Fantasy Cliches

[robinturner]

I just came across an interesting article from a gaming site: Overused Standards of Fantasy Literature. Embarrasingly, my projected novel (which I will return to this summer) contains no less than five of these overused features, notably:

1. The Great Disaster/Cataclysm/Doom, etc.
2. The Ancient Super-Advanced Society
3. The Ancient Scholars' Language
4. The Quest for the Uber Artifact/Weapon
5. The Conquering Horde.

On the other hand, there are no knights, mages, elves (unless you count the bad guys as quasi-elves) or crystals.

Comments

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

I don’t consider #3 and #5 to be overused, and it would be hard to write a societal-scale Romance without a major problem (#1), a potentially dramatic solution (#4), and an idealized ancient contrast state (#2). I am glad there are no crystals, though.

Have you read Sanderson? He's created new systems of magic that are really creative, and his characters are smart and sympathetic.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I hate those lists, and I include Diana Wynne Jones' Tough Guide to Fantasy Land. If you're still having fun with ideas that other people have used, go for it!

[solri.livejournal.com]

Lists like that can be annoying, although in this case, it's quite amusingly done. Perhaps it's worth looking at this not as a list of things to avoid at all costs, but a list of things to think about if you find them. For example, I have the Ancient Language thing, so I need to ask myself how my language differs from Quenya or Le Guin's Old Speech. And yes, it is different. Le Guin's Old Speech isn't really a language at all but a set of true names used for magic (though dragons speak it as a language). Quenya is the language a people used to use for their everyday speech but is now reserved for poetry, ritual and magic. My Old Speech can be used for conversation at a pinch, and most people in the story think it is the language everyone spoke in the Good Old Days. On the other hand, some people think it is the language of the gods and a few people think it was designed solely for the purposes of communicating with sorcerous devices (and not necessarily designed by people; a minority view is that the devices themselves designed the language). I'm not coming down definitely on any one side, but I'm designing the language more like a programming language than a normal language, so the smart money is on the minority view. Anyway, the point is that these fun ideas only came up after I thought, "Hmmm, I don't want this to just be another take on High Elvish."