LORD OF THE RINGS is about reddit manchildren, LGBT Elves, drug addicts, bandits, and p-dophiles (Gandalf) all wage aggression against PROSPERITY and INDUSTRY of Mordor. Sauron was a wise, righteous and powerful leader. Orcs were WORKING CLASS FIGHTERS. DECODE HOLLYWOOD LIES"
God bless r/Drama and all who sail in it, for the best takes!
Soviet sci-fi, in the form of Strugatsky brothers, features sentient dogs and a kraken (not in any great detail and not as the principal protagonist, but, they're there). Bernard Werber's Les Fourmis (Empire of the Ants) has all sorts of insects (predominantly, of course, the titular ants).
It has been a few years since I have read the song of ice and fire series, but I can't remember Arya getting a Valyrian steel sword? I think the sword she has at the beginning of the series, Needle, is castle-forged steel. IIRC, the smith of Winterfell forges Needle for her out of his own initiative, which he would certainly not be able to do with Valyrian steel. Perhaps she gets such a weapon later, but it seemed not particularly plot relevant to me?
Also, unlike light sabers in Star Wars (which btw checks all of the boxes for the fantasy tropes) Valyrian steel is not very plot relevant because for the people who might wield it, personal combat is not very plot relevant. And with the queen reforging the captured Stark sword into blades her spoiled son, Valyrian swords get tainted by association as a stupid status symbol, I would say. Spoiled rich kids get Valyrian swords, chosen kids get their own mystical animal companions (direwolves, dragons).
Furthermore, the only major character who is not obviously born into high nobility is Jon Snow. (There are minor characters such as the mercenary Bronn who go from rags to riches). The rest of the Starks, the Targarrians, and Lannisters certainly do fall on hard times, but all of them are aware of their claim to nobility from the minute they appear.
Yeah, I don't think Arya gets Valyrian steel in the novels, so far.
The "House of the Dragon" series has the dagger that Arya uses at the end of the "Game of Thrones" show be Aegon the Conqueror's personal dagger upon which he has secretly inscribed knowledge (as on the One Ring). Which is not particularly plot-relevant, but provides a nifty connection.
Use them and you’re ripping off David Brin (Startide Rising).
Is there some sort of general rule that you are allowed to conform to everyone else, but if you are trying to be eccentric, you should be eccentric in a unique way?
There’s so much fantasy and sci-fi out there that you’ll be ripping off someone, in particular, for any creature you choose. But if you use Elves, well, everybody uses Elves. No big deal.
Loosely speaking, sortition seems pretty common in fantasy? That’s what an Artifact of Power discovered by chance is for. [1] Then the problem becomes why someone doesn’t take it from you when you’re sleeping.
Another example is the Golden Ticket in *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory*. I guess to make this plausible and fun in a more modern environment, you need an eccentric billionaire?
There are also stories about winning the lottery in the ordinary way, and this would be a fantasy but not Fantasy, more likely a comedy. A “fairytale” romance is about someone meeting a Prince by chance, and maybe it doesn’t work as well for people who know they’re not that beautiful (or that young)?
I guess to be real sortition, you also need a society that’s okay with choosing ordinary people as leaders by chance, and that’s a lot of world building? Maybe it somehow makes you royalty?
I think writers do often invent interesting races and civilizations, but if done well, they become so associated with that story that nobody else can use them without seeming derivative. (Consider Star Trek’s alien races.) Maybe the question is how something becomes popular but also generic? Somehow, borrowing from Tolkien is okay, maybe because he borrowed from earlier traditions?
Browsing TV Tropes for “research” would help in answering the sorts of questions raised here, but then we’d never get anything done.
Once upon a time, when the famous scientist Albert Einstein worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a tiny old woman approached him as he was walking home. She was schlepping a skinny young boy of about six who was dragging his feet.
“Meester Einstein,” she called out in a strong Central European accent. “Meester Einstein, stop your tracks and help me!”
Einstein was taken aback. He didn’t know what to do except stop.
“How can I help you?” he responded with a smile as he took out a pipe.
“Meester Einstein, stop. You shouldn’t smoke. It will kill you,” the old woman said.
Again, Einstein was taken aback, and he put away his pipe.
“Is that better?”
“Much better,” the old woman said as she drew her timid grandson toward Einstein. “Jaky, stop fiddling and listen to this great man.”
Now she turned her attention back to Einstein.
“Meester Einstein, I want you should tell me what my grandson must do to become educated like you. I want he should be a great scientist.”
Einstein didn’t hesitate with his reply. “Fairy tales. He should read fairy tales.”
“All right,” the woman replied. “But what then? What should he read after that?”
“More fairy tales,” Einstein stated bluntly. He took out his pipe and continued walking toward his home.
The old woman was silent for a moment, but then she grabbed hold of Jaky’s hand and began dragging him through the park again. Suddenly, she stopped.
“You heard, Jaky!” She pointed her finger at the frightened boy. “You heard what the great man said! Read fairy tales! Do what the man said, or God help you!”
It might be worth applying this sort of analysis to other genres. Romance has been mentioned, and perhaps something similar can be done with mysteries, or perhaps the sub-genres of mysteries.
I haven't seen analysis of thrillers, though to judge by my little free library, they're possibly as popular as romances. I think thrillers can be typified as near-future science fiction (that is, one new piece of technology which hasn't changed things generally) that involves fighting against a conspiracy.
The boundaries are blurry of course. There's science fiction about fighting conspiracies and romance can be included in anything.
Alright, one hopefully productive comment, one criticism.
Sure, we'll try sharing this to Notes, new button.
So, with Tolkien and this ur-myth, I think it's probably fair to say that Tolkien less invented all the tropes than recognized and polished them. What Tolkien fundamentally did was obsessively study English and old English/Germanic mythology, which was hugely influential and popular for centuries. He studied 1000+ years of mythology, selected what tropes and elements worked best, polished them, and crafted a unified world out of the best of that tradition. He choose elves and dwarves, and we recognize those, because they're built out of the best of earlier traditions. For example, elves aren't fairies but they play a lot of the same story role and a lot more. And he feels so definitive because, well, he was a genius who worked on this pretty much his entire life in the best possible environment to do it: Oxford University. If you're trying to summarize and polish the best of 1000 years of mythology into a single story, well, that's super hard and it's very hard to top what he did.
As for the criticism, I think you're leaning far too hard onto the power fantasy element, or really the lack of agency. The vibe I get reading this is of people wanting to be powerful without doing work. And there's something to that but...the prince isn't the prince because he worked hard. People's situation they're born into plays a fantastic role in their outcomes. There's a power fantasy of just being a good person being enough but it's not hard to find medieval princes and kings who were fools and their reigns would have been far better for everyone if, ya know, they were just a good person. And I think it's very easy to confuse the fantasy of getting rewards without work or agency with the fantasy of just being born with a better starting position or better natural talents in life.
Maybe this blends over to the competence fallacy, like John Wick or James Bond, but even then James Bond never practices, he's just that good, he's just talented. Ya know, um, I remember watching one of those silly motivational videos with Kobe Bryant and he's bragging about practicing three times a day while everyone else in the NBA was practicing twice. And maybe that's legit, maybe he really did outwork everyone else in the NBA. But, ya know, China is full of sweatshop workers and peasant farmers who will work 10-16 hour days from adolescence to...basically death. And it's hard to convince me, or I think anyone, that the reason Kobe Bryant was a rich sports celebrity and they're working themselves to death in a factory is because Kobe Bryant just worked so much harder than they did. How do you differentiate between people fantasizing about getting the rewards without work and people fantasizing about just being born in a better place in life?
And some of this is about...kind of a moralizing tone but there's also something practical. Hey, ya know, I see a lot of guys with talent falling into this fantasizing and it is very destructive but, hey, some guys are born...just kind of dumb and unlikable. Half of people must be born with below average intelligence and half of people half to be born with below average charisma and that's basically how you improve your lot in life. The economy doesn't really need them and if they work hard they might go from flipping burgers to...being a shift manager and making $1.00 more an hour. And I don't like this advice but if those guys want to slip into a fantasy world of fiction, video games, and (usually) weed, I think that's bad but it's hard to make a case that their life would be better if they worked harder.
I enjoyed this article. I do think it's a mistake to focus only on the fantasy of being the person in the story. Sometimes it's fun to pretend a cool person exists so you can enjoy admiring them. Sometimes, for example with a pure, naive, and strong hero, you like the hero and enjoy rooting for them, are happy when things work out for them, but don't really want to be them.
Sometimes a story can focus on and present a purer version of a good thing that exists in real life. We can enjoy imagining it in the story, and then be more ready to pick it out of the mess of complicated things in real life. I don't think that kind of pleasure in imagining good things is silly or empty.
This post is interesting, but as I read it, I kept thinking of great series I'd consider "fantasy" that go far beyond these parameters and are all the better for it.
An adult example is Stephen King's Dark Tower series. A young adult example is the Sword of the Spirits trilogy by John Christopher (one of my favorite authors, his young adult novels are a hugely underrated treasure trove — especially the Tripods series).
I think what we are arguing about is the difference between pre-Tolkien and post-Tolkien fantasy. Fantasy tended to be lumped in with fairy tales as "for children" which is why you get so many British authors of what are now called YA fiction (Alan Garner - I highly recommend The Owl Service and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Susan Cooper, going earlier E. Nesbit and many more - J.K. Rowling came out of a tradition).
Sure, there were adult fantasy novels, but they were not at all the same commonality - William Morris and James Branch Cabell may be writing fantasy mediaeval-type worlds, but the *spirit* of the tales is *so* different. There was also the blurred lines with ghost stories and some horror fiction - when does it become dark fantasy and when is it horror? M.R. James is known as a writer of ghost stories, but there's definitely horror elements there*. Walter de la Mere wrote delicate ghostly fantasies which can subtly chill the blood. Arthur Machen was doing his own thing, and the story "The Novel of the Black Seal" which makes up part of the collection "The Three Imposters" would very easily be turned by a few alterations into a Lovecraft tale of the occult terrors in the back hills of New England.
But really, only people interested in the genre knew or cared about the distinction between High Fantasy, Low or Picaresque Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, and the rest of it which continues even today with new sub-genres like Urban Fantasy.
And then Tolkien got really popular in the 60s with the Americans, and *that* became the template for fantasy that 'normies' (to use that term) became familiar with. That was the model to be copied by aspiring writers who wanted the big publishing houses to take them on, because publishers were eager to find the "next Tolkien". The same way that Peter Jackson's movies, by their success, made (I maintain) the TV adaptation of "Game of Thrones" feasible. Yes, they're a best-selling series of books, but Martin wasn't known outside of the SF/F genre (and his 80s novel "The Armageddon Rag" was a commercial disaster which nearly ended his career), so for a network like HBO to commit to producing the series, it would be necessary to persuade them that big-budget fantasy adaption could work. With the mainstream success of the LOTR movies, that was easier to sell.
Now we're into post-post-Tolkien, when everyone is trying not to be the "next Tolkien" but the "new whomever". Ironically, I think there's going to be a lot of "the next GRRM" as publishers want to replicate what is a proven commercial success.
*From his story "The Mezzotint", there's a reason the BBC did a lot of adaptations of his work for their traditional A Ghost Story For Christmas both radio and TV:
By the bye, I think Mark Gatiss' 2005 adaptation of "The Tractate Middoth" is too heavy-handed, he goes for the obvious instead of the subtle scare and doesn't get the class distinctions right (this may be deliberate on his part as a kind of subversion; the people involved should be what is termed "decayed gentlefolk" who have come down in the world, but he presents them as lower to middle-middle class which just does not fit, especially the character of the wicked uncle).
"It was by this time rather late in the evening, and the visitors were on the move. After they went Williams was obliged to write a letter or two and clear up some odd bits of work. At last, some time past midnight, he was disposed to turn in, and he put out his lamp after lighting his bedroom candle. The picture lay face upwards on the table where the last man who looked at it had put it, and it caught his eye as he turned the lamp down. What he saw made him very neatly drop the candle on the floor, and he declares now that if he had been left in the dark at that moment he would have had a fit. But, as that did not happen, he was able to put down the light on the table and take a good look at the picture. It was indubitable—rankly impossible, no doubt, but absolutely certain. In the middle of the lawn in front of the unknown house there was a figure where no figure had been at five o'clock that afternoon. It was crawling on all-fours towards the house, and it was muffled in a strange black garment with a white cross on the back.
…"Not at all, Robert," interposed Mr. Williams. "I was meaning to ask you some time what you thought of that picture."
"Well, sir, of course I don't set up my opinion again yours, but it ain't the pictur I should 'ang where my little girl could see it, sir."
"Wouldn't you, Robert? Why not?"
"No, sir. Why, the pore child, I recollect once she see a Door Bible, with pictures not 'alf what that is, and we 'ad to set up with her three or four nights afterwards, if you'll believe me; and if she was to ketch a sight of this skelinton here, or whatever it is, carrying off the pore baby, she would be in a taking. You know 'ow it is with children; 'ow nervish they git with a little thing and all. But what I should say, it don't seem a right pictur to be laying about, sir, not where anyone that's liable to be startled could come on it. Should you be wanting anything this evening, sir? Thank you, sir."
With these words the excellent man went to continue the round of his masters, and you may be sure the gentlemen whom he left lost no time in gathering round the engraving. There was the house, as before, under the waning moon and the drifting clouds. The window that had been open was shut, and the figure was once more on the lawn: but not this time crawling cautiously on hands and knees. Now it was erect and stepping swiftly, with long strides, towards the front of the picture. The moon was behind it, and the black drapery hung down over its face so that only hints of that could be seen, and what was visible made the spectators profoundly thankful that they could see no more than a white dome-like forehead and a few straggling hairs. The head was bent down, and the arms were tightly clasped over an object which could be dimly seen and identified as a child, whether dead or living it was not possible to say. The legs of the appearance alone could be plainly discerned, and they were horribly thin."
Restrainedly nasty, with no gore to speak of, but it makes you queasy to think of what is being depicted.
Hmmm . . . applying this theory to my fantasy novel . . . yes, it fits well. I have two protagonists, one the "Aragorn" competence guy and the other needing to figure out the power she was randomly granted to save everyone else.
In the Prisoner's Dilemma of the world, the legend of the normal person who saves the day, despite possessing only ordinary talents, is a strong virtuous fable. The world is actually saved by normal people, without extraordinary talent or power, choosing goodness and honesty, when they could choose selfishness and lies. If ethics has any meaning ("not what you should do to achieve some given end, but what you should do, full stop") then the ordinary person who is one of the 3 billion people who save the world every day by refusing to betray their neighbor is just as good as the ordinary person who gets a magic sword that lets her save 3 billion people. All this particular fantasy trope is doing is throwing the real ethical situation into high relief.
"Random person using ordinary-people skills like friendship and self-understanding to save the world" is less escapist than it might seem at first, really.
It's rather common for people to be unexpectedly required to deal with difficult problems through no fault of their own, and rather common for the solutions to involve some combination of self-understanding, clear communication, networking, perseverance, and trust in goodness as an ultimately successful strategy. Ordinary-person-saves-the-world fantasy is just dramatizing those ordinary-life skills, so that people will have them internalized and ready when they suddenly have to deal with ordinary-life demons.
As a wise hobbit once said: "Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. [...] Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding onto something. [...] That there's some good in the world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for."
--------
There is a pattern that's kind of always bothered me about fantasy races. Typically, there's humans, who are organized into seven nations following the values of each of the seven Elder Gods, and each nation has its own system of class stratification and resulting social problems that follow from the hidden contradictions in the virtue ethics embodied by the particular Elder God they follow, or whatever... and then, somewhere off to the side, there are also some elves who live off in the forest and like nature, and some dwarves who live underground and like gold, and a few marauding bands of barbaric orcs who like killing. They're monocultures; don't think too hard about them.
In other words, the fantasy races rarely have the kind of internal diversity and adaptability that the humans have. Authors put a lot of thought into their unique human cultures, but then just drop in the fantasy races as a prepackaged trope that fills a narrative function.
I think that's partly why you don't see too many unique non-human races in fantasy. You can drop a bunch of dwarves into your story and trust your readers to accept them based on their pre-existing imported knowledge about dwarven culture, but they're probably going to have a lot more questions about the day-to-day life and moral beliefs of the giant wasp mercenaries which the author may just not want to spend pages exploring.
(Personally, I think that you shouldn't even bother including non-human races unless you're willing to do the work to make them seem completely alien, in a way that goes beyond the differences among regular human cultures. But I've still never gotten around to writing a proper fantasy story myself, so what do I know?)
Wow, I think you and I are the first to make the point about "ordinary person saves the world" being a useful fable, and we posted our comments in the same minute!
Another, thought, on the "ordinary person"/"competence guy" split... I think what's at work there is that most real people have some degree of impostor syndrome, and therefore never really see themselves as the "competence guy." Being an ordinary person stuck dealing with a problem you feel completely unprepared to handle, while people who actually appear to have the necessary skills are occupied dealing with other stuff is... a pretty typical human experience, I expect.
Since you brought up Shannara... Wil Ohmsford (the protagonist of Elfstones) is actually a pretty good example of a character who is fairly technically competent in some areas (healing, wilderness survival), but is also the only person who can save the world for unrelated reasons (the ancestral magic stuff). So he has some ordinary-person expertise he can lean on, but he still feels completely out of his depth. I think that balance of limited expertise that still doesn't adequately prepare you for what you're currently dealing with is fairly representative of real-person life.
(This particular case comes to mind for me because the TV adaptation of Elfstones decided to turn Wil into a goofy and barely competent teenager, which was pretty annoying.)
Regarding the second half of your comment, that's something that bothered me about the Belgariad when I read it when I was a child. The world seemed to have an inverse square law of detail, where the more it expanded, the less detail there was for the territory. The tiny regions of the home country in the beginning have as much flavor (more, really) than the vast enemy empires we encounter at the end. But it's been a while, and maybe he filled in the details later.
The last part probably does not go much farther than what you've already said, it simply saves time to not have to explain a race. Also characters that are similar to humans are easier to write compelling stories for and relate to. Warhammer40k famously gave up on writing stories from the point of view of anyone except humanity because they didn't sell even when all the races are basically human stereotypes.
Also WH40k has slug people that kill using time acceleration weaponry, orks that reproduce through spores, and a big gestalt consciousness of bugs that attacks planets by planting innsmouth style cults of human-alien hybrids that eventually take over and pray for their bug gods to consume them.
I think this is an accurate analysis of the "standard" ordinary-teenager-saves-the-world fantasy and its subversions, but there's so much more to the genre than that.
Some examples I've read recently that match little or none of your description:
- N.K. Jemisin's "The Broken Earth" trilogy. We're actually at the high point of what might some day be known as the Ancient Progenitor Civilization. Our protagonists' positions in society and personal characteristics are critically important, and their eventual pivotal roles rely on training, a lifetime of experience, and individual innovation. While there is a "born in obscurity and then identified as magical" element to the backstory, the way it plays out is...different. There are no elves. Dark lords are a matter of perspective, I suppose.
Suyi Davies Okungbowa's "Son of the Storm": Nobody is plucked from obscurity. Our protagonists' social positions and personal characteristics matter. Politics are central to the story, multipolar, and highly complex. There is no Ancient Progenitor Civilization (or maybe we're in it). There are no elves or dark lords.
Naomi Alderman's "The Power": There is no Ancient Progenitor Civilization. There is a sudden event that upsets the balance of power in a way that empowers some ordinary teenagers, but the outcome is not exactly saving the world, and the protagonist who ultimately comes across most strongly as filling the "ordinary person becomes hero by being a decent person" role is not one of the empowered teenagers. There are no dark lords or elves. There are guns.
I have a vague sense that some of my 20th-century fantasy favourites also broke the mold pretty thoroughly, but I don't remember any off the top of my head.
I think there's an argument for LoTR as the TED-Talk of High Fantasy. Tolkien gets credit for writing the books, but as others have pointed out he was drawing on existing literary, historical and cultural tropes. And then the sophistication and popular success of the books strongly reinforced some of those very tropes. People generally like tropes because they are familiar (that's the definition) and that familiarity is comforting, but you also score points for cleverly inverting tropes. Others have also mentioned Joseph Campbell and The Hero's Journey as a sort of uber-trope.
Scott wrote: "I think this is the key. Every part of the fantasy universe is optimized to justify why a person with no special ability or agency can save the world."
I think this misunderstands the monomyth and LoTR, but probably through (because?) of the lens of the modern rationalist. I want to recommend Eliezer Yudkowksy's Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality fanfic (https://hpmor.com/) here because he's explicitly trying to address that aspect of the juxtaposition Scott is weighing. Harry exists in the modern world of science, so EY does an awesome job of presenting Harry's modern, rationalist reaction to the apparently arbitrary magical world. In contrast, it's "presentism" (reality-ism?) to project the modern epistemology of science into the feudal or more ancient past. It requires a willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience to give up their modern rationalism to access the characters' experience. There are other takes on modern rationalism encountering the magical world. The Magicians was a pretty good recent TV series about this.
There's a close analogue of Scott's ideas that I can't find right now about how there are two superhero archetypes: Batman and Superman. Batman is the competency fantasy. He is given a purpose and becomes a superhero to achieve it. Superman is the agency fantasy. He is gifted super-agency and becomes a superhero to justify the gift. Every superhero is either Batman, Superman or some linear combination. They are both takes on the monomyth with the call to adventure either being the purpose (Batman is orphaned by crime, Ironman must escape his actual/metaphorical prison, Black Widow's "ledger") or the revelation of power (Superman, Wonder Woman, Thor). In LoTR Frodo has a superpower. It is (paradoxically, trope-inverting) his ordinariness , which makes him capable of resisting The One Ring almost to the very end of his hero's journey, and that's what makes him a hero.
To restate all this more succinctly: Tolkien both used and reinforced existing tropes. We like tropes and trope-inversion. The monomyth is a very big trope in human experience, arguably. You can think of modern rationalism and the epistemology of science as a trope-inversion of the way almost all humans have lived, so "fantasy" is a modern willing suspension of disbelief in order to access the lived experience of most humans, and their stories.
The genius and likely cause of part of the success of Star Wars and superheroes are that they are literally fantasy cosplaying as modern rationalism. Space wizards FTW.
Great article overall. On the "mystery" front, my wife and I always talk/joke about how she (and myself and most readers) simply love "revelations!" So many books spend huge amounts of time setting up (and if they are at all good) paying off revelations. It also causes a lot of bad/frustrating writing where characters are needlessly non-communicative and withholding so there can be needless conflict and later "REVELATIONS!".
You also didn't do enough here talking about how so much of what happens in books and who the characters are is about setting up plausible excuses to explain things to the audience. Which is why the main characters, or if not a super important character is always a neophyte.
As always I have a "I am not Scott's definition of 'normal' " note:
>If he is above-normal in any qualities, it’s the qualities we all imagine ourselves as being above-normal at - hard to corrupt, loyal to our friends, having a certain normal-person-good-sense while everyone around us seems strange and suspicious.
I would definitely not put any of those as strengths of mine, or qualities I particularly possess.
Man, there really is something special about a great revelation. It's just an incredible sense of euphoria when all the pieces fall into place, and your entire frame of reference for the story is flipped, especially if you make the connections before it's revealed and you suddenly have this nearly prophetic vision of what's left to come. The best Mystery novels show just how difficult and magnificent of an art form plot-crafting can be. The Shin Honkaku movement over in Japan have kind of mastered this, and I love them for it.
I think the main reason to re-use setting elements like elves and dwarves and fallen empires is that it saves exposition. Why reinvent physics, why reinvent races? When doing D&D, I prefer to play with this by having the common knowledge be exactly that: what's in the PHB and the Monster Manual is what a normal uneducated human thinks. How much is accurate? Trolls are probably big, and probably regenerate, and it's probably best to burn them with fire if you want them to stay dead. Probably. Unless someone was drinking too much, somewhere along the line. Do red dragons really look that much different than blue dragons? Do they actually live in different areas and have different personalities? Do you unquestioningly believe everything Herodotus wrote?
I'd separate this from the trend in fantasy to have reader-surrogate characters, or reader-power-fantasies, or things like that. That's a different matter altogether, IMO. There's plenty of fantasy that doesn't have it.
Also, for a fun twist on elves and dwarves, there's Steven Brust's Dragaera books. Unsophisticated Easterners call Dragaerans "elfs", which isn't terribly offensive. Unsophisticated Dragaerans occasionally call Easterners "dwarfs", which might not be offensive, it's hard to tell. Both refer to themselves as "humans".
> I'd separate this from the trend in fantasy to have reader-surrogate characters, or reader-power-fantasies, or things like that. That's a different matter altogether, IMO. There's plenty of fantasy that doesn't have it.
I feel like the main part of the post is like trying to reason about "dogs" using only the examples of chihuahuas and other small lap-dog-style breeds that do well in urban apartments as a substitute for children. The fantasy stories that are popular right now among people you know, are not necessarily characteristic of the genre as a whole. They may say more about the people you know, and what their lives are like right now, than they do about the genre as a historical entity. They may even have been crafted specifically to appeal to people like the people you know.
"Steven Brust's Dragaera books. Unsophisticated Easterners call Dragaerans "elfs", which isn't terribly offensive. Unsophisticated Dragaerans occasionally call Easterners "dwarfs", which might not be offensive, it's hard to tell. "
Reminds moe of the European interpretation of Tolkien: Hobbits=English, Elves=French, Dwarves=Germans.
>. As far as I know, this extremely basic idea (someone has to invent spells, but then anyone can use them) had never been tried before;
Ted Chiang's "Seventy-Two Letters", in case you have read not it, has a similar theme, including the reference to the kaballistic names of God. More generally, he explores a number of other more unusual forms of "fantasy". That said, people tend not to call it fantasy any more, e.g. wikipedia calls it "steampunk".
To be honest, I think I fundamentally disagree with the premise that fantasy isn't an experimental genre. What you refer to as Here Be Dragons type fantasy, what I usually call Epic Fantasy, is just one sub-genre within the category. I wouldn't even say that Tolkien invented it, a ton of it is clearly derived from the Kalevala and other sagas from Northern Europe. He was a great writer, and as a result successfully popularized many plot elements, but I would call that the evolution and cementation of just one particular sub-region, as you follow the path through D&D and Dragon Quest.
But there's a lot of other fantasy out there! Much of it is even developed independently. As far as I can tell isekai came about pretty much wholly detached from what was called Portal Fantasy in the west. Certainly I can't find many parallels between Mushoku Tensei and Narnia/Conan/Alice in Wonderland/A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
I also see many ways in which Fantasy splits off from the Saga-esque. Harry Potter is the most profitable Fantasy series of all time, and shares very little with Tolkien. They call Voldemort a Dark Lord, but the name is about all he shares with the likes of Sauron; the man is basically just the leader of a terrorist organization in a single country. Twilight stands out to me as well, showing the ways in which Fantasy has largely absorbed Horror and rebuilt it to fit contemporary desires. Urban Fantasy is another notable sister; The Dresden Files is likely the most famous example within the English speaking world, but I would also offer up much of the Korean Web Novel scene. Works like Solo Leveling, SSS-Class Suicide Hunter, and Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint are utterly unlike anything I've read from the US. There's Gaslamp Fantasy, like the works of Diana Gabaldon; Flintlock Fantasy, like Guns of the Dawn by Adrian Tchaikovsky; Gothic Fantasy, like Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake; Ninja fantasy or whatever you want to call all the Naruto-derived series out there. I don't even really feel like I've covered the tip of the iceberg here, I don't particularly care for LotR or its copycats, so these other forays in the genre are almost all I read of Fantasy.
I will grant to you that the Fantasy races tend towards repetitiveness. There are exceptions, like Jim Butcher's Codex Alara or maybe Nisioisin's Monogatari series, but they're certainly rarer. My theory on it is that you only really have so much space to introduce your reader's to new concepts. There are a lot of jokes about authors who first page is 25% made up fantasy terminology, and at the end of the day there's not a lot of impetus to bother. Fantasy races are generally specific archetypes with a purpose. Sure, an author could take the time to create a whole new race that specializes in crafting wondrous weapons and artifacts, but what does that do for your reader that using Dwarves doesn't? For the purposes of developing your themes, or politics, or character relationships, just about every niche already has a fully fleshed out archetype that your readers are already intimately familiar with. For the books that deviate, it's usually the deviation that is their entire focus. The story becomes about introducing your reader to these races and their society, and convincing them that they matter. If that's not what you're writing, it's just a lot of unnecessary work.
...This is just wildly inconsistent with the fantasy books I've read.
Like, I agree the generic fantasy setting described here exists. It's D&D. Or, rather, it's D&D percolated through MMOs, Japanese webfiction, and pop culture in general. But books aren't actually set in it, aside from D&D tie-in novels (which used to be a pretty big deal, but less so now). In non-tie-in published fiction, almost no one copies all of Tolkien's races, and dungeon-diving is even rarer. And basically every actual story I've read that does use this generic fantasy setting is trying in some way to subvert it - usually not done very well, due to the writer confusing the generic fairytale or pseudo-medieval setting, Middle-Earth specifically, and that generic D&D/MMO setting.
But, as some other commenters have noted, if you want novels with more creativity than that, there's literally thousands of options.
I find the omission of Star Wars confusing. It's *the* fantasy I'm most used to hearing discussed in these terms, and I have some evidence that Scott's familiar with it
Split the difference; it's soft SF or science fantasy, of the Planetary Romance kind. It has spaceships and robots and aliens, but also midichlorians, "hokey ancient religions" and the like.
Tatooine is not very far, in imagination space, from Barsoom or the Venus and Mars of the Northwest Smith stories.
Star Trek is slightly harder (medium?) SF in that it relies on technobabble and not The Force.
Then there's the alternate history school of fantasy, such as the Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett where magic has laws and rules, you don't need special powers to learn it, and it is in the place of science and technology in our world (e.g. there's a forensic sorcerer who assists the detective instead of a forensic scientist):
"The Lord Darcy stories are set in an alternate world whose history supposedly diverged from our own during the reign of King Richard the Lionheart, in which King John never reigned and most of western Europe and the Americas are united in an Angevin Empire whose continental possessions were never lost by that king. In this world a magic-based technology has developed in place of the science of our own world.
Lucas explicitly designed *Star Wars* to be a mix of Westerns and Jidaigejki, i.e. Samurai legends. Thus, it draws on adventure, technology, and spiritualism in equal measure; but the concept of legendary larger-than-life characters is what binds it all together.
There really isn't any easier way to say this: this is, at best, limited and misguided.
First of all, this piece contradicts itself, conflating the 'born special' people of Shanara with the not at all special Frodo (S.A. seems to bith find and miss what is distinctive about Tolkien). And it then goes on to conflate Middle-earth with Discworld, when they are nothing alike (Discworld starts as a parody of the pulp fantasy that is now largely forgotten- Thongor of Valkarth etc. etc.) Pratchett also dips into the pre-Tolkien fantasy motives, e.g. having DEATH actually be present on stage, something the medieval would immediately recognise.
It isn't that Tolkien was the only creative, it is that he is like Shakespeare: later writers have struggled not to be him. Some succeed: Martin & Moorcock. But if you look at the pre-Tolkien fantasy, you find no such commonality as S.A. suggests. See Poul Anderson "Three Hearts, Threw Lions", Cancer "Dying Earth", Fritz Leiber etc. And, of course, there's Narmia.
So no evidence for commonality there.
I will go so far as to say S.A. does injustice to Isekai. Yes, there is a lot of tripe out there, that deals with the same tired fantasy tropes. There are also ones like "Tanya the Evil", "Hero has Returned", "Haibane Renmei", and the masterly "Now and Then, Here and There", which explores what a world that would use random children as soldiers would actually be like (the maker researched groups like the LRA).
So - what's left of the original premise? Not much. All we know is there's a bunch of power-fantasies marketed to people who want power-fantasies. That's it, really.
> The one thing I still don’t understand is why everyone has the same races. Why elves, dwarves, goblins, and sometimes drow? Why not sentient dogs, or dolphins, or bee-people living in hive-cities, or those weird people with ten arms and one eye who the medievals sometimes reported seeing in the Orient, or one-inch tall people whose cities are the size of football fields, or sentient wasps that you can hire to sting your enemies?
I think this is mostly false. It's true that quite a few fantasy worlds have these races, but there are many (more?) that don't. Mieville has already been brought up, as has Sanderson, but I might throw Pullman into the mix as well since your mention of sentient wasps put me in mind of the Gallivespians (we also have talking bears and sign-language-using elephants who ride wheels!).
And sure, you can say "well Perdido Street Station isn't really the type of fantasy I was talking about" or "Well the Parshendi from Stormlight are kind of like orcs" or "Pullman is a bit too close to science fiction". But in the end, you're either being tautological ("the fantasy I'm talking about is the kind with orcs, elves, and dwarves") or you're taking "elves, orcs, and dwarves" so broadly that any woodland folk count as "elves", any subterranean folk count as "dwarves", and any ugly baddies count as "orcs".
(The phenomenon you describe is definitely present, to be clear: orcs, elves, and dwarves are somewhat overrepresented. But I'd say not as much as you imply.)
A lot of people have brought up the point that a lot of fantasy authors have created unique races for their works. The question nobody here seems to be asking has been "why haven't any of those non-Tolkien fantasy races stuck around in the public consciousness?"
I've seen three pools of fictional races creators can use that are common to multiple universes. There's the Tolkien / D&D set (elves, dwarves, halflings / hobbits, orcs); there's the stock Japanese 'isekai' set (Tolkien / D&D + flavors of animal accented beastkin + flavors of 'cute' monsterkin), and there's the rubber-forehead/ears sci-fi set (Vulcans / Space Elves, Klingons / "Proud Warrior Race Guys"). The rubber-forehead/ears sci-fi set is a bit more distinct from use to use.
The rubber-forehead/ears races tend to get the "planet of hats" treatment, where there's a single defining human comprehensible characteristic (the "hat") the race can be associated with (Klingons are warriors; Ferengi are capitalists). The isekai beastkin types, which are typically either humanoid versions of an animal (isekai kobolds are often humanoid dogs rather than lizardfolk) or a human with animal ears and tail, tend to have racial psychological traits associated with the animal species their appearance derives from. If you know what a 'cat' is, you can imagine a catfolk in an isekai light novel (or, for that matter, a Khajiit from the Elder Scrolls, a Miqo'te from Final Fantasy XIV, a Charr from Guild Wars, or a Kilrathi from Wing Commander).
What's fascinating is that the Tolkien / D&D set seems to stand on its own. We can describe Vulcans as Space Elves and everyone seems to know what an elf is. The other interesting note is that we're a lot better at creating new memorable monsters than we are races (Starship Troopers 'bugs' / Warhammer 40k's Tyranids / Starcraft's Zerg / ...).
How many of what you call the "Tolkien/D&D" set are long-standing mythical creatures and how many are Tolkien inventions? Elves, for example, predate Tolkien, so the fact that we know what a "space elf" is might not have anything to do with the Tolkien/D&D set standing on its own, but be more just a consequence of elves being a concept that's been in the public consciousness forever. Am I missing your point?
More recent authors invent races, but it would be weird for another author to copy them wouldn't it? If somebody wrote a story involving somebody with an insect for a head who makes art with the insect shit, it would feel like they were ripping off China Mieville.
There must be some axis along which races feel more generic or less generic. (Doesn't actually mean they _are_ generic, but they feel that way.) Anything from the generic end of the spectrum can be used in your works without it feeling like fanfic; anything more specific feels like you're ripping people off. So a fantasy author who wants to be seen as respectable has to either borrow from the generic end or invent their own, new, specific races (which other authors will then steer clear of).
I'm not familiar with the "isekai" you describe, but I would say that humanoid animals, as well as talking animals, and crosses between animals, are generic no matter what (so for example Pullman doesn't get a monopoly on talking polar bears).
So maybe the question we should be asking is what factors make fantasy races fall on different parts of the generic/specific spectrum? And how quickly can a race move from the specific end to the generic end? (This might be another way of asking your initial question of why don't the non-Tolkien fantasy races stick in the public consciousness.) And has the generification process slowed down a lot now there are so many authors (so Tolkien could generify races really quickly because he was the only(ish) fantasy author of the time, but Sanderson can't do the same today)?
That Tolkien relied on existent mythology is partly why his set of races stuck around; elves and dwarves certainly pop up enough in mythology. However, mythology can't explain everything. While I think the origins of the word 'orc' tie back to folklore, I think the race itself is pretty much Tolkien's creation.
