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Sentient dogs in the medieval fantasy setting has been done, sorta: A Fire Upon the Deep

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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.

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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023

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.

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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.

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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?

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GRRM isn't quite doing a hard sf version of fantasy, but maybe not quite a soft as most.

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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/

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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.

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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.

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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/

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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.

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Apr 29, 2023·edited Apr 29, 2023

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).

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Just here to note that this comment by Godoth is both clearly correct and well-stated. Nice!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.)

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Those dogs were not explained and it took me forever to figure out what they were. Very annoying.

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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

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That picture is seriously creepy. Even without the caption telling us who it, sort of, is.

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They look a bit sinister when they’re just silhouettes, but I imagine them as big furry greyhounds/ferrets.

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That's how I picture them too.

It's just this particular picture, plus the fact that 2/5ths of this one is Flenser.

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In the October Daye series, Cu Sidhe are fairy dogs with dog and human forms.

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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".

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Or "City" by Simak.

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023

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.

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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.

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Apr 29, 2023·edited Apr 29, 2023

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.

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"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.

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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.

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"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.

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> 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.

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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'.

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There’s also lots of weird other stuff though. I write it down to being mercenary with brand recognition.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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Huh. Well, TIL....My apologies to Superman and his brethren for underselling their list of antagonists.

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In fairness, many - not all, but many - of those nominal aliens do kinda still end up being de facto guys in capes.

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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?

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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.

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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).

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>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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Is Jack honest? In the versions I recall, he's a trespasser, then a thief, then a murderer.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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May 7, 2023·edited May 7, 2023

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.

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Actually Arya Stark doesn't have Valyrian steel, Needle is just regular steel.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023

"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.

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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.

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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

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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023

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.

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This is exactly it. Tropes exist for orientation.

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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/

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'"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

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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)

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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.

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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

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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> 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.

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founding

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?

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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

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author

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)

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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.

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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023

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

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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.

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There is a classic order of the stick line about vances impact on RPG magicians https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0345.html

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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.

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founding

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

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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.

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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023

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.

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Thanks for the reply!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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founding

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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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founding

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.

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It's been a while since I've read it, too.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Jan 19·edited Jan 19

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.

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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).

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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.”

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Apr 30, 2023·edited Apr 30, 2023

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.”

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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."

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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.

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The deaths and betrayals of friends, spider poison, orc torture, mere hunger and exhaustion, the sunset of hope.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 😁

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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!"

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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.

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Apr 30, 2023·edited Apr 30, 2023

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."

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I don't think the Thomas Covenant books were much like LOTR. Except for the existence of world-building, everything was different.

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"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.

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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.

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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023

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.

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Well said!

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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.

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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.

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founding

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.

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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023

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.

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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.

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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023

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."

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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.

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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023

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.

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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.

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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.

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One range of variation is whether people want happy endings or tragic endings or just ongoing stories.

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founding

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.)

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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

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founding

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.

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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)

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> 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!

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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.

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"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.

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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).

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Graydon Saunders “Egalitarian Heroic Fantasy” might fit

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founding

Very much so!

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023

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.

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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.

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Apr 28, 2023·edited Apr 28, 2023

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.

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founding

Came here to say the same thing. The Guide doesn't just break this mold, it makes a mockery of it.

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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 😁

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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".

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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.)

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That's nice to hear!

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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).

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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.

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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. :-)

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Glad to help! Also just a heads up (in case you hadn't heard) that "Lyorn" is due out April 9 next year.

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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").

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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/

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Jan 22·edited Jan 22

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.

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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.

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