5 Things I Avoid as a Fantasy Author

I have opinions.

This is one of my “get off my lawn” rants, so it carries a tone. I’ll apologize in advance.

Readers who follow my writing might notice that I tend to avoid certain tropes.

I avoid them because I find their presence in the fantasy genre as boneheaded, redundant, and dull.

Here at the five things that I try to avoid in my stories.

DRAGONS

Dragon tears, dragon blood, dragon venom, dragon people, dragon genes, dragon teeth, dragon gems, dragon wings, eyes of a dragon, dragon riders, blah blah blah.

If you think about it, a dragon is an apex being with no rival. Aside from others of its kind, just a clutch of dragons would decimate an ecosystem. The brood would have to spread out to find enough food to eat or gold to horde, so really, dragons shouldn’t be depicted as coexisting with nature but ravaging it. They’re an enemy of nature. If we’re to find a dragon, we should expect to find a barren countryside with all of its natural resources expended. After they’d consume everything, then they just fly right off and move to another until the fantasy world the author so diligently built is just mud and slag.

So unless the author places the dragon into a bleak wasteland where it’s consumed everything, why read the book? And even then, what’s there to write about because their species is dying. Perhaps if we zoomed-in on the moment when the last dragon inhaled its last breath so that nature could recover from the massive devastation it caused. Now there’s a good story!

The moment I start reading a fantasy book with a dragon in it, I get skeptical. I’m really tired of giant, anatomically-impossible, flying lizards with magical powers. Aren’t you?

ELVES

Groan. I’m so sick of elves.

They’re like Superman in the DC Universe.

Is there nothing that can stop them short of this super rare mineral that’s remarkably abundant on Earth?

In every respect, elves are so far superior to mankind that they should be a dominant species and enslave man (a la, “The Fey”, Kristine Rusch).

What’s this “friendship” between an evolutionary superior species and a bunch of lesser wanna-be’s? Did we see Homo Sapien and the Neandertal “get along”, go on quests together, have a pint of ale at the nearby tavern? No! Homo Sapiens came in with their larger brain and beat the smaller brains out of the neandertal if they didn’t outright fornicate with them to make them part of the “family”.

Elves are ridiculously overpowered critters. They’re so overpowered that, in the context of writing about them, their culture, art, scholarship, and instruments of war have no comparison. There are no threats, so, like Superman, you have to throw gods at them to create a conflict.

When you write about elves, you might as well be writing about demigods. In fact, in my writing, I do regard elves as demigods, and I don’t necessarily incorporate them into principal characters. The moment I introduce an elf protagonist, they’d steal the show; they have no flaws. They don’t even die appropriately. They, like, board a boat to go the east rather than just simply dying and decaying, like the rest of us.

Ugh! Elves! Really?

ROMANCE

I am so sick and tired of seeing “best selling” books capitalize on hyper-sexualized supernatural (read: werewolf or vampire) BDSM dominatrixes.

Further, why does the female protagonist, to be interesting, need to be something fantastic? Like, chosen to breed? A mistress? Part alien? Or own a “reverse harem”?

Can’t we conceive of a female protagonist with no special powers who doesn’t have an “off-the-rails” libido? Or desperate to find their one true love at the expense of living their own damned life? Who is simply a woman and a person all at the same time?

I’m also very sick of romance, as a genre, spilling into fantasy and eroding the search algorithms. If you’re going to write a romance, put it on a cruise ship with a bald captain and be done with it. Every romance everywhere should simply be on the Love Boat. Get out of my magical forests with bugbears, halflings, and unicorns; they don’t get a flip about your emotional needs.

I don’t write romance - I write fantasy! I want to escape reality, not lament about how bad my own love life is, and pine over the unobtainable.

USELESS DESCRIPTIONS

One of the biggest annoyances that I have about modern fiction is the outright need to explain things in seven pages that would take one paragraph.

I’m lookin’ at you Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin!

When you write about a meadow, you should say, “The protagonist entered a meadow,” not provide seven pages of description about the meadow since it has no bearing on the outcome of the story! It’s just filler! It’s like, how many ways can you say that the character entered a meadow? Just one! “The character entered a meadow!”

Same for food. Hey, I like to spend a few paragraphs explaining food in my work, true, but do we need a history of each meal to be offered as some rationale by the author as to why it’s being served? Do I need to know where the potatoes came from, who they were cultivated by, and how they were yanked out of the ground? No! “Baked potatoes were on the table, and they were hot.” That’s all you need to say!

What’s funny about this is that I’ve always joked that my own novels would actually be about 10 pages long. The protagonist thinks this, does that, stabs this person, celebrates, end of story. I guess this is why I write short stories. Why take seven pages to describe something? I don’t get it. And it’s boring. Stop it!

MONARCHIES

Kingdoms… cringe. I’m so sick of kings. And their doms.

Why must a monarchy govern everything? Why is there a singular guy (usually white) in charge all things? And everybody answers to him?

I mean, why not have a perfectly acceptable fantasy setting that’s ruled by a council of old women? Or how about if people shake potato bugs in a jar to make decisions? Or, looking at indigenous cultures, are there committees or groups or people who make complex decisions over lifetimes? Certainly, in a fantasy setting, we can do better than monarchies.

I really like the potato bugs in a jar governance style. I think I’ll try using that.

Anyway, there’s my rant. Thanks for reading!

R