The ability to make a race generic enough is part of it, but I think it also has to fill a useful niche. I think a good example of what I'm talking about is the D&D mimic, which is a monster that takes the appearance of a mundane item, often a chest. It's an idea that has a lot of use for RPG creation: a monster that by posing as a reward lulls the player(s) into a false sense of safety. Because it is useful, the idea got copied and used in other games.
It seems to me this post is very much a continuation of themes present in "Nerds and Hipsters" and especially the Highlights from the Comments on that. Isn't there an impulse behind all three posts that, in an important sense, is just more of what Weber called "The Protestant [Work] Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism"? It's secularized, of course, as Weber said that spirit was already by the 18th century. But there's the same exhortation to police one's use of time ("what comes naturally . . . is to browse Reddit and play video games"), the same valuation of (more or less) anhedonic effort over pleasure (a cultural production is worthy to the extent it requires effort on the part of the consumer), and, overall, the same obsessive drive to *produce* (although the product is now cultural status in a 21st-century sense, not wealth or bourgeois respectability). Mightn't "Do better!" be translated as "Work hard, young man, and don't you come out of your study until you have something worthy"? There is a place for this spirit in the maintenance of certain aspects of human vitality. But, after so much, dare one say, scolding, does not even the lamest--perhaps especially the lamest--fandom come to seem like the pleasure principle's cry in the wilderness, and a necessary corrective to relentless meritocracy? Should we not give even a moment to the--admittedly not intellectually rich, but still authentic--call of “I enjoy it because it’s fun”?
Oh, nice catch! There's definitely more than a whiff of the sense that fiction must be Educational and instill Proper Values and Right Modes of Thought, and its ultimate goal must be to Uplift The Spirit.
"Isn't there an impulse behind all three posts that, in an important sense, is just more of what Weber called "The Protestant [Work] Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism"?"
This makes it even more pointed that Tolkien was Catholic 😁
The newish fantasy animated series on Netflix 'Arcane' which is based on League of Legends plays around with the idea of 'someone has to invent spells and then everyone can use them'. It's pretty great
"There are, however, some questions that one who is to speak about fairy-stories must expect to answer, or attempt to answer, whatever the folk of Faërie may think of his impertinence. For instance: What are fairy-stories? What is their origin? What is the use of them? I will try to give answers to these questions, or such hints of answers to them as I have gleaned—primarily from the stories themselves, the few of all their multitude that I know.
What is a fairy-story? In this case you will turn to the Oxford English Dictionary in vain. It contains no reference to the combination fairy-story, and is unhelpful on the subject of fairies generally. In the Supplement, fairy-tale is recorded since the year 1750, and its leading sense is said to be (a) a tale about fairies, or generally a fairy legend; with developed senses, (b) an unreal or incredible story, and (c) a falsehood. The last two senses would obviously make my topic hopelessly vast. But the first sense is too narrow. Not too narrow for an essay; it is wide enough for many books, but too narrow to cover actual usage. Especially so, if we accept the lexicographer's definition of fairies: “supernatural beings of diminutive size, in popular belief supposed to possess magical powers and to have great influence for good or evil over the affairs of man.”
...The diminutive being, elf or fairy, is (I guess) in England largely a sophisticated product of literary fancy. It is perhaps not unnatural that in England, the land where the love of the delicate and fine has often reappeared in art, fancy should in this matter turn towards the dainty and diminutive, as in France it went to court and put on powder and diamonds. Yet I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of “rationalization,” which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass. It seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood. In any case it was largely a literary business in which William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton played a part. Drayton's Nymphidia is one ancestor of that long line of flower-fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae that I so disliked as a child, and which my children in their turn detested. Andrew Lang had similar feelings. In the preface to the Lilac Fairy Book he refers to the tales of tiresome contemporary authors: “they always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple-blossom… These fairies try to be funny and fail; or they try to preach and succeed.”
But the business began, as I have said, long before the nineteenth century, and long ago achieved tiresomeness, certainly the tiresomeness of trying to be funny and failing. Drayton's Nymphidia is, considered as a fairy-story (a story about fairies), one of the worst ever written.
...Fairy, as a noun more or less equivalent to elf, is a relatively modern word, hardly used until the Tudor period. The first quotation in the Oxford Dictionary (the only one before A.D. 1450) is significant. It is taken from the poet Gower: as he were a faierie. But this Gower did not say. He wrote as he were of faierie, “as if he were come from Faërie.” Gower was describing a young gallant who seeks to bewitch the hearts of the maidens in church."
As others have pointed out, the "protagonist is/becomes the chosen one" [0] is a trope which is ubiquitous. It appears in fairy tales (Cinderella?), SF (Matrix), space opera (Star Wars) as well.
I think it is actually somewhat less frequent in pen & paper role playing games. D&Dish systems have one of the more extreme power curves, to the degree that no amount of level one characters can hope to best a single high level character. Still, apart from being heros, the PCs are not inherently special. There are also NPC sorcerers of high level, and from my understanding most games people play do not have the goal of the PCs reaching godhood or something. White Wolf's World of Darkness games typically start with somewhat-near-ordinary human levels of power which then goes through the roof (especially for Mage).
In Shadowrun, the characters are the underdogs, which is why they need to use covered actions in the first place. There is no power level reachable which allows the characters to fry Lofwyr and take over Saeder-Krupp. The dark eye (DSA, a German system) also has little power leveling. Getting into a fight with a few dozens angry people with clubs is generally a poor idea even for an experienced character.
Contrast this with (single player) role playing video games. I think there are different levels of Chosenness:
* The PC is a non-unique hero who happens to have solved the previous quests (Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout series, VtM: Bloodlines)
* The PC is plotwise Chosen, but does not get extra personal combat power for that (Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur's Gate, later-series Dragon Age and Mass Effect). Typically they get a title ("Commander") as well as a fort, an army or a space ship.
* The PC is Chosen and gets extra-special powers to reflect that (Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous eventually drops ten Mythic Levels on the PC enabling them to do extra-special stuff, Skyrim's Dragon words). Instead of earning lichhood through long-winded study ~like Pharasma intended~, you basically get it gifted as a goodie from an NPC.
I think this is because computer RPGs are agency simulators. Nobody wants to play a game where they are constantly running defenseless from helicopters shooting them. Power curves work very well for that. If you started out being able to one-shot mirelurks, that would be much less impressive than if you start out being totally powerless against them and then later are able to evaporize them or whatever. The choseness seems mostly to tie the PC in the plot. KotOR would work if the main character was just a random person who eventually became a Jedi, but then the story would not be particularly memorable.
> As far as I know, this extremely basic idea (someone has to invent spells, but then anyone can use them)
Multiple Brandon Sanderson books have systems adjacent to this. In Warbreaker the magic system is accessible to everyone, and scholars work to develop new spells.
Another of his books, Elantris does have a genetic component to magic, but the magic system was broken by a cataclysm a couple generations ago. The protagonist then figures out that it can still work with modifications, through a huge amount of poring over books and experimenting. Also, the magic system is clearly supposed to basically be programming.
I think Sanderson books are pretty close to "technology, but magic is the technology" so that's why they don't fall into the mold described here.
I am commenting only to say that whatever is happening with Substack, with the popups and un-dismissable BS, is maddening and destroys the platform for me. Fix it immediately or I never interact with this site or susbtack ever again.
> As far as I know, this extremely basic idea (someone has to invent spells, but then anyone can use them) had never been tried before;
In Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicle the main character invents a new magical device, patents it and is paid royalties.
This book is also basically the opposite of what you are describing: the main character is very competent (though often unwise), both gifted and very dedicated. The books also don't really have any Dark Lord (well there kinda is one, but he doesn't play a very big role in the story) and don't really have elves, unless you count a kind of a succubus that likes keeping men as sex slaves and some other creatures like that.
You kind of touched on this with your reference to D&D, but it seems to me that fantasy RPGs, video games in particular, operate on a different, superficially opposite fantasy, i.e. that there are large and predictable returns to work. You kill the monsters, gaining gold and experience, and you use them to become stronger, until you're capable of accomplishing your ultimate goal. Success is virtually guaranteed, as long as you put in the hours.
But maybe they're not so different. In single-player games, there's still a chosen-one aspect here: If it's so easy, why isn't there any competition? Because you, as the sole player character, are the chosen one. Even if the narrative says that you're just a regular guy, you're the only one with agency, which makes you special.
On the other hand, in MMORPGs, there is competition. Nowadays, I think they're more skill-based, but in the early days many of them really did come down to putting in the most "work," playing into the work -> reward fantasy without the chosen-one element.
Of course, to some extent the real world works that way as well, but it's a lot messier. Talent and luck play important roles. There are fairly reliable ways to turn talent and hard work into a pretty good result, but exceptional outcomes require luck as well. And if you don't have the talent, hard work can only take you so far.
One thing I appreciate about R. Scott Bakker's second apocalypse books is that they actually do take the logistics of moving massive medieval-tech armies seriously, and often use those problems as key plot points.
They also just in general contain about zero of the tropes laid out here.
> But also: the way to become John Wick is to practice shooting, every day, again and again, more obsessively than anyone else.
Oddly enough, I'm currently reading the *Cradle* series (by Will Wight), which is basically this. The protagonist starts off at the bottom (actually, below even the bottom), and acquires incredible power through a). relentless grinding all day, every day, b). getting involved in fights with significantly more powerful people than he could ever imagine, and c). winning (or at least surviving) the fights through a combination of perseverance and blatant cheating. Then, he goes right back to (a), because he's on a deadline, and unless he manages to attain virtual godhood in time, everyone and everything he loves will be destroyed. He's not the classic Chosen One, either: yes, the heavens have blessed him with their attention, but only to say, "your self-imposed mission is kind of impossible and you should probably give up". He doesn't.
One way to think of fantasy is as a literary genre that pretends to be folklore. Middle Earth is in some ways a unique creation of Tolkien but is in other ways the same world that traditional fairy tales are set in. Tolkien described The Hobbit this way explicitly. Tolkein's big groundbreaking idea wasn't the concept of elves or whatever, but rather the idea that fairy tales could be written for adults and have literary merit. Fantasy literature (at least in the Western tradition) feels same-y because it all draws from the same European folkloric roots. The Lord of the Rings didn't have any unicorns in it, but when subsequent Tolkien-derived fantasy works include them, nobody bats an eye. Even though Tolkien didn't draw on the specific folkloric concept of unicorns, drawing from folklore is the same kind of thing he was doing, so it still feels like it fits. Fantasy doesn't usually have sentient wasps and whatnot, because then the work would lose that feeling of being this ancient tale from folklore. Not that out-of-the-box ideas like that couldn't be fun, it would just be a different feel.
My exposure to fantasy is mostly through gaming, so I have a different perspective about why these kinds of tropes show up there. In RPGs, the point of the game *is* for the players to exercise agency and use their PCs' special powers to solve their problems, so the idea that the point is "for someone who's not unusually talented or agentic to be the hero" does not apply.
However, one thing that does apply is that you need problems that the players can come up with solutions for *without needing a lot of context*, because the players will almost always have less information about the fictional world than they do about the real world. For instance, going back to Scott's example of gaining power in a democracy. If you wanted to do an RPG where the PCs are trying to win an election in something resembling a modern democracy, you would need a lot of the following information:
- who the different constituencies/demographics are
- what are the different issues, and what sorts of people have what positions on what issues
- who your opponents are and what *their* positions are
- who possible campaign donors are, what they want, and what might convince them
- what you will have the power to do (or at least what voters think you have the power to do) once elected, i.e. what you could credibly promise
- and so on.
Now, we're familiar with a lot of this stuff *in our own world* just from living in it our whole lives and paying attention to the world. But a lot of this stuff is totally different e.g. between different countries at the same time, between today and a few decades ago, and maybe even between different U.S. states. So if you wanted to do a campaign like this in some totally different world, you would have to give the PCs a huge amount of background information before they could even start.
So you end up with things like "if you can kill the old king then you become the new king", because that reduces the problem to how to kill someone, which the players are already familiar with how to solve.
There *are* fantasy themed games that do focus more on other stuff. Like the way you described Celebrimbor: "the story would mostly be about him studying magic smithcraft and trying to figure out the exact right ratio of mithril to orichalcum that maximizes spell adherence." That basically describes the board game Alchemists (not that *exactly*, but in Alchemists you're trying to learn the rules for which potion ingredients have which effects and then publish your results). Those, however, are usually board games or computer games rather than RPGs. In that case the game rules are what provide the necessary context.
The standard fantasy race package is a thing for the same reason fanfiction is a thing in general - explanation length/inference distance: to create a memorable race or culture (or a character or an archetype, or world mechanics, or (...)) one needs a lot of work and many words that don’t push the story forward. Doing it competently and not derailing your story is _hard_. Using already established culture is easy and short, just write ‘dwarves’! As a bonus, you get superficial creativity points for misspelling the name or subverting one irrelevant part of the trope (no need to first establish something you’ll subvert, neither, that’s already been done for you!).
The fantasy races fit very nicely into stereotyped categories. We humans love our stereotyped categories, but don't condone doing it with real people anymore. Instead, we get to have fun engaging in stereotyping behavior and categorization with dwarves, elves, orcs, etc...
A NZ writer called Maurice Gee wrote a short but wonderful three-part teen fiction series called The Halfmen of O that most NZers my age (40) will have read. I thought of it over and over as I read this piece. Susan, the 12yo normal human protagonist, as a baby receives a magical birthmark from a transworld visitor who was about to die and couldn't find an adult to pass his mark on to at the critical moment. But she doesn't find out about any of this for years. So she's born totally ordinary, raised ordinary, but at the onset of adolescence is chosen for an extraordinary task (to save the other world from fascism, basically) and given some "mystical powers lite" to do it, with help from her totally ordinary cousin Nick. It's a great coming of age story but the fantasy world of O is also beautifully imagined and original. No dolphins, but there are talking seals, as well as bloodcats, varg (giant polar bears), and flying birdmen.
This article, ironically enough, has been "psychologically life-changing" by convincing me that my problems / problems I want to solve, will yield more to doing *unusual actions* (obsessive practice, novel thinking) instead of "finding myself". Thank you, Scott.
There are few books inbetween which bring some difference, given that 99% percent in this genre are just even more primitive adaptions of the Vogler's Journey with such a bad storyline that "Deus ex Machina" becomes a writing style of its own. Mostly standing out is Nalini Singh with her first books of the Psy Universe, there you get your Dolphins and whatnot and a much broader scope of psychological insight. On another plane there is the Shadowrun Universe, hero stories yes, but reverberating the sacrifices of the average player saving some human values.
Arya Stark never got Valyrian steel in the books. Even the dagger she gets in the show is basically forgotten there, and it seems like a first-book-ism for such a valuable item to be in possession of some nameless catspaw.
Others have pointed out Robert Howard's Conan stories as a contrast, but I don't know if Tolkien had any awareness of that (that might be too American & low in prestige). He was aware of Lord Dunsany & E. R. Eddison, and disapproved of the former's cynical approach to religion and the latter's Nietzcheanism. He was also critical of Shakespeare's approach to fantasy (thinking the medium of theater is inherently deflating of anything magical) and Michael Drayton for perpetuating the most childish & cutesy form of fairies (following in the tradition of A Midsummer Night's Dream).
I don't think Ayra Stark was a good reference, partly because A Song of Ice and Fire was written to intentionally avoid these issues. Daenerys does have the innate magical ability to wield ancient power, but it conspicuously doesn't make her a ruler. Even with her dragons, her ability (or inability) to rule comes from how she juggles obligations to various interest groups or how she feeds an army.
Yes, she's a ruler because of her dragons. Before they hatched she was not really a ruler. It is her dragons that enable her to conquer her first city.
Yes, she conquers Astapor using her dragons, but she is unsuccessful in her goals for the city. By the end of the most recent book, her favored government has been overthrown by a series of warlords that have brought back slavery and allowed the spread of a deadly plague. The city is about to fall to representatives of the group she overthrew with her dragons. Her dragons did not give her the ability to rule the city, only overthrow the previous rulers. In order to rule, she'd have to develop things like tax policy and governing principles, not just have dragons.
This was an intentional theme for the author. He has an interview where he talks about being interested in what Aragorn's tax policy would be and that choices like that will be more important in whether a ruler is "good" than the moral character of the ruler.
Sorry, I should have originally said that the dragons don't make her a *good* or successful ruler. Do you think she was a good or successful ruler?
In traditional fantasy, heirs to the ancient ruling family tend to bring prosperity. However, she seems to be mostly unsuccessful in accomplishing her goal of establishing a free, prosperous society in Slaver's Bay, despite having a magical birthright.
The Targaryens are not "the ancient ruling family" of anywhere in Essos; they were one of the relatively minor family of dragonlords in Valyria. The place they ruled was the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros (and Dragonstone before that), which she still hasn't gotten back to.
Planescape Torment, at least, tries to transcend these tropes (tho not fully, and it still borrows a lot from fantasy worlds, maybe with different-than-stereotyped roles).
They did, that's what created the Dark Lord in the first place. Before the union vote, they were all just hardworking Orcs trying to feed their families and working the mines for Amalgamated Mithril LLC. But then smooth-talking Sauron showed up, started talking about workers' rights and class struggle, and installed himself as Union Rep. Now it's nothing but immanentizing the eschaton by furthering the revolution all day long.
Don't look for a Watsonian answer to a Doylist question.
Fantasy is genre fiction. It is largely commercial, trying to sell a recognizable product to an established audience.
Even if the pulp market isn't what it was, the conventions formed by the pulp market run so deep by now as to be part of e definition of the genre. Would pre-Tolkien works such as The Well at World's End and Islandia (neither of which I have read, btw) be recognized as fantasy nowadays?
This is, incidentally, why Warsaw-Pact sci-fi such as Lem's feels not-quire-sci-fi while having obvious qualities: Lem didn't *get* (until later in life) that sci-fi was supposed to be genre fiction, in the commercial sense.
Then there is the case of established literary figures trying their hand at the genre (as in Olvidado Rey Gudú, which I *am* reading now). Then some tropes have to be recognizable and salient (map on the first page, grimdark) or else there would be nothing to comment on; pastiche needs references.
How about a story 4: we've effectively redefined "fantasy" to mean "Tolkien-like universe", so we hardly recognize other fantasy worlds as such. One that comes to mind: Piranesi (Susanna Clarke). While you could probably find a few parallels to the tropes you outline in virtually any story, this one doesn't really participate in them, yet it's a masterwork of fantasy. Anyone know of other good but very different fantasy worlds?
Rachel Aaron's Eli Monpress series is an animist fantasy (everything has a spirit, magic is done my communicating with and controlling/persuading those spirits).
Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight divides reality into layers, with reality working fundamentally differently across those layers and magic mostly being a manifestation of authority structures between those layers.
Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber envisions an infinite continuity of parallel worlds, each subtly different from its neighbors and focuses on protagonists who can shift between them.
Christopher Stasheff's A Wizard in Rhyme portrays a medieval fantasy world based on the author's study of medieval European folklore (as close as he could get to the world medieval people thought they were living in, including religiously).
Gabriel King's The Wild Road is urban fantasy from the perspective of a magical cat.
Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit is weird enough to be difficult to describe, but "military science-fantasy" is the best I've come up with. The opening scene involves a military commander adjusting the formation of their unit because the local magical laws are different enough from standard that their energy-shield formation isn't as effective as it should be.
Michael Stackpoole's A Secret Atlas presents a world where any skill eventually becomes magical when taken to a sufficient height of practice and expertise (and in the process makes the practitioner a near-immortal "mystic"). We first see this with the expected mystic swordsmen, but the main question of the primary protagonist's story is "what does it mean to be a mystic cartographer".
I think the author has come to some very wrong conclusions based on a narrow experience of the fantasy genre. To illustrate the point, here are examples of fantasy doing nearly every thing he claims it does not do.
Magic must be discovered, but can then be used by anyone - The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
No ancient progenitor civilization - The Legend of Eli Monpress by Rachel Aaron.
No sealed dark lord - The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven.
No dark lord at all - Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny (if you read only one thing of all the stories I'm citing here, make it this one).
All of the above in the same work - A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Leguin
Ancient progenitor civilization didn't fall - Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone by J K Rowling
Sentient dogs - Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb
Sentient cats - The Wild Road by Gabriel King (you din't ask for this one, but it's really good)
Dolphins - The Dolphins of Pern by Anne Mccaffrey
Bee people in hive cities - Codex Alera by Jim Butcher (this is a series, the bee people don't show up until the later books).
One Inch People - Give of a Useless Man by Alan Dean Foster
Mercenary Wasps - The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher is the closest I could think of on this one, though it doesn't fully fit (mercenary pixies that fight like wasps are close, but not exact).
But I think the disconnect goes even farther. I browsed the fantasy section of my local bookstore last week and don't recall seeing a single book that meets the definition of "the fantasy world" as you've laid it out here.
The core appeal of the Isekai/LitRPG genre has more to do with the game mechanics than the setting or tropes. Most people live in a world where it is incredibly easy to work hard for nothing and feedback is usually more status-noise than signal. By contrast, in a world with video game mechanics, objective feedback is constantly available (how good at guitar am I? character sheet says 7). And there are generally a set of clearly understood actions that lead to improvement.
The appeal of isekai fantasy is not in getting results without hard work. The appeal of isekai fantasy is in having the ability to advance and improve with just hard work.
I think fantasy races are so well-established because they map well to social classes. Elves are noble, beautiful, and few in numbers, which makes them resemble aristocracy and elite. Dwarves resemble burly workmen, hobbits resemble diligent farmers, and humans are left out to be sort of middle-class bourgeoisie. Obviously, there are dwarven kings and elven traders, but the similarities to the social classes still hold. And once there exists a niche for such races, the niches get filled with some winning variants, like elves being called elves, having pointed ears and liking archery.
The only classical race that does not fit this picture is orcs. Their niche is the "Evil and Dangerous Other", and so they are similar to barbarians and/or steppe nomads, which were the typical enemy in the cultural narrative (and one substantially different from "Us" in a way that the nearest rival kingdom is not).
Someone, I forget who, claimed that the Harry Potter series are anti-Christian because the assumption that things can be achieved by merely waving a wand, once one gets the hang of it, is at odds with the Christian ethos of struggle and just reward (if any) only after effort and perseverance. That is a brief summary of his point, as I recall it, but he developed it more fully and it seemed quite persuasive at the time.
About the last paragraph - the reason you don't see animal protagonists and deuteragonists much in fantasy might be because they don't have opposable thumbs. I remember reading a blog post by, or maybe an interview with, one of the original game developers at Insomniac Games. They were made famous by their Spyro the Dragon trilogy for the original PlayStation. He said that they didn't continue the series because they ran out of gameplay ideas for a quadruped. They really wanted a main character who can pick things up and use tools with hands. And so their next platformer game had a whole new universe with a new main character, Ratchet, who's essentially a furry human, and the gameplay focus is on beating things with a wrench and shooting them with guns.
I think the same thing is at play with fantasy books. A story where the main character cannot wield a magic sword, cannot have a magic sword. Any character that's not based on human anatomy would have very limited ability in what actions they can take, and thus what the story featuring them can contain. And there aren't that many human-shaped creatures in reality. You basically have to choose from tall humans, short humans, midget humans, pretty humans, ugly humans, humans with funny ears, humans with beards, humans who live in forests, humans who live underground... And all those kinds of fantasy humans already have names: elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins and so on.
Sentient dogs in the medieval fantasy setting has been done, sorta: A Fire Upon the Deep
Yeah, and it also has the random person who becomes super reason for dumb luck reasons.
I don't think a deepness in the sky though matches the formula nearly as well.
Maybe the difference between the evolved dogs in A Fire Upon the Deep and "orcs" in everything else is that the point have having sentient dogs is to explore the question of "what would it look like if dogs evolved to the point of being able to create a sophisticated civilization" (the impact of different evolutionary paths - both biological and social - is a fundamental theme of Vinge's novels in this setting), while the point of having orcs is that it's an orc. The reader already knows what an orc is, and a dwarf and a fireball. A fantasy author can focus on what it would mean to put these known entities in novel settings.
What would happen in a feudalistic, honor-based medieval tech level society if only one noble family had dragons? Martin can spend his time exploring how they would disrupt politics and war and social organization rather than spending chapters explaining what dragons are. If he instead had used Scott's sentient wasps the impact on the story world would be the same but he'd have to waste a lot of time bringing the reader up to speed on the powers and limitations of wasp-assassins. Maybe this is an important dividing line between hard sci-fi and fantasy.
I feel like GRRM is the hard sci-fi of fantasy. He doesn’t just use a setting to explore the feelings of an ordinary person - he explores what the economics and politics of a world with dragons and lost magic would be.
I disagree there. Martin may be regarded as the 'hard sci-fi' version due to his "it was grim up north back then" plotting, but he doesn't *really* go into "so how does the tax system work, what are the politics, what are the logistics of running this empire?" Mostly, I think, because he has so much going on that keeping all the characters straight and who is where right now doing what consumes the energy and attention. The TV series also cut a lot out because it was too much, you have to have a fairly simple plot that can be understood and followed over the course of the show to let viewers know what is going on and keep up with it, no matter how many complications you introduce.
I mean, can anyone quote me the facts and figures of the Iron Island fisheries, for instance?
GRRM isn't quite doing a hard sf version of fantasy, but maybe not quite a soft as most.
I'd say it's softer than Tolkien, just bent in different directions. https://acoup.blog/2020/12/11/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-ii-subsistence-on-the-hoof/
Thanks. It's pleasant to see a comment on an old thread.
That's an amazing essay, and I only dipped into it here and there.
I don't think most sci-fi known for being "hard sci-fi" is really meeting those standards either. VERY VERY few fiction books get at all into hard facts and figures about economics. Technology, sure, meaningless bureaucratic technobabble sure. Actual description of a working economy....no. Even something like say Silo, where Hugh Howey they clearly put a lot of thought into the economy, its mostly just a handwave.
I've been working on bringing the Exalted RPG up to that level of rigor. Seems necessary, since many of the major characters have superpowers specifically focused on craftsmanship, bureaucracy, mass transit, etc. https://docs.google.com/document/d/10VAUEYEqWYWcQ9gz4bk9uok8OkAIYl1cy50KEw2y75o/
Robert Silverberg has, in Majipoor, and others. But then, he also writes actual science fiction, too. In "Lord Valentine's Castle", the protagonist opines that the king ought to pay for his own festival, but someone else notes that that would be nothing more than the taxes everyone else has paid. He also goes into some money denominations and how they are used.
As it happens, he also has some new races there that never caught on much in a popular sense. Four-armed people (who can make great jugglers), and a Yoda-like race yet with different personality than Yoda.
I have to push back on that one, though it’s not on topic. For all his veneer of gritty realism, as Brett Devereaux has pointed out, his vision of the logistics of medieval warfare is much less accurate than Tolkien’s. Tolkien moves realistically sized armies over attainable distances in a logical way; Martin often teleports absurdly large armies over vast distances and furthermore suggests surprise battles that are impossible to have with an army of that size. There are similar careless misunderstandings of technology, strange anachronisms, etc. His grasp on medieval politics is equally shaky and error-ridden—particularly apparent because internal politics between lord and vassal are so prominent. And some things are just absurdly implausible. For example, the Starks have ruled the north for an absurdly long time and yet they have virtually no relatives. There should be a Stark under every rock and bush rather than one nuclear family and one estranged cadet branch. The weird paucity of relatives among the great houses is necessary for Martin’s constant backstabbing to work—realistically naked assassinations of entire houses at a time by their vassals are not possible and the attempt would not work well for obvious practical reasons.
Frankly I think it’s the opposite. Martin gives you the aesthetic impression of doing a really critical look at the implications of fantasy while in substance actually being quite tropey and doing almost everything by the Rule of Cool. He does deliberately subvert expectations but not often realistically—for example the deep cynicism about religion, chivalry, and warrior code/ethos is very much ahistorical, obvious if you have read any primary accounts of the time and note how many decisions make zero logical sense unless they actually are bound by an ethics and outlook that Martin writes as a sham.
On the other hand Tolkien was legitimately a medievalist, and is pretty concerned about accurately creating a world of verisimilitude and plausibility that continues past the surface, and I would argue that his characters are much more realistically depicted than Martin’s within their context. He doesn’t go so far into internal politics as Martin but what he does show is much more realistic (absent the occasional encroachment of fantasy or the consequences of fantasy, which is actually rare because Tolkien’s world has much less magic in it than Martin’s).
Just here to note that this comment by Godoth is both clearly correct and well-stated. Nice!
I largely agree with your critique of the "Martin is more realistic" narrative. To add to it, I'd say that what people are actually noticing is a difference in the genre of the *story*. ASoIaF and the Tolkien Legendarium are the same genre in terms of *setting*, but the stories are very different in genre. Martin is mostly writing a military/political thriller (basically, Tom Clancy with dragons instead of jet fighters), while Tolkien wrote various combinations of mythological tragedy, heroic saga, traditional English fairy-story, and the odd bit of gothic horror.
Similarly, a lot of post-Tolkien fantasy which is often described as being derivative of Tolkien doesn't feel very Tolkienesque to me, and I think the disconnect there is also story-genre vs setting-genre. They're seen as Tolkien-derived because their settings draw heavily on at least the aesthetic of Tolkien's universe, but the stories seem to draw more heavily on the sword-and-sorcery fantasy of Robert Howard, Jack Vance, etc. I think this pattern is heavily influenced by D&D, which was originally designed for small-unit wargaming through Conanesque storylines and had Tolkien-derived setting elements layered on top of it at the request of many of Gygax's wargaming buddies.
Tangentially. later in life, Tolkien did start writing a sequel to LotR ("A New Shadow", set a century or two after LotR and dealing with a Morgoth-worshipping cult arising and making a nuisance of itself in Gondor), which he abandoned about a dozen pages in because he realized it would be a thriller-style story which he wasn't particularly interested in writing.
re: "A New Shadow"--What! How did I never know about this!
Anyway--regarding GRRM, I think the criticisms of his world are perfectly accurate. But that's not what made ASOIAF good! GRRM's strength is rich, varied, psychologically realistic characters. Tolkien's characters (besides the hobbits) are in many ways quite alien to us, exactly because they're properly contextualized in their imagined time periods. They aren't "worse characters," they're just serving different purposes in different genres.
Agreed. Additionally, I have heard the argument that SoIaF is more early modern than medieval. For example, the betrayal of Ned Stark involves Littlefinger (a very minor noble) bribing the white cloaks (the non-noble city guards in Kings Landing) to take his side in a political conflict. Robert seems to have basically no loyal people around him, where in a vassalage system, he would put long-trusted vassals in the small council and in command of the city guard (which obviously should not be powerful enough to arrest nobles in the first place).
Also, while I am sure that some backstabbing occurs occasionally in vassalage systems, the amount of it in SoIaF feels ridiculous. After the red wedding, nobody will ever visit Lord Frey again. This would severely affect his ability to control his vassals and make his liege worry about his reliability and letting this precedent against hospitality stand. Not a good combination.
Uhm, this is more or less exactly what happens to Walder Frey after the RW; his only company are the Boltons, who exploit him. And while no well-groomed noble would have ever come up with such a stupid idea, Walder Frey is an upstart bridge-troll who thinks he can rise simply by spawning lots of children and marrying them off.
GRRM may have misgendered his fair share of horses, and the presence of dragons and Others isn't doing the applicability of his storylines a great service, but he has an uncanny intuition for realistic behavior of people in power.
No—it isn’t. You don’t seem to understand that in the medieval context it’s *Frey’s* vassals that he should be worried about—Frey is sitting at the top of a pyramid of complex and traditional fealty obligations. Or at least he should be, but this enormous and critical element of the feudal world is ignored because the consequences of his betrayal of the vassalage code would pretty much immediately render him irrelevant because he would only be in control of his personal holdings.
You seem to be taking for granted that GRRM is writing about the European Middle Ages. I see where this assumption is coming from, but I think a good deal of it comes from the angle from which you're looking. His setting resembles the Middle Ages in terms of (non-magical) warcraft, Antiquity in terms of the role and the diversity of religion (the Faith of the Seven has little of the power of the Vatican), and Early Modernity in terms of occasional technological advances (and anything Braavos). And even in the Middle Ages, I believe that China and the Arab World adhered much less to a chivalric code than Europe. I agree, though, that the individual outlooks of many characters are unmistakeably modern.
The whole idea of comparing Tolkien with GRRM is of limited use; the authors were writing in different genres while using some of the same topoi. I have seen people use bits and pieces of ASOIAF as metaphors for contemporary politics with great effect and good justification (among other things, ASOIAF portrays in detail various ways people can fail to adapt to changing circumstances); I cannot imagine any such applicability for anything in LotR or the Silmarillion. On the other hand, GRRM goes nowhere as deep in the worldbuilding as Tolkien does, and in many ways stands on the shoulders of giants (I wonder how much sense ASOIAF would make to a reader unfamiliar with Western culture, mythology and fantasy).
Whose world has more magic? Hard to say, because of how different they are. Tolkien has omnipotent gods that deliberately meddle with the world; Martin has chaotic fields of unknown forces that some believe to have mastered to their advantage, but ultimately just are what they are and don't desire anyone's good or evil (the irregular seasons, in my headcanon, are evidence of a three-body system; ASOIAF started out as a sci-fi writer). I personally found the latter easier to immerse myself in, and e.g. warging rings more natural to me than resurrection by the will of Eru Iluvatar. But it's a matter of intuition, and you will find yours just as natural as I find mine.
I feel that for House of the Dragon specifically, the world building does not feel consistent. The Targarrians conquered Westeros with their dragons, so they are obviously very important strategically.
Giving dragons to female Targarrians of child-bearing age does not optimize the availability of dragons for combat. Handing out a few dragon-bound brides for patrilinear marriage to the other houses for prestige might work if you kept 80% of the dragons plus the big ones for yourself (which they don't in the show).
A simple fix would be to declare that dragon riders have to have the same gender identity as their dragon (just make the eggs pink and blue). Even then, I would expect female dragon riders to be unmarried and either celibate or on contraceptives.
Instead, we have the rider of the biggest dragon in a non-Targarrian household (!) and then dying in child-birth (!), presumably depriving the military of a dragon rider with decades of training.
Also, one would expect dragons to be guarded better? Instead, the crazy uncle can steal a dragon egg and an owner-less dragon getting dragon-jacked by some minor Targarrian without any authorization.
In a vassalage system, one of the key tasks of the ruler is to keep their powerful vassals happy. Here, these are mostly the dragon riders. Having a monthly council of all the dragon riders,complete with military-relevant games and feasts would be a no-brainer. Instead, dragon riders fight in tourneys on horseback, which feels like holding an archery competition in the marine corps.
Also, the combat speed of dragons is low enough that they are vulnerable to ballista arrows (which travel perhaps at 324km/h) at long distances in a way I would not expect a Cessna (cruise speed 226km/h) to be. I would not expect a dragon cruise speed higher than 100km/h. Westeros is oversized at 1200x3000 miles^2. That would make Kings Landing - Oldtown a ten hour flight. Apparently Targarrians are also cold resistant.
Finally, while Robert might be in no position to conquer in Essos, the old king at the start of HotD is? I would assume that the logistics of besieging Pentos from Kings Landing are much favorably compared to besieging Winterfell. If I had united the six kingdoms in Crusader Kings, that would be an obvious next goal.
I would classify that as SF.
IIRC, the packs of sentient dogs form some sort of telepathic hive mind, where the pack is much smarter than its members. This is something way more alien than elves or dwarfs.
Also, that planet is conveniently located in the no-FTL zone of a otherwise populated galaxy (IIRC).
Yes! IMO, that was the most interesting part of the aliens; being dog-like was almost incidental. The hive-mind was based on sound, so different packs couldn't get close together (except for fighting and mating), and cities were spread out. Individual members could die, and the continuity of personality was a big deal, and there were various ways around that. All sorts of cool stuff.
(On the second, I think the planet was still in the FTL zone at the start of the book, but close to the slow zone, so FTL was slow and advanced technology was unreliable unless specifically designed for operation in that area.)
Those dogs were not explained and it took me forever to figure out what they were. Very annoying.
Well they're not exactly dogs, they're quadrupeds and they're pack animals but they're the product of a different evolutionary process so I didn't imagine them as dogs exactly. This discussion has a sketch of Tines by Vinge where they look more like big weasels: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/18268593-afutd-can-we-talk-about-these-aliens-for-a-bit-possible-minor-spoiler
That picture is seriously creepy. Even without the caption telling us who it, sort of, is.
They look a bit sinister when they’re just silhouettes, but I imagine them as big furry greyhounds/ferrets.
That's how I picture them too.
It's just this particular picture, plus the fact that 2/5ths of this one is Flenser.
In the October Daye series, Cu Sidhe are fairy dogs with dog and human forms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%B9-s%C3%ACth
Tangentially, the complaint about populating your fantasy novel with "alfar" because it kind of sounds like "elves" rubs me the wrong way. Anyone who picked the name "alfar" wasn't going for "something that kind of sounds like 'elves'." It kind of sounds like "elves" because it is the Norse word "elves".
Or "City" by Simak.
"The one thing I still don’t understand is why everyone has the same races. Why elves, dwarves, goblins, and sometimes drow?"
Is there some truth to the idea that lots of (most?) real-world folklore has something a bit like these tropes?
"Why not sentient dogs, or dolphins, or bee-people living in hive-cities [...]"
These all sound like ideas I would associated more with science-fiction (or perhaps science-fantasy). My gut instinct is that truly speculative writing is somewhat at odds with the premise of fantasy, which largely feels like it's about tapping into things we already feel intuitively familiar with. That's why fantasy feels like it's set in the past - even if it's never explicitly stated as such.
It reminds me of anime I watched when I was small. I'm thinking Dragonball. Maybe even anime-ish stuff like Samurai Jack. I think that showing things off visually helps to avoid tedious headachey descriptions.
And then there’s the stuff that seems like fantasy at first but is eventually revealed to be future/post-apocalyptic in some way (e.g. people going Back To Nature and it looks like it’s in some alternate past).
But also, with the elves/dwarves/etc: it reminds me of something Brandon Sanderson said once, that “elves are played out”. And, I mean, he’s the expert and I’m not, but to me it kind of sounded like saying that guitars are played out in rock music because it’s been so many decades since the Beatles or whatever. Tropes are tools (as a wise man once said), instrumentation is a tool, and what you do with those tools can continue to evolve. That’s what I think, at least.
Ach, I can't read Sanderson. He's a competent writer but his prose is cardboard and I don't care about the stat-nerdery of his magic system.
Also, I don't think American writers *get* elves, they seem to regard them as "like humans only live way longer and are sexier". The SERRAted Edge series which had the American Faerie Court into NASCAR racing? Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God.
https://urbanfantasy.fandom.com/wiki/SERRAted_Edge_series
And yes, they do tend to spell it "Faerie". Our Elves Are Different, I suppose.
The same way I would not *attempt* to write a Paul Bunyan or John Henry story, because those are real American folklore concepts and I'm not American (I still have no idea how John Connolly managed to pull it off with the Charlie Parker series of novels), Americans should be *firmly* limited in how they can depict the Daoine Sídhe.
Poul Anderson's 'The Broken Sword' got elves better than anyone since Tolkein. Larry Correia's 'Monster Hunter International' trailer park elves probably aren't your cup of tea.
No, probably not 😁 But if they're the American equivalent of local spirits, that would fit.
Tolkien did make his Elves different to how they are in folklore, he did take Celtic influences (I think probably Welsh as that was his second favourite language, rather than Irish), and keep them instead of the English by-then 'flower fairy' types of the fairies, as well as Nordic influences, and made them nobler and higher than their antecedents, but he did get the strangeness and beauty and timelessness right. And how Fairyland is perilous, when Sam compares Galadriel to a river that might drown a Hobbit, but it's not the river's fault.
Mercedes Lackey's stockcar-racing Elves who want to help abused children may have good intentions, but oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
"Also, I don't think American writers *get* elves, they seem to regard them as "like humans only live way longer and are sexier"."
That's a nice insight - you've crystalised a thought that has been bothering me for a while now.
I agree with all of what you have said in your comment; there are fundamental cultural differences in the interpretation of what it is to be an elf, and I assume this is for the reasons outlined above - different cultures need different things from their stories.
I liked Jo Walton's _Among Others_ because the elves were more alien than most elves. She's Welsh, so she was doing a good example of elves from the British Isles.
Americans do seem to think it's fun to have elves take up modern culture.
Have you read _The Tommyknockers_ by Stephen King? His aliens from a UFO struck me as being as chaotic as elves should be.
So far as I know, Paul Bunyan isn't exactly an authentic American folk legend, he was invented as part of an advertising campaign. So he's an American invention, but probably not the way you meant. it.
"The Tommyknockers" was very good, a novel take on aliens. The ST:TNG Pakled reminded me of them; just because a species has space travel does not mean it is smart.
> Also, I don't think American writers *get* elves, they seem to regard them as "like humans only live way longer and are sexier".
That is a pretty accurate representation of what we know about how early Germanic cultures thought of elves.
The word got repurposed later to refer to essentially any supernatural creature, and picked up an evil sense due to the influence of Christianity, but we can tell that elves were originally not viewed as evil because the element "elf" is used in "theophoric" names like Alvin and Alfred. The other element that survives of old elf-related mythology is a sexual theme.
Yeah, but elves/fairies are not really comprehensible from a human viewpoint. They seem cruel and arbitrary to us, and make decisions based on criteria we can't understand. Fairyland is a *dangerous* place for humans in the old tales. American fantasy Elves tend to be "well I get where you're coming from" level for humans, at least the 'good' ones. The ones interested in music/art/knowledge tend to be depicted as too aloof, stuck-up, and indeed either prigs or boring.
Though Laurell K. Hamilton *really* went to town on the sexual themes of old elf-related mythology, to the point that it made her Merry Gentry series unreadable for me; the 'problem' of the main character were "oh, which of these six guys of various degrees of human or fairy blood will I fuck? how about all of them? oh yeah and my wicked relatives are trying to kill me, but the most pressing issue is do I fuck the goblin or not?"
The Anita Blake series started off well with a really interesting world, but went downhill fast as Anita got overpowered and the tone shifted to softcore porn. I think Hamilton figured out 'sex in urban fantasy' was the big selling niche and she went for it. A lot of urban fantasy already overlapped with paranormal romance, she just turned up the dial from 'romance' to 'sex'.
There’s also lots of weird other stuff though. I write it down to being mercenary with brand recognition.
Right. It's sorta like asking why Super Man is always fighting bad guys in capes, and not, like...aliens or a plague of giant lizards or terminator robots or something. Kinda not his niche.
Superman does fight all those things, though.
Aliens? Brainiac, Darkseid, Zod, the Hybrid of Oric, Lobo, and plenty of others. It's a recurring plotline in the Silver Age comics that a good third of the aliens that pester Earth from time to time are there to cause exactly the minimum amount of trouble needed for an excuse to challenge Superman to a 1v1. Kryptonians going extinct, for quite a few of the more militaristic races in the galaxy, was like if the Patriots all died in a bus crash the week before the Superbowl, denying the other team any possible satisfaction of victory.
A plague of giant lizards? Terminator robots? The classic 1941 animated short films "The Arctic Giant" and "The Mechanical Monsters" (respectively) had him fighting a whole bunch of each, and the tradition's continued anytime Lex Luthor doesn't feel like getting his hands dirty personally and goes for cloning or machinery instead. I really recommend those shorts, by the way; shockingly high animation quality, which holds up really well even eighty years later.
There have been a couple cases (Red Son, Kingdom Come, Superman: Peace on Earth) where he tries to fight something way more abstract, like world hunger, to various degrees of success. There's a phenomenal short fanfiction "A Common Sense Guide to Doing The Most Good" (https://archiveofourown.org/works/30351690) in which Superman becomes an effective altruist and strict utilitarian, and tries to solve *everything*. Sure, bad guys in capes and run-of-the-mill supervillains are his bread and butter, and he's fighting those most of the time, but that doesn't mean you can't or shouldn't write him with a little more creativity.
I see your point and Joe's, that fantasy is about tapping into legends we "already know" while sci-fi is about exploring new directions, but on the whole I agree more with Scott that current fantasy does not go as far as it reasonably could, and that while there's a need to build off legends and worlds we already know, there are still more cliches than needed.
He's also literally fought Ridley Scott's Aliens (Superman/Aliens 1995 plus a 2002 sequel) and James Cameron's Terminators (2000's Superman versus The Terminator: Death to the Future). He also fought H.G. Wells' Martians once. (Superman: War of the Worlds during the centenary of the Wells novel in 1998.)
Supervillains were also mostly a relatively late addition to the genre generally. (Which is one reason Superman's primary antagonist mostly wears a business suit or prison gray rather than a costume.) Superman's first decade or so was mostly spent dealing with gangsters, mad scientists, corrupt politicians, assorted profiteers, etc. And of course Nazi and Japanese infiltrators. (Clark got his draft notice, but failed the eye test due to accidentally reading the chart in the next room with his X-ray vision and so he was classified 4F.)
Huh. Well, TIL....My apologies to Superman and his brethren for underselling their list of antagonists.
In fairness, many - not all, but many - of those nominal aliens do kinda still end up being de facto guys in capes.
I think you're on to something, but there are a few twists that need explanation. Some decades ago, when I read quite a few fantasy novels, I eventually grew tired of the MWTRKHHAHHTBRBPFSTEHHDNKHITTP, and the peasant boy chosen by destiny to save the world, and all the other stuff. Then a friend recommended "A Game of Thrones", and he pointed out that it's different - more realistic in an important way, in that (almost) all main characters are nobility. No destiny is needed to give them a headstart in the race and to justify their special position in the Game. Arya Stark has Valyrian Steel (TM) because - wait for it - she got it from her family. Also, the dragons don't really play a role until pretty late. With such an obvious deviation from the formula, how did ASOIAF still become one of the defining fantasy series of the last decades?
Game of Thrones balances sUbv3rT1nG Exp3ctAt10Ns with standard fantasy tropes. You get both the magical dragon prince who is chosen to save the world with his super sword and cool wolf powers and also the magical dragon prince who gets his brains bashed by a giant cartoon hammer wielded by a drunk guy.
And it seems like the 'subverting expectations' part is achieved largely by mining real Middle Ages history, the best-recorded parts of which did consist of nobles and royals plotting to discredit/murder/incestuously mate with each other. Game of Thrones seems like it's a hybrid of fantasy and historical fiction where you keep the fantasy world but replace the quest tropes with somewhat more realistic geopolitics (I haven't read/watched it so this is just my badly informed impression).
Also, it just occurred to me that Joan of Arc is a real historical example of a teenage girl who doesn't know much about the world suddenly becoming the Chosen One and going on an epic quest to defeat the Dark Lord's armies (well the British).
>Game of Thrones seems like it's a hybrid of fantasy and historical fiction where you keep the fantasy world but replace the quest tropes with more somewhat more realistic geopolitics (I haven't read/watched it so this is just my badly informed impression).
No that is an exactly accurate description of what at least the first three books are about.
No, the geopolitics of A Song of Ice and Fire don't work at all. This is actually a case where the trite moral of a random Saturday Morning Cartoon is more accurate than the "gritty truth" - the Forces of Good can't be defeated by the Forces of Evil because the Forces of Evil aren't able to cooperate with each other.
George R. R. Martin's world is populated almost entirely by nobles whose most common go-to strategy is to double-cross whoever they happen to be working with at the time. In reality, nobles who act like that are very swiftly deposed.
That is, in fact, what we see happening. The bastardly stabparty mode of politics, in Westeros, is *less than a generation old*. The only betrayals in Robert's Rebellion were:
- The Mad King Aerys being Mad and a King
- The 'Late Lord Frey' showing up to the pivotal battle of the war only when it was already over and claiming to swear allegiance to the winning
- Tywin and Jaime Lannister turning on Aerys for the wrongs he'd done them personally and planned to do later
Plus Dishonorable Mentions for Castamere(, Rains of) and Cersei betraying her marriage vows and having incest babies instead. These are all (except Cersei) very mild examples and ones which are largely not held against the betrayers. (Cersei's is secret, which shields her from the consequences for a while, and also as the narrative makes *extremely* clear she's a complete idiot with delusions of grandeur, getting carried by her family despite her best efforts.)
It's only in the new era that people get this idea that perhaps they should be Machiavellian, and they are correspondingly quite bad at it with disastrous consequences for themselves and the country. With the exception of the (rot13)qbear naq ernpu plot where a couple of the shrewder nobles in the country agree to secretly plan a *slow* revenge and reveal it only to the extent necessary to keep their own families from fouling up the plan.
The MWTRKHHAHHTBRBPFSTEHHDNKHITTP works for most because it's the model of fairy stories. The miller's son? The youngest daughter of three? Cinderella? The poor but honest Jack and the Beanstalk? Where the moral, if any, is that "being kind and generous to the poor and outcast is what qualifies you to win" where the miller's son or the skivvy shares their last loaf of bread with the ugly beggarwoman, who turns out to be the powerful witch who sends them on the quest with the right instructions and weapons to win.
Is Jack honest? In the versions I recall, he's a trespasser, then a thief, then a murderer.
Yes, but the victim was a cloud giant nobleman who Jack's people were already presumptively at war with, which by the standards of the time made that a meritorious border skirmish.
I agree with you, but I’d argue that some of the pleasure of engaging with ASoIaF is that it *seems* like a more complex subversion at first, but is actually in a gradual process of turning into one of the more simplistic “underestimated messiah saves everybody from capital E Evil” stories, and it shows its hand pretty early.
I have a suspicion that the reason the last books are taking so long, is that resolving these two threads in a satisfactory way is HARD.
There's a lot that's hard about it, but one thing GRRM has talked about is that he's committed to telling the story through the viewpoints of characters-- he doesn't believe in truth from an omniscient viewpoint-- and he's having trouble getting characters into place for the events he wants to have happen.
He also wrote himself into a corner from a pacing standpoint. The whole early three books are very “these are all preliminaries to the real war”, so if you are going to give that the proper respect it deserves you need to probably leave a trilogy just for that.
And if you are going to do that, then you need to start frog marching the characters into the right places and towards resolution and the reduction of viewpoints/characters in a middle “bridge” trilogy. Instead that middle bridge trilogy mostly opened up new storylines and new characters and broadened the world.
And what’s left is just too heavy a lift to get done the couple books he is shooting for. It’s too big a task.
Yeah, I read something by him where he was talking about having originally wanted a 5-year timeskip somewhere in the middle, but that there was so much that would happen during that timeskip that he'd have to spend so much time describing it that he might as well write it anyway, and that the collapsing of the timeline led to characters not being in the right place, or having experienced the right things. It sounded like he was trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle using rubber tongs and a time-delay.
Honestly the extent it slowly gets more typical is also the extent that it slowly gets worse. Everything that is good about the series really has nothing to do with the main plot, which is pretty shit.
I mean, we don't know how this ends - the show clearly isn't right. There is some capital E Evil, and there are some necessary messiahs to deal with it, but it doesn't look like ordinary politics is lining up to support them in their efforts. We already saw this with the pleas for aid to all five kings, where only Stannis answers - even with the destruction of the world at stake, since that will only arrive in a couple dozen months the normal intrigues don't even pause to consider whether they should help. (:galaxybrain: This is actually a parable about AI Safety.)
I think the actual ending (assuming we ever see it) is a story about how, even if there was a real, verifiable messiah and a threat that needed them to beat it, the world would not reward them and their story would be a tragedy. They would be used as a political prop at best and probably end up burned at the stake like Jeanne d'Arc for being inconvenient to those with temporal power.
Actually Arya Stark doesn't have Valyrian steel, Needle is just regular steel.
I'm unclear whether the intended question here is "why is this structure so successful/popular/common" (which I think is what you answer?) Or "why is all fantasy like this?" which is how I read your framing, but which I think is manifestly untrue unless you define the genre tautologically.
I read it as a mildly cheeky provocation: painting with a very broad brush in the certain knowledge that a lot of us will spot this.
Witty as usual; nicely written. Presumably just a rhetorical flourish, but I don't think it was remotely fair to say that Tolkien is the only creative person living in the 20th century...
There are quite a few authors who do write more diverse and interesting worlds; when not getting into public controversies over the women in his life, China Mieville used to write about sentient cacti, ant-headed artists and the like. Isekai stuff on the other hand is utterly miserable, in a “What If CS Lewis, but as a Sociopathic Nihilist?” way? And that’s without mentioning the LitRPG, surely the most wretched form of genre writing yet to exist.
I don't fully agree with you on Isekai. First because I don't honestly think it's like Lewis at all beyond being transported to another world. Of the Western options, I think it tracks more closely with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and that was a truly cynical piece of literature.
But second, there is just so, so much isekai out there that I don't think you can boil it all down to any one descriptor. The majority of it can probably be fairly described as soulless Dragon Quest fan fiction, but then you get stuff like No Game No Life which is an incredible burst of joy, or The Second Coming of Gluttony which actively uses the premise to give its protagonist tools to grow and to repair all of the bridges they burned on Earth.
I'm quite surprised at just how much romantic fantasy isekai there is out there, much of it also of the 'slow life' subcategory, where someone who had a bad end on Earth (often death by overwork) gets a second life in a fantasy world, and rather than saving the world, they end up settling down and finding, well, romance. I mean, they usually find some way to work 'magic' and 'adventurers' into the story, but it's not the focus of the story.
Yeah, a lot of the time the isekai aspect is basically just a hook to grab readers. The market dynamics of an industry driven by web novels means authors have to focus on getting you to pick up the first chapter of their story out of thousands of options, and apparently isekai is just the single most effective way to do that in Japan. So you end up getting a lot of stories that basically aren't even an isekai outside of mentioning it at the start, and maybe referencing it every now and then. Like, The Academy's Undercover Professor is really just a fantasy spy novel/comedy of errors, and pretty much the only consequence of the MC being reincarnated is that he uses names from Earth for his various pseudonyms like Morirarty or Machiavelli.
"The one thing I still don’t understand is why everyone has the same races. Why elves, dwarves, goblins, and sometimes drow?"
Some people like worldbuilding, and some people just want to tell a story.
N.K. Jemisin's worlds are super unique and popular. Brandon Sanderson's worlds are, too. There are fantasy writers who create something extremely new.
But both spend a lot of time worldbuilding to describe that world. What if you just want to tell a story using magic? You can import the generic fantasy world, tweak it to suit your purposes, and just go. Everyone understands the world so you can reference elements without explanation and people get it.
Generic magical fairy-adjacent people? Elves. Brutish, strong, tribal types? Orcs. One-and-done. Now tell your unique story.
That's what I did with my first novel because I didn't want to do huge amounts of worldbuilding. So I did Fantasy-Renaissance—tweaked the generic world to suit my unique story.
As there is no upvote function on Substack, I'll just comment saying I completely agree and recommend checking out Sanderson's work in particular.
Between him, Joon Ha Lee, Ada Palmer, and Ann Leckie, to name only the few that came to mind immediately, we really are in the best age of speculative fiction there ever has been
I was looking for a new book to read and tried picking up a few inventive, highly recommended fantasy novels. It was exhausting. When I put down the Malazan Book of the Fallen after about 50 pages and picked up Fleischman is in Trouble instead, I couldn’t believe how much of a relief it was to read a book set in present day New York City where not every single aspect of society, history, politics, magic systems, etc had to be painstakingly explained over the course of hundreds of pages before the story would make any sense! (And the level of nuance you can convey with just tiny details like what street a character lives on or what style of eyewear they have when you’re writing about a society that is real and the reader knows about intimately is really remarkable...) I feel like this must be why even sort of creative fantasy stories are still usually set in some kind of vague medieval pastiche — it’s not easy to tell a story set in a truly exotic, novel, and detailed world and bring your readers with you if they’re actually going to enjoy themselves.
This is exactly it. Tropes exist for orientation.
John Holbo wrote about exactly this issue just the other day on Crooked Timber - but his point is that it’s not just sci fi and fantasy that has the worldbuilding problem, since th same thing arises if you write about parts of the real world for readers that aren’t familiar with it. His blog post is about authors who seem to have learned the skill from good sci fi.
https://crookedtimber.org/2023/04/27/red-team-blues-and-the-as-you-know-bob-problem/
'"And the level of nuance you can convey with just tiny details like what street a character lives on or what style of eyewear they have when you’re writing about a society that is real and the reader knows about intimately is really remarkable"
That is indeed true, but the problem exists for me in literary fiction where I have no idea of the layout of New York City so no idea why *this* street rather than *that* street, or what this season's most hot fashion must-haves are so it goes right over my head why the character is noted as wearing glasses by Oompala La Loompala 😁
Meanwhile, drop me down in Morris's "The Well At The World's End" and I can make my way around.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Well_at_the_World%27s_End
Sanderson specifically overturns these tropes in Stormlight, where the story of a person gaining agency through effort, encounters with terror, and overcoming and integrating mental illness is the story of multiple characters. The progenitor civilization being advanced is not actually true, it's a story that people tell themselves from back when there were more frequent world resets and the people whose job it is to deal with that are surprised at how much better the civilization everyone lives in at finding out how things work is than any that has existed on the world thus far (there's a multiple progenitor world thing going on but that is mostly unhelpful to those concerned)
I love Sanderson and I think he bucks the fantasy trends so much I'm not even sure I would place late stormlight books in the genre. It's very clearly moving towards science fiction. Hell 1/3 of Rhythm of War is a ~mage~ scientist inventing the equivalent of anti matter.
All the cosmere stuff is going that way, as Arcanum Unbounded and this year's secret projects show. All of them so far are either fantasy sci fi hybrid extensions of fantasy books, or straight sci fi
Aren't the races in Dune also fairly different from the usual elves, dwarves, goblins, and drow?
(although, I'm not sure if Dune is classified as Fantasy or Science Fiction in these types of analyses).
Dune? Everyone in Dune is human. The Guild Navigators have turned themselves into something weird, but they're still considered human and don't match any of the standard fantasy races.
The Bene Gesserit are human only in the sense that they can interbreed with us, and that only because it's their whole project to breed humanity like dogs. And they're the *most* human of the strange factions. Tleilaxu? Pod people. Guild? Mermen who swim in spice gas. Ixians? Unclear but cyborgs. Mentats? Living computers with drug habits. Even the Swordmasters of Ginaz seem to be remarkably superhuman. As are the Fremen!
Everyone is *of human stock*, that's the signature feature of the universe. But by breeding and training humanity has been shaped into a dozen elite factions with superhuman powers no one else can replicate.
L Frank Baum, predating LOTR and pretty nakedly just writing books about silly fantasy creatures, did have one of his protagonists chosen King via sortition.
> As far as I know, this extremely basic idea (someone has to invent spells, but then anyone can use them) had never been tried before
This is canonically how the Harry Potter universe works, albeit without much explanation or exploration. Snape invents the Sectumsempra curse, writes it down in his potions book, and then Harry uses it two decades later just based on that description. There are similar hints, though not very fleshed out, about potions and other things working the same way. (There is a lot of fanfiction that explores this more.)
In D&D, a lot of spells have a set origin. For example, Aganazzar’s Scorcher is a spell invested by Aganazzar, whoever he was (there are lore books about this, I assume). You don't do this as a normal adventurer playing D&D, but that's because it's hard to balance and doesn't fit the pacing of a table top role playing game.
In Eragon, if my memory holds, spells are sentences and phrases in the Ancient language. While this does tie it back to an ancient civilization (they tied magic itself to their language), it also means that anyone who knows that language can casually invent new spells, which Eragon does throughout the series.
Yeah, this is a pretty wide swath, and I came to mention D&D as well: anything that is downstream of D&D tends to work like this. Sometimes there's a special bloodline or years of study to get to be the "anyone" who can cast spells, but that seems orthogonal to the basic idea?
I'm pretty sure in Harry Potter you still have to _be magical_ to use the spells, and _being magical_ is a heritable trait that only rarely shows up in people without the right bloodlines
I agree that Potter sort of uses this, but it doesn't explore it or follow it to any logical conclusion, and it's not really true that anyone can use spells (spells are quite hard, Dumbledore is a better wizard than the average first-year student because the average first-year student can't just Google "what are all the spells Dumbledore knows" and memorize them over a few days)
I haven't read the books, but at least pop-culture and movie perception is fairly clear that you have to be born with magical ability. Most people in the Harry Potter world are "muggles" and cannot use magic even if they learn the spells.
This is basic Vancian magic from the "Dying Earth" series. Many spells are prefixed by the name of the inventor. But "learning" the spell is tricky - you have to have the knowledge of the spell, and you have to have a certain amount of skill to even be able to learn it, and ultimately you go through a long process to cram a single instance of the thing into your brain, and then once you cast the spell it's gone from your brain, and you need to go through the long process again in order to cast it again.
The spells have names such as:
Lugwiler's Dismal Itch
the Spell of Forlorn Encystment
the Agency of Far Despatch
the Spell of the Macroid Toe
Thasdrubal's Laganetic Transfer
Phandaal's Critique of the Chill
Phandaal's Gyrator
Felojun's Second Hypnotic Spell
the Excellent Prismatic Spray
the Charm of Untiring Nourishment
the Spell of the Omnipotent Sphere
Arnhoult's Sequestrious Digitalia
the Spell of Lightsome Striding
the Green and Purple Postponement of Joy
They were really something. Sometimes I was rooting for the protagonist, and sometimes against, but I always wanted to turn the page and find out what happened next.
There is a classic order of the stick line about vances impact on RPG magicians https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0345.html
And I miss it in modern D&D! So much about being a wizard was hoarding power, using intimidation and bluff to prevent wasting your magic, having the foresight to prepare the right spells, and the creativity to make use of the spells you did have prepared.
Great post. Perhaps i'm unusual in this, but the very end of the LOTR movies brought on a depression in me when Frodo realized that he cannot go back to his quiet existence in the Shire after what he's seen and done.
If the main driver of one of fantasy's memes is akin to a lottery, then I wonder of there is also the lottery winners curse after the adventure is complete.
I wrote a short post about the onset of my depression courtesy of the LOTR.
https://robertsdavidn.substack.com/p/frodo-mid-life-crisis-trumpian-sycophants
I haven't read your post yet, but I've bookmarked it for later.
At a glance, though, I can certainly see the end of LOTR as depressing for that very reason. I don't read enough fantasy to know how often there's a "lottery winners curse."
The closest example I can think of (again, with my limited knowledge) is something I've noticed in a few other works, where the hero suffers some injury early in the story, and that injury is never fully healed. That of course happens to Frodo with the Nazgul blade. But I remember it happening to C. S. Lewis's character Ransom in his (Lewis's) "sci fi trilogy" (I believe it's called a "sci fi trilogy," but to me it rings more like fantasy). I suspect that the trope of a persistent injury probably has a long tradition in European/Western folklore. But again, I haven't read enough to know.
Very long tradition! Most famously the Fisher King (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_King) although that has some extra connotations (barrenness) but see also other examples in the 'Myths' section of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WoundThatWillNotHeal.
Thanks for the reply!
Brett Deveraux (acoup.blog) said in his series looking at LotR that Frodo's return is "one of the best descriptions of PTSD I have ever read".
Since Tolkien fought in WW1 and was open about how that had influenced his outlook - he was offended at the idea that his work was an allegory for WW2 e.g. Sauron as a metaphor for Hitler, but he affirmed that his experience in WW1 had influenced his work - Frodo's "the Shire has been saved, but not for me" is very likely a deliberate choice in that direction and not just a plot device to let him sail into the west.
It's interesting to me that Brett has also written that there's nothing in the ancient literature suggesting that anything like PTSD existed back then - so it could be a culture-bound snydrome in the general sense of the word, or "battle PTSD" could be a result of attributes of specifically modern warfare. The physical wound that never heals is very much an ancient thing (and a real thing, especially if you don't have modern medicine) but the concept of a mental wound that doesn't heal could be a modern take on it again coming from the fact that "battle PTSD" is a thing in the modern world.
My personal suspicion is that PTSD is largely the result of a betrayal of trust: "war is honorable and glorious", "we'll be home by Christmas", "we'll be greeted as liberators", "we're the good guys". ("Family members won't hurt you, so it's OK to take off your clothes.") And battle PTSD would occur less in societies that didn't rely on propaganda to motivate killing, didn't pretend that people don't have to make hard choices, and where people were closer to ground truth, as it were. Which isn't to say it couldn't happen, but that it's less likely.
Also that, in the absence of a modern theory of mind, PTSD might be characterized in other ways, such as possession by spirits.
And also, to put it in abstract terms, in societies with less surplus than we have, people who cease to be functional would be steered onto other, faster paths of resolution. So there'd be less of a data set to draw conclusions from, even adjusting for the size of the societies.
It's interesting because I've read what Devereaux and others have written about PTSD in pre-modern times and the consensus that "yeah, we really don't have any solid evidence for it" (a lot of pop history books will, indeed, cite the same handful of references to people being possessed or fighting ghosts or whatever) -- for literally millennia of human history, it seems like the standard refrain from our sources is something like "war kicks ass, we should do more of it." (See e.g. Bret Devereaux's commentary on Bertran de Born, who was very much in favor of war as a positive experience.)
But then, as Devereaux and others point out, the ancient or pre-modern writer whose works survive tends to be a military aristocrat, someone who was expected to do a lot of war in order to win glory, and who might even have a bunch of peasant levies around them to take the lion's share of the casualties. We don't see very much written from the perspective of the peasant whose house was burnt down, or the villagers put to death by a foraging party. (And indeed, Devereaux suggests in his commentary on ancient Sparta that the brutal treatment of children in the agoge resembled that of modern groups' treatment of child soldiers, resulting in deeply embedded psychological trauma that shows itself in Sparta's culture and foreign policy.)
It may be an oversimplification on my part but I do think a large share of military-related PTSD being recognized is that we just happen to have a lot of sources on ordinary folks, not just aristocrats -- we have Sassoon and Remarque and Tolkien -- and maybe future historians would be hard-pressed to say if anyone from these times experienced PTSD if they only had the memoirs of, say, Haig and Ludendorff.
I agree with the general point, about having limited and unbalanced sources. And I've read what Bret's written about it.
But I also think that if it were as prevalent then as now, even the sources we have would have mentioned it. And none of your examples really contradict what I was saying. Would peasant levies expect something different? Would the peasants on land an army passes through expect anything different? You read the series on foraging, right? "Harbinger" is a ominous word, and associates with "doom" for a reason.
We have I think a fair bit from Greece and Rome, and those societies didn't really do "peasant levies". A hoplite was a respectable middle-class citizen of the polis; if he's not the one who winds up writing down the story he's probably a neighbor and drinking buddy of the guy who is. Same for the Roman legions, I think.
And if you're going to invoke Remarque, you kind of have to throw in Junger. By WWI, things had changed to the point where PTSD was not rare, but neither was it close to universal. How much of that is down to changing human nature and how much to changing the nature of war, is going to be hard to tease out of the data.
Ransom is the new Pendragon, so he has the same type of injury as the Fisher King from Arthurian mythology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elwin_Ransom
One of the background themes in LOTR is that everything is going downhill. Each round has smaller bad guys and smaller good guys. Gondor, the greatest city of middle earth, was once just a military outpost.
I believe Tolkien was setting up the resurrection as a eucatastrophe, but not that he was intending to write about it directly.
I'll disagree with your post a bit. This is all obviously my opinion; I don't currently have a direct line to the Source of Universal Truth.
I don't think Frodo's depression is a result of losing relevance on a large scale. It's that he failed. After all the suffering on the long journey, at the end, he succumbed to the call of the ring. And succeeded in his mission through no immediate virtue of his own. (Yeah, people tell him that it was because, once upon a time, he had mercy and spared Gollum's life, but that's not what it feels like to Frodo now. Those people are just trying to lift his depression. They don't know.)
And sure, Frodo didn't really *do* anything bad with the ring. But he would have. He just didn't have time.
Everyone praising him, everyone celebrating him, all of that makes it worse. Even back in the Shire, where most people don't know and don't care about the details of his "adventure", he still sees them going about their lives unaware of the depths in their own souls. The prayer is "lead us not into temptation", because he was tempted and he gave in. And so would everyone else, and the only reason everyone else can be happy is that they don't know it. Not the way Frodo knows it.
I'm going by the ending of the movie trilogy. I read the books many decades ago so can't recall how consistent the movies and books were.
That said, your interpretation is plausible and intriguing. Perhaps there's some important element of the effect of false praise in Frodo's sadness.
It's been a while since I've read it, too.
I've read material based on Tolkien's letters that backs up your interpretation. Maybe not all the details, but that to a large extent, Frodo's suffering was because he blamed himself for succumbing to the Ring.
He's supposed to get healing in the West-- I wonder whether part of the healing will be getting shown convincingly that his succumbing to the Ring is part of a larger plan more than being reassured that his achievement was extraordinary, which it was. He held out against the ring for a long time, something that Gandalf and Galadriel didn't trust themselves to do.
I'm afraid I've got a negative gut reaction to the term "plan" used in this sort of context, but if I re-phrase it as "perspective", it's more palatable to me (and probably just the same thing when seen clearly). So yes, I think part of the healing would be from being able to see what happened from a wider angle, as it were. All the ways he could have failed and didn't, all the horrible things that could have befallen the world had he chosen differently, and against them all the single moment of failure may not seem as bad.
And there might also be virtue in being around others who *know* what he went through. Sam knows, Gandalf knows, Galadriel knows. I think the Valar would know. (And although it's AFAIK prevented by the metaphysics of the world, Boromir's spirit would know. I like to imagine them hanging out somewhere in the gardens. Maybe out on a boat, together, fishing, silently, occasionally passing the beer.)
And I think there's some inherent virtue in it being *over*. Finally, literally. Frodo doesn't have to keep trying any more. There was this bit from Tolkien that Deiseach linked, below, which I think nicely summarizes a problem that Frodo will no longer have to deal with.
> For finite judges of imperfect knowledge it must lead to the use of two different scales of 'morality'. To ourselves we must present the absolute ideal without compromise, for we do not know our own limits of natural strength (+grace), and if we do not aim at the highest we shall certainly fall short of the utmost that we could achieve. To others, in any case of which we know enough to make a judgement, we must apply a scale tempered by 'mercy': that is, since we can with good will do this without the bias inevitable in judgements of ourselves, we must estimate the limits of another's strength and weigh this against the force of particular circumstances.
IIRC, Boromir and Frodo will meet up again, since Frodo's going to Elf Heaven, but he'll eventually die and go to Human Heaven, where Boromir presumably is. The Undying Lands are called that because the Elves and Valar live there; there's nothing really special about the lands themselves.
While I share your negativity when it comes to the real world, Providence / the will of Eru is a fairly explicit part of Tolkien's world-building. At several points in the series it's heavily implied that Frodo's quest is either the plan of the Valar or of Ilúvatar.
I think it's an attempt to import a 4D perspective into a 3D world, and while the language used may be helpful for some people, it's anti-helpful for me (and presumably anyone else like me).
I think it would be healing for Frodo to see his story as part of a larger plan or a larger context. But he would be giving up something there, too — something about the his own autonomy and choices mattering in a crucial way. In the big picture, Frodo’s story and Gollum’s came together to destroy the Ring, and of course woven into each of their stories are many other
beings’ stories. So Frodo has to step back from seeing himself as the crucial figure, and more as part
of a tapestry. Kind of painful, even if it can be seen as spiritual growth. It’s a transition Gandalf seems to have gone thru before the story begins. He’s commanding and knows he’s a great wizard, but lacks personal vanity. Says to the steward of Minas Tirith, whose name I can’t remember, “I too am only a steward.”
But it *was* Frodo's choice that did matter, Frodo's and Bilbo's choices to be merciful to Gollum when they were faced with it.
They could have chosen otherwise, and nobody would have blamed them, and it would have (seemed to be) the prudent, sensible decision. The mysterious workings of fate and/or Providence don't take away from agency, they incorporate all choices (good and bad) into the final weaving:
"If you re-read all the passages dealing with Frodo and the Ring, I think you will see that not only was it quite impossible for him to surrender the Ring, in act or will, especially at its point of maximum power, but that this failure was adumbrated from far back. He was honoured because he had accepted the burden voluntarily, and had then done all that was within his utmost physical and mental strength to do. He (and the Cause) were saved – by Mercy : by the supreme value and efficacy of Pity and forgiveness of injury.
...There exists the possibility of being placed in positions beyond one's power. In which case (as I believe) salvation from ruin will depend on something apparently unconnected: the general sanctity (and humility and mercy) of the sacrificial person. I did not 'arrange' the deliverance in this case: it again follows the logic of the story. (Gollum had had his chance of repentance, and of returning generosity with love; and had fallen off the knife-edge.)"
"By chance, I have just had another letter regarding the failure of Frodo. Very few seem even to have observed it. But following the logic of the plot, it was clearly inevitable, as an event. And surely it is a more significant and real event than a mere 'fairy-story' ending in which the hero is indomitable? It is possible for the good, even the saintly, to be subjected to a power of evil which is too great for them to overcome – in themselves. In this case the cause (not the 'hero') was triumphant, because by the exercise of pity, mercy, and forgiveness of injury, a situation was produced in which all was redressed and disaster averted. Gandalf certainly foresaw this. See Vol. I p. 68-9 [1. "Pity? It was Pity that stayed [Bilbo's] hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity."]. Of course, he did not mean to say that one must be merciful, for it may prove useful later – it would not then be mercy or pity, which are only truly present when contrary to prudence. Not ours to plan! But we are assured that we must be ourselves extravagantly generous, if we are to hope for the extravagant generosity which the slightest easing of, or escape from, the consequences of our own follies and errors represents. And that mercy does sometimes occur in this life.'j"
"I do not think that Frodo's was a moral failure. At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum – impossible, I should have said, for any one to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when starved and exhausted. Frodo had done what he could and spent himself completely (as an instrument of Providence) and had produced a situation in which the object of his quest could be achieved. His humility (with which he began) and his sufferings were justly rewarded by the highest honour; and his exercise of patience and mercy towards Gollum gained him Mercy: his failure was redressed."
"So Frodo has to step back from seeing himself as the crucial figure, and more as part of a tapestry."
We get that in the book, though, with Sam talking about being part of a story:
"“I don’t like anything here at all,” said Frodo, “Step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.”
“Yes, that’s so,” said Sam. “And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventure, as I used to call them.
I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.
Folk just seem to have landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten.
We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in. I wonder what sort of tale we fallen into?"
“What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven't we?' he said. 'I wish I could hear it told. Do you think they'll say: Now comes the story of Nine-fingered Frodo and the ring of Doom? And then everyone will hush, like we did, when in Rivendell they told us the tale of Beren One-hand and the Great Jewel. I wish I could hear it! And I wonder how it will go on after our part.”
Yes, I agree with what Tolkien is saying, and you too. It was clear long before Frodo got to Mt Doom that he would not be able to destroy the ring. He could barely stand to let Sam wear it for a little while a few days before he got to the Crack of Doom. And I get that being saved from himself by Gollum was the only way the ring could be destroyed, and that Gollum's being alive was the result of a good quality of Frodo's, mercy. So in a way Frodo's own goodness saved him. Still, looking at the story from Frodo's point of view, it seems like the only someone could take on delivering the ring to the fire would be to swear to themself that they will never, never give in to it no matter how badly they want to. You can't say to yourself, "well I will try, but if the temptation is too powerful then I will just have to give in" -- because taking that point of view would never sustain you. So at the end Frodo broke an oath he made to himself, and I don't think there's a way to back things up and say to yourself, "well, if I had understood the situation better, I would have realized I'd never be able to throw the ring into the Crack of Doom, so it's OK that I couldn't keep an oath I made at I time when I was very naive."
I don’t think Frodo’s condition at the end of LOTR is an inability to enjoy the sweet little Shire after all the adventures he’s had and the wonders he’s see he’s seen, and that he leaves with the elves so he can again live in a world of magic and wonder. Seems to me the book makes clear that Frodo was damaged by what he had been through. He lost more than a ring finger in the course of being the Ring -bearer. . He is, for instance, sick on the anniversary of various ring-related events. His eyes are sad, not bored. I think the elves are hospice.
The deaths and betrayals of friends, spider poison, orc torture, mere hunger and exhaustion, the sunset of hope.
Lots of fantasy series have gnolls, which are sentient hyenas. Tabaxi too, sentient cats. In D&D there are the aarakocra, bird people. The next version of D&D is introducing Aardlings, divine people that have the head of an animal and the body of a human, and have the ability to grow wings. There are dozens more beyond that - https://www.dndbeyond.com/races. And that's all just in D&D!
I can think of lots of fantasy series with lots of different unique species. In Mother of Learning, there's a race of sentient wasps that the main character has to negotiate with. In The Wandering Inn, there's a race of people who are only a few inches tall. It's all out there.
Once you have elves and dwarves and goblins, it's easy to keep throwing in even more races. I don't think D&D or the D&D-esque stories would have tabaxi and so forth if they didn't have elves and dwarves to begin with.
This makes me reflect a good deal on Stephen R. Donaldson's 'Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever', which basically is a ten book consideration of the nature of power itself.
It does avoid the tolkienism of dwarves/elves, having rather several cultures of humans plus giants each with different magical-ish skills. On the other hand, the plot of the whole series revolves around a ring, so your mileage my vary.
It's not for the faint of heart, though. Covenant is something of an antihero and about half the people I know who have tried to read the series gave up in the first book, disgusted with him.
The use of language is also very weird-- Donaldson uses obscure words with no clues about what they mean.
It was an effort at a fantasy world with a very different feel from Tolkien. The art in it is modern in the sense of free verse for the poetry and what I think is atonal music.
Wellll... the first trilogy is very much *influenced* by Tolkien. They don't have Dwarves and Elves - but they do have people who work with wood and people who work with stone, magically. They don't have the Rohirrim, but they do have people who live with and are devoted to magical horses. The Council of Lords is that world's version of wizards.
It is, however, *very* much different in its exploration of power. Donaldson comes to a somewhat similar proposition as Tolkien about power corrupting, but he works it out in a hugely different way: the innocent are weak, only the guilty can wield power. So to save the innocent, the guilty may have to do terrible things. This doesn't excuse them, it doesn't make the terrible things not-terrible, but it's the price of power.
I did like the entire series, even if it was very very much built on a different philosophy base. And as Nancy says, it expanded my vocabulary immensely.
I ran out of interest long about book seven or so. One thing I especially liked for unclear reasons was, in the second trilogy, the world is going through extreme phases-- drought, flood, rapid plant growth (which enables people to survive the other phases, but is still bad-- the plants are screaming, some more I don't remember)-- the sun is a different color for each phase. It was neat that it wasn't the sun changing, it was something happening in earth's atmosphere. Maybe I liked it because it showed a sense of proportion.
The last four books went in an odd direction, very feminist (of a sort). It was clear Donaldson had changed his mind about several elements since the last book twenty years before.
Some of that was good, some not so good. It does complete the story and wrap it all up, but he never really deals with the character of the Creator who he introduced in the first book but never really developed. I think he found a creator being too much and not enough for what he wanted to do, which was (in part) an examination of moral choices and belief. If there's a powerful god-being outside it all, then the stakes aren't that high as he can intervene and work it out (I disagree there, but whatever) and if the creator is powerless, then he's not really doing anything for the story. Lord Foul as the shadow-side of our humanity is something he can work with, but not a Creator.
I still like the original six best 😁
I agree with both Nancy and Deiseach on this... and Deiseach makes a good point about human stand-ins for elves and dwarves (plus the forests being alive and having the forestals, which is clearly somewhat derivative of Ents).
I really like the whole ten book series, but it does, I think, come down to being pretty derivative with a twist of Tolkein, a la Scott's point.
I may have been a tiny bit in love with Lord Mhoram, who really is a very appealing character for his sense of justice, morality, and compassion 😁
The Giants are great creations, too; I dare anyone not to tear up about Saltheart Foamfollower (though Donaldson does overdo it on the elevated language front there, which doesn't always come off as well as one might wish).
Also, it was very effective while, after a period of sterility, Giant children are get boon, everyone is celebrating, and the children turn out to be monsters.
Yeah, before GRRM, Donaldson made a habit of "oh, you think things can't get worse? hold my beer! oh, you think there's going to be good times? you sweet summer child!"
I'd say that it's actually Donaldson's giants and not the Woodhelvenin tree-mages who actually resemble Tolkien's elves more than superficially. A long-lived and slow-reproducing non-human race, few in number but great in power, they are allied to the humans against the forces of evil. The first ones we meet are exiles from a magic land across the sea which is also home to the godlike beings who occasionally intervened in history to avert catastrophe or the triumph of evil. Their skills at sailing at arms, and certain types of crafting eclipses human achievement; despite being good guys they have a history of berserk/excessive violence, and they are the most celebrated singers in the Land.
Interestingly, I thought Donaldson meant the Elohim to be the Elves stand-ins (and really Stephen, you couldn't have hit us over the head *harder* with that anvil about god-analogues?)
The Giants' special relationship with stone was more a Dwarvish trait, though I think they were not meant to be copies of any other species. I think they would appreciate and agree with Gimli's speech to Legolas:
"You have not seen, so I forgive your jest," said Gimli. "but you speak like a fool. Do you think those halls are fair, where your King dwells under the hill in Mirkwood, and Dwarves helped making long ago? They are but hovels compared with caverns I have seen here: immeasurable halls, filled with an everlasting music of water that tinkles into pools, as fair as Kheled-zâram in the starlight."
"And, Legolas, When the torches are kindled and the men walk on the sandy floors under the echoing domes, ah! then, Legolas, gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel. There are columns of white and saffron and dawn-rose, Legolas, fluted and twisted into dreamlike forms; they spring up from many-coloured floors to meet the glistening pendants of the roof: wings, ropes, curtains as fine as frozen clouds; spears, banners, pinnacles of suspended palaces! Still lakes mirror them: a glimmering world looks up from dark pools covered with clear glass; cities, such as the mind of Durin could scarce have imagined in his sleep, stretch on through avenues and pillared courts, on into the dark recesses where no light can come. And plink! a silver drop falls, and the round wrinkles in the glass make all the towers bend and waver like weeds and corals in the grotto of the sea. Then evening comes: they fade and twinkle out; the torches pass on into another chamber and another dream. There is a chamber, Legolas; hall opening out of hall, dome after dome, stairs beyond stairs; and still the winding paths lead on into the mountains' heart. Caves! The Caverns of Helm's Deep! Happy was the chance that drove me there! It makes me weep to leave them!"
"No you don't understand," said Gimli, "No dwarf could be unmoved by such loveliness. None of Durin's race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We would tend these glades of flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap - a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day - so we could work, and as the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. And lights, Legolas! We should make lights, such lamps as once shone in Khazad-Dûm; and when we wished we would drive away the night that has lain there since the hills were made; and when we desired rest, we would let the night return."
I don't think the Thomas Covenant books were much like LOTR. Except for the existence of world-building, everything was different.
"The one thing I still don’t understand is why everyone has the same races. Why elves, dwarves, goblins, and sometimes drow? Why not sentient dogs, or dolphins, or bee-people living in hive-cities..."
Elf, dwarf and goblin variants all seem 'organic' and natural, partly because they're familiar from previous fantasy and myth, and partly because they all relatively subtle variations on normal humans. A fantasy setting can bear small additions like bird-people, before seeming too unnatural, but too many more novel additions (e.g. singing purple ants) can seem artificial and arbitrary, and take you out of the fantasy. One can end up wondering 'why did the author decide that the world is inhabited by singing purple ants in particular?', rather than just automatically accepting the world as a given.
To riff on this, I think that part of what's happening is that we are collectively doing a categorization or lumping of things that are actually meant to be distinct.
One could look at the Eldar (Tolkien), Eldar (Warhammer), Drow, Alfar, Christmas elves, Aes Sidhe, Nymphs, Kitsune, and round them all off as "elves, basically." Skinny folk who do magic and seem uncanny, basically. A huge amount of resolution is lost when we casually grant this lumping-together. What do the WH40K Eldar and the Tolkien Eldar have in common beyond pointy ears, really? (Trick question, Tolkien never states in the books that his elves have pointy ears.)
Even mysterious never-actually-shown progenitor-races who have left behind artifacts and architecture give off an elf vibe ... but isn't this us projecting our trope awareness onto an intentional blank spot in the lore?
Sometimes authors will intentionally muss the tropes up, like with Robert Jordan's Ogier, who are large and monstrous in appearance, but are in fact long-lived and wise nature-mages, thus breaking your expectation enough that you don't automatically classify them as elves, despite the fact that they borrow heavily from fantasy elf tropes.
Something I always found interesting about this is that Tolkien, the father of the modern Fantasy genre, actually doesn't tell this story in LoTR.
Or rather, he does tell this story, but he deliberately makes it a secondary plot. The story of the lost prince who finds himself and rises to meet his grand destiny does happen in LoTR - to Aragorn. Aragorn has the destined bloodline. Aragorn finds himself through a difficult journey. Aragorn becomes the king of men. Aragorn marries the elven princess. None of this ever happens to Frodo, our main protagonist. And Frodo's story is not much like the fantasy stories described here at all.
Frodo isn't chosen by some grand destiny in his bloodline, he's present at the council by circumstance and volunteers. When Frodo enters the forbidden forest to discover its secrets, he doesn't go on a self-actualizing journey where he finds himself, he's wounded by the monsters and never recovers. Frodo does carry The Lost Magic of the Ancient Civilization, but the ring is not an equalizer that allows him to battle the dark lord. It's a terrible burden that destroys his life and offers nothing in return. There is no moment of self-discovery or godlike power. He is offered no happily ever after. Frodo is an ordinary person without a destiny who sacrifices everything for the sake of what's good.
The hobbits are a lot of things, but they are not classic fantasy heroes. The hobbits can never become rulers of men, they will never be great warriors or kings even hypothetically. They don't have magical blood and aren't fated to accomplish anything in particular. Frodo and Sam remain fairly ordinary people throughout the story, who's primary strength is merely that they stepped up to sacrifice themselves in order to do an extremely difficult thing. They make a sacrifice that few of us could ever imagine deliberately making. Aragorn is going through his reluctant hero arc and discovering the power and strength that were always inside him, while our main characters are pushing through a much more painful, grounded story that we know from the start cannot end well for them.
And then Aragorn's story is explicitly spelled out in the text as being less important than Frodo's. Aragorn's big conclusion isn't fighting the Dark Lord himself, it's choosing to divert the Dark Lord away from Frodo. "My friends, you bow to no one" says the destined king of men as he kneels before the little hobbits. The ordinary people who make the simple choice to resist evil are far more important than the epic heroes in their perfect fantasy plot.
Tolkien invented a lot of what we now consider modern fantasy - but he invented it as background. The Perfect Fantasy Story about the fated protagonist isn't the focus. We associate Tolkien's work so strongly with fantasy as a genre that it's easy to forget how LoTR itself is effectively a subversion of these classic tropes.
Well said!
Peter Jackson's Aragorn is a reluctant hero (because Jackson doesn't get nobility as a character trait and has to replace it with something else in all the characters where that's a factor), but Tolkien's isn't. He does get the "raised in obscurity then learns he's the heir to a special bloodline" bit. But there's no immediate glory, and also no Refusal of the Call, just assumption of responsibility and a life of of hopeless work fighting and working against the enemies who dispossessed his people a thousand years earlier.
He's technically the heir to the throne, but for most of his life that's about as likely to get him a throne as someone having documentation that he's the heir of Charlemagne. His immediate job isn't to save the world or win the kingdom. The expectation is that, like the last many members of his hereditary line he'll spend a short life doing hard things with no recognition, while leading a small band of like-minded fighters.
It's only after decades of that that the prospect of anything changing appears. As you note, Aragorn fully understands that he's not the central hero of the drama, and spends a lot of that period harrying and presenting himself as a distraction to the enemy to enable the real mission (which he's not on) to go forward, or assisting with important but secondary goals like rescuing Hobbits or helping preserve Rohan.
Then he does become king and marry the fairy princess after all. But "plucked out of obscurity for a lifetime of thankless hidden heroism, culminating in leading a doomed diversionary force far from the site of the main confrontation" isn't exactly a cliched hero's journey.
And contra Hollywood expectations, he never visibly questions what he has to do whether it's working alone in the dark for suspicious villagers or leading armies, nor does he doubt his right and intention to rule if the occasion comes up. His doubts focus on his judgment and ability to make the correct choices, not his overall mission. His story isn't really one of self-discovery, but of accepting duty and responsibility when it comes to him. And of a hero with a full complement of royal blood and destiny deliberately choosing to play a supporting role.
Sincere sacrifice and a life of duty as themes tend to get missed by critics and, interestingly, adaptors. I suspect it’s a fear of being thought naive.
Another point here is that Frodo, at the end, fails in his resolve. He carries the burden to the end but he is not finally capable of completing the mission of his own volition. The Ring is ultimately destroyed through conflict between two victims of its own corruption, and Frodo has to live with the knowledge that it was within him to have ended up another Gollum.
Right - it's not by accident that the moment of Frodo's fall in Mount Doom occurs in the same moment as any other fantasy would have the triumphant self-actualization where the hero finally understands his own power. If Frodo were Brin Ohmsford or Harry Potter or a D&D character, Mount Doom would be the moment where everything comes together - he'd finally understand his purpose and his greatness and he'd use this new understanding to defeat the dark lord.
But LoTR isn't actually that kind of fantasy story. And so this moment that might be heroic is instead played as horror. Frodo choosing to wield The Lost Magic Of The Ancient Peoples and Realize His True Destiny is understood by the audience to be the moment when all our hopes fail. The worst thing Frodo can do for Middle Earth is to try to be like Aragorn, to be a creature of power instead of relying on the simple goodness he's known since the shire.
The Ring itself is all about doing this to different characters in different ways. No matter who holds it, the promise of the one ring is always that it will turn you into The Grand Hero with The Epic Destiny Who Will Grow Through Their Challenges To Reshape The World. The goodness of characters in LoTR is measured not in the strength to accept that destiny, but in the will to reject it as a lie. Hobbits resist the ring because they're simple, wholesome creatures who don't want to be epic fantasy heroes. and the message is that the real victory comes through the struggle and sacrifice of ordinary people who must always remain ordinary.
Isildur even *was* the epic hero who overcame an escalating series of challenges and loss to defeat the Dark Lord in direct confrontation and leave Mordor as the victorious High King. And taking the Ring ensured that his victory remained incomplete, and his life ended.
And that last was probably for the best, because one can only imagine what the Kingdoms in Exile would have become if Isildur had gotten all the way home with it. The Witch-King would have been a distant second to a descendant of Elros corrupted and made a wraith by the One itself. By the time Sauron recoalesced it would mostly have just been a change of administration.
Oh, indeed Tolkien wasn't writing a conventional hero in Frodo. From a 1944 letter to his son Christopher:
"Cert. Sam is the most closely drawn character, the successor to Bilbo of the first book, the genuine hobbit. Frodo is not so interesting, because he has to be highminded, and has (as it were) a vocation. The book will prob. end up with Sam. Frodo will naturally become too ennobled and rarefied by the achievement of the great Quest, and will pass West with all the great figures; but S. will settle down to the Shire and gardens and inns. C. Williams who is reading it all says the great thing is that its centre is not in strife and war and heroism (though they are understood and depicted) but in freedom, peace, ordinary life and good liking. Yet he agrees that these very things require the existence of a great world outside the Shire – lest they should grow stale by custom and turn into the humdrum."
1954 letter:
"Frodo is not intended to be another Bilbo. Though his opening style is not wholly un-kin. But he is rather a study of a hobbit broken by a burden of fear and horror — broken down, and in the end made into something quite different. None of the hobbits come out of it in pure Shire-fashion. They wouldn't. But you have got Samwise Gamwichy (or Gamgee)."
Letters of 1956:
"Frodo was in such a position: an apparently complete trap: a person of greater native power could probably never have resisted the Ring's lure to power so long; a person of less power could not hope to resist it in the final decision. (Already Frodo had been unwilling to harm the Ring before he set out, and was incapable of surrendering it to Sam.)
The Quest ⁂ was bound to fail as a piece of world-plan, and also was bound to end in disaster as the story of humble Frodo's development to the 'noble', his sanctification. Fail it would and did as far as Frodo considered alone was concerned. He 'apostatized' – and I have had one savage letter, crying out that he shd. have been executed as a traitor, not honoured. Believe me, it was not until I read this that I had myself any idea how 'topical' such a situation might appear. It arose naturally from my 'plot' conceived in main outline in 1936.1 I did not foresee that before the tale was published we should enter a dark age in which the technique of torture and disruption of personality would rival that of Mordor and the Ring and present us with the practical problem of honest men of good will broken down into apostates and traitors."
"If you re-read all the passages dealing with Frodo and the Ring, I think you will see that not only was it quite impossible for him to surrender the Ring, in act or will, especially at its point of maximum power, but that this failure was adumbrated from far back. He was honoured because he had accepted the burden voluntarily, and had then done all that was within his utmost physical and mental strength to do. He (and the Cause) were saved – by Mercy : by the supreme value and efficacy of Pity and forgiveness of injury.
...No, Frodo 'failed'. It is possible that once the ring was destroyed he had little recollection of the last scene. But one must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however 'good'; and the Writer of the Story is not one of us."
"By chance, I have just had another letter regarding the failure of Frodo. Very few seem even to have observed it. But following the logic of the plot, it was clearly inevitable, as an event. And surely it is a more significant and real event than a mere 'fairy-story' ending in which the hero is indomitable? It is possible for the good, even the saintly, to be subjected to a power of evil which is too great for them to overcome – in themselves. In this case the cause (not the 'hero') was triumphant, because by the exercise of pity, mercy, and forgiveness of injury, a situation was produced in which all was redressed and disaster averted. Gandalf certainly foresaw this. See Vol. I p. 68-9. Of course, he did not mean to say that one must be merciful, for it may prove useful later – it would not then be mercy or pity, which are only truly present when contrary to prudence. Not ours to plan ! But we are assured that we must be ourselves extravagantly generous, if we are to hope for the extravagant generosity which the slightest easing of, or escape from, the consequences of our own follies and errors represents. And that mercy does sometimes occur in this life.
Frodo deserved all honour because he spent every drop of his power of will and body, and that was just sufficient to bring him to the destined point, and no further. Few others, possibly no others of his time, would have got so far. The Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself), 'that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named' (as one critic has said). See Vol. I p. 65. A third (the only other) commentator on the point some months ago reviled Frodo as a scoundrel (who should have been hung and not honoured), and me too. It seems sad and strange that, in this evil time when daily people of good will are tortured, 'brainwashed', and broken, anyone could be so fiercely simpleminded and self righteous."
Letter of 1963:
"Very few (indeed so far as letters go only you and one other) have observed or commented on Frodo's 'failure'. It is a very important point.
From the point of view of the storyteller the events on Mt Doom proceed simply from the logic of the tale up to that time. They were not deliberately worked up to nor foreseen until they occurred. But, for one thing, it became at last quite clear that Frodo after all that had happened would be incapable of voluntarily destroying the Ring. Reflecting on the solution after it was arrived at (as a mere event) I feel that it is central to the whole 'theory' of true nobility and heroism that is presented.
Frodo indeed 'failed' as a hero, as conceived by simple minds: he did not endure to the end; he gave in, ratted. I do not say 'simple minds' with contempt: they often see with clarity the simple truth and the absolute ideal to which effort must be directed, even if it is unattainable. Their weakness, however, is twofold. They do not perceive the complexity of any given situation in Time, in which an absolute ideal is enmeshed. They tend to forget that strange element in the World that we call Pity or Mercy, which is also an absolute requirement in moral judgement (since it is present in the Divine nature). In its highest exercise it belongs to God. For finite judges of imperfect knowledge it must lead to the use of two different scales of 'morality'. To ourselves we must present the absolute ideal without compromise, for we do not know our own limits of natural strength (+grace), and if we do not aim at the highest we shall certainly fall short of the utmost that we could achieve. To others, in any case of which we know enough to make a judgement, we must apply a scale tempered by 'mercy': that is, since we can with good will do this without the bias inevitable in judgements of ourselves, we must estimate the limits of another's strength and weigh this against the force of particular circumstances.
I do not think that Frodo's was a moral failure. At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum – impossible, I should have said, for any one to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when starved and exhausted. Frodo had done what he could and spent himself completely (as an instrument of Providence) and had produced a situation in which the object of his quest could be achieved. His humility (with which he began) and his sufferings were justly rewarded by the highest honour; and his exercise of patience and mercy towards Gollum gained him Mercy: his failure was redressed."
One thing that I don't remember seeing Tolkien write about is why Sam, after Rosie died, chose to sail West instead of remaining with his children, and his grandchildren not yet past their tweens. He had the right as a ringbearer, but he wasn't wounded by it the way Frodo was, or stretched like Bilbo.
(He couldn't even be sure Frodo was still alive given their respective ages. Especially if the representations to the Numenoreans, that mortals in Aman would weary faster in its light, were true.)
It's the sort of choice that seems poetic in the immediate glow of Frodo's departure. But decades later, after making a life in the Shire-- one a lot less solitary and eccentric than Bilbo's: patriarch of a large clan plus Mayor for almost fifty years-- it seems as if it would feel like a rejection to those left behind that he would want to leave them forever, in the footsteps of someone none of them remembered.
Sam is also wounded, if less extremely than Frodo, we must remember: he too went to Mordor, he too suffered privations, and he too was a Ring-bearer and tempted (however fleetingly) by the Ring. So he too has his own painful memories and changed character.
After his long life, to find healing and then natural death (which would not be long in coming) in Valinor is the final ending of the entire journey. His wife had died, which I think is part of his reason for leaving; he didn't have long left either, and his family were all settled and living their own lives (and had moved away). It's not a rejection, it's the final stroke of the pen to the last word of "The End":
1482
Death of Mistress Rose, wife of Master Samwise, on Mid-year's Day. On September 22 Master Samwise rides out from Bag End. He comes to the Tower Hills, and is last seen by Elanor, to whom he gives the Red Book afterwards kept by the Fairbairns. Among them the tradition is handed down from Elanor that Samwise passed the Towers, and went to the Grey Havens. and passed over Sea, last of the Ring-bearers.
Merry and Pippin too leave the Shire when their own ends come:
1484
In the spring of the year a message came from Rohan to Buckland that King Éomer wished to see Master Holdwine once again. Meriadoc was then old (102) but still hale. He took counsel with his friend the Thain, and soon after they handed over their goods and offices to their sons and rode away over the Sarn Ford, and they were not seen again in the Shire. It was heard after that Master Meriadoc came to Edoras and was with King Éomer before he died in that autumn. Then he and Thain Peregrin went to Gondor and passed what short years were left to them in that realm, until they died and were laid in Rath Dínen among the great of Gondor.
1541
In this year on March 1st came at last the Passing of King Elessar. It is said that the beds of Meriadoc and Peregrin were set beside the bed of the great king. Then Legolas built a grey ship in Ithilien, and sailed down Anduin and so over Sea; and with him, it is said, went Gimli the Dwarf. And when that ship passed an end was come in the Middle-earth of the Fellowship of the Ring.
I'd look at it the other way. Sam's journey to the West is an indication that that's what he needed to do, and that the things he went through had a deeper effect on him than might be apparent from the surface.
He saw, up close, what the ring did to Frodo, one of the people he knows best, one of the best people he knows. He carried the ring himself, for a short time. He knows what it would have done to him, if he'd carried it longer. And apparently that knowledge was enough that he couldn't live completely happily, ever after. He needed to seek out gardens of healing beyond the world's end. Empirically, the love of those he left behind wasn't enough. What would have happened to him if he'd stayed, and endured longer to avoid hurting the people in his life? I don't know, but given the story Tolkien was telling, I think Sam made the right choice at the right time, and to delay longer would have caused more harm than it would have done good.
So you're saying you'll be writing more longer-form fiction? Excellent, it's always a pleasure.
I have this strong suspicion that, if fantasy indeed fulfills a certain psychological need (seems pretty plausible, Argument from Fictional Evidence and all that)...Cultures Very Different From Our Own should have radically different stories. Not talking so much about differences in history, religion, geography, whatever, although those of course play a part. I'm thinking more that, the shared psychological needs all humans have...if those get filled in other ways, stories won't have to scratch those itches, and thus won't find traction. What kinds of stories would a truly post-material scarcity society crave?
Conversely, exacerbating those needs will raise the salience of fictional cures. It feels like today's modern world specifically encourages agentic fantasies, with a listless populace continually coming unmoored from traditional paths towards meaning and milestones of life achivement. Dovetails with infantilization, the perpetuation of adolescence beyond all reasonable limits. Stories let one grow up vicariously...one could cynically claim that's the whole point, to keep people narrowly satiated with the shadow of competence. But it's probably just that successful art reads the room correctly, intuits the missing moods of modernity and seeks to fill such needs.
-also, I think Project Lawful is quite good, once one gets past all the academics...but maybe that's because it's not a typical cool-fantasy isekai? Being self-aware or genre-savvy is hardly novel at this point, yet it remains effective if done well.
One range of variation is whether people want happy endings or tragic endings or just ongoing stories.
Indeed, the Wuxia genre (martial arts fantasy within Chinese cultural sphere) has few overlapping tropes with LoTR. No races, no classes, few magical creatures. This setting also enables characters where luck + a good heart is predominant (Duan Yu), talent is predominant (Yang Guo), hard work is predominant (Guo Jing), and cunning is predominant (Wei Xiao Bao). The closest analog to magic is "inner force" (nei gong), but it's more like a prerequisite for higher level martial arts than something that a person would choose to specialize in.
(One exception: Duan Yu managed to specialize in "inner force" skills, because he was actually a pacifist who refused to learn any moves that would hurt people, but due to a series of fortuitous circumstances, he ended up with more "inner force" than anyone could realistically achieve, and ended up being the only person who could learn a skill that can cast serious DPS without knowing how to throw a punch, so perhaps he was the first and only "mage" in the Wuxia genre.)
Jin Yong doesn’t because he’s writing what we’d call low fantasy, but look at the pulp guys like Huanzhulouzhu or at contemporaries like Gu Long who wrote less down to earth and more fantastical stories
Point taken. Would you then consider "Xian Xia" to be high fantasy? Likewise, that genre has many shared elements (typically a buddhism-inspired celestrial hierarchy, afterlife, etc.) that works in a similar genre tend not to deviate from, yet is very different from LoTR.
Yes, I’d consider Xian Xia to be a good close analogue to high fantasy and agree that it is similarly formulaic. Ditto for the online spinoff of the ‘cultivation’ genre and LitRPGs, which seem to me to be an attempt to remove everything extraneous to the formulaic core (and which I find completely unreadable as a result)
> It feels like today's modern world specifically encourages agentic fantasies, with a listless populace continually coming unmoored from traditional paths towards meaning and milestones of life achivement. Dovetails with infantilization, the perpetuation of adolescence beyond all reasonable limits.
Yeah, this feels very true to me. It may connect to the prevalence of, if not literally apocalyptic, then at least high-stakes messaging. The world is dying, people are suffering, society is collapsing, evil is taking root, and YOU, yes you, can stop it, if you just retweet the right memes and chant the right slogans at the right protests. Clap loud enough, and the fairies will be saved!
It is convenient to use elves, dwarves and goblins (or orcs) because they are off-the-shelf. The reader knows what they are, and you don't have to explain them. And readers, especially young readers, do like to find some familiar bits in a novel.
Perhaps one reason why they are well-known is that they are similar enough to humans to be playable in role-playing systems. It's much harder to integrate a player who plays a fairy or a demon.
Apart from that, I don't think elves, dwarves and goblins are really so over-represented. I just mentally went through some of my favorite classic fantasy novels. The Belgariad Saga by Eddings features neither elves nor dwarves, but dryads and fenlings. The Wheel of Time features Ogiers, but no dwarves and elves. The Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams features elves (Sithi and Norns), but no dwarves, and instead Qanuc. Sanderson features all kind of creatures (Warbreaker has literally a god as a main protagonist), but elves and dwarves don't stick out to me.
Perhaps this is because I have focused on pretty long books which can afford to introduce their characters. In novellas, it may be more convenient to let the party meet Archetype Dwarf #3 without much explanation.
"It's harder to integrate a player who plays a fairy or a demon."
Well, unless every player is a fairy or demon, as in some White Wolf settings, or the particular nonhuman isn't any more nonhuman than most Star Trek aliens. But "group of basically human-like creatures plus one creature very different from humans" can certainly get weird in a hurry.
This is why I love Alexander Wales stories.
I really wish there were more fantasy stories where the greater enemy was societal trends or whatever, and there aren't Secret Artifacts of Specialness (and their evil cousin, Ancient Prisons of Never-Mentioned-Until-Now Dark Lords) littered everywhere, but rather the special powers *and* the bad guys arise organically from that world.
Avatar and Korra are a good example of that. The powers are part of an established mythology; the Avatar is special, but not in a "it could be anybody, even you!" way. The villains are all politically motivated, not ancient monsters of evil (LoK season 2 aside).
Graydon Saunders “Egalitarian Heroic Fantasy” might fit
Very much so!
I wonder if some of Piers Anthony's stories count? Most of the bad guys in the Apprentice Adept series are basically "members of the other political party" trying to preserve their wealth and power instead of Sauron-like figures.
(Disclaimer: This comment takes no position on the quality of Piers Anthony novels or to what extent they are Problematic.)
I don't think it's right to say everyone has the same races. Yeah, it's common to go "we have elves and dwarves but we call them alfs and eorfs", but I think it's also pretty common to throw in one unique race. "we have alfs, eorfs, urks, boblins and earimitans, 7 foot tall ears that eat sound" (I'm pretty sure I've even seen things with sentient dogs, bee people, and inch tall people, but I can't place it) Most just stop at adding one weird race, otherwise half the book is explaining how taverns work and not how special the hero is, and if you go too far in explaining how wasps visit dolphin cities the work stops being recognizably fantasy at all.
I think your Stories 1 and 2 explain a lot if not most things about (mainstream) post-Tolkien fantasy, including your final question about the same races.
Though Story 3 is more interesting to ponder, hence the thought-provoking post.
Although not strictly fantasy, David Brin's Uplift series deals with sentient chimpanzees and dolphins. Their sentience is developed by other sapient (in this case human) agents who become their 'patrons'. In the universe there are many patrons and many uplifted species, but sapient chimps and dolphins play important roles in many of his works.
This is one of the big reasons I like the Practical Guide to Evil - the free power you can pick up off the ground is intrinsically tied to having a lot of agency. Meanwhile a major theme throughout the book is that grand mages doing grand rituals is a lot less productive than rounding up everyone with a scrap of magical talent and training them to fireball in formation.
It's not clear to me that grand rituals are less effective than formation fireballing in PGtE - yes, Amadeus's reforms to the legions prioritize the second over the first, but I think that was a political decision. Amadeus didn't want close-knit clusters of noble or noble-trained mages to be a vital part of his army, because he didn't want his armies run by the nobles who were his political enemy, and those are pretty much the only way he could have gotten grand rituals.
What made his reforms so effective was a the other side of that political decision, that the factions he did support (orcs, primarily), meant he had much more effective infantry than previous legions, and most other countries.
Basically every time someone has the option to have grand mages doing grand rituals, they take it.
If you see a dollar lying on the ground, you pick it up. But purely political decisions don't explain Malicia being the first to ever actually conquer Callow despite every single Dread Emperor having tried at least once, most with much more power.
Came here to say the same thing. The Guide doesn't just break this mold, it makes a mockery of it.
I haven't read that, but it sounds like the introduction of firearms - now you didn't need knights in armour, just conscript a bunch of working class guys and drill them in "the bullet goes in this end, aim at that spot and pull the trigger".
And that does indeed level the playing field - until someone invents planes and bombs that can be dropped on your guys with guns from a distance they can never shoot over, and then the race for Grand Rituals is back on 😁
Indeed, the big advantage of early firearms was not that they were more effective weapons than the alternatives, but that they were cheap to make and didn't require a lifetime of training to use effectively.
I think the main reason for common tropes like elves, goblins etc is the "common vernacular" dynamic, explaining new creatures takes a lot of space and pacing out of telling the story. However, I think the reasons these specific tropes have stuck is because they fit into the story structure.
Elves, for example, have a similar function as Ancient Progenitors: they provide strong artifacts and magic to the protagonists to receive, but are sufficiently alien / capricious / aloof that these things are still exclusive. Indeed, what might motivate elves to give the protag cool stuff is usually those traits that the everyman reader identifies with -- honesty, incorruptibility, loyalty, etc.
So, even if you want to make a race superficially different to elves, you still have strong reasons to make it fill the same story purpose (magic+aloof) to satisfy the fantasy, which in turn makes the race similar in a lot of ways anyway, and so you might as well give them pointy ears. Similarly, you're gonna want little rascal enemies that are easily defeated by the everyman folk hero protagonist but disgusting enough to justify violence towards them despite their weakness. Might as well make them green and call them goblins.
On another note: I think the romance of the Dalai Lama kind of related to all this. If you think about it, the idea of entirely deleting some kids' identity for religious purposes should be abhorrent to western sensibilities, and I wondered about this recently. A friend pointed out that this is probably superseded by the specific special ego self-discovery "what if I'm secretly the heir to the throne" fantasy which the Lama system kind of fits into.
Not only this, but also the character in the story most likely knows what Elves, Dwarves, Goblins etc. are. If I invent a race that is familiar to the characters in the story but not the reader, I have to find a way to perform an infodump about what the character knows to explain to the reader. If I use a race that the reader knows, I only need to explain anything that's not a part of the baseline concept.
I feel like the pattern of too much similarity is historical. The sorts of stuff I think of as recent fantasy, especially from the 2010s are things like litrpg, or cultivation that really are using different patterns in terms of races and how the things work - while at the same time keeping the random person being super powerful in a way that feels like they earn it.
I think this also could be why I find it hard to write fantasy well. I want a good explanation for why the random person is special that doesn't ultimately boil down to because it makes the plot work.
Those are basically just retellings of video games though; the ‘cultivation’ genre and litRPGs are both Let’s Plays for people who don’t have the literary competence to write Let’s Plays.
My firm belief, which I've held for quite a while, is that "Fantasy is optimized for storytelling"; removing parts of it makes it harder to tell stories. That one of the most common of those stories is "a person with no special ability or agency [...] save[ing] the world" follows naturally from that.
I would wager that the most well known Fantasy story today is actually Cinderella. There's no saving the world or even a real adventure. It just so happens that the rigid class structure resulting from traditional monarchy is very good at setting up dramatic romance between individuals of different social classes. It's a lot harder to set up a good romance with a Senator than it is with a Prince. The 'fence' (in Chesterton's metaphor) of monarchy is doing multiple jobs.
Fantasy works as a setting genre because the European Middle Ages-derived setting (culture and technology) contains a lot of obstacles that make for the meat of stories while containing the tools for the protagonist to overcome those obstacles. The most important of those are related to communication and transportation. For almost any story, the thought exercise of 'what would change if every character had a functional cell phone?' should give some interesting results (most Horror / Suspense type stories have tropes around removing the characters ability to communicate freely). If people in the setting can freely travel from point to point, it removes both a lot of the resource scarcity and a lot of the threat of monsters; the entire ideas of 'frontier' and 'wilderness' are tied to a lack of transportation.
Re: cellphones
One of the things I've observed about myself lately when I've watched/read 20th-century realistic fiction is just how much of every plot revolves around communication difficulties. It's particularly prominent in dramas and thriller/suspense-driven plots, but almost every story involves a problem that could be resolved instantly with a cellphone.
(I think I first noticed this when I watched season 1 of The Wire, where the focus on communication tech is explicit.)
I actually lived through the '80s and '90s. I remember the Before Times. But somehow my brain has rewired itself to not understand how two people in a modern urban setting could be unable to talk to each other.
I suspect older generations probably had similar experiences around other technologies. I think one of the purposes that 'standard' fantasy and preindustrial settings serve is as a sort of switching mechanism in the reader's mind, instantly shutting off all expectations of industrial technology. Fantasy offers the additional advantage of being able to selectively reintroduce some of our modern capabilities, but in an altered or limited way: only *some* people can fly, or communicate instantly across long distances, or make light without heat, or kill with the flick of a finger.
I haven't read any of the Wheel of Time this century, but as I recall, half the time I was yelling at the characters to just TALK WITH EACH OTHER DAMMIT.
Yep, sounds about right. I think I made it through the first book and then gave up, largely because of that.
But that's a problem genre conventions can't fix: characters who *can* talk to each other but *won't* are infuriating regardless of the setting.
That's a problem with a lot of detective stories, especially ones from the Golden Age; the character who Knows Something but doesn't tell anyone or go straight to the police, instead they drop hints, say they have to think about it, go home for the night and immediately get murdered.
Even when done well, it's annoying - just tell the cops! - and often it's not done well. Needless obfuscation.
Steven Brust's novels come up in this thread almost too often, but I once more feel the need to mention them. One of his latest, "Iorich", involves a version of this that actually mostly makes sense.
Our protagonist Vlad, on the run from the elf mafia, returns to the capital because he hears that the Empress has arrested one of his friends for practicing "Elder sorcery". Which is illegal and dangerous, but his friend is a high noble and everyone knew she did it and turned a blind eye, so something weird is going on, and it can't be so straightforward as merely distracting public attention from the military committing a few minor atrocities while putting down a small rebellion in a far corner of the empire. So Vlad shows up, and finds that no one is talking to one another. The imprisoned friend is pissed off and on a high horse of honor and refuses to lift a finger in her own defense, the Empress can't actually talk with her off the record, and all their mutual friends are getting quietly and intensely drunk because they can't find a way to resolve their duty as a friend with their duty to the Empire. Vlad is the only one who can fix this, because he's the only one with the combination of friendships with high nobility, disregard of what they all consider "honor", disregard for the Empire itself, and knowledge of the legal system (from the other side, from his time in the elf mafia).
Which is exactly what the conspiracy was counting on.
What, get the shephards to stop being stubborn and distrustful? It doesn't help that they are getting played like fiddles by everyone around them.
More like, get them to stop assuming they know what's going on in their friends' heads, and talk to each other. Forget anyone who isn't from Two Rivers.
Sometimes I've wondered what the story would be like if I only read one character's thread at a time. Would everyone else's actions seem inexplicable, simply because there's so much going on that I wouldn't know about?
That's the main reason I gave up on that series. Mid-way through (I think, don't quote me on this) volume seven (it might have been six or eight) the three main characters were all having prophetic dreams/visions/foreshadowing. Did any of them TALK to each other about that, and so avoid ten more books worth of difficulties? Of course not!
Even though they were meant to be best friends and kids from the same small village all thrust into this wide world of wars and magic and Big Bads, they didn't *talk* to each other about "guys, something weird has been happening to me recently" "wow, me too!"
At that point, it was obvious this was just to set up Plot Difficulties that would otherwise not happen, and there was no *reason* for them not to be confiding in each other at that point; indeed, that would have been the *natural* thing to do - who else can they trust or talk to about this? That's when I thumped the book down and went "No, forget it, this level of stupid is not sustainable".
They do a much better job at coming together in the end despite their conflicts than the people in the Game of Thrones TV show do in the face of the Night King's invasion. It actually turns out to be the "good guys" that start the Last Battle by raising a huge army to *invade the Blight*, not the massive invasion *from* the Blight that most people had expected - and once the fighting starts, pretty much every single human nation ends up helping out, with logistics greatly aided by the re-discovery of magic teleportation. (The one nation that actually fights on the side of the Dark One is the one nation that's sometimes mentioned but no viewpoint character has ever interacted with - every attempt by the Forsaken to acquire political power ended up being thwarted by the heroes except that one, because it was on the other side of the world and, unlike the Seanchan, never gave the heroes a reason to care about it.)
That's nice to hear!
Even before the cell phone, thriller/suspense plots often used tropes about the phone connections being cut or otherwise subverted ("the call is coming from inside the house!").
Having used a setting where communication and transport is hard, the ability to communicate across long distances or travel more quickly becomes a significant power, and it's easy for authors to forget how powerful that is. It's why we joke about Gandalf just flying the ring to Mt. Doom on a giant eagle (yes, I know there are reasons this wouldn't work in universe).
Steven Brust's Dragaera series (begun in 1983, latest volume came out last week) is interesting in that most people the protagonist deals with can do that sort of thing by magic, not to mention teleportation and raising the dead-- but with enough complications that it's never a get out of plot free card.
The psychic communication in the book was in most ways better than 1983 phones. (And the fact that it could be used to instantly check the time kind of prefigures one of the unexpected side benefits of cell phones.) But while it still offers a few advantages, modern phones have mostly passed it.
Ooooh, thanks, I forgot that "Tsalmoth" was coming out! Stupid memory, I got it mixed up with a favorite restaurant that's re-opening on the 15th. Time to wander through some local bookstores to find it. :-)
Glad to help! Also just a heads up (in case you hadn't heard) that "Lyorn" is due out April 9 next year.
Thanks! And, since you also seem to be a fan, can I ask - did you notice something unusual about the writing style of Iorich? I thought something was "off" the first time I read it, but on my recent re-read of everything, it jumped out, and I think it makes sense as an intentional device. But I haven't heard anyone talk about it online. I was going to post a comment over on dreamcafe to see if anyone else had noticed, but I got distracted and forgot (like I forgot about "Tsalmoth").
I don't remember noticing. But it's been a few years, so I may have forgotten. What was unusual about it?
When "Vallista" (I think) came out, I did a reverse publication order reread of the series. One thing that popped out is that each book (or at least most of them) includes subtle bits that turn out in retrospect to foreshadow the next one. (Unfortunately specifics have faded, but it was interesting to note.)
I also ran across a note that Brust has begun writing "The Final Contract". His plan is to write a draft, use that to inform "Chreotha", and then revise TFC after finishing "Chreotha".
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jhereg/comments/zenq23/brust_begins_the_last_contract/
Yeah, once you hit the late 1990s, you have a lot of stories with dead phone batteries and places with no cell signal. On the other hand, technology - real or imagined - also gives writers new ways to screw with people. The Ghostface killer in the original "Scream" cloned someone's cell phone as part of a plan to frame him for the murders, and "Alien" solved the "why don't the characters just leave the haunted house" problem by putting the heroes and monster on a spaceship. There's even a new version of "the bad guys cut the phone lines and now we can't call for help" - instead of cutting the lines, they have a cell phone jammer.
Fun fact: Tolkein was asked to help identify a cursed Roman ring that was found in England, which probably inspired the trope of magical artifacts from the ancient progenitor civilization.
I've read only a few fantasy books/stories and don't have strong opinions about Scott's piece. But I do like it. I see it basically as an attempt to define the genre by outlining the contours.
He does seem to offer criticisms. E.g., his "do better!" admonition and his reference to the "sadder corners of the internet" where being in a fantasy world is a goal/dream. But it seems to me that all genres have points to criticize.
I guess my question, either for Scott or for those who know fantasy more than I do, is this: Is fantasy uniquely bad (or challenged, or criticizable) or are the weaknesses of the genre of the same order as the weaknesses of other genres?
Nice, reminds me a lot of The Last Psychiatrist's old posts about the common tropes in books and films. I remember that Alone used a lot harsher words about the phenomenon of people wanting to be the Ordinary Teenager With a Heart of Gold. Or maybe it was the Neo fantasy, out of The Matrix? Neo-type story would be: you, a boring programmer doing nothing with your life discovers some forbidden knowledge and all of a sudden you realize that you have been The One (i.e. awesome, not boring) all along. This seems to match the ordinary person saving the world factor of common fantasy.
Look, fantasy should probably be compared to its most closely-similar genre: romance. That's another genre where the specific tropes have been refined over time precisely for that familiarity, because familiarity is vital to fantasy--be it sword-and-sorcery fantasy or romantic fantasy. So we shouldn't be surprised that there are elves and dwarves rather than completely wild races in most fantasies; people who really get into a genre, and who have shelves and shelves of it, are specifically looking to see the same beats and same ideas.
At the same time--and we see this in romance too--it can be fertile ground for play, because not every genre reader is looking for that repetition, and so you can have something like Game of Thrones or Discworld.
As such, I think it's correct to combine stories 2 and 3--to say, "Genre readers like the familiar, but why has _this_ become the familiar?"
So, some sort of female chest covering is going to get ripped, but we here in the English-speaking early 21st century have settled on bodices, so we see lots of bodices getting ripped, because that's what the genre calls for? I can buy that.
Muahahahaha exactly
Why indeed.
When I was a kid, there was a widely recognised cohort of supernatural races who were about as real as the christian god. They included (but were not confined to) fairies, pixies, brownies, dwarves and giants, and elves.
I've listed them in approximately descending order of benevolence. They were part of pre-existing and reasonably long-standing folk beliefs.
These days I'm still vaguely bemused that some of them have become famous - elves (fantasy) and fairies (disney) but others, like pixies and brownies, have disappeared entirely.
I think my childhood self wants to call it some kind of cultural appropriation!
Once upon a time in the forgotten past, there was a second kind of fantasy story-- the picaresque wanderer story-- Conan, and Fafryd and the Grey Mouser are notable examples, with Alyx showing up late.
It lost out to LOTR, possibly because people preferred saving the world to just wandering around having adventures.
Seannan McGuire's October Daye stories are a variant. October Daye is a lot tougher than most people, and probably smarter (the stories are mysteries as well as fantasy), but I suppose she has enough problems that it's possible to imagine being her.
Instead of a rather open world, the stories about about navigating complex family relationships and fae law. The races are pretty conventional, though worked out in more detail than in most fantasy.
The episodic TV era kept the picaresque adventurer wandering the Earth (or wherever) and getting involved in local troubles in various genres: Route 66, the Fugitive, Kung Fu, Logan's Run, The Incredible Hulk, etc. The Witcher and Poker Face revive the idea, albeit with an added throughline because the fashion has turned away from the purely episodic.
(Even Star Trek Strange New Worlds, which is consciously a throwback to episodic storytelling, has continuing character arcs in a way that TOS didn't.)
There are other models for fantasy from the 20th century (Conan and his subversion Elric, Zelazny’s Amber, Vance, etc.). But they’re not widely read even by genre fans anymore. I think it’s right that these aren’t psychologically compelling.
It occurs to me that, phrased this way, the average borderline aspie had their potential fantasy moment in real life on the early-2000s internet. It's not a perfect match, but the parallels are there even if you don't squint too hard:
- the world is open to change and being threatened by the old, evil forces of religion and overly restrictive copyright regimes (IIRC, then embodied by the still tyranically powerful music industry rather than the YouTUBE algorithm that sometimes plays the same role today)
- in order to stop them, you don't need to be particularly brilliant or agentic, you just need to be able to run a web server and/or install linux on things and/or do some light programming (I did mention borderline aspie)
- the technologies you're binding this way were mostly created by the ancients of 1960s MIT, who are still active in the world, but have moved on from the domain of making technological progress to various teaching/community leader roles or exited the field entirely
- confronting evil and triumphing meant knocking down the arguments of the enemy in a public and coordinated fashion, while maintaining your freedom to share music/pirated videogames with your friends, or possibly making a webcomic/blog so widely read that your place in the culture is cemented for all time
Squinting a bit harder, how close are John von Neumann/Jay McCarthy/Ken Thompson to Celebrimbor? How close were Richard Stallman/Cory Doctorow to Gandalf? How close were Holkins/Krahulik to Frodo/Bilbo? How many parallels are there between Bernie Cosell/jwz and Tom Bombadil?
Also, if we see the parallels, what can we learn about the aftermath of their adventures, given that we can see the way they played out in real life without something freezing the world in place with a well-placed "The End".
There’s definitely something about the mid 2000s internet that appealed to a lot of nerdy people but I think this is applying the US model and domain knowledge to a lot of people who didn’t live in the US and didn’t have these things in mind.
As someone who's never lived in the US, I reject this criticism. Did you want to specify what you mean by "the US model and domain knowledge"?
Fair. I was observing that the early 2000s Dawkins / Napster preoccupation with religion and copyright and breaking the chains of the past seems to me to have been a mostly US phenomenon.
Nice parallel!
Also, wizards with beards: checks out.
I hadn't even thought of the beard angle, but good point. Most of the ancients had them :p
Elves and Dwarves are “the diversity found within the everyman’s local, virtuous nation.”
Just as long-lost-kingship is a way to convey authority and status in a mythical rather than material way, Demi-humans are used as rapid shorthand for the full range of healthy diversity within a culture. Masculine/feminine, labor/capital, jocks/nerds, peasantry/aristocracy, urban/rural, etc. The key thing to notice is that fantasy stories will tend to involve one of each, as a kind of dyad. So having oaths of service (or just friendship) from both races symbolically creates the ‘grand alliance’ where society unifies behind a figure that transcends internal divisions. At the same time, the details of the way you characterize each race can be used to present the protagonist Everyman as ann intermediate figure along specific axes, demonstrating the golden virtues of moderation.
The reason why dwarves and eves in particular are so ‘sticky’ in fantasy isn’t because they stand in for any one particular role very well, but because they stand in serviceably well for so *many* binaries that crop up in society. They can collapse an entire complex society in to a mythic reference frame with remarkable economy, just two characters. People can and do increase the roster of demihumans beyond this, depending on the needs of the story or the medium, but those two are the Allen wrench and screwdriver of fantasy construction, you can almost always use them as-is.
+1 to the above. I think these categories stick around because they are shorthand for certain concepts and tropes that our minds find interesting and see in real life. TV tropes has a page on this dwarf/elf combo and others I am sure: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ElvesVersusDwarves
This reminds me that a great exception to many of the tropes is the Daughter of Empire series by Janny Wurts and Raymond Feist. There are insect warriors and whatnot in a Japanese feudal setting, but more importantly it is very much a competence fantasy where the main character outwits her enemies, strikes good alliances, and grows the economy of her region.
Anyone have recommendations for other good competency- or agency-based fantasy series?
Walter Jon Williams’ Quillifer and Patrick Rothfuss’ Kvothe are both omnicompetent characters with series built around them; of the two Quillifer is the more plausible.
Ascendence of a Bookworm is about an extreme bibliophile reincarnated as a peasant into a medieval world with few, very expensive books and so invents paper plus the movable printing press. It starts out fairly low competence and small, but I'd say around volume 4 part 2 is when this starts up.
The main character does bumble a fair bit, but the machinations of the more competent people around her are a joy to watch.
A second enthusiastic recommendation for this particular series.
One of the many things I enjoy about this particular series is the very gradual world-building. There's a lot to the world, but the scope of the story starts very small.
There's _The Thirteenth Child_ and it's sequels by Patricia Wrede. The viewpoint character is very competent though not omnicompetent. She's much observant and steady-minded than most people.
>The one thing I still don’t understand is why everyone has the same races. Why elves, dwarves, goblins, and sometimes drow? Why not sentient dogs, or dolphins, or bee-people living in hive-cities, or those weird people with ten arms and one eye who the medievals sometimes reported seeing in the Orient, or one-inch tall people whose cities are the size of football fields, or sentient wasps that you can hire to sting your enemies? If most of the fantasy universe is a machine for producing ordinary-person-saves-the-world stories, that explains the Chesterton Fence well enough to justify knocking down the parts that don’t contribute. Do better!
So, there's a writer I follow, who does work in different media under different pen names, but one of her larger scale works is an epic fantasy series called The Brightest Shadow which she does under the name of Sarah Lin. On the scale of more vs. less different from the archetypical standard fantasy, it's definitely towards the more-different end. And it's quite interesting and worth checking out in my opinion. But it also has a distinct weakness relative to Sarah Lin's other work. The setting is unfamiliar enough that the reader has to spend a lot of time learning stuff about it- stuff which is actually relevant to their ability to follow the plot, rather than the author just chucking it all at the reader so they can appreciate what a cool new setting the author has come up with. This comes with a number of downsides (the most obvious is that it makes it more difficult for the author to handle the pacing,) but one of the biggest I've come to realize is that *it's a lot harder for the story to be funny*.
Sarah Lin can be a very funny writer. She's proven herself capable of weaving humor even into works whose overarching tone is pretty grim. But The Brightest Shadow as a book series is rarely funny, because there aren't many opportunities where the audience is sufficiently familiar with what they're dealing with for the author to amuse them by subverting their expectations. It's easy to be funny in Discworld, *because* it takes the audience's familiarity with standard fantasy tropes for granted, and so it has countless ways to riff on those expectations. "Since you're expecting A, wouldn't it be funny if A turned out to B?" The first book of the TBS series has one particularly funny bit which stands out in my memory, around midway through the book, which plays with a trope that's familiar across fantasy and a few other genres of fiction. And it gives a feeling sort of like you've been floating around adrift, and the series has to get solid ground under it to pull off something as complicated as a joke.
Even straightforward character-based humor can be difficult to pull off in a setting that's too unfamiliar. It's hard to tell jokes which make sense to someone with a completely different cultural context, different assumptions and stereotypes and stuff. This article about an anthropologist trying to convey the story of Hamlet to people in an African tribal village gives a sense for how hard it is to follow along with the beats of a story when you don't have one-to-one analogues for all the cultural assumptions built into it.
https://www.naturalhistorymag.com/picks-from-the-past/12476/shakespeare-in-the-bush
I think that fantasy which is *too* unfamiliar kind of veers towards the character of sci fi, in the sense that so much of the narrative process is built around acclimating the audience to the unfamiliar that there's not much room left to use it as a framework for familiar human drives and dynamics. Human culture can be *really* flexible, and even the real world has seen societies with very different assumptions about things like how people associate with each other, why people engage in relationships, what a person ought to aspire to to live a good life, what kind of endeavor might contribute to that, etc. Take away too much of the audience's familiar grounding, and suddenly it's difficult to write something as straightforward as two characters establishing a rapport and becoming friends, because their interactions become a load-bearing mechanism for rebuilding the audience's assumptions about society.
I agree, this can be contrasted with her other work written under a different pen name, an epic porn JRPG that is a subversion of porn JRPG tropes, which are a superset of fantasy JRPG tropes. The Last Sovereign can be ridiculously funny when it wants to, exactly because the setting is so familiar that you can pull off the "audience expects A, then B happens, because of course it would" trick.
Homer should be showing up here. It seems classical stories were basically Homer fanfic for hundreds of years. Aren't special blood heroes just demigods? Aren't powerful ancient weapons just Achilles' armor? Aren't superhero action sequences just an aristeia?
The big innovation in this account is that instead of quirky gods being in frame, the fates are often more mechanistic or ancient and so out of frame. ("Bitten by a radioactive spider" instead of "born of an Olympian rape")
But if you view this as an interesting twist but the roots are thousands of years old, it is maybe more liberating. It may make sense that storytellers have tapped most of the fruitful veins over tens of thousands of years. But also: just go pick a different thing from Ovid to transpose and it may feel more original than much of this genre.
The dividing line to me between Fantasy and other fiction has been that the cosmology is anthropic and there is some clear source of supreme Authority, ie you know a thing is good because the Authority said it was good. Should also add this isn’t a simple “The Authority always says what is good and true” but in the Fantasy setting “what is good and true is good and true because it was said by the Authority.”
I think the becoming all powerful/wish fulfillment piece comes below that. It’s resonating because you can side step the whole problem of staying awake all night thinking “is that the right thing? Am I a good person?”
Like in Unsong there was a God somewhere deciding which universe got to have their seed implemented, right? That was the Authority. It existed above everyone and everything else, the flame imperishable or whatever you want to call it. Everyone else didn’t know what exactly it wanted or why but therein was the drama.
On the fictional race thing, dwarves I don’t get at all how they have survived the current age. Politician correctness or wokeness or what have you. We have actual humans who are dwarves and are not magical blacksmiths.
"On the fictional race thing, dwarves I don’t get at all how they have survived the current age. Politician correctness or wokeness or what have you. We have actual humans who are dwarves and are not magical blacksmiths."
Possibly because there is an existing tradition of dwarfs in folktales and fairy stories? People know when you talk about dwarves in a fantasy story, you mean the Snow White sort of dwarves, not the short people sort:
"I am under the difficulty of finding English names for mythological creatures with other names, since people would not 'take' a string of Elvish names, and I would rather they took my legendary creatures even with the false associations of the 'translation' than not at all.
Even the dwarfs are not really Germanic 'dwarfs' (Zwerge, dweorgas, dvergar), and I call them 'dwarves' to mark that. They are not naturally evil, not necessarily hostile, and not a kind of maggot-folk bred in stone; but a variety of incarnate rational creature."
Without grappling with too many specifics, I automatically just pattern match this all to the idea that You Get About Five Words (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4ZvJab25tDebB8FGE/you-get-about-five-words). Tolkien chose some obscure references like the Kalevala as part of the basis for Middle Earth and built his own languages, but most readers of Fantasy never get through most of the more esoteric Tolkien canon, and in any case already know what fae and kings and wizards and dragons and monsters and gods and spirits "are." And we already understood the idea of a mythic past and fall from grace (the Greeks had the Age of Heroes and then early Renaissance Europe had the Greeks and Romans and Christianity has Eden, etc,).
As for Frodo vs Aragorn fantasies, we conveniently gloss over the fact that in addition to being born to be king, Aragorn is over 80 years old and was raised by millennia-old Elrond to be incredibly knowledgeable and skilled and talented, so he can do things far beyond a normal human. We *also* gloss over the fact that Gandolf mostly acts like a human-scale wise-but-flawed old man and not at all like a realistic representation of a five thousand year old demigod who entered the world from outside time itself and saw the rise and fall of countless civilizations in preparation for his quest to help a fallen world defeat the greatest remaining embodiment of evil. We even ignore that Eru told all the demigods, including Sauron and Gandolf and Saruman, that anything they did to thwart or deviate from his will would just end up working out anyway, or that he directly intervened in Numenor and in sending in the Wizards to get things back on course, or that all the Ainur know full well that In the Beginning Was the Music, and the Music Was With Eru. These other characters, if we pay attention at all, are deliberately making themselves look more relatable than they are, in order to not be the central figures of the story. Gandalf and Aragorn can't complete the quest in part because Sauron knows to pay attention to the Important People with Divine Spirits or Elven/Numenorean Blood but conveniently forgets that Pride Cometh Before the Fall. It's tropes all the way up and all the way down because otherwise the reader would need to slog through *another* few hundred multi-chapter elven poems and Tom Bombadil-lic side stories to have any understanding of what's going on, and then no one would read it, and most likely no one could write it either.
"We *also* gloss over the fact that Gandolf mostly acts like a human-scale wise-but-flawed old man and not at all like a realistic representation of a five thousand year old demigod who entered the world from outside time itself and saw the rise and fall of countless civilizations in preparation for his quest to help a fallen world defeat the greatest remaining embodiment of evil."
You're correct that we have to go into the lore to find out why this is, but there is a reason for it. Again, quoting the Letters:
"But G. is not, of course, a human being (Man or Hobbit). There are naturally no precise modern terms to say what he was. I wd. venture to say that he was an incarnate 'angel'– strictly an ἄγγελος: that is, with the other Istari, wizards, 'those who know', an emissary from the Lords of the West, sent to Middle-earth, as the great crisis of Sauron loomed on the horizon. By 'incarnate' I mean they were embodied in physical bodies capable of pain, and weariness, and of afflicting the spirit with physical fear, and of being 'killed', though supported by the angelic spirit they might endure long, and only show slowly the wearing of care and labour.
Why they should take such a form is bound up with the 'mythology' of the 'angelic' Powers of the world of this fable. At this point in the fabulous history the purpose was precisely to limit and hinder their exhibition of 'power' on the physical plane, and so that they should do what they were primarily sent for: train, advise, instruct, arouse the hearts and minds of those threatened by Sauron to a resistance with their own strengths; and not just to do the job for them. They thus appeared as 'old' sage figures. But in this 'mythology' all the 'angelic' powers concerned with this world were capable of many degrees of error and failing between the absolute Satanic rebellion and evil of Morgoth and his satellite Sauron, and the fainéance of some of the other higher powers or 'gods'. The 'wizards' were not exempt, indeed being incarnate were more likely to stray, or err. Gandalf alone fully passes the tests, on a moral plane anyway (he makes mistakes of judgement). For in his condition it was for him a sacrifice to perish on the Bridge in defence of his companions, less perhaps than for a mortal Man or Hobbit, since he had a far greater inner power than they; but also more, since it was a humbling and abnegation of himself in conformity to 'the Rules': for all he could know at that moment he was the only person who could direct the resistance to Sauron successfully, and all his mission was vain."
"Gandalf is a 'created' person; though possibly a spirit that existed before in the physical world. His function as a 'wizard' is an angelos or messenger from the Valar or Rulers: to assist the rational creatures of Middle-earth to resist Sauron, a power too great for them unaided. But since in the view of this tale & mythology Power – when it dominates or seeks to dominate other wills and minds (except by the assent of their reason) – is evil, these 'wizards' were incarnated in the life-forms of Middle-earth, and so suffered the pains both of mind and body. They were also, for the same reason, thus involved in the peril of the incarnate: the possibility of 'fall', of sin, if you will. The chief form this would take with them would be impatience, leading to the desire to force others to their own good ends, and so inevitably at last to mere desire to make their own wills effective by any means. To this evil Saruman succumbed. Gandalf did not. But the situation became so much the worse by the fall of Saruman, that the 'good' were obliged to greater effort and sacrifice. Thus Gandalf faced and suffered death; and came back or was sent back, as he says, with enhanced power."
On the one hand, I absolutely see and agree with what you're getting at in this post; on the other hand, I feel like you're completely and totally off-base. Yes; power fantasies are a huge subsegment of the fantasy genre. Yes; power fantasies require those three components of competence, agency, and accessibility in order to be able to be successful.
But in my opinion that has in many ways very little to do with the ur-fantasy world and the ubiquity of certain fantastical concepts. The backbone of fantasy is mythology. Elves and Dwarves existed long before Tolkien grabbed them for the Lord of the Rings. (For that matter, so did hidden princes who knew not what of their parentage, but I think it's fair to say the ur-myth that inspired more modern stories probably succeeded because of the same psychological underpinnings that you call out for more modern stories.) Bee-people and sentient dolphins don't have the same sort of mythological background, so stories written about them come off less as 'fantastical' and more as 'weird' - which some authors, like China Mieville, cheerfully use to great effect. Same goes for magic rings, swords, etc. being so common; how many fairy tales feature magic swords?
Ancient Ruins are sort of the odd one out because they're not quite as much of mythological origin - but at the same time, they're not just there because they're a convenient source of plot elements (although that is a very common role for them to take), they're an element of the literature because for a long while, Western civilizations were very concerned by and inspired by the crumbling ruins of Roman structures that they couldn't maintain.
But that just explains why Elves and Dwarves and Treasure and Ruins are there in the first place, not why they're ubiquitous, particularly in the generic-fantasy isekai worlds. *That* you can blame on Gary Gygax. He chose Tolkien as a base for his fantasy-inspired wargame he called Dungeons and Dragons, and made telling fantasy stories something that had a set of easily accessible rules that could be used to do it. And then video games were built off of that chassis.
I submit that the modern trashy fantasy / isekai story is, at heart, a *video game* fantasy. The fact that stories which are the most power-fantasy oriented, also tend to hew most closely to the Gygaxian example of Elves/Dwarves/Treasure/Ruins, isn't because Elves have some sort of innate psychological underpinning that makes them better at manipulating power-fantasy readers' psyche; it's because there's a shared cultural language around other very power-fantasy novels, games, etc. that fans of the genre are already very familiar with and enjoy experiencing, and the particular variety of escapism they're after is one where they can escape to something similar to the *other* power-fantasies they've already enjoyed.
There are no Elves or Dwarves, and only a few magic items or ruins in that *other* most power-fantasy of genres, Superheroes, but most superhero universes also all tend to look the same because the people attracted to those universes want to fantasize about universes similar or identical to the ones that gave them happiness in the past.
There's a bunch more I could say about the thousands of fantasy novels that don't fall into either the power-fantasy tropes or the Gygaxian ur-fantasy world, and how tarring an entire genre with the same brush is unnecessarily pithy and reductive, but that's a bit beside the main point.
I think people overemphasize the mythological background of elves and dwarves. In Tolkien, and even more so in post-Tolkien fantasy, they're really just weird humans, even though they're not called that. in mythology, they're more like nature spirits or minor gods.
In Tolkien, elves and humans are both Children of Iluvatar (Creator God), so it makes sense that they are similar in many ways. Variations on the same theme.
See the quote below:
"I am under the difficulty of finding English names for mythological creatures with other names, since people would not 'take' a string of Elvish names, and I would rather they took my legendary creatures even with the false associations of the 'translation' than not at all."
"As far as I know, this extremely basic idea (someone has to invent spells, but then anyone can use them) had never been tried before;""
Isn't that kind of the mechanic in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality?
I'm not familiar enough with Rowling's work to know if the mechanic was derived from Rowling's work. I took to the fanfiction more strongly than the original text.
Of course, the Harry Potter universe is essentially post-industrial in parts of it, with some bleedover into the more fantastical side of the world (train engines and such.) I wonder if the trope of inventing or discovering magic is one which tends to apply to post-industrial magic universes?
Some of the spells in D&D are named after people, e.g. Bigby's Grasping Hand and Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion. These came about because the authors were also playing the game, and their characters invented some spells.
It's the traditional idea of witchcraft. You don't need any kind of special powers or heritage to become a witch (apart from the whole "selling your soul to the Devil" bit) and you learn spells and charms and potions and the rest of it from other witches or whoever is willing to teach you.
Less malign but still on the borderline are the fairy doctors/quack doctors/cunning men/wise women who know cures and can do charms and spells. Maybe they learned these from the fairies, but they are ordinary humans. See Biddy Early and her magic bottle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biddy_Early
https://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/people/biddy.htm
"Of all the tales of Biddy’s magical powers none were so fascinating as her “Blue Bottle” with which it was said she could see the future. Her son Tom died as a young man, but being worried about how his poor widowed mother would survive now that he was dead, Tom returned from the dead, to give her this magical “Blue Bottle”. He told her: “Take this mother and it will make a living for you”, and this bottle did indeed make her a living. People from all over the country were to seek Biddy’s predictions for the future which were said to be amazingly accurate down to the last detail. It was also said that if a weary traveller was coming many miles to meet Biddy, she would see him coming in the bottle and meet him half way.
Biddy was visited also, for her great healing potions which it was said healed most ailments. Biddy had a well at the side of her house, the water from which possessed the most magical powers, and if given with her consent could cure a person of any affliction. Animals were of enormous importance, the death of a cow or pig could mean failure to pay rent and the death of a working horse could mean destitution. In this time of no vets, Biddy was relied upon to cure the most serious of animal ailments of which it was said she could cure very effectively with a drop of water from her well, or one of her potions. Biddy, not being a selfish woman, did not make a great fortune from her powers, she only accepted a jug of poiteen or whiskey, or perhaps some food for her services but never money. It was said that never was a tired traveller turned from her door and many a passer-by was given a jug and a seat in front of her warm fire.
Another great power which Biddy is accredited with her ability to talk to and cure the wrath of the Fairies. People used to come to her who had been bewitched by the “little people”. One man had his entire herd of cattle cursed by the fairies and they all became violently ill. On the advice of one of his friends he went to see Biddy. After looking in to her bottle, she saw the problem. He had planted a whitethorn bush along a fairy path in his field. She instructed him to go home and remove the bush. As soon as he had done this, his entire herd immediately returned to full health."
What does go along with the special bloodline thing is such things as "seventh son of a seventh son" or cures being hereditary in certain families who knew the particular charm to cure such-and-such an illness, often involving smearing their blood on the affected part (e.g. children of first cousins were supposed to have such curative blood).
This is just from Irish superstition and folklore, I'm sure other cultures have the same kind of thing.
HPMOR uses pretty much exactly the generic fantasy rules outlined above: magic mostly comes from the Ancients, and dwindles over time (because magic books become unintelligible after the author dies and magical secrets are constantly lost); so people who stumble upon a secret cache of ancient magic (like the Chamber of Secrets) or ancient artefact (like the Elder Wand) can become very powerful. Occasionally, special people like our hero will recieve a new spell or new version of a spell through some mystical flash of insight, which seems to have something to do with their mental state.
The original Harry Potter stories were much closer to UNSONG's Names of God, with progress over time as new spells were discovered and spread. IIRC the old blog post where Scott first outlined the idea explicitly credited Harry Potter as one of the inspirations. There are some differences though; spells in Harry Potter require much more practice and skill, which mostly determine "power levels", whereas in UNSONG you mostly need secret Names to have any edge. Also, of course, magic in Harry Potter is limited to people with secret special bloodlines whereas in UNSONG literally *anyone* can use it and it transforms the whole world.
Interestingly, I just read a book called "7 Figure Fiction" by a romance novel author. Her underlying advice for writing is: Everything should be a self insert fantasy. Everything. Every single scene should have one or more places where the reader inserts themselves and enjoys it. How do you do this? She gives some common universal fantasies:
* Having a rich guy hyperfixate on you
* Being pulled from your boring life to one of adventure
* Falling in love at first sight
* Starting out kind of drab and then looking super hot
* Fixing a man via sex
* A guy who is mean to everyone but you
She emphasizes that while many of these things are red flags in real life, they have some aspect that makes the reader feel special / cool when they imagine them.
The book struck me as incredibly myopic in the scope of what she felt were "universal" fantasies, and also completely changed how I looked at fiction. I think what you've done is start to pick at the universal fantasies in fantasy novels here.
What's more interesting to me is analyzing the ones that appeal to me. "Hot guy picks me out of a crowd to stalk" does nothing for me. But things like HPMOR and Unsong have tons. Unsong in particular hits these notes: You have your out of nowhere mundane protagonist who is super gifted but down on his luck pulled out of his humdrum life. Then you have the Comet King, who I think is probably my personal self insert focus in an aspirational sense. For HPMOR, at least once a week I spend a few minutes in the car imagining I'm Harry doing clever things.
For a brief moment I had a crises about whether all writing just served the self insert point, but I don't think that's true. Some of the books I really like focus on puzzle solving within the lore, or communicate messages or ideas I found useful in real life. Unsong was an enjoyable read and also reading about the Comet King actually changed my behavior in a very real way. But "7 Figure Fiction" really brought this fantasy insert thing to the fore.
How did reading about the Comet King change your behavior?
It was nothing profound, I think just nudged me towards being a little bit more moral in a way that has stuck with me since.
Perhaps it was nomative determinism, Max Moral-ski? :-)
You realize that this post suggests you haven't read a lot of fantasy. There are so many counter-examples to your Ur-Fantasy-World that it's hard to even know where to start.
Martha Wells, Raksura novels, and Wheel of the Infinite, and the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy
Andrea K Host, Pyramids of London
Susannah Clarke, Pirenasi
CJ Cherryh, Rider at the Gate
China Mieville, Railsea
NK Jemisin, The Shadowed Sun / The Killing Moon
I could list a hundred more without effort, but how long can a list be before everyone gets bored reading it? But it's not like unusual fantasy worlds that are nothing like Tolkien's LotR world are remotely rare. Hell, I've written a totally different fantasy world myself. Honestly, there are hundreds of excellent books that do this. Thousands.
Yeah. I initially assumed it was Scott mildly trolling us but it’s possible he really hasn’t read all that widely in the genre. There may be a divide between fantasy-liking codexers and fantasy-disliking codexers despite the fact we’re largely ad idem on other things.
Yes, I thought it had to be tongue-in-cheek, but if so the assumed view of fantasy was so consistent through the post that I finally bought it. So if Scott was trolling, I fell for it!
My ordinary world is so strongly fantasy-liking that I guess I also have a hard time believing there's a significant fantasy-disliking population. But if they've never read anything but Sword of Shannara knock-offs, that sure explains the dislike!
FWIW, though I read LOTR half a century ago, I'm much more drawn to the science fiction end of the spectrum, particularly to the world building/thought experiment end, than to the fantasy end.
I'm sorry to burst your fiction bubble, but it's probable that the majority of people are fantasy-disliking.
I mean, a lot of people do not read much to begin with, and therefore are almost completely unfamiliar with it - although GoT changed this a fair bit. (The fantasy-dislikers dislike it across all mediums and don't watch it much either, but GoT was a widespread success and coaxed some of them to make an exception.)
Then of those who do read, many - maybe the majority - find fantasy unappealing.
While it's vastly more popular than it was thirty years ago, it is still nothing even close to being universally admired.
It's plausible that most people aren't interested in fantasy *books*, but fantasy in other media seems to be quite popular.
I think Scott is picking up on an extremely popular set of defaults rather than the whole genre. What you've listed are mostly stories that are liked but not extremely popular.
I tried Pirenasi but couldn't get into it, even though I liked (but not loved) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. I'm familiar with Mieville's SF, and he has a style of writing where I appreciate his prose and creativity, but dislike his political philosophy and the worlds he creates. You could not pay me to read N.K. Jemisin. I am aware of Cherryh and Wells, and though others have raved about them, there is nothing to attract my wandering will o' the wisp interest there.
And these seem to be more in the SF than the Fantasy range, which is what we are discussing right now.
I may not get what you mean by "these," but if you mean that I mentioned books in the realm of SF, no. Every book I mentioned is definitely and clearly fantasy. Nor does anything depend on personal taste. The comment regarded worlds that have nothing in common with Tolkien. There you go, half a dozen out of literally thousands of examples.
"Railsea is set on a dystopian world whose lands are covered by endless interconnecting tracks of rails, known as the "railsea". The earth is colonised by ravenous giant naked mole-rats and other carnivorous giant forms of familiar animals, such as earwigs and antlions as well as stranger non-identifiable creatures that reside in the polluted sky. These threats mean that humanity are confined to 'islands' of harder rock through which the animals cannot burrow and the spaces between can only be safely traversed by use of trains."
Yeah- that sounds more along the "science fantasy" lines to me than "fantasy" proper.
It's possibly more surrealist than either fantasy or science fiction, though I don't have a definition for the difference. I thought it was ridiculous fun, but mileage obviously varies.
What's your opposition to NK Jemisin? I thought The Broken Earth trilogy was some of the best SF I've ever read and certainly the most creative world building I've ever encountered.
Are you just on some culture war shit? I gather there was some culture war shit around NK Jemisin a while back but you couldn't pay me to pay attention to that stuff.
Tell me what this "culture war shit" was about, then? If you know of it enough to mention it, then develop what you think I think.
No, it's the taste of the prose she wrote. It just doesn't appeal to me. And I'm a bit tired of the "I am Woman, Hear Me Roar" stuff - Women! So oppressed! (Oppressed!) So vital and life-bearing! (Bearing!) - that I don't want one novel, much less a series' worth, of it.
I'm female myself, but I know women are only human. Yeah, yeah, the Patriarchy and the rest of it, and there was genuine wrong done, but that's not the novel angle for a story today that it might have been in the 70s.
And the "culture war shit" seems to be the selling angle the publicity blurb for her books goes by, and really I'm just tired of it all. I want a story, not a sermon. So imagine why this description does *not* grab me to go get this book:
https://nkjemisin.com/series/the-great-cities/
"A new candidate for mayor wielding the populist rhetoric of gentrification, xenophobia, and “law and order” may have what it takes to change the very nature of New York itself and take it down from the inside. In order to defeat him, and the Enemy who holds his purse strings, the avatars will have to join together with the other Great Cities of the world in order to bring her down for good and protect their world from complete destruction."
Whoop-de-doo. Or I could get my partisan politics from the news, and get something decent to read in a story. I'm not picking on Jemisin here alone, let me make it clear; Ace Atkins was continuing the late Robert Parker's "Spenser" series of detective novels, and the most recent one was almost a roman à clef. The lead character was a stand-in for AOC and the plot went along predictable lines (I was hoping he'd do a twist where the enemy was on the inside and it was one of her campaign, but no, it was the very clearly delineated from the start baddies all along):
"In the latest thriller featuring the legendary Boston PI, Spenser and his young protégé Mattie Sullivan take on billionaire money manager running a network of underaged girls for his rich and powerful clients.
Carolina Garcia-Ramirez is a rising star in national politics, taking on the establishment with her progressive agenda. Tough, outspoken, and driven, the young congresswoman has ignited a new conversation in Boston about race, poverty, health care, and the environment. Now facing her second campaign, she finds herself not only fighting a tight primary with an old guard challenger but also contending with numerous death threats coming from hundreds of suspects.
When her chief of staff reaches out to Spenser for security and help finding the culprits of what he believes to be the most credible threats, Garcia-Ramirez is less than thrilled. Since her first grassroots run, she’s used to the antipathy and intimidation women of color often face when seeking power. To her, it’s all noise. But it turns out an FBI agent disagrees, warning Spenser that Garcia-Ramirez might be in real danger this time.
It doesn’t take long for Spenser to cross paths with an extremist group called The Minutemen, led by a wealthy Harvard grad named Bishop Graves. Although Graves is a social media sensation, pushing an agenda of white supremacy and toxic masculinity, he denies he’s behind the attacks. As the primary nears and threats become a deadly plot, it’s up to Spenser, Hawk, and a surprise trusted ally to ensure the congresswoman is safe. This is Spenser doing what he does best, living by a personal code and moral compass that can’t ever be broken."
To make it clear, neither would I bother my time with a series where the sides were swapped and all the good guys were the white Christians and the bad guys were the women of colour etc. As I said, when I want a sermon, I'll go to church.
Both of those blurbs sound awful. If that's the kind of stuff Jemisin is doing now, that's incredibly disappointing and feels like a sellout.
I read Broken Earth without knowing anything about her, and I found out after I read it that there had been a backlash to her clean sweep of Hugos for the trilogy, which I thought was absurd because to me they were clearly excellent, creative books. She was obviously a lefty but I didn't think the books were any preachier than your average SF, although I read them right after my Meiville kick so perhaps my tolerance for preachiness was elevated at the time. I do love Meiville though, Perdido Street Station and it's sequels are some of my favorites.
I suppose the books had a fairly emotional and urgent prose style which I could see not being everyone's cup of tea, but I found it a really interesting departure from the dry and dispassionate default for the genre. Everything isn't for everyone, of course.
As for Cherryh, I think you will enjoy the *Penric and Desdemona* series. It consists of short novellas (novellae ?) that are punchy, to the point, and oddly touching.
Penny Arcade sums up my feelings on Mieville quite nicely.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/05/14/the-verge
Not quite my feelings, I admit he writes well, but the old-school Marxist-Leninist stuff is not my cup of tea. And he takes a perverse delight in the muddy and the filthy, sometimes, beyond "look at what the honest working-class have been reduced to by the elite rich bastards" socialism.
A kind of "look, look! *this* is what reality is! stop all your stupid dreams of shining whatever, sickness, misery, and corruption are the *truth*!" extreme of the Realist novelist. A sort of Hardy's Nihilism, as described by Chesterton, talking about the immediate post-Victorian era:
"Hardy became a sort of village atheist brooding and blaspheming over the village idiot. ...Nature is always coming in to save Meredith's women; Nature is always coming in to betray and ruin Hardy's. It has been said that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent Him. But it is not often, as in Mr. Hardy's case, that it is necessary to invent Him in order to prove how unnecessary (and undesirable) He is. But Mr. Hardy is anthropomorphic out of sheer atheism. He personifies the universe in order to give it a piece of his mind. But the fight is unequal for the old philosophical reason: that the universe had already given Mr. Hardy a piece of its mind to fight with. One curious result of this divergence in the two types of sceptic is this: that when these two brilliant novelists break down or blow up or otherwise lose for a moment their artistic self-command, they are both equally wild, but wild in opposite directions. Meredith shows an extravagance in comedy which, if it were not so complicated, every one would call broad farce. But Mr. Hardy has the honour of inventing a new sort of game, which may be called the extravagance of depression. The placing of the weak lover and his new love in such a place that they actually see the black flag announcing that Tess has been hanged is utterly inexcusable in art and probability; it is a cruel practical joke. But it is a practical joke at which even its author cannot brighten up enough to laugh."
Though I haven't read Mieville recently, he may have brightened up since.
The problem with Mieville is not his message, but rather his writing style. He never uses one word where ten words would do; and those ten words better be "moldywarpe" and "disestablishmentarianism" instead of, like, "brick".
"By our own hands or none !"
I think that it is entirely appropriate to limit the analysis to the popular mass-market fantasy novels (anecdotally, I had read all of what Scott mentioned and hadn't even heard of those you listed), and perhaps it actually might not be a coincidence that the mainstream ones do hit the factors discussed in the article and the non-mainstream ones don't; that having these factors *facilitates* a fantasy novel becoming popular, and diverging from them hurts mass appeal - in which case your examples aren't counterexamples but rather even more reinforce the point of the reason behind the worldbuilding choices.
Yeah also like so many others, I also feel like I should point out that most of these specific tropes seem to have peaked in early 2000s in novels and now most of what we have are deconstructions, weird original stuff, or sexy fairies.
I think Elves and Dwarves and Orcs might just be the only species that human brains can possibly invent.
Or more precisely, the vector space of "species with notable characteristics which are interesting and affect the kind of story you can tell" is not that big, and basically anything you create is pretty close to an existing fantasy trope. Authors really do experiment in the small ways you can, but it's easier to just call your elves "elves" and give them pointy ears and call it a "nod."
Vulcans are elves. Klingons are orcs. Jawas are gnomes. Eewoks are kinda novel, but ultimately somewhere between Ents and maybe fairies? Chewbacca is a half-orc. Gungans (the Jar Jar Binks species) are just water Dwarves.
Did you forget about mermaids?
Betans are elves, Barrayarans are orcs.
They aren't exactly species, but vampires and werewolves are standard elements in fantasy.
I think you underestimate the extent to which fantasy is often about saying how someone with intellectual/unappreciated talent can be a great hero. It's not that the hero can't be talented but it has to be a talent which isn't appreciated by everyone. I mean even talented teens feel unappreciated and misunderstood.
Sure, you have Tolkien whose hero is an untalented hobit (never liked that part) but there are also quite a number of books, maybe even more (Feist's magician series stands out) where the hero is especially magically gifted.
So it's about simultaneously satisfying something like the following desiderada:
1) The hero has to have some kind of talent that isn't recognized by others (so most social talent and often physical talent is out).
2) It has to appeal to relatively young audiences since that's when we fall in love with fantasy worlds. Also young romance is more appealing.
3) It's harder to introduce a whole new world from the perspective of a character who already knows all about it.
So I don't think there is any bias against it being a skill, hell I think that plenty of fantasy novels are implicitly the story of how being smart can make you the hero. It's just that you need to combine awesome powers with a story that allows the hero to be naive enough about the world to explain it to the reader.
You get more flexibility in a standard fantasy realm but if you want something new you can't introduce it with a hero who doesn't have any of the awe or feeling of strangeness the reader will have.
You could equally well ask why do so many books occur in something very similar to the real world or one of a small number of familiar sci-fi scenarios (navy in space, cyberpunk, space tanks/mechs). There is a large cost involved in familiarizing readers with a totally new environment and if the story you want to tell can be done without that you probably avoid it.
And if you do choose that path there are multiple pressures to use a young hero (relatable to audience, everyone appreciates young love, and most importantly you can explain world from their eyes) so that limits the ability of long training to play a role in their great power.
This is the kind of content I subscribe for! Thought-provoking, perceptive, and witty.
I think there's one big aspect that Scott is missing, though. The point of fantasy, IMHO, is *not* to stoke a person's ego by making them believe, "I may be the Chosen One tasked with saving the entire world!" That veers into arrogance and hubris, which are hallmarks of the evil side, not the good. (Which, if you want to identify with the evil side when reading a fantasy story, that's your right I guess, but that's not why these stories were written.)
Instead, I think of fantasy epics like LOTR or Star Wars as a sort of magnified reflection of what goes on in a person's mind/soul. All of us have in us the capacity for good and evil, and we must choose between them. As Solzhenitsyn famously said, "The line between good and evil runs through every human heart." Fantasy epics dramatize this internal struggle. They inspire and give hope: "Even if the right thing to do feels really, really hard, you can still choose to do it, just like Frodo chose to take the Ring to Mount Doom, even though he knew it was extremely dangerous and he would most likely die in the attempt."
This kind of struggle is recognizable to every human being. In real life, it most often is not epic, but rather takes the form of tiny, mundane decisions. The point is, in real life, you can choose to do the right thing even if you are not especially gifted or brilliant - you can choose to be kind, generous, responsible, hardworking, etc.
And yes, the "humble hero discovers super-duper magic that makes them special" trope is common in fantasy, but it's not the magic that makes the hero special, it's the choices he/she makes. In terms of raw magical power, the evil is stronger than the good in these stories. Emperor Palpatine, Sauron, and Voldemort have more powerful magic than Luke Skywalker, Gandalf, and Harry Potter, respectively. It's the hero's choice to fight for what is right in the face of overwhelming odds that makes them admirable.
On the Ancient Progenitors, forget invidious, pejorative theories like "The Ancient Progenitors are just another way of giving a force multiplier." One gets much closer to what, for many of us, is a very deep and lifelong love with the issue of mystery. I've been infatuated with old, far-off, forgotten things (happy or unhappy) since as long as I can remember. The feeling is impervious to reason or questions of instrumentality. If you don't share the love, at best you'll have trouble getting it. De gustibus . . .
To be fair, "invidious" and "pejorative" are probably too strong. After all, "another way of giving a force multiplier" is pretty kindly next to the sort of Freudian, Marxist, or whatever spins that can be put on things one disapproves of aesthetically ("the pathetic, oral-infantile fixation is obvious!" etc.). But still . . . reach for a little empathy, please!
The past is numinous in a lot of ways for a lot of people and in a lot of fiction. There are the ancient powers, and also the more recent past represented by ghosts.
And European civilization had a bunch of that baked in, with the whole "fall of Rome" thing. I don't think it's surprising that a lot of stories from European-descended cultures involve ruins of fallen civilizations, lost knowledge, and stuff like that.
Yes, though they're not the only ones. Consider "The City of Brass" from 1001 Nights. And Tolkien, for one, probably cultivated his native sense for old, past things more from the Old English tradition than the Roman (especially, the lovely Old English poem "The Wanderer," and the scene in Grendel's mother's cave in "Beowulf"). Tolkien was very self-conscious about how he treated his Ancient Progenitors; the goal was to reveal just enough to create what he called "the impression of depth"--of a deep, mostly lost, epic past--without revealing too much to take away the frisson of mystery. His explicit model was the same sense of depth in time that he had gotten out of the very old northern literature.
That touches on another thing that stands out to me in Tolkien's works. There's a lack of population, given the size of the land. Yes, there are ruined cities from ancient civilizations, but there's not as much as one would think (unless coming from a more American tradition which uses English settlement of a de-populated North America as the baseline). Middle-Earth is young, and wild, and there's an active force of Evil out there that will eventually destroy any settlement that becomes overextended. In Europe, there were people pretty much everywhere, and had been for thousands of years. But much of Middle-Earth has the feeling of a place where people tried settling, long ago, and then failed, and no one's been back since.
"Therefore, MWTRKHHAHHTBRBPFSTEHHDNKHITTP is the fantasy world’s preferred method of government (though absolute sortition would also work, if any author was brave enough to try it)."
You knew this was coming 😁 One author of a fantasy novel did indeed try this - "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" by G.K. Chesterton:
"The old gentleman opened his eyes with some surprise.
"Are you, then," he said, "no longer a democracy in England?"
Barker laughed.
"The situation invites paradox," he said. "We are, in a sense, the purest democracy. We have become a despotism. Have you not noticed how continually in history democracy becomes despotism? People call it the decay of democracy. It is simply its fulfilment. Why take the trouble to number and register and enfranchise all the innumerable John Robinsons, when you can take one John Robinson with the same intellect or lack of intellect as all the rest, and have done with it? The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic. Why should we not choose out of them one as much as another. All that we want for Government is a man not criminal and insane, who can rapidly look over some petitions and sign some proclamations. To think what time was wasted in arguing about the House of Lords, Tories saying it ought to be preserved because it was clever, and Radicals saying it ought to be destroyed because it was stupid, and all the time no one saw that it was right because it was stupid, because that chance mob of ordinary men thrown there by accident of blood, were a great democratic protest against the Lower House, against the eternal insolence of the aristocracy of talents. We have established now in England, the thing towards which all systems have dimly groped, the dull popular despotism without illusions. We want one man at the head of our State, not because he is brilliant or virtuous, but because he is one man and not a chattering crowd. To avoid the possible chance of hereditary diseases or such things, we have abandoned hereditary monarchy. The King of England is chosen like a juryman upon an official rotation list. Beyond that the whole system is quietly despotic, and we have not found it raise a murmur."
"Do you really mean," asked the President, incredulously, "that you choose any ordinary man that comes to hand and make him despot — that you trust to the chance of some alphabetical list...."
"And why not?" cried Barker. "Did not half the historical nations trust to the chance of the eldest sons of eldest sons, and did not half of them get on tolerably well? To have a perfect system is impossible; to have a system is indispensable. All hereditary monarchies were a matter of luck: so are alphabetical monarchies. Can you find a deep philosophical meaning in the difference between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians? Believe me, I will undertake to find a deep philosophical meaning in the contrast between the dark tragedy of the A's, and the solid success of the B's."
"And you risk it?" asked the other. "Though the man may be a tyrant or a cynic or a criminal."
"We risk it," answered Barker, with a perfect placidity. "Suppose he is a tyrant — he is still a check on a hundred tyrants. Suppose he is a cynic, it is to his interest to govern well. Suppose he is a criminal — by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality. In short, by substituting despotism we have put a total check on one criminal and a partial check on all the rest."
...Two grave-looking men in quiet uniforms came up the hill towards them. One held a paper in his hand.
"There he is, officer," said Lambert, cheerfully; "we ain't responsible for him."
The officer looked at the capering Mr. Quin with a quiet eye.
"We have not come, gentlemen," he said, "about what I think you are alluding to. We have come from head-quarters to announce the selection of His Majesty the King. It is the rule, inherited from the old régime, that the news should be brought to the new Sovereign immediately, wherever he is; so we have followed you across Kensington Gardens."
Barker's eyes were blazing in his pale face. He was consumed with ambition throughout his life. With a certain dull magnanimity of the intellect he had really believed in the chance method of selecting despots. But this sudden suggestion, that the selection might have fallen upon him, unnerved him with pleasure.
"Which of us," he began, and the respectful official interrupted him.
"Not you, sir, I am sorry to say. If I may be permitted to say so, we know your services to the Government, and should be very thankful if it were. The choice has fallen...."
"God bless my soul!" said Lambert, jumping back two paces. "Not me. Don't say I'm autocrat of all the Russias."
"No, sir," said the officer, with a slight cough and a glance towards Auberon, who was at that moment putting his head between his legs and making a noise like a cow; "the gentleman whom we have to congratulate seems at the moment — er — er — occupied."
"Not Quin!" shrieked Barker, rushing up to him; "it can't be. Auberon, for God's sake pull yourself together. You've been made King!"
With his head still upside down between his legs, Mr. Quin answered modestly —
"I am not worthy. I cannot reasonably claim to equal the great men who have previously swayed the sceptre of Britain. Perhaps the only peculiarity that I can claim is that I am probably the first monarch that ever spoke out his soul to the people of England with his head and body in this position. This may in some sense give me, to quote a poem that I wrote in my youth —
A nobler office on the earth
Than valour, power of brain, or birth
Could give the warrior kings of old.
The intellect clarified by this posture —"
Lambert and Barker made a kind of rush at him.
"Don't you understand?" cried Lambert. "It's not a joke. They've really made you King. By gosh! they must have rum taste."
"The great Bishops of the Middle Ages," said Quin, kicking his legs in the air, as he was dragged up more or less upside down, "were in the habit of refusing the honour of election three times and then accepting it. A mere matter of detail separates me from those great men. I will accept the post three times and refuse it afterwards. Oh! I will toil for you, my faithful people! You shall have a banquet of humour."
By this time he had been landed the right way up, and the two men were still trying in vain to impress him with the gravity of the situation.
"Did you not tell me, Wilfrid Lambert," he said, "that I should be of more public value if I adopted a more popular form of humour? And when should a popular form of humour be more firmly riveted upon me than now, when I have become the darling of a whole people? Officer," he continued, addressing the startled messenger, "are there no ceremonies to celebrate my entry into the city?"
"Ceremonies," began the official, with embarrassment, "have been more or less neglected for some little time, and —"
Auberon Quin began gradually to take off his coat.
"All ceremony," he said, "consists in the reversal of the obvious. Thus men, when they wish to be priests or judges, dress up like women. Kindly help me on with this coat." And he held it out.
"But, your Majesty," said the officer, after a moment's bewilderment and manipulation, "you're putting it on with the tails in front."
"The reversal of the obvious," said the King, calmly, "is as near as we can come to ritual with our imperfect apparatus. Lead on."
The rest of that afternoon and evening was to Barker and Lambert a nightmare, which they could not properly realise or recall. The King, with his coat on the wrong way, went towards the streets that were awaiting him, and the old Kensington Palace which was the Royal residence. As he passed small groups of men, the groups turned into crowds, and gave forth sounds which seemed strange in welcoming an autocrat. Barker walked behind, his brain reeling, and, as the crowds grew thicker and thicker, the sounds became more and more unusual. And when he had reached the great market-place opposite the church, Barker knew that he had reached it, though he was roods behind, because a cry went up such as had never before greeted any of the kings of the earth."
Nice try, Scott, but I'm still pretty sure it's all because Tolkien was the only actually creative person in human history.
Scott (and my fellow commenters), if you're looking for a fantasy epic that doesn't follow some of the tropes above, I highly recommend The Dandelion Dynasty series by Ken Liu. It's like "A Game of Thrones," but set in an archipelago modeled after ancient China. There are four books; the first one is "The Grace of Kings."
The story has really fantastic worldbuilding, well-done characters, and an exciting plot. The one big weakness is that sometimes there's too much worldbuilding; the author will go on for pages describing how some aspect of the world works, instead of getting back to advancing the plot, already. And the story sags in book three, but then the author pulls it together and really sticks the landing in book four. Be warned: Ken Liu gives George R.R. Martin a run for his money in the "beloved characters die in horrible ways" department. Very highly recommended overall.
Re: Scott's comment on why all fantasy has to have elves, dwarves, and goblins/orcs? This one doesn't. Almost all protagonists are human, and Ken Liu goes out of his way to describe protagonists of many races, which is a nice touch (there are very dark- literally black - people, pale white people with red hair, and everything in between). There are gods, and they sometimes interfere in the affairs of mortals, but they are mostly minor characters. And there are fantastic animals, like sentient whales and flying, fire-breathing not-dragons.
Sounds great, but has he actually finished writing the story? I've been burned too many times.
Yes, he has. The four books form a complete story with, IMHO, a very satisfying conclusion.
I think a lot of this template can be placed at the feet of Gary Gygax and DnD. He (as the exemplar of the modern role-playing game creator) took a bucketful of influences from SF and Fantasy, but mostly Tolkien who had become the 800lb gorilla. The magic system, I am told, came from Jack Vance. Hence why the fantasy races (sorry, "species", this term has now been Politically Corrected) were all some variant of Human, Elf, Dwarf and Hobbit (with different names, perhaps). There was a bit more room in the evil/opponent races for development, but again dragons were the favourites.
Fantasy novels, therefore, when they were being written built up on these templates because they were being aimed at, and sold to, the market of DnD players and SF/F nerds. This was the tie-in/crossover market the big publishing houses were interested in, because they weren't going to waste time and money on original fantasy novels that might sell about a dozen copies. Everyone wanted the next Tolkien, so we got a lot of copies of Tolkien-clones.
I myself read the Shannara books for lack of other new fantasy (remember, we're talking the days of the 70s/80s and for all the Del Rey/Ballantine fantasy libraries, there were about ten publishing houses who didn't care about that nerdy crap) and I have to say I didn't much like it (too American, if you will forgive the Eurocentrism). But Brooks did indeed develop a formula and a template that worked, his sales were impressive enough, and that set the pattern from then on: fantasy novels had to be at least triple-deckers with the standard Dark Lord and Hero plot.
The elves and dwarves in D&D came from people other than Gygax; he wanted it to be more the pre-Tolkien Sword and Sorcery genre (e.g., Conan the Barbarian). The Hobbits in LotR leave home without weapons, because it doesn't occur to them that they'll need them; neither Conan nor a D&D character would ever make that mistake!
Not so much that they don't think they'll need them, as that they don't really have access to them. The Shire is insular and peaceful, the last time anybody fought was back in the days of the Dire Winter when wolves and goblins invaded, and any weaponry has been quietly rusting away since in the mathom house. They have sticks and staves, and probably daggers, but nothing serious as they set out because they're not expecting anything on the way.
What they are *expecting" is "get to Bree, meet up with Gandalf, let him take care of all this and either we go back home or we stay in Bree". But of course, what happens is very different.
I really enjoyed this, so I will show my appreciation by nitpicking a bit.
There's an argument that the real hero of LotR is Sam - he may not even be the chosen ringbearer, but when the lava hits the fan and he can't carry the ring, he can at least carry Mr. Frodo. Score one for the ordinary working-class person!
Tolkien almost certainly considered the Silmarillion his magnum opus, but it's LotR and the Hobbit that got him fame, maybe because they so closely fit the common fantasy tropes. Maybe there's authors out there who are trying to invent new archetypes and races of fantasy, but they only get a very small readership but the ones who mostly stick to the standard narrative get all the publicity? It might be because there's genuinely a bigger market for that (Scott's points #2 or #3), or it might be that marketing executives or whoever selects which authors get book deals go for what shareholders will see as the safe option, just like Disney is going with the n-th Star Wars franchise film yet again. If it's the executives, then we'd expect to see more "diversity" in self-published internet fan fiction as that cuts out these particular meddling middlemen.
That said, all this is Western fantasy. I'm by no means an expert on South Chinese fantasy but what I do know of it is that the hero is generally a Kung Fu master (not exclusively male), monks and nuns fulfil vital NPC roles, the counterpart to the Lost Ancient Civilisation is the burning of the Shaolin Temple causing the masters to disperse and share their knowledge with whichever locals take them in, dragons are generally good, and people living by rivers and lakes may or may not be bad but are definitely chaotic.
Also, whoever wrote Journey to the West was at least as inventive as Tolkien, as they basically came up with the genre of D&D fan fiction back in around 1600.
I like this, but I would add that I think the progenitor civilization which has collapsed serves to underscore the stakes that the main characters are playing for. One of the Wise Characters explains: "Look, there was this awesome ancient civilization with technology we still don't understand X thousand years later, but it collapsed because they failed to deal with the Dark Lord effectively. Imagine what the Dark Lord and his pals can do to *you*, you later, lesser son of great sires! And who knows, maybe if you carry out your quest and defeat the baddies, the great ancient civilization can then be rebuilt, ushering in a new golden age, and we'll all have you to thank for it! Get to it, bucko."
Competence porn is an essential thing for me. Harry Potter series without Hermione/Dumbledore would be lame. LOTR without Aragorn/Gandalf/Elves would be lame. The archetypal elf is hyper-competent and they exist to provide the competence porn and rare knowledge. Dwarves are more down-to-earth, figuratively and literally. In the star wars universe, the Jedi are the elves and the gungen/wookies/smugglers are the dwarves. Dwarves are there to provide comic relief or be more relatable for people with small egos. Orcs and Goblins exist only to be the Dark Lord's foul minions. In Star Wars, Stormtroopers are the orcs. And I guess the sith are drow. I guess you could draw a 2x2 matrix where the good is above evil and competent is to the right of incompetent.
Top left (good, incompetent): hobbits,dwarves,gungen,wookies,ewoks,ron,neville
Top right (good, competent): elves, jedi, mandalorian, gandalf, dumbledore, hermione, aurors
Bottom right (bad, competent): Dark Lord, sith, drow, dark wizards, bond villains
Bottom left (bad, incompetent): orcs, goblins, stormtroopers, crabbe, goyle, bond mooks
I think a fantasy universe needs to have all four quadrants covered. I don't think a neutral row is necessary because the neutrals almost always end up picking a side.
Good analysis overall, but how do you get Dwarves in the good/incompetent quadrant? Tolkien's Dwarves are highly competent. They are amazing blacksmiths and engineers (they built the Mines of Moria)! And they can be fearsome warriors. In The Silmarillion, the Dwarves pretty much single-handedly stop Smaug the Dragon from killing all the good guys in one of the major battles. The LOTR movies made Gimli into a comic relief character, but that's not what he's like in the books.
I second this, with Dáin Ironfoot. You cannot call him incompetent. The Dwarven kings of yore make stupid mistakes at times, but that is out of the normal pride/arrogance of kings. Being renowned for vast hoards of treasure means that dragons will be interested in you, as in "flying down to burn you out of house and home and take that hoard for themselves".
'I grieved at the fall of Thorin,' said Gandalf; 'and now we hear that Dáin has fallen, fighting in Dale again, even while we fought here. I should call that a heavy loss, if it was not a wonder rather that in his great age he could still wield his axe as mightily as they say that he did, standing over the body of King Brand before the Gate of Erebor until the darkness fell.
'Yet things might have gone far otherwise and far worse. When you think of the great Battle of the Pelennor, do not forget the battles in Dale and the valour of Durin's Folk. Think of what might have been. Dragon-fire and savage swords in Eriador, night in Rivendell. There might be no Queen in Gondor. We might now hope to return from the victory here only to ruin and ash. But that has been averted - because I met Thorin Oakenshield one evening on the edge of spring in Bree. A chance-meeting, as we say in Middle-earth.'
"In The Silmarillion, the Dwarves pretty much single-handedly stop Smaug the Dragon from killing all the good guys in one of the major battles."
I love that bit! And I wish that Rings of Power was halfway good (and also that someone had the rights to The Silmarillion) because I want to see this done onscreen: Sauron is sweeping all before him, he has corralled Elrond and it is looking very very girm indeed, when the Dwarves march out of Khazad-dum, give his forces a good kicking, chase them around Middle-earth continuing with the ass-kicking, then retreat back to Khazad-dum and slam the doors in his raging but helpless to do anything about it face 😁
Sure, apologies to any dwarves I offended. I play a dwarf holy paladin in WoW. Dwarves can be good blacksmiths and warriors, but they work hard for it, and they're materialistic. Versus elves who tend to seem more like they were just born with divine grace and be effortlessly competent and noble. It's sort of like bourgeois vs idealized aristocrats.
(I would like to genetically engineer my kids to have the grace and beauty of the elves)
Tolkien's Elves do have their own flaws (do *not* engineer your kids to turn out to be like Feanor) and the kind of people who like to see racism under every stone tend to hyperventiliate about his Dwarves as an Anti-Semitic Stereotype:
"There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don't expect too much."
To which I can only say "Have you ever read the descriptions of dwarves in Nordic mythology and folklore? Try reading about them even in the tidied-up versions online":
https://scandification.com/dwarves-in-norse-mythology-norse-dwarves/
I never really "got" the dwarf-Jewish connection until I saw the first of Jackson's Hobbit movies. When they were in Bilbo's house and started singing, it might as well have been "By the Waters of Babylon"...
Jackson's movies are not without their flaws (there's a reason why "Flaming Denethor!" became a pet epithet on one fansite I frequented, and personally I think that it was a bad decision to make the character like that, same with making Wormtongue such a visible Villain - I'd like to have seen what Brad Dourif could have done with the "looks like a venerable, respectable councillor which makes people trust him" original - but I'm not a movie director and I know nothing about what makes a movie work) but when he gets it right, he gets it *right*.
The Dwarves singing in "The Hobbit" is not the same as the book version, but by thunder it *works*:
"The dark filled all the room, and the fire died down, and the shadows were lost, and still they played on. And suddenly first one and then another began to sing as they played, deep-throated singing of the dwarves in the deep places of their ancient homes; and this is like a fragment of their song, if it can be like their song without their music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyy_FIYE7EE
As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns. Suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up —probably somebody lighting a woodfire — and he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He shuddered; and very quickly he was plain Mr. Baggins of Bag-End, Under-Hill, again."
I was irritated at LOTR because I'm better at dexterity than language and history, but it seemed like elves are supposed to be cooler than dwarves.
I'm not sure I'd feel that way now-- part of it the Silmarillion making it clear that the elves aren't All That.
I think, as Tolkien developed his work, he realized that the irredemability of the orcs was a key failing, given his faith. D&D has eliminated the notion of evil races. And I see the notion of 'redeemability' or 'value of supposedly dark races' trending upwards.
Star Wars has already introduced a redeemed stormtrooper.
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-0ce02ff5c11f656ffe5b4dad2a6b5c00-lq
At the same time, there's a definite storytelling need for a category of enemy that has at least a little more than animal intelligence, is roughly comparable to a human combatant in power, and is obviously hostile. There's no need to explain why you can't negotiate with them or even why they're attacking you; it's what they do.
Some Japanese fantasy works set in European-fantasy settings do this by making orcs and goblins outright monsters; creatures that, while they're capable of making crude weapons and armor and using tactics, are instinctually aggressively hostile. This is far from universal; just as many works subvert the idea by making traditionally 'always Chaotic Evil' races as human in temperament as, well, humans.
I think it's good that the concepts of "orc" and "goblin" are broad enough to be used both ways. In fact, being able to subvert the preconceived notions is a great storytelling tool. It only works, though, as long as "in some worlds, goblins / orcs are always evil" is an option.
Did you ever read "The Last Ringbearer" by Kirill Eskov? It's a bit uneven but has some brilliant parts, although I don't know how much of the good and bad lies in the amateur translation.
If you haven't, it purports to be written from an oral history of the War of the Ring, from the perspective of the orcs. That is, "orocuen" was just the name of one of the ethnicities of humans who lived in Mordor, same as "trolls". Sauron the VIII was a constitutional monarch, Mordor was on the verge of an industrial revolution, elves were vicious xenophobes, Aragorn was an opportunist who "just so happened" to show up in Gondor right after Denethor "burned himself to death", and history was written by the victor.
> This, then, was the yeast on which Barad-dur rose six centuries ago, that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle Earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic. The shining tower of the Barad-dur citadel rose over the plains of Mordor almost as high as Orodruin like a monument to Man - free Man who had politely but firmly declined the guardianship of the Dwellers on High and started living by his own reason. It was a challenge to the bone-headed aggressive West, which was still picking lice in its log ‘castles’ to the monotonous chanting of scalds extolling the wonders of never-existing Numenor.
I have not read it. But I have been told of it a number of times. It does seem interesting, especially because, as much as I like Tolkien, I never bought into his technophobia. And I probably fancy royalty less than he did.
Well, I suppose if it's a sort of even more extreme version of "Paradise Lost" where the Bad Guy is indeed the Hero, then it works as a deliberate contradiction of Tolkien's work.
Just as someone could write an alt-history novel about how Stalin was really a benevolent ruler and Soviet Russia was on the brink of becoming the earthly paradise, only the covetous and envious West and the bumptious, brute force Americans destroyed it all by their underhanded tactics and deliberate campaigns to ruin it.
Pretty sure most people would not accept that in our reality, Stalin *was* the Good Guy (do some people think this? yeah, there's always someone) and the same for Sauron - he wasn't a benevolent ruler, however he may have started out with his intentions. But sure, if someone wants to read the anti-Tolkien, let them do so. I'm not interested, because I don't have the taste for those "what if Jack the Ripper really, y'know, was *not* a crazy murderer but was killing for a *good* reason?" takes, but Sauron Good is just as valid a novel as Stalin Good for the creative imagination to work on.
In fairness, with the 'canonical' LOTR we only really get one, single perspective which creates a huge potential for uncertainty. Imagine if the *only* source we had for Stalinist Russia was a single pro-Stalinist source. That would hopefully result in people questioning the narrative as presented. Tolkien's narrative framing ("LOTR is a translation of other texts") does kind of invite an 'unreliable narrator' style critique. The book is not the writing of an omniscient narrator and nothing in LOTR is certain based on that text alone. The notion of orcs as an irredeemable evil race does pose some problems that even Tolkien wrestled with in his later years. Calling people orcs does sound like propaganda. With Stalin there's far less room for a total rewrite. He's too recent. We have numerous voices including Soviet sources which support a sort of commonly agreed upon history. We know that the purges were real. With Tolkien's universe, there's a lot more room for error, and thus for rewriting of the narrative.
I wouldn't trust to just the gospel descriptions of the Pharisees, either. Vlad the Impaler was a hero to his people. Only the pens of his enemies described him as having sold his soul to the devil to become a sort of original vampire.
""what if Jack the Ripper really, y'know, was *not* a crazy murderer but was killing for a *good* reason?""
The problem with this scenario is that the murders are indisputable historical facts and their attribution is tautological. Whoever did the murders is, by definition, Jack the Ripper. But what if the facts, themselves, were in question. What if a person blamed for the murders was actually innocent and a patsy. What if the murders were *not* carried out by a single serial killer, but the impression was created by an ambitious journalist willing to string together crimes to create a narrative of a killer on the loose in order to sell newspapers. What if the number of prostitutes killed during "Jack the Ripper's" supposed killing spree was not actually higher than the average rate and there are enough murdered women, especially prostitutes, on a regular basis to provide ample fabric to selectively stitch together a compelling narrative.
Yes, but in this situation, we *do* know what Stalin was like and what living in Stalinist Russia was like, and instead it's a rabid defender of True Communism who is doing the rewriting like the Party in 1984.
It's not the recency which is in question here; indeed, with his proposed but abandoned sequel "The New Shadow", Tolkien found:
"I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall [of Mordor], but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless – while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors – like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going round doing damage. I could have written a 'thriller' about the plot and its discovery and overthrow – but it would be just that. Not worth doing."
"As for the Entwives: I do not know. I have written nothing beyond the first few years of the Fourth Age. (Except the beginning of a tale supposed to refer to the end of the reign of Eldaron about 100 years after the death of Aragorn. Then I of course discovered that the King's Peace would contain no tales worth recounting; and his wars would have little interest after the overthrow of Sauron; but that almost certainly a restlessness would appear about then, owing to the (it seems) inevitable boredom of Men with the good: there would be secret societies practising dark cults, and 'orc-cults' among adolescents.)"
"The Last Ringbearer" is one of those orc-cults. Great fun if that's your thing, but some of us are old enough to remember the true days 😁
"He straightened his back and lifted his head, and walked away up the path, slowly but steadily. The thought crossed his mind even as he stepped over the threshold: 'Perhaps I have been preserved so long for this purpose: that one should still live, hale in mind, who remembers what went before the Great Peace. Scent has a long memory. I think I could still smell the old Evil, and know it for what it is.'
The door under the porch was open; but the house behind was darkling. There seemed none of the accustomed sounds of evening, only a soft silence, a dead silence. He entered, wondering a little. He called, but there was no answer. He halted in the narrow passage that ran through the house, and it seemed that he was wrapped in a blackness: not a glimmer of twilight of the world outside remained there. Suddenly he smelt it, or so it seemed, though it came as it were from within outwards to the sense: he smelt the old Evil and knew it for what it was."
For that take on "Paradise Lost", try "To Reign in Hell" by Steven Brust. It's short and punchy and all Abdiel's fault.
For that take on "The Lord of the Rings", try "Banewreaker" by Jacqueline Carey. Just 2 books, not very long. The Melkor analogue and his lieutenants and their people aren't *nice*, and sometimes are even a bit evil. But the Manwe analogue is a Total Dick, and there's millennia of misinformation out there.
"The Last Ringbearer" is more like a product of an alternate universe where, when Athens lost the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians were portrayed as demon-worshiping sub-human monsters who enslaved the entire Aegean Sea, and therefore the Spartans were the noble leaders of a coalition who, while not perfect, did what was necessary to keep the world safe. (Alcibiades would be portrayed pretty much the same.) And then 2000 years later, someone finds Thucydides' notes.
From the descriptions, I have a vague feeling I read some of the Brust novel before? It sounds somewhat familiar. It is based on Gnosticism, so that is where the viewpoint is.
As for Carey, I knew I had heard of her. Since BDSM fantasy is not my thing, I've never read any of her famous Kushiel's Dart (and forgive me for laughing here, but I couldn't take a fantasy race in a fantasy world with a fantasy land named "Terre d'Ange"; I mean, come on girl, make more of an effort! Do you really think your American readers will never have come across the exotic tongue of French before?)
I see why her Sundering series didn't do much; she isn't really doing much with the story. It's the familiar "hey,. what if the Bad Guys were really the Good Guys and we turned everything around?" which works only when its novel, but once there's a body of works where "Look with thine ears: see how yond Judge rails upon yond simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?" has been established, then the work has to be very good indeed. I think the problem, again going by the description, is that this bold brave reversal only works if you're familiar enough with the Silmarillion to get the correspondences, so that it has the same problem as the Rings of Power: people who know (and like) the canon aren't going to want this, and people who are looking for a generic fantasy novel need something with a bit more "so what is going on?"
Re: Athens and Sparta, we're accustomed to thinking of Sparta as not a great society, but more recently Athens has been getting the same treatment - its attitudes towards women, slaves, and non-citizens, for instance.
Has our benevolent self-appointed King, Sauron, made sure to have DEIB in his selection of officials? How many women are in positions of authority? Why does he not recognise his Maia privilege? 😁
I'm not insulted by any of these, but I'm not interested, either.
"It was a challenge to the bone-headed aggressive West, which was still picking lice in its log ‘castles’ to the monotonous chanting of scalds extolling the wonders of never-existing Numenor"
"What is the house of Eorl but a thatched barn where brigands drink in the reek, and their brats roll on the floor among the dogs? Too long have they escaped the gibbet themselves."
Yes, I can see the family resemblance in the attitudes! 😁
Heh. :-)
To be fair to the author, from an afterword:
> Because The Lord of the Rings is not a good, or even the best, fantasy text. It is *sui generis*, the only one of its kind; therefore, we will not settle for anything less than a full exoneration.
The entire third chapter is a description of how the natural cycles of climate change resulted in reduced rainfall in Mordor, inspiring the government to attempt irrigation on a massive scale. But unfortunately they and their "infant science" didn't understand what they were doing well enough, and they caused an ecological catastrophe of desertification. Resulting in the need to import almost all their food up the Anduin and through Ithilien. Meaning that if hostilities broke out between Mordor and Gondor, Gondor would be able to strike first and cut off Mordor's food supply. Meaning that if hostilies become *likely* to break out, Mordor would need to strike first. Not to mention the geopolitical effect of having Gondor sandwiched between the allies of Mordor and Isengard, meaning that if Gondor struck first it could take out one and then reduce the other at its leisure.
Serendipity strikes again! 🤣
Content warning: our friends are doing more of their music theme weeks, you may want to turn the sound off when visiting this link (I like it, but some might find it annoying):
https://rdrama.net/post/167113/lord-of-the-rings-is-about
"LORD OF THE RINGS is about reddit manchildren, LGBT Elves, drug addicts, bandits, and p-dophiles (Gandalf) all wage aggression against PROSPERITY and INDUSTRY of Mordor. Sauron was a wise, righteous and powerful leader. Orcs were WORKING CLASS FIGHTERS. DECODE HOLLYWOOD LIES"
God bless r/Drama and all who sail in it, for the best takes!
I salute them for keeping the old spirit of the Internet alive, but most days they're too much for me. :-) There's some good stuff there, though.
Obligatory mentioniong of my my favourite book (web serial) Worth The Candle, which explores mentioned fantasy tropes and subverts them.
Soviet sci-fi, in the form of Strugatsky brothers, features sentient dogs and a kraken (not in any great detail and not as the principal protagonist, but, they're there). Bernard Werber's Les Fourmis (Empire of the Ants) has all sorts of insects (predominantly, of course, the titular ants).
It has been a few years since I have read the song of ice and fire series, but I can't remember Arya getting a Valyrian steel sword? I think the sword she has at the beginning of the series, Needle, is castle-forged steel. IIRC, the smith of Winterfell forges Needle for her out of his own initiative, which he would certainly not be able to do with Valyrian steel. Perhaps she gets such a weapon later, but it seemed not particularly plot relevant to me?
Also, unlike light sabers in Star Wars (which btw checks all of the boxes for the fantasy tropes) Valyrian steel is not very plot relevant because for the people who might wield it, personal combat is not very plot relevant. And with the queen reforging the captured Stark sword into blades her spoiled son, Valyrian swords get tainted by association as a stupid status symbol, I would say. Spoiled rich kids get Valyrian swords, chosen kids get their own mystical animal companions (direwolves, dragons).
Furthermore, the only major character who is not obviously born into high nobility is Jon Snow. (There are minor characters such as the mercenary Bronn who go from rags to riches). The rest of the Starks, the Targarrians, and Lannisters certainly do fall on hard times, but all of them are aware of their claim to nobility from the minute they appear.
Yeah, I don't think Arya gets Valyrian steel in the novels, so far.
The "House of the Dragon" series has the dagger that Arya uses at the end of the "Game of Thrones" show be Aegon the Conqueror's personal dagger upon which he has secretly inscribed knowledge (as on the One Ring). Which is not particularly plot-relevant, but provides a nifty connection.
Sentient Dolphins.
Use them and you’re ripping off David Brin (Startide Rising).
Is there some sort of general rule that you are allowed to conform to everyone else, but if you are trying to be eccentric, you should be eccentric in a unique way?
There’s so much fantasy and sci-fi out there that you’ll be ripping off someone, in particular, for any creature you choose. But if you use Elves, well, everybody uses Elves. No big deal.
Loosely speaking, sortition seems pretty common in fantasy? That’s what an Artifact of Power discovered by chance is for. [1] Then the problem becomes why someone doesn’t take it from you when you’re sleeping.
Another example is the Golden Ticket in *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory*. I guess to make this plausible and fun in a more modern environment, you need an eccentric billionaire?
There are also stories about winning the lottery in the ordinary way, and this would be a fantasy but not Fantasy, more likely a comedy. A “fairytale” romance is about someone meeting a Prince by chance, and maybe it doesn’t work as well for people who know they’re not that beautiful (or that young)?
I guess to be real sortition, you also need a society that’s okay with choosing ordinary people as leaders by chance, and that’s a lot of world building? Maybe it somehow makes you royalty?
I think writers do often invent interesting races and civilizations, but if done well, they become so associated with that story that nobody else can use them without seeming derivative. (Consider Star Trek’s alien races.) Maybe the question is how something becomes popular but also generic? Somehow, borrowing from Tolkien is okay, maybe because he borrowed from earlier traditions?
Browsing TV Tropes for “research” would help in answering the sorts of questions raised here, but then we’d never get anything done.
[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArtifactOfPower
From "My Fairy Tail Life" by Jack Zipes...
https://themillions.com/2023/04/my-fairy-tale-life.html
Once upon a time, when the famous scientist Albert Einstein worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a tiny old woman approached him as he was walking home. She was schlepping a skinny young boy of about six who was dragging his feet.
“Meester Einstein,” she called out in a strong Central European accent. “Meester Einstein, stop your tracks and help me!”
Einstein was taken aback. He didn’t know what to do except stop.
“How can I help you?” he responded with a smile as he took out a pipe.
“Meester Einstein, stop. You shouldn’t smoke. It will kill you,” the old woman said.
Again, Einstein was taken aback, and he put away his pipe.
“Is that better?”
“Much better,” the old woman said as she drew her timid grandson toward Einstein. “Jaky, stop fiddling and listen to this great man.”
Now she turned her attention back to Einstein.
“Meester Einstein, I want you should tell me what my grandson must do to become educated like you. I want he should be a great scientist.”
Einstein didn’t hesitate with his reply. “Fairy tales. He should read fairy tales.”
“All right,” the woman replied. “But what then? What should he read after that?”
“More fairy tales,” Einstein stated bluntly. He took out his pipe and continued walking toward his home.
The old woman was silent for a moment, but then she grabbed hold of Jaky’s hand and began dragging him through the park again. Suddenly, she stopped.
“You heard, Jaky!” She pointed her finger at the frightened boy. “You heard what the great man said! Read fairy tales! Do what the man said, or God help you!”
Wait were you specifically thinking of Aaron as "the Frodo" and the Comet King as "the Aragorn" writing Unsong?
It might be worth applying this sort of analysis to other genres. Romance has been mentioned, and perhaps something similar can be done with mysteries, or perhaps the sub-genres of mysteries.
I haven't seen analysis of thrillers, though to judge by my little free library, they're possibly as popular as romances. I think thrillers can be typified as near-future science fiction (that is, one new piece of technology which hasn't changed things generally) that involves fighting against a conspiracy.
The boundaries are blurry of course. There's science fiction about fighting conspiracies and romance can be included in anything.
Alright, one hopefully productive comment, one criticism.
Sure, we'll try sharing this to Notes, new button.
So, with Tolkien and this ur-myth, I think it's probably fair to say that Tolkien less invented all the tropes than recognized and polished them. What Tolkien fundamentally did was obsessively study English and old English/Germanic mythology, which was hugely influential and popular for centuries. He studied 1000+ years of mythology, selected what tropes and elements worked best, polished them, and crafted a unified world out of the best of that tradition. He choose elves and dwarves, and we recognize those, because they're built out of the best of earlier traditions. For example, elves aren't fairies but they play a lot of the same story role and a lot more. And he feels so definitive because, well, he was a genius who worked on this pretty much his entire life in the best possible environment to do it: Oxford University. If you're trying to summarize and polish the best of 1000 years of mythology into a single story, well, that's super hard and it's very hard to top what he did.
As for the criticism, I think you're leaning far too hard onto the power fantasy element, or really the lack of agency. The vibe I get reading this is of people wanting to be powerful without doing work. And there's something to that but...the prince isn't the prince because he worked hard. People's situation they're born into plays a fantastic role in their outcomes. There's a power fantasy of just being a good person being enough but it's not hard to find medieval princes and kings who were fools and their reigns would have been far better for everyone if, ya know, they were just a good person. And I think it's very easy to confuse the fantasy of getting rewards without work or agency with the fantasy of just being born with a better starting position or better natural talents in life.
Maybe this blends over to the competence fallacy, like John Wick or James Bond, but even then James Bond never practices, he's just that good, he's just talented. Ya know, um, I remember watching one of those silly motivational videos with Kobe Bryant and he's bragging about practicing three times a day while everyone else in the NBA was practicing twice. And maybe that's legit, maybe he really did outwork everyone else in the NBA. But, ya know, China is full of sweatshop workers and peasant farmers who will work 10-16 hour days from adolescence to...basically death. And it's hard to convince me, or I think anyone, that the reason Kobe Bryant was a rich sports celebrity and they're working themselves to death in a factory is because Kobe Bryant just worked so much harder than they did. How do you differentiate between people fantasizing about getting the rewards without work and people fantasizing about just being born in a better place in life?
And some of this is about...kind of a moralizing tone but there's also something practical. Hey, ya know, I see a lot of guys with talent falling into this fantasizing and it is very destructive but, hey, some guys are born...just kind of dumb and unlikable. Half of people must be born with below average intelligence and half of people half to be born with below average charisma and that's basically how you improve your lot in life. The economy doesn't really need them and if they work hard they might go from flipping burgers to...being a shift manager and making $1.00 more an hour. And I don't like this advice but if those guys want to slip into a fantasy world of fiction, video games, and (usually) weed, I think that's bad but it's hard to make a case that their life would be better if they worked harder.
Yeah, if Kobe Bryant were 2 inches shorter, how much extra practice would he have to do?
I enjoyed this article. I do think it's a mistake to focus only on the fantasy of being the person in the story. Sometimes it's fun to pretend a cool person exists so you can enjoy admiring them. Sometimes, for example with a pure, naive, and strong hero, you like the hero and enjoy rooting for them, are happy when things work out for them, but don't really want to be them.
Sometimes a story can focus on and present a purer version of a good thing that exists in real life. We can enjoy imagining it in the story, and then be more ready to pick it out of the mess of complicated things in real life. I don't think that kind of pleasure in imagining good things is silly or empty.
This post is interesting, but as I read it, I kept thinking of great series I'd consider "fantasy" that go far beyond these parameters and are all the better for it.
An adult example is Stephen King's Dark Tower series. A young adult example is the Sword of the Spirits trilogy by John Christopher (one of my favorite authors, his young adult novels are a hugely underrated treasure trove — especially the Tripods series).
I think what we are arguing about is the difference between pre-Tolkien and post-Tolkien fantasy. Fantasy tended to be lumped in with fairy tales as "for children" which is why you get so many British authors of what are now called YA fiction (Alan Garner - I highly recommend The Owl Service and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Susan Cooper, going earlier E. Nesbit and many more - J.K. Rowling came out of a tradition).
Sure, there were adult fantasy novels, but they were not at all the same commonality - William Morris and James Branch Cabell may be writing fantasy mediaeval-type worlds, but the *spirit* of the tales is *so* different. There was also the blurred lines with ghost stories and some horror fiction - when does it become dark fantasy and when is it horror? M.R. James is known as a writer of ghost stories, but there's definitely horror elements there*. Walter de la Mere wrote delicate ghostly fantasies which can subtly chill the blood. Arthur Machen was doing his own thing, and the story "The Novel of the Black Seal" which makes up part of the collection "The Three Imposters" would very easily be turned by a few alterations into a Lovecraft tale of the occult terrors in the back hills of New England.
But really, only people interested in the genre knew or cared about the distinction between High Fantasy, Low or Picaresque Fantasy, Dark Fantasy, and the rest of it which continues even today with new sub-genres like Urban Fantasy.
And then Tolkien got really popular in the 60s with the Americans, and *that* became the template for fantasy that 'normies' (to use that term) became familiar with. That was the model to be copied by aspiring writers who wanted the big publishing houses to take them on, because publishers were eager to find the "next Tolkien". The same way that Peter Jackson's movies, by their success, made (I maintain) the TV adaptation of "Game of Thrones" feasible. Yes, they're a best-selling series of books, but Martin wasn't known outside of the SF/F genre (and his 80s novel "The Armageddon Rag" was a commercial disaster which nearly ended his career), so for a network like HBO to commit to producing the series, it would be necessary to persuade them that big-budget fantasy adaption could work. With the mainstream success of the LOTR movies, that was easier to sell.
Now we're into post-post-Tolkien, when everyone is trying not to be the "next Tolkien" but the "new whomever". Ironically, I think there's going to be a lot of "the next GRRM" as publishers want to replicate what is a proven commercial success.
*From his story "The Mezzotint", there's a reason the BBC did a lot of adaptations of his work for their traditional A Ghost Story For Christmas both radio and TV:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Ghost_Story_for_Christmas
By the bye, I think Mark Gatiss' 2005 adaptation of "The Tractate Middoth" is too heavy-handed, he goes for the obvious instead of the subtle scare and doesn't get the class distinctions right (this may be deliberate on his part as a kind of subversion; the people involved should be what is termed "decayed gentlefolk" who have come down in the world, but he presents them as lower to middle-middle class which just does not fit, especially the character of the wicked uncle).
"It was by this time rather late in the evening, and the visitors were on the move. After they went Williams was obliged to write a letter or two and clear up some odd bits of work. At last, some time past midnight, he was disposed to turn in, and he put out his lamp after lighting his bedroom candle. The picture lay face upwards on the table where the last man who looked at it had put it, and it caught his eye as he turned the lamp down. What he saw made him very neatly drop the candle on the floor, and he declares now that if he had been left in the dark at that moment he would have had a fit. But, as that did not happen, he was able to put down the light on the table and take a good look at the picture. It was indubitable—rankly impossible, no doubt, but absolutely certain. In the middle of the lawn in front of the unknown house there was a figure where no figure had been at five o'clock that afternoon. It was crawling on all-fours towards the house, and it was muffled in a strange black garment with a white cross on the back.
…"Not at all, Robert," interposed Mr. Williams. "I was meaning to ask you some time what you thought of that picture."
"Well, sir, of course I don't set up my opinion again yours, but it ain't the pictur I should 'ang where my little girl could see it, sir."
"Wouldn't you, Robert? Why not?"
"No, sir. Why, the pore child, I recollect once she see a Door Bible, with pictures not 'alf what that is, and we 'ad to set up with her three or four nights afterwards, if you'll believe me; and if she was to ketch a sight of this skelinton here, or whatever it is, carrying off the pore baby, she would be in a taking. You know 'ow it is with children; 'ow nervish they git with a little thing and all. But what I should say, it don't seem a right pictur to be laying about, sir, not where anyone that's liable to be startled could come on it. Should you be wanting anything this evening, sir? Thank you, sir."
With these words the excellent man went to continue the round of his masters, and you may be sure the gentlemen whom he left lost no time in gathering round the engraving. There was the house, as before, under the waning moon and the drifting clouds. The window that had been open was shut, and the figure was once more on the lawn: but not this time crawling cautiously on hands and knees. Now it was erect and stepping swiftly, with long strides, towards the front of the picture. The moon was behind it, and the black drapery hung down over its face so that only hints of that could be seen, and what was visible made the spectators profoundly thankful that they could see no more than a white dome-like forehead and a few straggling hairs. The head was bent down, and the arms were tightly clasped over an object which could be dimly seen and identified as a child, whether dead or living it was not possible to say. The legs of the appearance alone could be plainly discerned, and they were horribly thin."
Restrainedly nasty, with no gore to speak of, but it makes you queasy to think of what is being depicted.
Hmmm . . . applying this theory to my fantasy novel . . . yes, it fits well. I have two protagonists, one the "Aragorn" competence guy and the other needing to figure out the power she was randomly granted to save everyone else.
In the Prisoner's Dilemma of the world, the legend of the normal person who saves the day, despite possessing only ordinary talents, is a strong virtuous fable. The world is actually saved by normal people, without extraordinary talent or power, choosing goodness and honesty, when they could choose selfishness and lies. If ethics has any meaning ("not what you should do to achieve some given end, but what you should do, full stop") then the ordinary person who is one of the 3 billion people who save the world every day by refusing to betray their neighbor is just as good as the ordinary person who gets a magic sword that lets her save 3 billion people. All this particular fantasy trope is doing is throwing the real ethical situation into high relief.
"Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere."
"Random person using ordinary-people skills like friendship and self-understanding to save the world" is less escapist than it might seem at first, really.
It's rather common for people to be unexpectedly required to deal with difficult problems through no fault of their own, and rather common for the solutions to involve some combination of self-understanding, clear communication, networking, perseverance, and trust in goodness as an ultimately successful strategy. Ordinary-person-saves-the-world fantasy is just dramatizing those ordinary-life skills, so that people will have them internalized and ready when they suddenly have to deal with ordinary-life demons.
As a wise hobbit once said: "Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. [...] Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding onto something. [...] That there's some good in the world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for."
--------
There is a pattern that's kind of always bothered me about fantasy races. Typically, there's humans, who are organized into seven nations following the values of each of the seven Elder Gods, and each nation has its own system of class stratification and resulting social problems that follow from the hidden contradictions in the virtue ethics embodied by the particular Elder God they follow, or whatever... and then, somewhere off to the side, there are also some elves who live off in the forest and like nature, and some dwarves who live underground and like gold, and a few marauding bands of barbaric orcs who like killing. They're monocultures; don't think too hard about them.
In other words, the fantasy races rarely have the kind of internal diversity and adaptability that the humans have. Authors put a lot of thought into their unique human cultures, but then just drop in the fantasy races as a prepackaged trope that fills a narrative function.
I think that's partly why you don't see too many unique non-human races in fantasy. You can drop a bunch of dwarves into your story and trust your readers to accept them based on their pre-existing imported knowledge about dwarven culture, but they're probably going to have a lot more questions about the day-to-day life and moral beliefs of the giant wasp mercenaries which the author may just not want to spend pages exploring.
(Personally, I think that you shouldn't even bother including non-human races unless you're willing to do the work to make them seem completely alien, in a way that goes beyond the differences among regular human cultures. But I've still never gotten around to writing a proper fantasy story myself, so what do I know?)
Wow, I think you and I are the first to make the point about "ordinary person saves the world" being a useful fable, and we posted our comments in the same minute!
Another, thought, on the "ordinary person"/"competence guy" split... I think what's at work there is that most real people have some degree of impostor syndrome, and therefore never really see themselves as the "competence guy." Being an ordinary person stuck dealing with a problem you feel completely unprepared to handle, while people who actually appear to have the necessary skills are occupied dealing with other stuff is... a pretty typical human experience, I expect.
Since you brought up Shannara... Wil Ohmsford (the protagonist of Elfstones) is actually a pretty good example of a character who is fairly technically competent in some areas (healing, wilderness survival), but is also the only person who can save the world for unrelated reasons (the ancestral magic stuff). So he has some ordinary-person expertise he can lean on, but he still feels completely out of his depth. I think that balance of limited expertise that still doesn't adequately prepare you for what you're currently dealing with is fairly representative of real-person life.
(This particular case comes to mind for me because the TV adaptation of Elfstones decided to turn Wil into a goofy and barely competent teenager, which was pretty annoying.)
Regarding the second half of your comment, that's something that bothered me about the Belgariad when I read it when I was a child. The world seemed to have an inverse square law of detail, where the more it expanded, the less detail there was for the territory. The tiny regions of the home country in the beginning have as much flavor (more, really) than the vast enemy empires we encounter at the end. But it's been a while, and maybe he filled in the details later.
The last part probably does not go much farther than what you've already said, it simply saves time to not have to explain a race. Also characters that are similar to humans are easier to write compelling stories for and relate to. Warhammer40k famously gave up on writing stories from the point of view of anyone except humanity because they didn't sell even when all the races are basically human stereotypes.
Also WH40k has slug people that kill using time acceleration weaponry, orks that reproduce through spores, and a big gestalt consciousness of bugs that attacks planets by planting innsmouth style cults of human-alien hybrids that eventually take over and pray for their bug gods to consume them.
I think this is an accurate analysis of the "standard" ordinary-teenager-saves-the-world fantasy and its subversions, but there's so much more to the genre than that.
Some examples I've read recently that match little or none of your description:
- N.K. Jemisin's "The Broken Earth" trilogy. We're actually at the high point of what might some day be known as the Ancient Progenitor Civilization. Our protagonists' positions in society and personal characteristics are critically important, and their eventual pivotal roles rely on training, a lifetime of experience, and individual innovation. While there is a "born in obscurity and then identified as magical" element to the backstory, the way it plays out is...different. There are no elves. Dark lords are a matter of perspective, I suppose.
Suyi Davies Okungbowa's "Son of the Storm": Nobody is plucked from obscurity. Our protagonists' social positions and personal characteristics matter. Politics are central to the story, multipolar, and highly complex. There is no Ancient Progenitor Civilization (or maybe we're in it). There are no elves or dark lords.
Naomi Alderman's "The Power": There is no Ancient Progenitor Civilization. There is a sudden event that upsets the balance of power in a way that empowers some ordinary teenagers, but the outcome is not exactly saving the world, and the protagonist who ultimately comes across most strongly as filling the "ordinary person becomes hero by being a decent person" role is not one of the empowered teenagers. There are no dark lords or elves. There are guns.
I have a vague sense that some of my 20th-century fantasy favourites also broke the mold pretty thoroughly, but I don't remember any off the top of my head.
I think there's an argument for LoTR as the TED-Talk of High Fantasy. Tolkien gets credit for writing the books, but as others have pointed out he was drawing on existing literary, historical and cultural tropes. And then the sophistication and popular success of the books strongly reinforced some of those very tropes. People generally like tropes because they are familiar (that's the definition) and that familiarity is comforting, but you also score points for cleverly inverting tropes. Others have also mentioned Joseph Campbell and The Hero's Journey as a sort of uber-trope.
Scott wrote: "I think this is the key. Every part of the fantasy universe is optimized to justify why a person with no special ability or agency can save the world."
I think this misunderstands the monomyth and LoTR, but probably through (because?) of the lens of the modern rationalist. I want to recommend Eliezer Yudkowksy's Harry Potter: Methods of Rationality fanfic (https://hpmor.com/) here because he's explicitly trying to address that aspect of the juxtaposition Scott is weighing. Harry exists in the modern world of science, so EY does an awesome job of presenting Harry's modern, rationalist reaction to the apparently arbitrary magical world. In contrast, it's "presentism" (reality-ism?) to project the modern epistemology of science into the feudal or more ancient past. It requires a willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience to give up their modern rationalism to access the characters' experience. There are other takes on modern rationalism encountering the magical world. The Magicians was a pretty good recent TV series about this.
There's a close analogue of Scott's ideas that I can't find right now about how there are two superhero archetypes: Batman and Superman. Batman is the competency fantasy. He is given a purpose and becomes a superhero to achieve it. Superman is the agency fantasy. He is gifted super-agency and becomes a superhero to justify the gift. Every superhero is either Batman, Superman or some linear combination. They are both takes on the monomyth with the call to adventure either being the purpose (Batman is orphaned by crime, Ironman must escape his actual/metaphorical prison, Black Widow's "ledger") or the revelation of power (Superman, Wonder Woman, Thor). In LoTR Frodo has a superpower. It is (paradoxically, trope-inverting) his ordinariness , which makes him capable of resisting The One Ring almost to the very end of his hero's journey, and that's what makes him a hero.
To restate all this more succinctly: Tolkien both used and reinforced existing tropes. We like tropes and trope-inversion. The monomyth is a very big trope in human experience, arguably. You can think of modern rationalism and the epistemology of science as a trope-inversion of the way almost all humans have lived, so "fantasy" is a modern willing suspension of disbelief in order to access the lived experience of most humans, and their stories.
The genius and likely cause of part of the success of Star Wars and superheroes are that they are literally fantasy cosplaying as modern rationalism. Space wizards FTW.
Obligatory meta self-reference:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyP-_QBOXn8
Great article overall. On the "mystery" front, my wife and I always talk/joke about how she (and myself and most readers) simply love "revelations!" So many books spend huge amounts of time setting up (and if they are at all good) paying off revelations. It also causes a lot of bad/frustrating writing where characters are needlessly non-communicative and withholding so there can be needless conflict and later "REVELATIONS!".
You also didn't do enough here talking about how so much of what happens in books and who the characters are is about setting up plausible excuses to explain things to the audience. Which is why the main characters, or if not a super important character is always a neophyte.
As always I have a "I am not Scott's definition of 'normal' " note:
>If he is above-normal in any qualities, it’s the qualities we all imagine ourselves as being above-normal at - hard to corrupt, loyal to our friends, having a certain normal-person-good-sense while everyone around us seems strange and suspicious.
I would definitely not put any of those as strengths of mine, or qualities I particularly possess.
Man, there really is something special about a great revelation. It's just an incredible sense of euphoria when all the pieces fall into place, and your entire frame of reference for the story is flipped, especially if you make the connections before it's revealed and you suddenly have this nearly prophetic vision of what's left to come. The best Mystery novels show just how difficult and magnificent of an art form plot-crafting can be. The Shin Honkaku movement over in Japan have kind of mastered this, and I love them for it.
I think the main reason to re-use setting elements like elves and dwarves and fallen empires is that it saves exposition. Why reinvent physics, why reinvent races? When doing D&D, I prefer to play with this by having the common knowledge be exactly that: what's in the PHB and the Monster Manual is what a normal uneducated human thinks. How much is accurate? Trolls are probably big, and probably regenerate, and it's probably best to burn them with fire if you want them to stay dead. Probably. Unless someone was drinking too much, somewhere along the line. Do red dragons really look that much different than blue dragons? Do they actually live in different areas and have different personalities? Do you unquestioningly believe everything Herodotus wrote?
I'd separate this from the trend in fantasy to have reader-surrogate characters, or reader-power-fantasies, or things like that. That's a different matter altogether, IMO. There's plenty of fantasy that doesn't have it.
Also, for a fun twist on elves and dwarves, there's Steven Brust's Dragaera books. Unsophisticated Easterners call Dragaerans "elfs", which isn't terribly offensive. Unsophisticated Dragaerans occasionally call Easterners "dwarfs", which might not be offensive, it's hard to tell. Both refer to themselves as "humans".
> I'd separate this from the trend in fantasy to have reader-surrogate characters, or reader-power-fantasies, or things like that. That's a different matter altogether, IMO. There's plenty of fantasy that doesn't have it.
I feel like the main part of the post is like trying to reason about "dogs" using only the examples of chihuahuas and other small lap-dog-style breeds that do well in urban apartments as a substitute for children. The fantasy stories that are popular right now among people you know, are not necessarily characteristic of the genre as a whole. They may say more about the people you know, and what their lives are like right now, than they do about the genre as a historical entity. They may even have been crafted specifically to appeal to people like the people you know.
I think about half of this post is explained here:
https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-malignant-escapism
"Steven Brust's Dragaera books. Unsophisticated Easterners call Dragaerans "elfs", which isn't terribly offensive. Unsophisticated Dragaerans occasionally call Easterners "dwarfs", which might not be offensive, it's hard to tell. "
Reminds moe of the European interpretation of Tolkien: Hobbits=English, Elves=French, Dwarves=Germans.
Perhaps if each of the different groups thought that they were the hobbits, and assigned all of the other groups to the different races?
>. As far as I know, this extremely basic idea (someone has to invent spells, but then anyone can use them) had never been tried before;
Ted Chiang's "Seventy-Two Letters", in case you have read not it, has a similar theme, including the reference to the kaballistic names of God. More generally, he explores a number of other more unusual forms of "fantasy". That said, people tend not to call it fantasy any more, e.g. wikipedia calls it "steampunk".
To be honest, I think I fundamentally disagree with the premise that fantasy isn't an experimental genre. What you refer to as Here Be Dragons type fantasy, what I usually call Epic Fantasy, is just one sub-genre within the category. I wouldn't even say that Tolkien invented it, a ton of it is clearly derived from the Kalevala and other sagas from Northern Europe. He was a great writer, and as a result successfully popularized many plot elements, but I would call that the evolution and cementation of just one particular sub-region, as you follow the path through D&D and Dragon Quest.
But there's a lot of other fantasy out there! Much of it is even developed independently. As far as I can tell isekai came about pretty much wholly detached from what was called Portal Fantasy in the west. Certainly I can't find many parallels between Mushoku Tensei and Narnia/Conan/Alice in Wonderland/A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
I also see many ways in which Fantasy splits off from the Saga-esque. Harry Potter is the most profitable Fantasy series of all time, and shares very little with Tolkien. They call Voldemort a Dark Lord, but the name is about all he shares with the likes of Sauron; the man is basically just the leader of a terrorist organization in a single country. Twilight stands out to me as well, showing the ways in which Fantasy has largely absorbed Horror and rebuilt it to fit contemporary desires. Urban Fantasy is another notable sister; The Dresden Files is likely the most famous example within the English speaking world, but I would also offer up much of the Korean Web Novel scene. Works like Solo Leveling, SSS-Class Suicide Hunter, and Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint are utterly unlike anything I've read from the US. There's Gaslamp Fantasy, like the works of Diana Gabaldon; Flintlock Fantasy, like Guns of the Dawn by Adrian Tchaikovsky; Gothic Fantasy, like Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake; Ninja fantasy or whatever you want to call all the Naruto-derived series out there. I don't even really feel like I've covered the tip of the iceberg here, I don't particularly care for LotR or its copycats, so these other forays in the genre are almost all I read of Fantasy.
I will grant to you that the Fantasy races tend towards repetitiveness. There are exceptions, like Jim Butcher's Codex Alara or maybe Nisioisin's Monogatari series, but they're certainly rarer. My theory on it is that you only really have so much space to introduce your reader's to new concepts. There are a lot of jokes about authors who first page is 25% made up fantasy terminology, and at the end of the day there's not a lot of impetus to bother. Fantasy races are generally specific archetypes with a purpose. Sure, an author could take the time to create a whole new race that specializes in crafting wondrous weapons and artifacts, but what does that do for your reader that using Dwarves doesn't? For the purposes of developing your themes, or politics, or character relationships, just about every niche already has a fully fleshed out archetype that your readers are already intimately familiar with. For the books that deviate, it's usually the deviation that is their entire focus. The story becomes about introducing your reader to these races and their society, and convincing them that they matter. If that's not what you're writing, it's just a lot of unnecessary work.
...This is just wildly inconsistent with the fantasy books I've read.
Like, I agree the generic fantasy setting described here exists. It's D&D. Or, rather, it's D&D percolated through MMOs, Japanese webfiction, and pop culture in general. But books aren't actually set in it, aside from D&D tie-in novels (which used to be a pretty big deal, but less so now). In non-tie-in published fiction, almost no one copies all of Tolkien's races, and dungeon-diving is even rarer. And basically every actual story I've read that does use this generic fantasy setting is trying in some way to subvert it - usually not done very well, due to the writer confusing the generic fairytale or pseudo-medieval setting, Middle-Earth specifically, and that generic D&D/MMO setting.
But, as some other commenters have noted, if you want novels with more creativity than that, there's literally thousands of options.
Even the first of the D&D tie-in novels, Dragonlance, made the decision to not have orcs. And they had multiple factions of dwarves and elves.
The simplest theory is that this Platonic-ideal world of fantasy does exist, and the various popular authors are merely describing it ...
A slightly more complicated theory is that it lives "in the hearts and minds of children everywhere", much like Santa Claus.
Relevant post by Balioc (one of my favorite Tumblr bloggers): https://balioc.tumblr.com/post/628726469386960897/a-taxonomy-of-magic
I find the omission of Star Wars confusing. It's *the* fantasy I'm most used to hearing discussed in these terms, and I have some evidence that Scott's familiar with it
I agree that Star Wars is fantasy, but people tend to think of it as science fiction.
Split the difference; it's soft SF or science fantasy, of the Planetary Romance kind. It has spaceships and robots and aliens, but also midichlorians, "hokey ancient religions" and the like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_romance
Tatooine is not very far, in imagination space, from Barsoom or the Venus and Mars of the Northwest Smith stories.
Star Trek is slightly harder (medium?) SF in that it relies on technobabble and not The Force.
Then there's the alternate history school of fantasy, such as the Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett where magic has laws and rules, you don't need special powers to learn it, and it is in the place of science and technology in our world (e.g. there's a forensic sorcerer who assists the detective instead of a forensic scientist):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Darcy_(character)
"The Lord Darcy stories are set in an alternate world whose history supposedly diverged from our own during the reign of King Richard the Lionheart, in which King John never reigned and most of western Europe and the Americas are united in an Angevin Empire whose continental possessions were never lost by that king. In this world a magic-based technology has developed in place of the science of our own world.
Lucas explicitly designed *Star Wars* to be a mix of Westerns and Jidaigejki, i.e. Samurai legends. Thus, it draws on adventure, technology, and spiritualism in equal measure; but the concept of legendary larger-than-life characters is what binds it all together.
There really isn't any easier way to say this: this is, at best, limited and misguided.
First of all, this piece contradicts itself, conflating the 'born special' people of Shanara with the not at all special Frodo (S.A. seems to bith find and miss what is distinctive about Tolkien). And it then goes on to conflate Middle-earth with Discworld, when they are nothing alike (Discworld starts as a parody of the pulp fantasy that is now largely forgotten- Thongor of Valkarth etc. etc.) Pratchett also dips into the pre-Tolkien fantasy motives, e.g. having DEATH actually be present on stage, something the medieval would immediately recognise.
It isn't that Tolkien was the only creative, it is that he is like Shakespeare: later writers have struggled not to be him. Some succeed: Martin & Moorcock. But if you look at the pre-Tolkien fantasy, you find no such commonality as S.A. suggests. See Poul Anderson "Three Hearts, Threw Lions", Cancer "Dying Earth", Fritz Leiber etc. And, of course, there's Narmia.
So no evidence for commonality there.
I will go so far as to say S.A. does injustice to Isekai. Yes, there is a lot of tripe out there, that deals with the same tired fantasy tropes. There are also ones like "Tanya the Evil", "Hero has Returned", "Haibane Renmei", and the masterly "Now and Then, Here and There", which explores what a world that would use random children as soldiers would actually be like (the maker researched groups like the LRA).
So - what's left of the original premise? Not much. All we know is there's a bunch of power-fantasies marketed to people who want power-fantasies. That's it, really.
*Should be "Vance". Autocorrect...
> The one thing I still don’t understand is why everyone has the same races. Why elves, dwarves, goblins, and sometimes drow? Why not sentient dogs, or dolphins, or bee-people living in hive-cities, or those weird people with ten arms and one eye who the medievals sometimes reported seeing in the Orient, or one-inch tall people whose cities are the size of football fields, or sentient wasps that you can hire to sting your enemies?
I think this is mostly false. It's true that quite a few fantasy worlds have these races, but there are many (more?) that don't. Mieville has already been brought up, as has Sanderson, but I might throw Pullman into the mix as well since your mention of sentient wasps put me in mind of the Gallivespians (we also have talking bears and sign-language-using elephants who ride wheels!).
And sure, you can say "well Perdido Street Station isn't really the type of fantasy I was talking about" or "Well the Parshendi from Stormlight are kind of like orcs" or "Pullman is a bit too close to science fiction". But in the end, you're either being tautological ("the fantasy I'm talking about is the kind with orcs, elves, and dwarves") or you're taking "elves, orcs, and dwarves" so broadly that any woodland folk count as "elves", any subterranean folk count as "dwarves", and any ugly baddies count as "orcs".
(The phenomenon you describe is definitely present, to be clear: orcs, elves, and dwarves are somewhat overrepresented. But I'd say not as much as you imply.)
A lot of people have brought up the point that a lot of fantasy authors have created unique races for their works. The question nobody here seems to be asking has been "why haven't any of those non-Tolkien fantasy races stuck around in the public consciousness?"
I've seen three pools of fictional races creators can use that are common to multiple universes. There's the Tolkien / D&D set (elves, dwarves, halflings / hobbits, orcs); there's the stock Japanese 'isekai' set (Tolkien / D&D + flavors of animal accented beastkin + flavors of 'cute' monsterkin), and there's the rubber-forehead/ears sci-fi set (Vulcans / Space Elves, Klingons / "Proud Warrior Race Guys"). The rubber-forehead/ears sci-fi set is a bit more distinct from use to use.
The rubber-forehead/ears races tend to get the "planet of hats" treatment, where there's a single defining human comprehensible characteristic (the "hat") the race can be associated with (Klingons are warriors; Ferengi are capitalists). The isekai beastkin types, which are typically either humanoid versions of an animal (isekai kobolds are often humanoid dogs rather than lizardfolk) or a human with animal ears and tail, tend to have racial psychological traits associated with the animal species their appearance derives from. If you know what a 'cat' is, you can imagine a catfolk in an isekai light novel (or, for that matter, a Khajiit from the Elder Scrolls, a Miqo'te from Final Fantasy XIV, a Charr from Guild Wars, or a Kilrathi from Wing Commander).
What's fascinating is that the Tolkien / D&D set seems to stand on its own. We can describe Vulcans as Space Elves and everyone seems to know what an elf is. The other interesting note is that we're a lot better at creating new memorable monsters than we are races (Starship Troopers 'bugs' / Warhammer 40k's Tyranids / Starcraft's Zerg / ...).
How many of what you call the "Tolkien/D&D" set are long-standing mythical creatures and how many are Tolkien inventions? Elves, for example, predate Tolkien, so the fact that we know what a "space elf" is might not have anything to do with the Tolkien/D&D set standing on its own, but be more just a consequence of elves being a concept that's been in the public consciousness forever. Am I missing your point?
More recent authors invent races, but it would be weird for another author to copy them wouldn't it? If somebody wrote a story involving somebody with an insect for a head who makes art with the insect shit, it would feel like they were ripping off China Mieville.
There must be some axis along which races feel more generic or less generic. (Doesn't actually mean they _are_ generic, but they feel that way.) Anything from the generic end of the spectrum can be used in your works without it feeling like fanfic; anything more specific feels like you're ripping people off. So a fantasy author who wants to be seen as respectable has to either borrow from the generic end or invent their own, new, specific races (which other authors will then steer clear of).
I'm not familiar with the "isekai" you describe, but I would say that humanoid animals, as well as talking animals, and crosses between animals, are generic no matter what (so for example Pullman doesn't get a monopoly on talking polar bears).
So maybe the question we should be asking is what factors make fantasy races fall on different parts of the generic/specific spectrum? And how quickly can a race move from the specific end to the generic end? (This might be another way of asking your initial question of why don't the non-Tolkien fantasy races stick in the public consciousness.) And has the generification process slowed down a lot now there are so many authors (so Tolkien could generify races really quickly because he was the only(ish) fantasy author of the time, but Sanderson can't do the same today)?
That Tolkien relied on existent mythology is partly why his set of races stuck around; elves and dwarves certainly pop up enough in mythology. However, mythology can't explain everything. While I think the origins of the word 'orc' tie back to folklore, I think the race itself is pretty much Tolkien's creation.
The ability to make a race generic enough is part of it, but I think it also has to fill a useful niche. I think a good example of what I'm talking about is the D&D mimic, which is a monster that takes the appearance of a mundane item, often a chest. It's an idea that has a lot of use for RPG creation: a monster that by posing as a reward lulls the player(s) into a false sense of safety. Because it is useful, the idea got copied and used in other games.
“As far as I know, this extremely basic idea (someone has to invent spells, but then anyone can use them) had never been tried before”
Harry Potter
It seems to me this post is very much a continuation of themes present in "Nerds and Hipsters" and especially the Highlights from the Comments on that. Isn't there an impulse behind all three posts that, in an important sense, is just more of what Weber called "The Protestant [Work] Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism"? It's secularized, of course, as Weber said that spirit was already by the 18th century. But there's the same exhortation to police one's use of time ("what comes naturally . . . is to browse Reddit and play video games"), the same valuation of (more or less) anhedonic effort over pleasure (a cultural production is worthy to the extent it requires effort on the part of the consumer), and, overall, the same obsessive drive to *produce* (although the product is now cultural status in a 21st-century sense, not wealth or bourgeois respectability). Mightn't "Do better!" be translated as "Work hard, young man, and don't you come out of your study until you have something worthy"? There is a place for this spirit in the maintenance of certain aspects of human vitality. But, after so much, dare one say, scolding, does not even the lamest--perhaps especially the lamest--fandom come to seem like the pleasure principle's cry in the wilderness, and a necessary corrective to relentless meritocracy? Should we not give even a moment to the--admittedly not intellectually rich, but still authentic--call of “I enjoy it because it’s fun”?
Hear hear!
Oh, nice catch! There's definitely more than a whiff of the sense that fiction must be Educational and instill Proper Values and Right Modes of Thought, and its ultimate goal must be to Uplift The Spirit.
"Isn't there an impulse behind all three posts that, in an important sense, is just more of what Weber called "The Protestant [Work] Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism"?"
This makes it even more pointed that Tolkien was Catholic 😁
The newish fantasy animated series on Netflix 'Arcane' which is based on League of Legends plays around with the idea of 'someone has to invent spells and then everyone can use them'. It's pretty great
To quote the man himself, from his essay "On Fairy Stories":
https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf
"There are, however, some questions that one who is to speak about fairy-stories must expect to answer, or attempt to answer, whatever the folk of Faërie may think of his impertinence. For instance: What are fairy-stories? What is their origin? What is the use of them? I will try to give answers to these questions, or such hints of answers to them as I have gleaned—primarily from the stories themselves, the few of all their multitude that I know.
What is a fairy-story? In this case you will turn to the Oxford English Dictionary in vain. It contains no reference to the combination fairy-story, and is unhelpful on the subject of fairies generally. In the Supplement, fairy-tale is recorded since the year 1750, and its leading sense is said to be (a) a tale about fairies, or generally a fairy legend; with developed senses, (b) an unreal or incredible story, and (c) a falsehood. The last two senses would obviously make my topic hopelessly vast. But the first sense is too narrow. Not too narrow for an essay; it is wide enough for many books, but too narrow to cover actual usage. Especially so, if we accept the lexicographer's definition of fairies: “supernatural beings of diminutive size, in popular belief supposed to possess magical powers and to have great influence for good or evil over the affairs of man.”
...The diminutive being, elf or fairy, is (I guess) in England largely a sophisticated product of literary fancy. It is perhaps not unnatural that in England, the land where the love of the delicate and fine has often reappeared in art, fancy should in this matter turn towards the dainty and diminutive, as in France it went to court and put on powder and diamonds. Yet I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of “rationalization,” which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass. It seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood. In any case it was largely a literary business in which William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton played a part. Drayton's Nymphidia is one ancestor of that long line of flower-fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae that I so disliked as a child, and which my children in their turn detested. Andrew Lang had similar feelings. In the preface to the Lilac Fairy Book he refers to the tales of tiresome contemporary authors: “they always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple-blossom… These fairies try to be funny and fail; or they try to preach and succeed.”
But the business began, as I have said, long before the nineteenth century, and long ago achieved tiresomeness, certainly the tiresomeness of trying to be funny and failing. Drayton's Nymphidia is, considered as a fairy-story (a story about fairies), one of the worst ever written.
...Fairy, as a noun more or less equivalent to elf, is a relatively modern word, hardly used until the Tudor period. The first quotation in the Oxford Dictionary (the only one before A.D. 1450) is significant. It is taken from the poet Gower: as he were a faierie. But this Gower did not say. He wrote as he were of faierie, “as if he were come from Faërie.” Gower was describing a young gallant who seeks to bewitch the hearts of the maidens in church."
That's what they *want* you to think. Then you won't be wary of going out at night to the countryside to visit "Mr. Underhill".
As others have pointed out, the "protagonist is/becomes the chosen one" [0] is a trope which is ubiquitous. It appears in fairy tales (Cinderella?), SF (Matrix), space opera (Star Wars) as well.
I think it is actually somewhat less frequent in pen & paper role playing games. D&Dish systems have one of the more extreme power curves, to the degree that no amount of level one characters can hope to best a single high level character. Still, apart from being heros, the PCs are not inherently special. There are also NPC sorcerers of high level, and from my understanding most games people play do not have the goal of the PCs reaching godhood or something. White Wolf's World of Darkness games typically start with somewhat-near-ordinary human levels of power which then goes through the roof (especially for Mage).
In Shadowrun, the characters are the underdogs, which is why they need to use covered actions in the first place. There is no power level reachable which allows the characters to fry Lofwyr and take over Saeder-Krupp. The dark eye (DSA, a German system) also has little power leveling. Getting into a fight with a few dozens angry people with clubs is generally a poor idea even for an experienced character.
Contrast this with (single player) role playing video games. I think there are different levels of Chosenness:
* The PC is a non-unique hero who happens to have solved the previous quests (Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout series, VtM: Bloodlines)
* The PC is plotwise Chosen, but does not get extra personal combat power for that (Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur's Gate, later-series Dragon Age and Mass Effect). Typically they get a title ("Commander") as well as a fort, an army or a space ship.
* The PC is Chosen and gets extra-special powers to reflect that (Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous eventually drops ten Mythic Levels on the PC enabling them to do extra-special stuff, Skyrim's Dragon words). Instead of earning lichhood through long-winded study ~like Pharasma intended~, you basically get it gifted as a goodie from an NPC.
I think this is because computer RPGs are agency simulators. Nobody wants to play a game where they are constantly running defenseless from helicopters shooting them. Power curves work very well for that. If you started out being able to one-shot mirelurks, that would be much less impressive than if you start out being totally powerless against them and then later are able to evaporize them or whatever. The choseness seems mostly to tie the PC in the plot. KotOR would work if the main character was just a random person who eventually became a Jedi, but then the story would not be particularly memorable.
[0] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheChosenOne
> As far as I know, this extremely basic idea (someone has to invent spells, but then anyone can use them)
Multiple Brandon Sanderson books have systems adjacent to this. In Warbreaker the magic system is accessible to everyone, and scholars work to develop new spells.
Another of his books, Elantris does have a genetic component to magic, but the magic system was broken by a cataclysm a couple generations ago. The protagonist then figures out that it can still work with modifications, through a huge amount of poring over books and experimenting. Also, the magic system is clearly supposed to basically be programming.
I think Sanderson books are pretty close to "technology, but magic is the technology" so that's why they don't fall into the mold described here.
"In the sadder corners of the Internet,"
Well, no wonder. I thought the internet was round.
"At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter'd bodies go;
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,
All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you whose eyes
Shall behold God and never taste death's woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
For if above all these my sins abound,
'Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace
When we are there; here on this lowly ground
Teach me how to repent; for that's as good
As if thou hadst seal'd my pardon with thy blood."
I am commenting only to say that whatever is happening with Substack, with the popups and un-dismissable BS, is maddening and destroys the platform for me. Fix it immediately or I never interact with this site or susbtack ever again.
> As far as I know, this extremely basic idea (someone has to invent spells, but then anyone can use them) had never been tried before;
In Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicle the main character invents a new magical device, patents it and is paid royalties.
This book is also basically the opposite of what you are describing: the main character is very competent (though often unwise), both gifted and very dedicated. The books also don't really have any Dark Lord (well there kinda is one, but he doesn't play a very big role in the story) and don't really have elves, unless you count a kind of a succubus that likes keeping men as sex slaves and some other creatures like that.
You kind of touched on this with your reference to D&D, but it seems to me that fantasy RPGs, video games in particular, operate on a different, superficially opposite fantasy, i.e. that there are large and predictable returns to work. You kill the monsters, gaining gold and experience, and you use them to become stronger, until you're capable of accomplishing your ultimate goal. Success is virtually guaranteed, as long as you put in the hours.
But maybe they're not so different. In single-player games, there's still a chosen-one aspect here: If it's so easy, why isn't there any competition? Because you, as the sole player character, are the chosen one. Even if the narrative says that you're just a regular guy, you're the only one with agency, which makes you special.
On the other hand, in MMORPGs, there is competition. Nowadays, I think they're more skill-based, but in the early days many of them really did come down to putting in the most "work," playing into the work -> reward fantasy without the chosen-one element.
Of course, to some extent the real world works that way as well, but it's a lot messier. Talent and luck play important roles. There are fairly reliable ways to turn talent and hard work into a pretty good result, but exceptional outcomes require luck as well. And if you don't have the talent, hard work can only take you so far.
This explains well why I don't like the genre.
One thing I appreciate about R. Scott Bakker's second apocalypse books is that they actually do take the logistics of moving massive medieval-tech armies seriously, and often use those problems as key plot points.
They also just in general contain about zero of the tropes laid out here.
> But also: the way to become John Wick is to practice shooting, every day, again and again, more obsessively than anyone else.
Oddly enough, I'm currently reading the *Cradle* series (by Will Wight), which is basically this. The protagonist starts off at the bottom (actually, below even the bottom), and acquires incredible power through a). relentless grinding all day, every day, b). getting involved in fights with significantly more powerful people than he could ever imagine, and c). winning (or at least surviving) the fights through a combination of perseverance and blatant cheating. Then, he goes right back to (a), because he's on a deadline, and unless he manages to attain virtual godhood in time, everyone and everything he loves will be destroyed. He's not the classic Chosen One, either: yes, the heavens have blessed him with their attention, but only to say, "your self-imposed mission is kind of impossible and you should probably give up". He doesn't.
One way to think of fantasy is as a literary genre that pretends to be folklore. Middle Earth is in some ways a unique creation of Tolkien but is in other ways the same world that traditional fairy tales are set in. Tolkien described The Hobbit this way explicitly. Tolkein's big groundbreaking idea wasn't the concept of elves or whatever, but rather the idea that fairy tales could be written for adults and have literary merit. Fantasy literature (at least in the Western tradition) feels same-y because it all draws from the same European folkloric roots. The Lord of the Rings didn't have any unicorns in it, but when subsequent Tolkien-derived fantasy works include them, nobody bats an eye. Even though Tolkien didn't draw on the specific folkloric concept of unicorns, drawing from folklore is the same kind of thing he was doing, so it still feels like it fits. Fantasy doesn't usually have sentient wasps and whatnot, because then the work would lose that feeling of being this ancient tale from folklore. Not that out-of-the-box ideas like that couldn't be fun, it would just be a different feel.
My exposure to fantasy is mostly through gaming, so I have a different perspective about why these kinds of tropes show up there. In RPGs, the point of the game *is* for the players to exercise agency and use their PCs' special powers to solve their problems, so the idea that the point is "for someone who's not unusually talented or agentic to be the hero" does not apply.
However, one thing that does apply is that you need problems that the players can come up with solutions for *without needing a lot of context*, because the players will almost always have less information about the fictional world than they do about the real world. For instance, going back to Scott's example of gaining power in a democracy. If you wanted to do an RPG where the PCs are trying to win an election in something resembling a modern democracy, you would need a lot of the following information:
- who the different constituencies/demographics are
- what are the different issues, and what sorts of people have what positions on what issues
- who your opponents are and what *their* positions are
- who possible campaign donors are, what they want, and what might convince them
- what you will have the power to do (or at least what voters think you have the power to do) once elected, i.e. what you could credibly promise
- and so on.
Now, we're familiar with a lot of this stuff *in our own world* just from living in it our whole lives and paying attention to the world. But a lot of this stuff is totally different e.g. between different countries at the same time, between today and a few decades ago, and maybe even between different U.S. states. So if you wanted to do a campaign like this in some totally different world, you would have to give the PCs a huge amount of background information before they could even start.
So you end up with things like "if you can kill the old king then you become the new king", because that reduces the problem to how to kill someone, which the players are already familiar with how to solve.
There *are* fantasy themed games that do focus more on other stuff. Like the way you described Celebrimbor: "the story would mostly be about him studying magic smithcraft and trying to figure out the exact right ratio of mithril to orichalcum that maximizes spell adherence." That basically describes the board game Alchemists (not that *exactly*, but in Alchemists you're trying to learn the rules for which potion ingredients have which effects and then publish your results). Those, however, are usually board games or computer games rather than RPGs. In that case the game rules are what provide the necessary context.
The standard fantasy race package is a thing for the same reason fanfiction is a thing in general - explanation length/inference distance: to create a memorable race or culture (or a character or an archetype, or world mechanics, or (...)) one needs a lot of work and many words that don’t push the story forward. Doing it competently and not derailing your story is _hard_. Using already established culture is easy and short, just write ‘dwarves’! As a bonus, you get superficial creativity points for misspelling the name or subverting one irrelevant part of the trope (no need to first establish something you’ll subvert, neither, that’s already been done for you!).
The fantasy races fit very nicely into stereotyped categories. We humans love our stereotyped categories, but don't condone doing it with real people anymore. Instead, we get to have fun engaging in stereotyping behavior and categorization with dwarves, elves, orcs, etc...
Two weird fantasy universes that don't exactly fit this:
- Miracle Jones' "The Fold"
- Walter Moers' "Zamonia"
Zamonia also has the talking dogs.
I think it fits well enough. When it doesn't, it seems to be aware of the trope and purposefully subverting it.
A NZ writer called Maurice Gee wrote a short but wonderful three-part teen fiction series called The Halfmen of O that most NZers my age (40) will have read. I thought of it over and over as I read this piece. Susan, the 12yo normal human protagonist, as a baby receives a magical birthmark from a transworld visitor who was about to die and couldn't find an adult to pass his mark on to at the critical moment. But she doesn't find out about any of this for years. So she's born totally ordinary, raised ordinary, but at the onset of adolescence is chosen for an extraordinary task (to save the other world from fascism, basically) and given some "mystical powers lite" to do it, with help from her totally ordinary cousin Nick. It's a great coming of age story but the fantasy world of O is also beautifully imagined and original. No dolphins, but there are talking seals, as well as bloodcats, varg (giant polar bears), and flying birdmen.
This article, ironically enough, has been "psychologically life-changing" by convincing me that my problems / problems I want to solve, will yield more to doing *unusual actions* (obsessive practice, novel thinking) instead of "finding myself". Thank you, Scott.
What other races have become standard, or are becoming, standard?
Some suggestions:
- catgirls and other animalfolk/beastkin/furries
- minotaurs/tauren
- dragonkin
- aasimars and tieflings/draenei
- reckless-tinkerer goblins/gnomes/kerbals
- werewolves
- vampires
- zombies
- maybe genies/djinni/djinn?
There are few books inbetween which bring some difference, given that 99% percent in this genre are just even more primitive adaptions of the Vogler's Journey with such a bad storyline that "Deus ex Machina" becomes a writing style of its own. Mostly standing out is Nalini Singh with her first books of the Psy Universe, there you get your Dolphins and whatnot and a much broader scope of psychological insight. On another plane there is the Shadowrun Universe, hero stories yes, but reverberating the sacrifices of the average player saving some human values.
Arya Stark never got Valyrian steel in the books. Even the dagger she gets in the show is basically forgotten there, and it seems like a first-book-ism for such a valuable item to be in possession of some nameless catspaw.
Others have pointed out Robert Howard's Conan stories as a contrast, but I don't know if Tolkien had any awareness of that (that might be too American & low in prestige). He was aware of Lord Dunsany & E. R. Eddison, and disapproved of the former's cynical approach to religion and the latter's Nietzcheanism. He was also critical of Shakespeare's approach to fantasy (thinking the medium of theater is inherently deflating of anything magical) and Michael Drayton for perpetuating the most childish & cutesy form of fairies (following in the tradition of A Midsummer Night's Dream).
I don't think Ayra Stark was a good reference, partly because A Song of Ice and Fire was written to intentionally avoid these issues. Daenerys does have the innate magical ability to wield ancient power, but it conspicuously doesn't make her a ruler. Even with her dragons, her ability (or inability) to rule comes from how she juggles obligations to various interest groups or how she feeds an army.
Yes, she's a ruler because of her dragons. Before they hatched she was not really a ruler. It is her dragons that enable her to conquer her first city.
Yes, she conquers Astapor using her dragons, but she is unsuccessful in her goals for the city. By the end of the most recent book, her favored government has been overthrown by a series of warlords that have brought back slavery and allowed the spread of a deadly plague. The city is about to fall to representatives of the group she overthrew with her dragons. Her dragons did not give her the ability to rule the city, only overthrow the previous rulers. In order to rule, she'd have to develop things like tax policy and governing principles, not just have dragons.
This was an intentional theme for the author. He has an interview where he talks about being interested in what Aragorn's tax policy would be and that choices like that will be more important in whether a ruler is "good" than the moral character of the ruler.
She wasn't ruling "her favored government", she left (with the army she got from Astapor). She ruled another city she conquered.
Sorry, I should have originally said that the dragons don't make her a *good* or successful ruler. Do you think she was a good or successful ruler?
In traditional fantasy, heirs to the ancient ruling family tend to bring prosperity. However, she seems to be mostly unsuccessful in accomplishing her goal of establishing a free, prosperous society in Slaver's Bay, despite having a magical birthright.
The Targaryens are not "the ancient ruling family" of anywhere in Essos; they were one of the relatively minor family of dragonlords in Valyria. The place they ruled was the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros (and Dragonstone before that), which she still hasn't gotten back to.
Planescape Torment, at least, tries to transcend these tropes (tho not fully, and it still borrows a lot from fantasy worlds, maybe with different-than-stereotyped roles).
gaspode can do things :)
>“what if the Dark Lord’s henchmen unionized?”
They did, that's what created the Dark Lord in the first place. Before the union vote, they were all just hardworking Orcs trying to feed their families and working the mines for Amalgamated Mithril LLC. But then smooth-talking Sauron showed up, started talking about workers' rights and class struggle, and installed himself as Union Rep. Now it's nothing but immanentizing the eschaton by furthering the revolution all day long.
Don't look for a Watsonian answer to a Doylist question.
Fantasy is genre fiction. It is largely commercial, trying to sell a recognizable product to an established audience.
Even if the pulp market isn't what it was, the conventions formed by the pulp market run so deep by now as to be part of e definition of the genre. Would pre-Tolkien works such as The Well at World's End and Islandia (neither of which I have read, btw) be recognized as fantasy nowadays?
This is, incidentally, why Warsaw-Pact sci-fi such as Lem's feels not-quire-sci-fi while having obvious qualities: Lem didn't *get* (until later in life) that sci-fi was supposed to be genre fiction, in the commercial sense.
Then there is the case of established literary figures trying their hand at the genre (as in Olvidado Rey Gudú, which I *am* reading now). Then some tropes have to be recognizable and salient (map on the first page, grimdark) or else there would be nothing to comment on; pastiche needs references.
How about a story 4: we've effectively redefined "fantasy" to mean "Tolkien-like universe", so we hardly recognize other fantasy worlds as such. One that comes to mind: Piranesi (Susanna Clarke). While you could probably find a few parallels to the tropes you outline in virtually any story, this one doesn't really participate in them, yet it's a masterwork of fantasy. Anyone know of other good but very different fantasy worlds?
Rachel Aaron's Eli Monpress series is an animist fantasy (everything has a spirit, magic is done my communicating with and controlling/persuading those spirits).
Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight divides reality into layers, with reality working fundamentally differently across those layers and magic mostly being a manifestation of authority structures between those layers.
Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber envisions an infinite continuity of parallel worlds, each subtly different from its neighbors and focuses on protagonists who can shift between them.
Christopher Stasheff's A Wizard in Rhyme portrays a medieval fantasy world based on the author's study of medieval European folklore (as close as he could get to the world medieval people thought they were living in, including religiously).
Gabriel King's The Wild Road is urban fantasy from the perspective of a magical cat.
Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit is weird enough to be difficult to describe, but "military science-fantasy" is the best I've come up with. The opening scene involves a military commander adjusting the formation of their unit because the local magical laws are different enough from standard that their energy-shield formation isn't as effective as it should be.
Michael Stackpoole's A Secret Atlas presents a world where any skill eventually becomes magical when taken to a sufficient height of practice and expertise (and in the process makes the practitioner a near-immortal "mystic"). We first see this with the expected mystic swordsmen, but the main question of the primary protagonist's story is "what does it mean to be a mystic cartographer".
These sound like great recommendations!
I think the author has come to some very wrong conclusions based on a narrow experience of the fantasy genre. To illustrate the point, here are examples of fantasy doing nearly every thing he claims it does not do.
Magic must be discovered, but can then be used by anyone - The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
No ancient progenitor civilization - The Legend of Eli Monpress by Rachel Aaron.
No sealed dark lord - The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven.
No dark lord at all - Nine Princes in Amber by Roger Zelazny (if you read only one thing of all the stories I'm citing here, make it this one).
All of the above in the same work - A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Leguin
Ancient progenitor civilization didn't fall - Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone by J K Rowling
Sentient dogs - Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb
Sentient cats - The Wild Road by Gabriel King (you din't ask for this one, but it's really good)
Dolphins - The Dolphins of Pern by Anne Mccaffrey
Bee people in hive cities - Codex Alera by Jim Butcher (this is a series, the bee people don't show up until the later books).
One Inch People - Give of a Useless Man by Alan Dean Foster
Mercenary Wasps - The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher is the closest I could think of on this one, though it doesn't fully fit (mercenary pixies that fight like wasps are close, but not exact).
But I think the disconnect goes even farther. I browsed the fantasy section of my local bookstore last week and don't recall seeing a single book that meets the definition of "the fantasy world" as you've laid it out here.
The core appeal of the Isekai/LitRPG genre has more to do with the game mechanics than the setting or tropes. Most people live in a world where it is incredibly easy to work hard for nothing and feedback is usually more status-noise than signal. By contrast, in a world with video game mechanics, objective feedback is constantly available (how good at guitar am I? character sheet says 7). And there are generally a set of clearly understood actions that lead to improvement.
The appeal of isekai fantasy is not in getting results without hard work. The appeal of isekai fantasy is in having the ability to advance and improve with just hard work.
I think fantasy races are so well-established because they map well to social classes. Elves are noble, beautiful, and few in numbers, which makes them resemble aristocracy and elite. Dwarves resemble burly workmen, hobbits resemble diligent farmers, and humans are left out to be sort of middle-class bourgeoisie. Obviously, there are dwarven kings and elven traders, but the similarities to the social classes still hold. And once there exists a niche for such races, the niches get filled with some winning variants, like elves being called elves, having pointed ears and liking archery.
The only classical race that does not fit this picture is orcs. Their niche is the "Evil and Dangerous Other", and so they are similar to barbarians and/or steppe nomads, which were the typical enemy in the cultural narrative (and one substantially different from "Us" in a way that the nearest rival kingdom is not).
Someone, I forget who, claimed that the Harry Potter series are anti-Christian because the assumption that things can be achieved by merely waving a wand, once one gets the hang of it, is at odds with the Christian ethos of struggle and just reward (if any) only after effort and perseverance. That is a brief summary of his point, as I recall it, but he developed it more fully and it seemed quite persuasive at the time.
Redwall fits what you ask for at the end to a T.
About the last paragraph - the reason you don't see animal protagonists and deuteragonists much in fantasy might be because they don't have opposable thumbs. I remember reading a blog post by, or maybe an interview with, one of the original game developers at Insomniac Games. They were made famous by their Spyro the Dragon trilogy for the original PlayStation. He said that they didn't continue the series because they ran out of gameplay ideas for a quadruped. They really wanted a main character who can pick things up and use tools with hands. And so their next platformer game had a whole new universe with a new main character, Ratchet, who's essentially a furry human, and the gameplay focus is on beating things with a wrench and shooting them with guns.
I think the same thing is at play with fantasy books. A story where the main character cannot wield a magic sword, cannot have a magic sword. Any character that's not based on human anatomy would have very limited ability in what actions they can take, and thus what the story featuring them can contain. And there aren't that many human-shaped creatures in reality. You basically have to choose from tall humans, short humans, midget humans, pretty humans, ugly humans, humans with funny ears, humans with beards, humans who live in forests, humans who live underground... And all those kinds of fantasy humans already have names: elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins and so on.